Marketing area
Public relations
Public relations is the practice of shaping how the world thinks about your organisation through earned attention - coverage, commentary, recognition and relationships - rather than paid placement. Done well, PR is the most credible kind of marketing because someone else is saying it about you.
Modern PR has expanded far beyond press releases. It now overlaps with content, social, investor relations and brand. The best practitioners are part journalist, part strategist, part network operator.
Media relations
The traditional core of PR: building relationships with the journalists, editors and producers who cover your industry. Pitch with a story, not a product. Understand what each writer cares about, time your outreach to their publishing rhythm, and offer exclusivity, data or access they cannot get elsewhere. One well-placed feature in the right outlet can outperform a hundred generic mentions.
Thought leadership
Thought leadership turns your founders, executives and specialists into recognisable voices in their field. It runs across owned channels (long-form essays, talks, podcasts) and earned ones (op-eds, expert commentary, conference keynotes). The bar is high: a real point of view, evidence to back it up, and the willingness to disagree with conventional wisdom.
Brand storytelling and announcements
Funding rounds, product launches, hires, milestones, partnerships - PR helps decide which of these deserve a moment, what story they tell about your trajectory, and how to time them so they reinforce rather than dilute each other. A clear narrative arc across a year is worth more than a flurry of disconnected announcements.
Crisis communications
When something goes wrong - an outage, a regulatory issue, a leadership controversy - the first 24 hours decide how the story is remembered. Prepare scenarios in advance, agree who can speak, and default to honesty, speed and specifics. Silence and corporate jargon make every crisis worse.
Internal and stakeholder communications
Employees, investors, regulators and partners are PR audiences too. The best external story collapses quickly if your own people are confused about what you stand for. Coordinate internal messaging with external moments so your team hears it from you first.
Measuring PR
Forget Advertising Value Equivalency. Measure what actually matters: share of voice in the conversations you want to own, sentiment, message pull-through (did the coverage repeat your key points), brand search lift, and downstream impact on pipeline and hiring. Pair quantitative tracking with qualitative reads of the most important pieces.
How PR fits with the rest of marketing
PR works hardest when it is connected. Earned coverage feeds social and sales enablement. Thought leadership content powers SEO and email. Crisis playbooks need legal, customer support and product input. Treat PR as a discipline that shows up across the marketing system, not a separate silo.