Partners in comms: Why PR needs marketing – and marketing needs PR
If 2025 has made anything clear, it’s that communication no longer lives in departments. It lives in outcomes. Yet many public relations professionals struggle to make the marketing handoffs while marketers forget to include PR in their content strategy.
What’s left are fragmented messaging, internal friction, and missed opportunities – chaos that impacts the organization’s bottom line at a time when trust is fragile and reputations are easily damaged.
There’s no silver bullet to overcoming the chaos. But on a recent panel hosted by Proven Media Solutions founder Dustin Siggins, three corporate strategists showed how to create alignment so that the entire communications team is hitting on all cylinders.
Building the scaffolding of success
Success doesn’t happen by having an ego or guessing at what’s happening among stakeholders. Nifares Group founder Wendy Serafin said that her most effective corporate communications roles start with a listening tour, crafting a message map based on how stakeholders talk about the brand to truly understand what the brand should be – and what is required to get there so consistent narratives are represented by everyone in their own voice.
Next, it’s time to make sure that everyone in the communications department sees where they add the most value, from the drumbeat to specific campaigns. TAG – The Aspen Group Senior Vice President of Communications Jennifer George said her team uses dashboards that align internal teams around reputation metrics, blending qualitative and quantitative data to drive home value to each other and to the C-Suite.
And since it’s rare that large organizations rely solely on internal teams, Reputation Partners Executive Vice President Andrew Moyer said agencies should act as partners instead of vendors – asking key questions and providing insights that can be gleaned as the outside team members.
Once the structure’s in place, it’s time to show the value of comms throughout the entire organization – from the front line to the C-Suite. That requires seeing around corners, aligning other departments before they cause friction, and creating narratives that are customized to every level of every function.
Finally, comms must move externally. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude are reshaping what audiences learn. They don’t pull from the best story—they pull from the most structured one. That means FAQs, earned media, and high-authority pages carry disproportionate weight, so AI-friendly strategies must be balanced with user-friendly content.
Seamless communications to impact the bottom line
In 2025, trust is fragile and reputations can crash in a moment. Marketing’s data is hollow without public relations’ storytelling – and PR’s traditionally soft value is quantitatively proven through marketing’s tools and capabilities.
Read our short blog post about how PR and marketing can create surround-sound marketing and branding outcomes, and watch the entire dynamic panel conversation below.
