How to make Inbound PR work for you

It’s the beginning of a new year and your company is screaming “2019, I’M COMING FOR YOU!” with the “new year, new me” mentality that is spreading like wildfire.

But, as you and your team are getting ready to dominate another year, you may also be considering making the transition from traditional PR methods to the Inbound PR way of life.

Adopting a new concept that will no doubt transform the majority of previous practices can be a little daunting. However, knowing how to make Inbound PR work for you by mastering and understanding the fundamentals will make the integration seamless.

In this blog we discuss the key things you need to make Inbound work for you, such as the three Inbound PR ‘pillars’, content creation and management, and ways to track your agency’s pitching efforts.

Data and keyword driven campaigns

More times than not, the phrases “Earned media”, “Owned media” and “Paid media” will be thrown around and highlighted as the three building blocks of an Inbound PR campaign. While this is true, not knowing how they work together to benefit your business can cause there to be slight hitches in the implementation of Inbound PR.

At the very foundation, all three elements are used alongside each other to ensure you can reach your desired audience – whether they’re scrolling through Google, online publications or on social media.

One key thing to remember is that all your content needs be data-driven in order to carry out measurement of activity. Why? Your audience is searching for specific topics/keywords to find solutions to their problems and you want to be the first port of call that they turn to.

In addition, ensuring everything is data-driven will make tracking your lead generation a whole lot easier.

Keywords need to become your best friend! Having consistent keywords established at the beginning of your campaign or at the point of refreshing your PR campaign will ensure that all your Earned, Owned and Paid media is homing in on the topics and search terms that you want to be most associated with.

Content analysis, creation and management

Next, it’s time to review the content you already have and carrying out a content audit. Things to consider when auditing:

• Buyer personas/pain points – Does this piece of content help solve the potential issues the buyer persona may be facing?
• Keyword(s) – Does this piece of content include any your agreed keywords? Are there any new keywords that could potentially be incorporated?
• Campaign themes – Does this piece of content meet the campaign focus/theme(s)?
• Reusable content – Can this piece of content be re-worked to meet the above points?

Once the analysis has been done, you may find that a lot of content has been scrapped, leaving room for a new batch of content. Although daunting, this gives you the opportunity to draft SEO-based and ‘campaign focused’ content.

To help the process, planning your content in batches of 5-10 will not only ensure you have enough content but also avoid the habit of creating ad-hoc content that may be missing the mark for your audience(s).

This will also allow you to manage the content in terms of what content ideas will be opinion articles, blogs, social posts etc, for your Owned media, Earned media and Paid media strategies.

Planning your content placements

Content management done – now it’s time start thinking about content placement strategically.

Unfortunately (but somewhat thankfully), counting the amount of coverage you have gained weekly/monthly is no longer going to cut it. Inbound PR is all about lead generation, optimisation and growth – and of course, how to track it.

Now, when it comes to coverage and measuring the impact of the exposure you are getting, backlinks and domain authority will help you to see how many which publications are  more likely to aid your lead generation process.

Having publications and other websites include links back to your website will help search engines evaluate how credible and reliable your website is. This in turn will increase the chances of your website ranking well on Google based on the keywords used and SEO authority.

The domain authority of each site that links back to your website will also impact where your website places on search engines. Usually scored out of 100, a higher score equates to a more authoritative publication/website, increasing the chances of an article popping up first in search engines.

Using Moz’s domain authority tracker will make content placement and publication analysis much simpler! So, before you start firing out content to every Tom, Dick and Hazza think about which publications are more likely to help you get to that top spot on Google’s infamous ‘page 1’.

Now that you have an idea of making Inbound PR work for you, find out what you need to get your blogging off the ground and noticed by your target audience(s) and publications.