Marketing job with my PR skills?

I’m a PR professional looking for a new job and keep seeing interesting looking marketing roles. Do my PR skills make me suitable for a marketing job?

By Chris Cooke

While many companies have separate PR, marketing and advertising departments who often operate pretty autonomously from each other, hiring the services of, respectively, PR, marketing and advertising agencies, there is clearly a lot of common ground between these three disciplines, simply because they are all involved, in one way or another, with a company’s communications.

There are, of course, many differences too. They generally employ different techniques and channels in order to reach and engage target audiences, and PR can generally be distinguished from marketing and advertising in terms of who is being communicated with – advertisers and marketers are generally targeting consumers direct, whereas PR people will normally talk to investors, decision makers, employees and, of course, the press.

But a lot of the skills required for all three disciplines are the same, and it’s not unheard of for people to move from one to the other. How suitable your PR experience will make you for a marketing role depends very much on what kind of PR you’ve done and what kind of marketing job you’re going for.

Obviously if you have been working in a consumer PR role then your experience will be much more relevant. While you may have been communicating primarily with journalists, you do so knowing that they in turn communicate with the general public, so presumably – if you’ve been doing your job right – you’ve been getting into the mindset of your target consumers, considering what kinds of events, stories, stunts, media and messages will attract those people. That’s the same process someone working in marketing communications goes through too.

And if you’ve been doing a lot of writing about your company’s (or clients’) products or services, or staging press or corporate events, or overseeing the production of websites or corporate literature, then these too are all tasks that marketers will get involved in. If you’ve led viral or social media PR campaigns then you are particularly well equipped for marketing roles – it is in this domain that the wall between PR and marketing is truly falling down, as viral marketing campaigns often use PR techniques, but talk directly to consumers.

So, let’s assume your past work has been on the border between PR and marketing. Now you need to analyse what exactly the marketing role you are applying for involves.

Remember, just like there is a lot more to PR than consumer-focused press or viral campaigns, there is a lot more to marketing than the events, websites and such like that I’ve just mentioned. The discipline of marketing covers a diverse range of business tasks, not all primarily concerned with communications, and certainly not outward communication.

Technically speaking marketing also includes a lot of a company’s research and development, consumer analysis and product distribution. Even within marketing communications, those jobs dealing with stats-heavy loyalty card programmes, or, in the advertising domain, media buying, would probably seem quite alien to many PR experts.

To make things more confusing, different people use the word ‘marketing’ to mean different things. In some companies the marketing department will almost exclusively work on the kind of promotional campaigns that sit close to the PR territory. In other companies marketers might work primarily on research and analysis.

All of which means that if you are going for a marketing role, in house or at an agency, you need to pay extra attention to the job spec and skills outline in the ad, and think hard about how much of that is covered by your PR background. If you score high, you should still rework your CV and use your covering letter to explain why, although coming from a PR background, you are a good candidate for the marketing job you are going for.

Arguably companies would do better if there was more collaboration between those working in PR, marketing and advertising and, as I said, in the digital domain the divide between each area is more blurred than ever. Therefore, especially if you’re early on in your career, having some experience in all three, and especially marketing and PR, can only make you more employable long term.