Digital marketing vs public relations: where do you draw the line?

As our lives become more digitally oriented, every aspect of business has been baptized by it, including public relations. Digital marketing and PR are ideally used together in an effective marketing strategy, so much so, that their differences are being subsided.
Both are essential part of any business approach, but vary in their target performance, and outcomes. Integrating the two in your campaign can bring the best of both the worlds. Despite the similarities they share, there are some key differences between the two, such as:

Communication Source:

The outlining factor dividing digital marketing, and PR are the sources they use to channelize information. Digital marketing solely accounts the online sphere, focusing on PPC, social media, and web development. PR, on the other hand, is a combination of print publications, and social media. However, the PR strategy includes both traditional, and modern tools of marketing.

Result Measurement:

When quantifying the impact of both the channels, they wary in their output metrics. While PR is more focused on increasing brand awareness, digital marketing focuses on increasing citations, and driving favorable search results. Through paid, earned and online media, digital marketing focuses more on numbers with ROI measurement.
Therefore, both work on different success criteria but cater to a common goal, i.e., to increase a brand’s overall credibility.

Target Audience:

Digital marketing uses several tools to engage audience, such as search engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), content marketing, social media and email marketing. Public relations directly deal with the customers you want to extend your services to through specialist, traditional or online means.

Integrating digital media and PR

Digital media and PR are often used in combination, to amplify the benefits of each other. PR is being combined with tools such as social media or SEO, to better impact the market. Online placements help the brand gather building links, increasing the traffic on site.
Sharing the brand website as a landing page on various social media portals, and relevant user-generated content, can be used as creative way to engross more audience.

Promoting content through PR puts your brand to an advantage as it helps drive search rankings, and highlights the company on various search engines.

While digital marketing was not a name taken in unison with PR, the conformity of their co-existence in a business strategy has been realized in the recent years.