Marketing officers often spend a great deal of time and money creating eye–catching brochures, innovative advertisements, and collateral materials. Although these products are both useful and necessary, they lack a key characteristic of effective marketing campaigns: namely, credibility.

Public relations can achieve the credibility that millions of dollars of advertising cannot simply by communicating through an objective third party: the media.

Think about it. Which message do you trust more? A statement in a company brochure that extols one of the company's products or services, or an endorsement of that product or service by a respected reporter who is unaffiliated with the company?

Unless you're the sort of person who looks up gullible in the dictionary when someone tells you it's not listed there, then clearly, you'd trust the latter source more than the former.

Credibility is only one of the many advantages of public relations. Others are:

1. Cost–effectiveness. Have you placed an advertisement recently? If so, then in all likelihood, you're painfully aware of the cost involved. If you're fortunate enough to have specialized vendors at your disposal, then you have additional payments to make to your copywriter, media planner, and designer or to your advertising agency.

The costs involved in public relations are comparatively inexpensive. Public relations agency fees are typically far less than those of advertising agencies, and most public relations work does not require elaborate (and expensive) graphics and design materials. In short, you get a lot more bang for your buck.

2. Flexibility Sure, you can tailor advertisements to several specific audiences through a wide range of media outlets, but you'd better have a sky–high budget to do so. In contrast, it's relatively straightforward to tailor public relations messages to different audiences. Pitches, the story angles public relations people propose to targeted media, are easily altered to suit the interests of different readers or viewers.

For example, imagine that your firm wants to publicize the completion of a multi–million dollar facility it designed on behalf of a medical center. It's a good bet that business publications will focus on the design team and the project specifications. Local newspapers and television stations might want to report on how the new facility will benefit the neighborhood in which it's located. Healthcare publications might cover the ways in which the facility meets the medical needs of 21st century patients.

Good public relations professionals are intimately familiar with the different media sectors, so they can tailor their pitches with minimum resources and time. The result is that, whatever the focus of the stories the pitches generate, your core message (e.g., that your firm designed a new facility) gets across.

3. Handy marketing collateral Got a front–page story in your number–one target publication? Order some reprints and add them to your marketing copy, or put them on your web site. Again, this is credible copy, and it's cheap: The journalist did the writing; you simply supplied the idea and background information.

Caveat: There is one important shortcoming of public relations: You will have less control—sometimes much less control—than you will ever have in advertising. You must decide whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages for you.

In general, however, the credibility that public relations provides, along with the additional benefits described earlier, necessitates its inclusion in any comprehensive marketing campaign. Costs are comparatively small, yet returns can be high. If you implement your public relations program in an organized and carefully thought–out fashion, then you, too, can achieve a competitive advantage.