When we talk about outbound and inbound, this is how you should think about it: outbound means pushing messages out there to journalists or potential customers for volumes-sake so that it goes out and hopefully reaches as many people as possible; inbound means pulling the right people in with relevant messages that they find on their own and choose to consume of their own will whenever they decide to.

That's what's changed over the past few decades ‒ consumers have become far more sophisticated, educated and guarded with devices, tools and apps to ignore you. Or if you do your job well, to pay attention to you.

This is the world we live in ‒ a constant fight for attention because of a complete saturation with content and information everywhere, all the time, from anyone, brands and ordinary people.  

To build a sphere of influence in such a tough environment is a hard job. Usually, that's the job of PR people so I don't envy their new reality. But to stay relevant and manage to break through that attention bubble, PR people need to turn to inbound. They need to combine the good parts of the outbound world and use them for inbound.

Inbound PR focuses on all things digital across paid, earned, social and owned media (PESO) and with this post I want to show you a few ways in which you can turn traditional PR activities into Inbound PR activities. Here we go.

We are all in the services business. You don't agree? Then think about all the people you need to please directly or indirectly - clients, potential clients, co-workers, bosses and subordinates.

This is most prevalent in professional services companies, especially agencies because this is what they sell – their knowledge and expertise in a particular service area rather than a product, e.g. marketing strategy, PR and digital comms management and implementation, website build, SEO optimization etc. All things that at first sight are intangible but extremely important to a client.

I’ve worked in five different agencies across Germany and the UK and I know firsthand how difficult clients can be. Even now on the other side where I consult agencies on how to grow their businesses with HubSpot and inbound marketing, I still face demanding and energy and time-consuming client situations all the time.

Learning how to properly handle those comes with experience because you are dealing with real people and everyone is different. The situation or issue might be the same, but the people you are working with have different characters, understandings, behavior and expectations. And they don’t care that you have other clients, they don’t even think about you or your situation, they want to feel special and have their issue solved now. As I always say, the client is king, right?

Marketing professionals and agency people like to-do lists. They just have so many things on their plate. But what they like even more is ticking off items on that to-do list.

As the workload increases, though, that to-dos list usually starts to get shorter, but the actual to-dos are of a bigger scope, which is not very helpful because the point of the to-do list is to break things down into small parts and tackle each one by one. When the task is too big and you don't break it down into subtasks, you tend to forget things or you don't know where to start nor can you tell your people what to do. 

What marketing and agency pros need in these cases is a checklist that they can use every time ‒ for various campaigns or clients. Think like a to-do template that enables them to turn these ad-hoc to-do lists into a process.  

Here's where today's post is going to help. It offers a simple checklist of 69 to-dos to help you optimise your marketing and communications activities throughout the entire inbound marketing methodology.

I'm really big on leadership. It's a topic that I've been actively reading and learning more about over the past year.

That learning journey led me to an essay by Daniel Goleman from the HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People called "Leadership That Gets Results" 

In his piece, Daniel Goleman explains that emotional intelligence (EI) really is the key ingredient for leadership and that successful leaders have the following EI competencies: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill.

But what makes the best leaders is their ability to adopt the correct leadership styles and use them at the right time with the right people. 

Daniel Goleman defines six leadership styles that I want to show you below in more detail and that I have summarised in the infographic at the end of the post. 

The Six Leadership Styles: 

We've spoken about how influencer marketing is becoming a really big deal. Here are all the stats to prove that. But that only gets us so far - to make us understand that we really should be doing influencer marketing. Knowing that you need to do something is different than actually doing it.

In our fast-moving, overcommunicated world, implementation is key. 

That got me thinking about the essence of influencer marketing and what it is about - basically, it's about engaging well-known influencers in your space of business to talk positively about you, your products or your services. 

Now, this is where we can start a debate because isn't this exactly what PR people do? They influence the influencers? They engage and build relationships with the media and with bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers and everyday peeps who have a serious online following so that they spread positive words about our business. This type of activity is far more effective than paid and push messages because, according to McKinsey, 20 to 50% of purchase decisions are influenced by word-of-mouth, influencer opinions are twice as effective as ads and customers acquired through such initiatives are 37% more likely to stick around. 

And that totally makes sense.