2. @LiverpoolHUG #LiverpoolHUG
What is a H.U.G?
A HubSpot User Group is a meet-up
bringing together:
• HubSpot customers
• Non-HubSpot Partners
• Marketing Professionals
6. @LiverpoolHUG #LiverpoolHUG
Who are we?
Stewart Bennett
Digital Marketing Executive
@stewart_bennett
Natalie Fox
Inbound Marketing Account Director
@NatalieFoxAP
10. #INBOUND16
WHY INBOUND PR IS
THE FUTURE OF PR
Iliyana Stareva
@iliyanastareva
Global Partner Program Manager
#InboundPR
11. #INBOUND16
1. What is PR?
2. What is Inbound PR?
3. Why Inbound PR for Your Company?
4. How To Do Inbound PR?
TALKING POINTS
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
13. #INBOUND16
“PUBLIC RELATIONS IS A STRATEGIC
COMMUNICATION PROCESS THAT BUILDS
MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL RELATIONSHIPS
BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR PUBLICS.”
PRSA, PUBLIC RELATIONS SOCIETY OF AMERICA
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
16. #INBOUND16
"PR SHOULD REINVENT ITSELF; WE ARE STILL
ROOTED IN CONVENTIONAL WAYS OF THINKING.
IF WE DON’T DO IT, WE WILL DIE OUT LIKE
DINOSAURS."
IWONA SARACHMAN, PR DIRECTOR AT AMREST SP. ZO.O.
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
39. #INBOUND16
1. Nail Your Stakeholder Personas
2. Define their Journey
3. Create a Content Plan
4. Promote Your Content
5. Do Inbound Media Relations
6. Nurture Your Media Leads
7. Measure Results
7 Steps to Starting with Inbound PR
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
42. #INBOUND16
• Who are our ideal customers
that are going to be interested
in our content?
• What does a day in their life
look like?
• How do they prefer to be
reached?
Buyer Persona Media Persona
• Who are the journalists,
bloggers, YouTubers etc. that
have an interested in us?
• What does a day in their life
look like?
• How do they prefer to be
contacted?
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
43. #INBOUND16
• How do they do research when
making a buying decision?
• What are they looking for when
making buying decisions and
what do they worry about?
• What challenges do they face
when making buying
decisions?
Buyer Persona Media Persona
• How do they do research when
writing a story?
• What are they looking for when
working on a story and what do
they write about?
• What challenges do they face
when working on a story?
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
45. #INBOUND16@iliyanastareva
Awareness Consideration Decision
Buyer
Persona I have a problem
I’m researching
solutions
I’m picking a brand or
top solution to solve
my problem
Media
Persona
I need to write a story I’m researching ideas
I’m picking my story
and brands or
influencers for it
The Buyer’s vs Media’s Journey
#InboundPR
49. #INBOUND16
THERE’S WAY
TOO MUCH
NOISE
It doesn’t matter how awesome
your content is, no one is going to
consume it if you don’t put it in
front of their faces.
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
52. #INBOUND16
1. Do your research first
2. Get creative with your outreach approach
3. Don’t be spammy and don’t overdo it
4. Create remarkable content
5. Use emotion in your stories, not so much structure
6. Don’t forget your own content and channels
7. Make it easy for journalists to get in touch with you
8. Share their content
8 Steps for Inbound Media Relations
@iliyanastareva #InboundPR
67. @LiverpoolHUG #LiverpoolHUG
Register for the next HUG…
Visit
liverpool.hubspotusergroups.com
for more info
Our next HUGs:
• Wednesday 6th
September
• Wednesday 25th
October - INBOUND 17
Special
Hi everyone! Thanks for the invitation to Stewart and the Active Profile Team. I’m super excited to be hear. My name is Iliyana Stareva. I know difficult spelling – ILIYANA. It’s Bulgarian. I was born there but I’ve lived and worked in 4 countries over the past 7 years. I’m fluent in 3 languages, so if you’re thinking “men, she has a weird accent” you are right because it’s a mix between Bulgarian, German, British English and a little bit of Irish as I currently live in Dublin. Now, during that moving around time I worked for 3 years in PR. I’ve now been at HubSpot for almost two years and I’ve worked with over 200 agencies during that time to help them grow their businesses with inbound marketing and deliver better client service. As you can see my background is PR but my current job entails inbound marketing so it only made sense to combine these experiences. By doing so, I came up with the concept of Inbound PR. Today, I’m going to talk to you about why inbound pr is the future of pr. What’s in it for you? Well, at the end I’ll give you some very specific tips so that when you get out of here you are an absolute PR expert.
Before we move onto our agenda, I want to get a feel for the audience. How many of you work in PR? How many of you work in marketing? How many of you are HubSpot customers?
Here’s our agenda. First, we are going to cover what PR is. Today. Then I’ll walk you through a journey of how I came up with the Inbound PR concept and what it is. After that, we’ll go through why you should be doing Inbound PR for your business and at the end as promised, I’ll give you some practical tips on how to do Inbound PR.
Let’s get started.
Whenever we try to define a term or an industry, we usually always look at the textbook definition that’s generally widely accepted and often used at universities.
Here’s what PR’s textbook definition is. It comes from the PRSA which is the largest PR body in the world. I’ll read this through… Those of you who didn’t really understand this, please raise your hand? Yeah that’s what I thought. Now let’s take a loot at a definition that’s easier to grasp.
… This makes a bit more sense, right? Now, let me ask you another questions How many of you think that the only thing that PR people do is to pitch journalists and get some coverage in the newspapers? Yep, the majority. WRONG.
Wrong, but understandable. That’s what PR’s reputation has been for a very long time. But with the emergence of digital and adoption of new technology it’s outdated. You’ll see later on how PR people are great at other things too. But the problem with the PR industry has always been this: It’s been too slow to adopt to changes and jump on the bandwagon of new technological developments. This happened with social media a few years back when it was just starting. Many felt that PR should be the owner of it 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 etc. Similar thing happened to SEO but I’m not going to dig into it much now.
So the reality is, PR needs to reinvent itself. PR needs to change this whole notion of how it’s seen just as 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 nor important. And that’s one of the messages of this presentation. I want Inbound PR to serve as a wake up call. As an approach that’s easy to understand and apply and is not a conventional way of thinking. Let’s take a look at it:
Whenever we try to define a term or an industry, we usually always look at the textbook definition that’s generally widely accepted and often used at universities.
A starting point here are the four types of media that we have today – Earned, Shared, Owned and Paid. When we think back again about PR being just media relations, we can see that this hasn’t gone away. That falls under earned media – we are earning coverage. Now we also have shared media which is all about social media and channels that we all use – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram etc. Then we have paid which is gaining in importance because we live in an information overload era so when we use native advertising or social sponsored posts we ensure that our message truly reaches our intended audience. And then we have owned media. Owned media has become hugely, hugely important over the last decade with the emergence of blogs and generally with the digital boom where it’s necessary that as a business you have a website and a presence with your own content online. When we look at all of those, it’s content that’s at the centre of them. Relevant content designed for a particular audience or a particular media type.
And this is what PR people are really great at! They are natural storytellers. They understand audiences and they can pic a tiny news bit and turn into an entire story. This is what they learn to do best and is at the centre of their jobs.
But PR people are really bad at measurement. Google anything around why do PR, should I do PR, and you’ll find numerous articles explaining how you can’t measure PR and how the PR industry is really terrible at proving the ROI of their activities. And that’s true. That’s been like that for over 100 years now and the PR industry itself has been trying hard to figuring out measurement.
So these two things really got me thinking – we have content and we have measurement.
And that’s exactly what the inbound methodology is all about. We attract strangers through our website with blogs, social and SEO, we convert them into leads again through higher value content that we gate behind forms on landing pages; then we nurture those leads with email which again is content in order to offer them even more value and convert them into clients. And it doesn’t end there but we continue offering them relevant content to delight and retain them because as we know acquiring a new customer is 4x more expensive than retaining existing ones.
So you see, I just started thinking about what PR does and what Inbound Marketing does and I connected the dots.
It makes just full sense to combine them. Because in my experience through working with all those HubSpot partner agencies, I’ve seen how PR people really do well with content creation but their colleagues from other industries like marketing, web or digital struggle with it the most. On the other hand, PRs people don’t fully grasp this measurement thing, their colleagues are all over it.
And so last year I started experimenting with these two concepts. I have a blog which is turning 5 at the end of the year. It took me 3 years to gain a big audience and reach traffic of about 8000 visits per month with 40-50% conversion on my landing pages. Blogging is my thought process, it’s my way of experimenting and learning. So I started researching and writing about this idea of Inbound PR. And people were interested. You can see two examples of blog posts I wrote for my blog and then republished on LinkedIn. People were sharing and commenting how it all makes sense. So I continued working on this concept.
The moment when it hit me that Inbound PR is a thing was when Sarah Hall – a PR practitioner from the UK – reached out to me to ask me to contribute a chapter on Inbound PR for the first edition of FuturePRoof last autumn. FuturePRoof is a crowdsourced book with the essays of over 30 global PR pros with the goal to increase awareness of how PR needs to reinvent itself and should be seen as a management discipline.
This is how Inbound PR was born. Out of the realisation that it only makes sense to combine PR’s biggest strength – content – and alleviate it’s biggest challenge – measurement – through inbound. It came about through a lot of research and writing and it ultimately serves the belief that digital is about connecting with people through content.
Whenever we try to define a term or an industry, we usually always look at the textbook definition that’s generally widely accepted and often used at universities.
I want to start with a paragraph from my chapter in the FuturePRoof book that I mentioned a few slides ago. There are really 2 main takeaways here: Our consumer and purchasing behaviours have changed. If you don’t have an online presence, you don’t exist.
Let’s start with the first one. 20-30 years ago we didn’t have the internet, we couldn’t really do much research. So we relied on sales people to educate us. That’s no longer the case today. When you have a problem and you need to solve it, how many of you go online and search for it as the very first thing you do? Yeah the majority, same with me. I go to Google or Facebook search, I type my problem, I check out websites and blogs and brands, I look at their social media presence, I chat to some of my friends to get recommendations, I dig deeper into specific brands. And then often I don’t even need to speak to a sales person to choose what I want to buy. If it’s a bigger let’s say B2B software decision, then you’d rely on sales experts. But the majority of our buying decisions are made on our own. We educate ourselves. Through the content we find.
Now, here’s where the second takeaway comes into play. If I can’t find your brand online when I’m doing my research to solve my problem, you basically don’t exist. If you have not used Inbound PR to create and strengthen your own online presence, I’m going to ignore you and ultimately not buy from you.
The consumer behavioural change is easy to explain. With all new technologies and apps and networks we’ve become empowered to make our own decisions. We are a lot more sophisticated and we know that. And as Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism illustrates so well, we are at the centre of our own universe. I am the most important person in my life. And brands have to catch up with me. Brian Solis calls this Digital Darwinism where digital moves faster than brand’s ability to adapt. This is also important in PR because digital moves faster than print so the lead time for a story online is much shorter than that for print.
What’s also changed, are all the interests groups a brand now has and what a powerful voice they can all raise everywhere. Brands no longer have to deal with customers, investors and the media but their employees are a lot more vocal now. And the media is not just journalists – it’s bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, all influencers that have a huge voice and can influencer consumers and their behaviours.
Anyone can be an influencer today. Think about Michelle Phan who’s actually from Boston and when she was 17 she started with a personal make up blog then transitioned to doing YouTube make up tutorials. She now has over 8 million subscribers, billions of views on her videos and makes millions. Her net worth is 5 million dollars. And it was all just a hobby. She now has a huge voice. Brands are killing it to work with her.
Even journalists build their own brands – think about it, Facebook just started offering online courses for journalists that focus on 3 areas: discovering content, creating stories and building an audience.
All this change in technology, consumer and influencer behaviours, leads us to believe that traditional PR is outdated. PR people just drafting a press release and mass emailing it to their entire media lists is totally outbound. And it doesn’t work. Shift Communications – a PR agency I’m a big fan of – did a research recently using Google Analytics data and found that there are 1092 press releases being sent every day. That adds up to about 240000 press releases until today in 2016. But barely anyone clicks on them or reads them. Because they are not targeted.
What’s more, with that many influencers out there, if PR people were only to do media relations, they can’t reach that many stakeholders and influencers as we saw on the previous slides. No wonder then that PR pros far outnumber journalists today – according to the US Department of Labour, there are 4.6 PR pros to 1 journalists in the USA; according the a Canadian census, that number is 4.1 to 1. And according to a research in the UK by the PRCA, the number is about almost 2 PR pros to 1 journalist.
So the biggest reason why you should be doing Inbound PR is because Outbound PR interrupts. It’s pushy and not relevant to our needs or experiences.
But an Inbound PR approach is because it attracts and is targeted to us. It’s about being human-centered.
Inbound PR achieves this with content that is relevant, remarkable and created for a specific audience and her needs .
Whenever we try to define a term or an industry, we usually always look at the textbook definition that’s generally widely accepted and often used at universities.
What I want to start with is to tell how I turned the inbound marketing methodology into an Inbound PR methodology. I’ve added them both as comparison but we are going to focus on the Inbound PR methodology only, so please follow that part.
Smart content -> contextual marketing
Attention earning and respect earning – earning their time to listen to you
Link earning vs link building
Now, looking at the entire methodology seems overwhelming so I really want to make it easy for you to apply it. Which is why I’m going to walk you through the 7 steps that you need to follow to start doing Inbound PR. I’m going to read these out and then we are going to go through each of them in more detail.
The most important part is to define your stakeholder personas. With inbound marketing we speak about buyer persona – or the representation of our ideal customers. Now, we spoke about how PR touches on multiple stakeholders so this is why I use this word here and the Inbound PR methodology can be applied for any stakeholder persona.
The first thing I teach my HubSpot partners is to learn how to do research. I can’t even tell how many people don’t dig into or gather data but just rely on assumptions. And then they are not sure if whatever they are planning to do is going to work and get any resonance. And then I tend to ask them, well, have you interviewed or surveyed your personas? And then it drops. Nope, we haven’t. If you don’t do your research, you are not going to be able to make informed decisions that’ll bring the results you are seeking.
Now for the purpose of our Inbound PR methodology we are going to focus on our Media Persona. And by media I not only mean journalists but also all other influencers like bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers etc. So what we really need to know is who are the journalists and influencers that might have an interest in us based on the stories that they write? What does a day in their life look like – are they super busy in an office where the phone is ringing the whole time, or do they write in a small coffee shop? How do they prefer to be contacted – we said that they received about 1100 press releases a day so email is maybe not the best vehicle. They might prefer Twitter or Instagram. But knowing what their day looks like will give you hints too – if the office is super busy and loud they probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation in there as it’s too stressful and distracting.
Moving on, how do they do research when they are writing a story? Do they go online and visit websites, do they go to events? What exactly are they looking for in a story – maybe facts and data or maybe interviews with execs? What challenges are they facing when working on story? Maybe they very short lead time so they have 1 day to submit their story. This is important to know so that you are flexible enough and help them with such a deadline.
Once we have our media persona defined, we want to figure out her journey which really is the process they go through to making the decision to work with us on a story.
Again, we are focusing on the media person here. We define three stages for her journey – awareness, where she releases she needs to write a story and knows how long she has; then consideration where she evaluates ideas and specifics about that story. And at the end is decision where after all the research she picks the brands and influencers for that story.
Now defining the media persona and her decision-making journey is hugely important because without it we are not going to be able to create the content that’s needed to support this process.
The way to go about creating this content plan is pretty straightforward, but believe me, done the other way around by so many PR or marketing professionals. Often times, they’d come up with a topic, write a few blog posts on that and hope for leads after they maybe add some content offers gated behind landing pages based on the blogs that perform best. WRONG! The only way to create content that is going to covert is to start with the persona, then to define the key questions at each of the stages of the journey. Once you have those questions, I always recommend to start with just one for each of the stages. So being very focused. Now once we have one key question we are going to think about how we are going to turn this into a content offer to gate behind a landing page – an ebook, a research, a video interview, whatever. Then we are going to think about how we are going to promote these content offers and brainstorm the ideas for the blog posts, the press releases or any other materials we put on our newsroom. When we do this once, the second time around (maybe for the next quarter), we return to our key questions and pick the next round.
Great, we’ve got amazing content out now. We need to make sure it reaches our audience.
The challenge here is that we are swamped with content and information. Many of my HubSpot partners create fantastic content and then share it on Facebook once, on Twitter once, and on LinkedIn once. And that’s about it. Then they tell me, no one is reading our blog. You need to promote these things multiple times on various channels in different ways. The life of a tweet is less than 20 minutes so of course not everyone is going to see your awesome content. Put it out there properly!
To help you with this content promotion piece, I like to use the PESO model by SpinSucks – probably my favourite PR agency in the world. Now, we’ve already seen the 4 different types of media but what this is giving us are more ideas of how to promote our content and it’s important that we use all those types of media to achieve the results that we are hoping for. So for example, to do blogger relations which I’ll dig into in a bit. Then to maybe experiment with some other social networks like Snapchat. With owned, let’s repurpose the research into a quick video. Then let’s push that video with some Facebook sponsored posts. There you have it.
Okay, so I said that media and blogger relations is part of the promotion piece so I want to look into this a bit more.
Now, we know that media relations is still part of PR but we also know that it’s not done so greatly with that mass press release pitching. So here’s my model for doing media relations the inbound way. Obviously as we said let’s do our research into our media personas. Then based on that let’s ensure that we are reaching out to them in the best way possible and stop sticking to the obvious like email or phone. If we’ve pitched our perfect media persona once but they haven’t come back to us, maybe send one more reminder but leave it there. Don’t overdo it. If they are interested, they’ll get back to you. If not, don’t be a spammer. Of course, create this amazing content because with 1092 press releases a day you’ll need to stand out. Also, press releases are important as they are still the official instrument for communicating news but don’t be boring sticking to that crazy limited structure. Get out of the box with videos or social cleverness. Part of that is to make sure that you are not ignoring your own channels because media people are going to check you out and if they don’t like your website and see nothing on your blog, they’ll move on. Now, it’s also key that when they come to you because you’ve attracted them, don’t make it too hard for them to reach the right person. Have a media contact right then and there not just an empty form they need to fill and god knows who’s going to see and respond to this. And finally, share their content. Not just when they write about you, but more. Build a relationship by listening.
I mentioned earlier that we’ll go into why an Inbound PR newsroom is important and I think a few of the things came clear in the previous slide. These two examples are yes of very big companies because I haven’t seen many other doing this. Having an online newsroom is a fantastic way of ensuring that you are doing media relations the inbound way. And I have the formula for you.
Here are the 16 key things your Inbound PR Newsroom needs. …
Okay, so we’ve attracted and converted our media leads with great content, now we need to move them towards the decision stage of their journey.
We can do this with lead nurturing. The same approach we use to nurture our clients can be applied to journalists. So by having figured out their journey and created content based on it, you can design automated email drip campaigns or workflows as we call them at HubSpot and help them move to decision by showing respect, care and relevancy. With some strategy behind this, this can do wonders for you. They’ll remember you.
Okay a lot of things that we need to do but how do we now it works. Well, we measure it. I know, so hard with PR right. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to measure all this Inbound PR activity? Yes, it would. And it’s possible.
Just use the data! I’m shocked at how many PR people don’t do this. There are so many free tools out there – take Google Analytics for traffic; Hootsuite for social monitoring and management; why not coverage book to create great reports with you company mentions. It’s all there! Record it at least on a monthly basis, analyse it and make informed decisions based on what’s worked and what hasn’t. This is all about getting in the habit of doing this and sticking with it.
Also, plan your campaigns with outcomes not inputs in mind. So really what is it that you want to achieve rather than let’s write 5 press releases and send them to 500 journalists. Use this fantastic interactive tool that was introduced by AMEC recently. It’s free and you can easily google it. It allows you not only to measure and track things as you go, but also generally to plan a campaign and everything that needs to be in it for it to be successful.
AMEC Interactive Integrated Evaluation Framework; The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC)
Also, plan your campaigns with outcomes not inputs in mind. So really what is it that you want to achieve rather than let’s write 5 press releases and send them to 500 journalists. Use this fantastic interactive tool that was introduced by AMEC recently. It’s free and you can easily google it. It allows you not only to measure and track things as you go, but also generally to plan a campaign and everything that needs to be in it for it to be successful.
AMEC Interactive Integrated Evaluation Framework; The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC)
Now we’ve gone through a journey of today’s notion of PR, of how I came up with Inbound PR, why it’s important and how you can start doing it. I know, a lot of information but what I really want you to take out today is this: It doesn’t matter what we call things, whether PR, Inbound PR, PESO model. It’s all about the approach and how we end up doing things. I want this presentation to be a wake up call for PR so that it really starts to reinvent itself and earn that management position of a true value-driving discipline. It’s all about changing how we see and do things.