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The media industry is evolving more than ever every day and there is more talk about Inbound PR strategies . If you are familiar with this strategy, you will see how it can be useful and differentiating for brands. It is no wonder that this method is increasingly used in marketing and PR nowadays.
In the past, PR was seen as a strategic communication process that created a mutually beneficial relationship between an organization and its public. However, as the world became more digital, PR became more than just a public relations tool, starting to play a role in brand crisis management, internal communications, and digital communications. Today, many PR campaigns serve to build brand value and change people’s perceptions of the brand through social media platforms and online media.
What is Inbound PR? And Why It’s the Future of Brand Promotion
Traditional marketing and PR methods that use outbound methods, which are sending campaigns and advertisements to the audience without considering whether the audience is interested or ready to receive the content, such as advertising during TV programs or advertising on billboards along the road, as well as sending emails and text messages, are considered by many people to be intrusive and annoying rather than interesting. Journalists who receive a lot of emails and invitations to press conferences and product launches start to feel less interested because there are many new product and service launches that are mostly the same. Therefore, companies need to do something to attract people and media attention, which is to turn to Inbound PR strategies.
Inbound PR combines the strengths of content writing and PR storytelling, and measures the results of the strategy through visits to the website, media interest, and engagement with brand content posts published across blogs, websites, and social media.
If we talk about doing Inbound PR simply, companies can do it by setting the goals of the desired PR campaign. Then, determine all participants in this campaign by collecting information on who is involved, whether it is the target audience, online media, influential influencers, etc. Then, find out the interests of these participants, study how the participants want to reach and how they engage with the brand/agency. Knowing the participants in detail will help the company plan to create the right content and distribute it through the right channels and at the right time, which will help make Inbound PR successful without having to spend a lot of money on advertising as usual. But it will make the target audience walk to your brand.
But if you want to know the process of doing Inbound PR more deeply, it can be further explained with the framework of how to do Inbound PR as follows.
Principles of Inbound PR (Inbound PR Methodology)
People’s daily lives these days have changed a lot, partly due to advances in technology and the internet, which allow them to access information and receive media quickly through digital platforms. Therefore, companies and media have to adapt more, as we can see that today’s media has methods to do PR and do their own marketing through 4 types of channels according to the PESO model, which are:
- Paid Paying to display ads and support your own content published on various channels, whether it’s paying to advertise, doing affiliate programs to find people to help promote products and services, paying to have content shown to target audiences on various social media.
- Earned Benefit from relationships with other media outlets, online influencers, and investors.
- Shared Self-presentation through participation in online communities and partnerships with various social networks.
- Owned Ownership of media that publishes its own content
As mentioned above, Inbound PR focuses on groups of people who own media themselves, whether they are blog owners, website owners, influencers, which are the best channels for distributing content. Because these media owners are outstanding, different, and already of interest to online audiences, the content disseminated through them is interesting and highly credible.
One of the interesting things about doing Inbound PR is that there are many groups of people involved, including customers and target audiences, but also media and publishers, investors, sales teams, social media, communities, NGOs, and many more. Because all parties have access to the PR content that is published and can share it to spread the content further, the content will be forwarded indefinitely.
Inbound PR Framework
The person at the center of Inbound PR Before creating any content or digital media, the company must know who the content and media are going to be created for, what kind of target group the content wants to reach. Therefore, the company must always find detailed information about the target group, which may ask the following questions as a guideline for finding information and researching the target group.
- What type of media is appropriate for your company’s products or services?
- What types of influencers, bloggers or social media owners are interested in our brand’s products and how do you contact them? What are their personal online channels, such as blogs or social networks, and what are their recent projects?
- What is the daily life of the target customers like? What are they interested in? What is their lifestyle like?
- What are your target customers looking for? What do they need? What pain points do they want to eliminate?
The above questions are just some of the questions. In actual planning, the company may need to list more questions that require more information.
Once you have identified the bloggers or influencers that your company wants to publish content, you can plan your work by following these steps:
- Attract is the first thing that must be done. This can be done by writing or creating quality content along with placing the content correctly according to SEO in order to show good search results when viewers search for content from Search Engines. This is very important and cannot be overlooked because more than 80% of purchases come from the power of Google, where target customers search and find the company’s products or services without having to use salespeople. Therefore, creating content that meets the needs of the target group will result in purchases of products and services and repeat purchases.
- Convert Turn strangers into visitors and eventually into customers. Once you have captured the attention of your target audience to visit your website, you will need to customize your landing page, which is the first page where viewers will see the details of your brand’s content and communications to your website visitors. You need to customize your landing page to be full of great content and communications, and include all the important information your viewers need to know. This will make your viewers visit again and again, which will greatly increase the chances that they will turn from visitors into customers.
- Close Close the sale Once the company has shown website owners, bloggers and influencers how great the content on its website is, and it knows who is interested in the content on its website and what it cares about the brand, it can reach out to them personally with information, special offers and a great user experience that they can then tell others about on their social networks or other online communication channels.
- Delight The process of working according to all the steps mentioned above can also be called building a good relationship with the media or influencers who have influence in the online world. They will publish content or tell the experience of using the company’s products or services on their blogs, websites or social networks. Then the company will ask to place a link to your company’s website. When the audience reads the content and is interested, they can click on the link to the company’s website. At this stage, the company still has to follow up on the feedback and comments that the audience talks about the brand in order to continuously add value to the audience, which will promote a good image and create a difference for the brand that is different from other competitors.
From the above, it can be seen that the most effective way to attract people is to build trustworthy relationships through good content and well-planned Inbound PR strategies.
How to measure the results of Inbound PR?
Measuring the results of Inbound PR can be done using tools like Google Analytics and Social Media Analytics. Focus on measuring the effectiveness or outcomes of the strategy, not the outputs. For example, measuring brand awareness and engagement with the target audience is an outcome measure, rather than the amount of media or content published on social media, blogs, and websites. Integrating with HubSpot also makes it easier to manage content distribution across online platforms.
One metric that can be used for Inbound PR is AMEC’s Integrated Assessment Framework.
Inbound PR strategies are increasingly used today and are likely to be used more in the future because audiences and target customers are starting to lose interest in traditional outbound marketing. Therefore, inbound PR, which creates content that meets the needs of the target group and makes customers come to the brand themselves, is a better PR alternative that marketers and PR departments of companies should learn to use to their advantage amidst the changes in advertising media and public relations in this digital age.
