One of the most popular buzzwords nowadays is customer-first or putting your customer at the centre of every business decision and activity.

I stand behind it. The Inbound PR methodology preaches this customer or as I call it persona-first thinking and in fact doesn't really work without it. 

Far too many businesses are still putting their products and services first when it comes to their marketing, sales and communications decisions even though they say they're customer-centric. 

In fact, over 80% of businesses are talking about the benefits of a customer-first approach, but few of these are turning talk into action. 

This stat comes from Optimizely - a leader in customer experimentation technology that did research earlier this year around the digital experience economy. 

I dug into it and I want to share some key findings and learnings: 

8 Key Problems for Customer-First:

Since the Inbound PR book came out, there have been a number of agencies adopting the practice and creating new Inbound PR services to deliver better value to clients. 

I'm always eager to learn how PR agencies have transformed their businesses with Inbound PR and I know a lot of you're are interested in it too so I'm starting an interview series with agencies owners and CEOs who've made the jump to Inbound PR. 

First up is my now dear friend Maria Gergova-Bengtsson from United Partners - one of the first and most successful PR agencies in Bulgaria. 

Let's see what Maria has to say about how they've transformed their PR agency with Inbound PR and the results they've achieved so far.  

#1 When you first heard of Inbound PR, what did you think?

AI or Artificial Intelligence has definitely become one of the most popular buzzwords in marketing and PR over the last few years. 

Most marketing and PR pros haven't yet figured out the implications of AI in their jobs and there seems to be this misunderstanding that AI will replace the human. 

In fact, according to a recent report automation threatens a quarter of marketing and PR jobs.  

I don't believe this to be true. AI to me is an enabler, just as technology is. You still need a human's brain to discover and analyse problems, identify solutions and connect the dots between the human and the AI work through the best choice of tools. 

AI might diminish the need for certain tasks to be performed by a human but then this frees the human to work on the more important and strategic stuff and should be seen as an opportunity, as a challenge to develop new and better skills. 

These are exciting times for marketing and PR pros and agencies.

I've been reading a lot about AI recently and I want to share with you a compilation of blog posts and videos that apply to marketing and PR agencies. 

75% of journalists say less than 25% of the pitches they get are relevant. 

To me, this is one of the key stats from Cision's 10th annual State of the Media Report that was just published. 

They surveyed ca. 2,000 journalists from around the world to discover trends around the industry. 

With the massive spread of fake news and the decreasing trust in the media where half of the population doesn't trust the media, journalism in 2019 seems to be facing quite a few challenges. 

For the industry, building trust is becoming its business model where for 51% of publications ensuring accuracy has become more important than revenue (34%).

This is important for PR pros as well because it means that stories and pitches will be heavily vetted. 

The research identified 5 key trends for journalism in 2019 that a PR pro must be aware of and many of them align with and speak of the need for the Inbound PR approach. 

5 Key Trends for Journalism in 2019 

Content Marketing has been around for quite some time.

We use it in inbound marketing, we use it in inbound PR, we use it in internal communication, we use it any time we need to interact with an audience. 

Content has become a business asset.

In fact, 88% of B2B content marketers say that creating content makes their audience view their organisation as a credible and trusted resource.  

I learned this from a very cool infographic from my friends over at PointVisible that I want to show you today. 

You can take a look at the full image below but I to run through some of the key statistics from my point of view.

6 Key Facts About the State of Content Marketing