Respond to this statement with a “yes” or “no”: The job of a public relations agency is to get ink and airtime from the media.

For decades, the correct response was yes, because we didn't have any choice.

Back in the day, the only way to easily communicate with your public was to use mainstream media and analysts as your mouthpieces. So the public relations department and the agencies they employed spent a great deal of effort convincing editors, reporters, and analysts that your company was one worth writing about. Prior to gaining the ability to self-publish content, there wasn't an efficient way for organizations to communicate directly to the public, so we were stuck with using the media as our mouthpiece.

That's exactly what I did for nearly a decade. As the vice president of marketing for several different technology companies, I had to work with agencies to pitch our story to the media. Occasionally, we got mentioned in a newspaper or magazine article or got airtime on television or radio. But it was really hard work and damned expensive.

Today, the correct response to my statement is an emphatic no!

In our new world of real-time engagement, there are so many other ways to communicate with your publics. There has been an explosion of channels and content that organizations can use to reach their audience directly with valuable online content: videos; e-books; white papers; photos; infographics; social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Snapchat; and more. Now we reach buyers directly, and they are eager to share our content.

However, many PR professionals still operate as if their only conduit is mainstream media. Most agencies still only use the traditional press release and pitch strategy.

If your organization operates in this outdated way, you've got to change the way you do business. Fortunately, you are reading the right book to help guide you with that transition.

Iliyana Stareva comes from the PR trenches. She worked in PR agencies in several countries and personally implemented many of the ideas you will read in these pages. This is no academic tome; instead, it offers practical and proven advice for reaching customers directly.

Iliyana is currently Global Partner Program Manager at HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales software company. I've seen Iliyana in action because I serve on the advisory board of HubSpot. I frequently encounter her smart blog posts and social networking posts. In her work at HubSpot, she's met with the leaders of several hundred agencies, and she draws from those interactions to make this book perfectly positioned to help agencies make the transition.

In this new world, which Iliyana calls inbound PR, smart public relations pros realize they have a tremendous opportunity to communicate directly with their publics. They are transforming themselves and their agencies into content creators. And they are helping their clients grow their businesses.

I use these ideas myself and they work!

—David Meerman Scott

Marketing and public relations strategist, entrepreneur, and
best-selling author of 10 books, including The New Rules of Marketing & PR and Newsjacking

www.WebInkNow.com

@dmscott

The role of the old is to inspire the young. But often the young inspire the old.

This book is about an innovative application of modern public relations. But it's also a young woman's story about innovation, motivation and hard work.

I first met Iliyana Stareva in Dublin in October 2015. I sought her out on a visit to the city after reading her blog, and seeing her work at HubSpot on the inbound PR model. I'm a long-time fan of Iliyana's blog. She uses it as a means of thinking out loud, and sharing ideas. She's earned a reputation as a forward thinking practitioner in marketing and public relations. Iliyana has used her blog to help develop her thinking. She's generous in publishing her ideas, and as a result has built a community that supports her work through conversation and sharing. It's a highly effective form of learning that requires both bravery and humility, characteristics which Iliyana possesses in abundance.

I first learned about inbound PR from Iliyana's blog. It's a means of identifying and understanding an audience or public and using content to start a conversation. It's made possible thanks to a growing industry of data, media and tools, to help understand behavior on the internet and social web. Inbound PR seeks to build a relationship based on an organization meeting a need rather than creating a need. It lies at the heart of the difference between public relations and marketing. It's a subtle but important point of difference. The internet is full of spam and unwanted marketing content. Inbound PR enables an individual or organization to build relationships and trust, and influence behavior. It's a highly effective form of lead generation in business-to-business or professional services, although its application is by no means limited to this sphere.

The inbound PR model has been stress tested in Iliyana's day job at HubSpot where she helps agencies around the world get to grips with the tools they need to execute content marketing campaigns. She's a regular speaker at HubSpot events, and has joined the international speaker circuit in the footsteps of the likes of Seth Godin, David Meerman-Scott and Brian Solis to share her ideas. She has written extensively for a variety of industry publications, including #FuturePRoof and Spin Sucks.

In Dublin, we talked about how Iliyana could develop her thinking and writing on inbound PR into a book. I followed up after our meeting with a list of potential publishers. It's a testament to Iliyana's drive and motivation that 18 months later she sent me a proof of Inbound PR, and the news that she'd landed a publishing deal with Wiley. Inbound PR codifies the model that Iliyana devised, and describes its application in practice. The book is written very much in the style of her blog. It's clear, concise and highly informative. You'll have no problem in applying her teaching in your work.

I couldn't be more proud of Iliyana for what she's achieved.

—Stephen Waddington

Partner and Chief Engagement Officer, Ketchum

Visiting Professor, Newcastle University

I come from a public relations (PR) background. I spent three years working in PR agencies across Germany and the United Kingdom. I loved it but I saw the flaws, too, and so I moved away from the industry, transitioning into something more modern: inbound marketing and agency business consulting.

It turns out I was wrong. For two and a half years, I consulted over 200 agencies in my role as a Channel Consultant at HubSpot—the inbound marketing and sales software as a service pioneer—and I realized that I'm never getting away from PR. I still researched it and I still wrote about it. I still saw the flaws and I still wanted to fix them.

Thankfully, I saw a way. A way that can transform the public relations industry. A way that can transform the PR agency model.

It started with a simple realization: the way we make decisions has fundamentally changed, regardless of whether that concerns our personal or our professional lives. We've become a lot more sophisticated and we feel empowered to go online, do our research, talk to friends, read recommendations, tweet at companies with questions, and demand answers to our problems through the content that we find. We don't want to be marketed at; we want the freedom to choose, based on our own online experiences.

Content is the name of the buying game today.

And who's better suited to create fascinating content and use it to engage with the public than PR practitioners?

Marketers, advisers, and digital professionals struggle with content creation, but they are good at numbers, data, and measurement—something PR professionals are still at odds with.

Enter inbound PR, where content meets measurement and helps PR people show the real return on investment (ROI) of their efforts in the new digital era.

So, there are two main reasons why inbound is the perfect fit for PR:

1. PR people excel at content creation.
2. PR people suck at measurement.

PR professionals are the best content creators. They are natural storytellers—this is how it has been since the first press release. Writing and communication skills have been at the forefront of PR practitioners' skillsets, but not so much for marketing, advertising, or digital agency professionals.

On the other hand, PR people are very bad at measurement. Showing the tangible results of their efforts in a way that makes sense to the bottom line has been the single biggest challenge for PR since its very beginning.

Especially in the digital era, you can't be using outputs or metrics such as advertising value equivalents (AVEs) or impressions; you must be able to measure outcomes and show the real impact on the business that is often defined by an increase in sales.

Inbound makes measurement possible; however, it doesn't work without content.

By now, you as a PR agency owner who is struggling to take your agency to the next level are hopefully hooked, so let me ask you some questions:

1. Do you blog?
2. Do you use social media?
3. Do you have a landing page on your website?
4. How much time do you invest in doing PR for your own agency or communications team?

Let me take a guess the answers:

1. Hmm, when we have time.
2. Yes, but mainly just to curate or share our own stuff.
3. No, no time for that and what's the point.
4. We just don't have time because we are too busy with client work.

Now you might be thinking, “Why do I even need any of that? We have our clients, our team is busy, we can't invest time and money into something that won't bring us much results.”

This is the number one challenge for agencies—we don't have time for our own PR and marketing.

I know agency life, and believe me, I sympathize with the workload, and I know how demanding clients can be. But for me, not having time is an excuse. Think of it this way: you really want to lose weight, so you need to fix up your diet and work out five times per week. However, you are super busy at work and at home, so you know that to achieve your goal you need to develop some new routines and adjust your daily lifestyle. That includes finding or better yet making the time for working out and preparing healthy food and snacks. There are two possible scenarios here: you find excuses and don't make the time and so you don't see any results, but you are still frustrated and angry as nothing is happening; or you've made a conscious choice to change and make the time (for example, through calendar planning) and you are seeing some fantastic progress.

As a PR agency owner or CEO, which one will you choose: being stuck in the state where you've always been, or will you embrace change?

I hope it's the latter because doing your own PR with your own content and promoting it on your own channels is the best thing you could ever do for your team or agency. Why? Because inbound PR can help you build brand awareness, generate leads (customer or media), nurture them, close them as customers or publishers, and then delight them to retain them with even better services, stories, and strong relationships. Most importantly, you'll be able to track the ROI of all those activities. And once you can do this for your agency, then you'll be able to develop the inbound PR services and the internal capabilities to deliver them for clients. That's how you'll grow your PR business in the twenty-first century.

This book is about you. Just as inbound is.

In a typical inbound fashion, each chapter will educate you on particular topics that all build upon each other so that you can move from learning to doing.

In Chapter 1, we'll look at the definitions of public relations and inbound marketing, what the two disciplines do and where the similarities are. We'll also see what binds them. We'll lay a foundation of common knowledge.

Chapter 2 is dedicated to PR's biggest challenge—measurement—and covers the current status quo, the history of communications measurement, how measurement works with inbound, where the opportunity for PR lies, and what the future of PR measurement looks like.

In Chapter 3, I'll take you on the journey of how I came up with the inbound PR concept, its definitions and benefits, and why you as a PR agency (or any communications agency) should adopt it.

Once we have this theory covered, I'll introduce you to the inbound PR methodology in Chapter 4 and offer you a lot of practical advice and tips on how to run inbound PR campaigns, how to create remarkable content, and how to tell inbound stories. This chapter has a strong focus on how to work with journalists, influencers, and media people in an inbound way as well as how to create inbound PR newsrooms.

Chapter 5 will delve into the importance and development of a strong positioning strategy for your agency that will then ultimately help you generate new business, nurture leads, and close the leads in your sales funnel.

Finally, in Chapter 6, we'll cover how to define and package inbound PR services into 12-month client retainers and how to develop the knowledge, capabilities, and skills your people need to be able to deliver inbound PR and to drive client results.

PR is ripe for transformation. Are you ready to embark on the inbound PR journey?

Iliyana Stareva lives and breathes inbound marketing and PR for agencies. Iliyana spent three years in the PR industry throughout Germany and the United Kingdom, establishing the presence of some of the largest fast-moving consumer goods brands in the world in those markets. She was then recruited by HubSpot—the leading marketing and sales software as a service pioneer—to become one of its first agency business consultants in Dublin, Ireland, where she helped dozens of marketing, content, PR, and web agencies double or triple their revenues. It was during that time that Iliyana developed the inbound PR concept.

Earning rapid promotions at HubSpot, Iliyana is now Global Partner Program Manager, focused on aligning HubSpot's expanding global teams and helping agency partners grow within the program.

Iliyana is also the author of Social Media and the Rebirth of PR: The Emergence of Social Media as a Change Driver for PR (2013) and Social Media—Key for Sustainability Communications (2013).

Iliyana spends her free time dancing salsa or writing about inbound PR, inbound marketing, and agency business on her blog at www.iliyanastareva.com.

Huge thanks to my family for the support provided when I was writing this, especially to my mom, Teodora Stareva, for always encouraging me and being there for me.

Special thanks to Stephen Waddington for getting the idea in my head to write a book about inbound PR.