Inbound PR

The PR Agency's Manual to Transforming Your Business With Inbound

Iliyana Stareva

• Éditeur: Wiley
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119462255
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Negocios y empresa
• Sous-sujet: Relaciones públicas

The digital era's new consumer demands a new approach to PR

Inbound PR is the handbook that can transform your agency's business. Today's customer is fundamentally different, and traditional PR strategies are falling by the wayside. Nobody wants to feel "marketed to;" we want to make our own choices based on our own research and experiences online. When problems arise, we demand answers on social media, directly engaging the company in front of a global audience. We are the most empowered, sophisticated customer base in the history of PR, and PR professionals must draw upon an enormous breadth of skills and techniques to serve their clients' interests. Unfortunately, those efforts are becoming increasingly ephemeral and difficult to track using traditional metrics. This book merges content and measurement to give today's PR agencies a new way to build brands, evaluate performance and track ROI.

The ability to reach the new consumer, build the relationship, and quantify the ROI of PR services allows you to develop an inbound business and the internal capabilities to meet and exceed the needs of the most demanding client. In this digital age of constant contact and worldwide platforms, it's the only way to sustainably grow your business and expand your reach while bolstering your effectiveness on any platform. This book shows you what you need to know, and gives you a clear framework for putting numbers to reputation.

• Build brand awareness without "marketing to" the audience
• Generate more, higher-quality customer or media leads
• Close the deal and nurture the customer or media relationship
• Track the ROI of each stage in the process

Content is the name of the game now, and PR agencies must be able to prove their worth or risk being swept under with obsolete methods. Inbound PR provides critical guidance for PR growth in the digital era, complete with a practical framework for stimulating that growth.

Chapter 1
Getting the Basics
PR and Inbound

What Is Public Relations?

Whenever we try to explain a term, we tend to start with the textbook definitions that students learn when they go to university.

Public relations (PR) certainly is a mystery to many people, including some working in the industry or studying it.

The Public Relations Society of America which is the leading PR organization in the world, defines public relations as “the strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its publics” (PRSA, 2017).

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations the other leading PR body based in the United Kingdom—argues that “public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behavior. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics” (CIPR, 2017).

Now admittedly, these two definitions are a bit hard to grasp as they entail a number of buzzwords such as “mutually beneficial,” “influencing,” “goodwill,” and so on.

If you read Guy Kawasaki's book The Macintosh Way (1989, 123), you'll see a quote by Jean-Louis Gassee—a former Apple executive—explaining that advertising is saying that you're good, whereas PR is getting someone else to say that you're good.

This definition is easier to grasp, right?

It doesn't tell us exactly what PR people do, but at least it strengthens the point that PR is concerned with organizational reputation and building meaningful and positive relationships between various audiences.

For most of its existence, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, PR has mainly dealt with media relations, events, reputation, crisis management, and investor relations. In fact, for a very long time public relations and media relations (or publicity) have been considered synonymous, where PR people write press releases and send them to journalists who then use those press releases to write stories for their publications and media outlets—newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and so on.

Many are under that same assumption today, which is what has been driving PR's own reputation.

But with the emergence of digital technology and its mass adoption, this understanding is outdated, because PR is not just media relations—and it shouldn't be just media relations.

Heavily relying on the media and pitching them press releases has been the traditional view of PR, but with the growth of digital media, the need for an intermediary—the media—to spread the information has diminished. PR can now engage directly with customers, prospects, investors, and any stakeholder group using online channels to send key messages through various means such as articles, blog posts, e-books, social media, comments, and video.

Digital is the reason why the arsenal of PR activities has increased enormously. Media relations can simply be one of those activities. More and more PR people are now responsible for generating leads as well as nurturing them to help sales close new business. They do this by making use of content marketing (e-books, whitepapers, reports, videos, podcasts, webinars, blog posts), e-mail marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), blogger relations, influencer relations, online reputation management, crisis communications, and more.

But the problem with the PR industry has always been this: it's been too slow to adapt to changes and jump on the bandwagon of new technological developments. This happened with social media a few years back when the use of social channels was just starting to peak. Many felt that PR should be the owner of social because PR pros are the people who build mutually beneficial relationships with communities—basically what social media is all about. Unfortunately, PR was a bit too slow and so social media agencies arose, advertising agencies won social media awards, and so on. A similar thing happened with SEO as well, but let's not get into that here.

The reality is that PR needs to reinvent itself. PR needs to change the widespread perception that it's just about media relations. It needs to show that it's able to grow, adapt, and adjust for the digital economy and show sustainable results to clients. Because if PR continues to stick with the conventional ways of thinking, it's not going be relevant or important.

And here's where the link between PR and inbound begins: using the inbound marketing methodology to drive tangible and trackable results.

So, what's inbound then?

What Is Inbound?

The way we make decisions and buy things has fundamentally changed. We used to rely on direct sales and direct mail, or on television and magazine advertising and media publications. We couldn't do much research; we didn't need much convincing as the array of choice for products and services wasn't as vast as it is today.

But we are a lot more sophisticated and empowered now. We do our research online, we check recommendations on social, we read and get information, we compare vendors and products, we barely speak to sales reps because we prefer the advice from peers and friends on social media. We do all that on our own, at our preferred time, using our favorite devices, apps, and websites. Essentially, we make decisions based on the content that we find when we need it.

We don't like when something—such as advertisements—interrupts this process, and we tend to skip them. But we like to be engaged, enticed, and drawn into something interesting.

That's what inbound is all about. It's about attracting people with the right content.

In essence, inbound is about getting found. It's about creating remarkable content and sharing it with the world so that people can find it and come to you, instead of you having to find and chase them.

As HubSpot puts it, the inbound methodology is “the best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business.” It's more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective than traditional outbound techniques.

The major difference between the old-school outbound approach and the new inbound method is the notion of pushing versus pulling people in. Outbound marketers predominantly used to (and many still do) push their messages with top-down, interruptive communications and activities. Inbound marketers, on the other hand, use multichannel techniques that earn people's attention and trust by engaging with relevant content. By creating and fostering such meaningful, two-way dialogues, often driven by social media, people come to you on their own; you are not chasing them. This is marketing that people love. Why? Because it's seamless, transparent, authentic, engaging, empowering, and value-adding. It's human.

The inbound marketing methodology is based on four key actions that help turn strangers into promoters of the business: attract, convert, close, and delight. Inbound marketing relies on specific channels, tools, and techniques to guide strangers through the different stages of the methodology (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Inbound Marketing Methodology

Source: © HubSpot.

Inbound marketing is more effective than traditional marketing because it uses blogs, e-books, whitepapers, videos, SEO, webinars, and social, whereas traditional outbound marketing relies on cold calling, TV and print ads, direct mail, and trade shows, which people nowadays know how to ignore, using things such as caller ID and ad blocking, spam filters, and so on. To give you an example, a 2015 research study from Fractl and Moz on outbound and inbound marketing concluded that consumers are fed up with low-value, high-noise marketing.¹

The key difference then is that outbound interr...