Inbound PR strategy has been used for many purposes, including developing PR value or the value of public relations because nowadays, digital advertising is something that every brand gives importance to. Companies must measure the feedback from customers and the perception of the media audience about how they feel about the brand, and quickly adjust the PR strategy when the audience has a negative feeling. The traditional PR value measurement that uses the size of the media space that talks about the brand or the brand positioning may not be enough anymore. In addition, the traditional method may not be able to measure the results clearly. Therefore, there must be a new method to create brand value and be able to measure the results of PR more with effective tools.
What is Inbound PR Strategy?
The PR industry has been working hard to prove that PR can drive sales and drive brand success. But the value of PR is increasingly being evaluated, and it’s competing with marketing automation software like HubSpot, one of the hottest inbound marketing tools , and Google’s analytics tools, which have both executives and clients expecting PR spend to yield meaningful returns.
When a company plans to promote a brand, product or product, both marketing and PR departments feel that their work is overlapping. Marketing often feels that their work is being overshadowed by PR, while PR feels that their work is being devalued by marketing, which has a bigger advertising budget and more power to manage promotions. Therefore, PR departments need to have a way to manage the brand’s online reputation to achieve tangible business results to prove their worth, impress customers and beat their bigger competitors.
For a long time, PR has been in the shadow of marketing, but that’s all about to change now that there’s a more powerful and standardized way to measure PR, called Public Relations Search Value, or PRSV.
Reputation is everything
As everything in the world goes digital, people’s lifestyles change. People enjoy searching for things they want to know online, whether it’s buying new clothes, shoes, places to visit, booking hotels, opening new bank accounts, and so on. Therefore, the content that people find when they search is very important, especially since search channels have become easier than ever because mobile devices like mobile phones have become cheaper and more functional, allowing people to search for things they want to know anytime, anywhere. This situation presents an opportunity to provide alternatives or solutions to problems that they are facing and ultimately lead to purchasing products and services that meet those needs.
When looking at the lifestyle of people in the present era as mentioned above, it can be seen that the Inbound PR strategy is a good choice to use. By creating quality content that can solve problems for people, it creates interest and clicks to the brand’s website. When they click, they expect to receive additional useful information and be able to communicate with the brand. Therefore, Inbound PR can help provide value and impression to viewers who click through.
Marketing and PR teams play a key role in building trust and making viewers feel good about the brand when they click through to your website. Sales teams are responsible for the final step when viewers are interested and want to buy products and services from the company, responding to customer inquiries, orders, and all customer needs in order to provide the best possible experience for customers.
Quality over quantity
Nowadays, people are starting to pay less attention to advertising or proactive public relations that use media channels to reach the audience. Whether it’s turning on the TV, listening to the radio, walking on the street or even surfing the internet, you will see these advertisements popping up everywhere. And many people feel that it is more disturbing and annoying than interesting. As a result, many brands and companies have failed to promote and have to spend a lot of money on these advertisements without getting anything in return. Therefore, there is a need to use a new marketing and advertising strategy, which is Inbound PR, which uses the method of presenting useful content to the audience through influencers and popular social media until they are interested and eventually come back to the brand.
But when it comes to promoting brands through online channels and social media, many people think that these things will reduce the importance of PR, and eventually the company will no longer need a PR department because everyone can promote products and services to reach target customers without needing a specific team for this public relations. But in fact, public relations or PR is still important and the more you use this Inbound PR strategy, the more you need a skilled and quality PR team because doing PR is about storytelling, which will present the value and good things of the brand in the best way. Therefore, the company must plan the PR carefully, using storytelling and psychological communication methods that reach the audience’s hearts without making the audience feel disturbed or being offered something. This method will make the Inbound PR strategy successful in the end.
Google is the number one search engine but it still has limitations for PR.
Whenever there is a question or a problem that needs a solution, most people think of Google because they just type in what they are looking for and the answers will come right out of the box, making it the most convenient way to find the answers they need. It is no wonder that Google is a platform with a huge number of users, and that group of users is larger than the number of users on social media and other online PR channels.
Therefore, PR and various promotions have turned to focus on advertising to attract viewers from Google by trying to make their websites rank in the first and first pages of search results by using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) methods. However, SEO does not always guarantee success because Google’s algorithm is always changing, causing the website’s ranking to be unstable. In addition, website development must focus more on quality content and domain credibility, which requires the company to greatly adapt to its work. Importantly, all this hard work does not guarantee that the company’s website will always be ranked well in search results. However, marketing and PR, which must be constantly measured, make working with Google quite a daunting task.
Inbound PR Strategy: The Answer for Modern Promotion
Since SEO for website search ranking is difficult and cannot guarantee good search ranking all the time, companies must find new ways to promote their brands. Inbound PR strategy that uses excellent content creation to attract customers and make them come to the brand themselves is the answer to the fierce online marketing competition in this era.
PR using the Inbound PR strategy requires selecting online media that matches the target group. Then, create content that matches the audience’s interests and publish this content on online media or social media that the team has selected as a user, not as a company or advertiser, which will cause resistance among the audience. Or, you can use a method of having experts or influencers publish the content, which will make the audience more interested.
There is marketing research that shows that most brands are good at creating content that explains the benefits and functionality of their products, but they fail to create a sense of brand value in their audience, which leads to poor brand loyalty. For example, viewers will know how useful a product or service is, but will not care if the brand is still around or disappearing. When they buy a product or service, they will not care if they buy it because they do not see the difference or importance of the brand. These are examples of how important it is to create brand value and awareness for your customers. Therefore, creating good content that is useful to your audience and providing them with usability value will help them understand how your brand is different from others.
Companies need to be well-planned about the content they deliver to their audiences, understanding what types of content are right for their audiences and the occasions they are presented with. For example, if an audience is expecting content to be educational, then a brand needs to provide content that is educational to their audiences, not just entertaining.
Creating good, useful and relevant content for the audience, as well as using credible publishers, are important factors that make PR with Inbound strategies successful. Therefore, the company must plan to create quality content that takes into account the audience’s interests first, as well as plan to present it through appropriate channels, such as publishing content through blogs or websites of experts or influencers who have influence on the audience, as well as publishing content through social media that the target audience uses. This will help the audience become interested in the content, comment and express their opinions on the content presented, and then follow up and tell others, making the promotion and PR very successful and creating a difference for the brand from the many competitors in the market.
