Traditional PR is dead. 

That's one of the key learnings from my Inbound PR talk at INBOUND16. 

The old way of mass mailing press releases to journalists to write good things about your brand and getting some positive coverage is gone. It's outbound and it doesn't work. (Although it still happens. Sad face.)

I'm not saying that PR isn't relevant anymore. Far from it. It's become even more important in a digital economy where basically everybody can have a massive voice and influence other people's decisions. 

So you still need Earned media but getting it today is different than some 10-20 years ago. 

Here's where influencer marketing comes in - it's the latest buzzword and for me, it's just modern PR done right with influencers that are not just journalists but bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers etc. 

But is it right for you? I'd say yes. 

Influencer marketing is right for any business that wants to generate WOM and have others share positive experiences with the brand, products or services. 

How do you figure out if that's for you? I have a really nice infographic from Shane Barker to help here. 

With 19,500 attendees, INBOUND16 was again a fantastic event for marketing, sales and communications professionals as well as agency people. 

The four days were packed with sessions and networking opportunities.

Last year, I learned a lot about the agency business and what my agency partners from HubSpot were struggling with or excelling at. I came out of the conference with eight key takeaways for agencies. 

This year, I felt like the week had three main big themes that were visible in one way or another throughout all talks and conversations with other people attending.

I want to cover these with you this week. Let's get started.

3 Big Key Learnings from #INBOUND16

Last week was one of the best weeks of my life. 

A huge part in that played my talk at the biggest inbound conference in the world with 19,000 marketing, communications and sales professionals: INBOUND in Boston. 

I spoke about my concept Inbound PR that I developed last year and I've been working on since. 

Heading up the stage in front of a fully packed room with 300 people coming from a PR or a marketing background was extremely gratifying and exciting.  

The best part was the feedback afterward with a lot of people coming over to me right at the end of the talk to chat or ask questions or later connecting on LinkedIn and requesting meetings. 

There were also a lot of people positively tweeting during or after. Here's my favourite: 

The Inbound PR session by @IliyanaStareva is the sleeper hit of #INBOUND16. @HubSpot: heads up. Iliyana's framework is going to be BIG.

— Jonathan Michael (@JonathanMichael) November 10, 2016

For me, all that interest and social sharing are the ultimate confirmation that the concept is needed. 

I'm hoping by now you've become curious about the talk and if you weren't there, don't worry! I've got the slides right here for you to take a look.  

Many of my partners and customers at HubSpot struggle with content creation. 

They'd come to me and usually say at least one of those three things:

• "Oh, we are not getting enough traffic as we've wanted to."
• "Our landing pages are not converting."
• "My leads are not good." 

The main reason for all of these issues always revolves around one thing: your thought process behind your content creation. So how did you approach this in the first place step by step? Basically, what was your strategy for content creation. 

Now, the way to go about creating content for inbound is pretty straightforward, but believe me, done the other way around by so many PR and marketing professionals.

This is why today I want to walk you through how exactly you should go about creating content for inbound so that you generate proper traffic and good quality leads because you can’t just blast out 10 blog posts on some cool topics and hope for wonders.   

The 4 Key Steps to Doing Content Creation for Inbound

We've known PR to be slow at adopting new trends and technologies. 

There's a lot of talking being done around how PR needs to evolve and reinvent itself because if it doesn't, PR people will die out like dinosaurs. 

That's a scary thought. But valid when we think about PR's traditional focus on outputs rather than the actual value they provide to clients. 

This is especially visible today when digital rules our lives and allows PR people to measure the results of their activities and if done right, to tie them back to actual money through influenced sales numbers.

That's easier said than done, though, because the reality is, very few PR agencies are able to do so today.

There seems to be a disconnect between what PR agencies can do for their clients and what they actually end up offering them.

That's my main learning from the latest PRCA Digital PR and Communications Report 2016.   

The research looks into how PR uses digital communications across industries as well as among in-house PR people and PR agencies. 

Today I'm going to cover some of the results from the point of view of PR agencies and that of clients.