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.

After a little over a year of having my email open to anyone and offering PR students to reach out to me for advice and help with their PR dissertations, I'm now done with this free service and free will to help. I'm shutting the PR mentoring down. I've kinda had enough. 

I don't  usually start or seek a rant, but I need to say all of this hoping that someone will be able to explain it to me. 

I can't even count the number of thoughtless, pointless emails I've received over the past year:

• My advisor says I need to narrow down my topic – can you give me a narrowed one please? 
• I like PR and social media – can you tell me what a good topic is that I should go for? 
• I want to conduct research around PR and have this brand's Facebook page – can you suggest a topic for it and what the hypothesis should be? 

Square2Marketing – one of the most successful inbound marketing agencies in the US – wrote an interesting post about how stories are the foundation of inbound marketing. I agree. 

But stories are also the foundation of PR. PR people have always been great storytellers. It's what they do day in and day out – they tell the stories of their clients by engaging with various audiences, whether that's through writing press releases, blog posts and longer content formats like ebooks, or utilising social media, or even drafting speeches.  

It's what PR people excel at – content.

So it turns out, content is the centrepiece for both inbound marketing and PR, which is one of the reasons why inbound PR makes perfect sense.