Iliyana Stareva has written what I’d call, with a considerable degree of confidence, the most important, actionable and forward-looking PR book of the past ten years. That’s true, I believe, for the following reasons, which I’ll circle back to and discuss in a bit more detail:
Before building out a little further on why I think this is such a meaningful work, it’s important to have some clarity on definitions.
The market reality is that PR, marketing and advertising are rapidly converging. But certainly many shops still hold themselves out as primarily specializing in public relations. I won’t dwell here on the laughable official definitions of PR, which are essentially entirely self-referential such as “public relations is the process of managing an organization’s relationships with its various publics” – like, thanks for that, my mind is blown.
But I will speak to the way public relations has in the past, and sometimes still is, defined via the functions it performs. There’s a tendency to equate a firm specializing in PR with a firm that is necessarily dealing exclusively in “earned media.” Earned media, in turn, is often – incorrectly – perceived as being the same as “media relations”.
There’s no question that PR shops indeed operate substantially in the earned media realm. But forward-thinking agencies - the kind that will benefit from this book and the kind that’ll still be alive in 10 years – unquestionably practice (or attempt to practice) content strategy and content marketing. If one wants to be a strict adherent of a PESO model (personally, I prefer “PEO” – I don’t believe shared media ought to be categorized separately, it’s not difficult to break out shared media, which is mostly social media, into its earned, owned and paid components) – content falls primarily under owned, but it also hits strongly on shared, and while not optimal, of course there’s a massive amount of paid content to be found in the world.
I say all this to make the point that if one accepts the notion of inbound PR, folks need to trash the notion – and by folks, I mean the agencies as well – that PR falls exclusively under the earned media banner. Not even media relations falls exclusively under the earned banner, as the book so righty emphasizes.
My concept here isn’t perfect, but perhaps my preferred tool to differentiate PR is to say that it deals largely in the realm of reaching clients’ target audiences through some sort of third-party intermediary – be it traditional reporters and media channels, the more modern notion of relevant industry influencers. or a social media platform (whether a platform is an intermediary is debate for another time).
But please don’t manage to read this wonderful book, and then do a Google search for earned media services – what you’ll find will be a highly limited list, mostly covering press releases and reporter pitch and place – and then be confused about where inbound fits. Good PR firms are completely at home in the realm of owned and shared media, too.
Also note that in the previous few passages I’ve taken a view of the perception of PR firms that Ms. Stareva acknowledges and quickly disregards (except for the measurement problem) – the author is very much on board with the notion of PR firms’ harnessing the myriad tools offered by all of earned, owned, paid and shared, most importantly for the inbound concept, content marketing.
Back to the book itself and some more specific items, related to the broader points above, that are so key and unique:
That means the agency devoting real time to managing a first-rate landing page, developing remarkable thought content, sharing that content socially, etc. It’s just not going to be optional. Customers aren’t looking for agencies that specialize in talking about themselves. They want agencies who are focused on addressing the prospective client’s needs in the context of the client’s line of business. Agencies who don’t run their own highly effective content strategy processes, and then perform masterfully in creating and promoting that content aren’t going to make it.
Ms. Stareva is 100% on the mark in the way she combines PR with inbound. Inbound is about creating awareness of an agency or a business such that prospects with certain problems to be solved will naturally come to find the right universe of agencies via their own research, as opposed to being bombarded by advertising. That kind of awareness is rooted in a premise centering on agencies/businesses having a productive two-way dialogue with prospects that is valuable to both sides and that doesn’t jump immediately to a sales pitch.
Put simply, it’s a conversion funnel that provides the right kind of content to the right kind of personas at the right stage of the funnel, thereby pulling prospects through the funnel stages : attract, persuade, convert and delight or, if you prefer, strangers, visitors, media leads/leads, customers/publishers, promoters/repeat publishers. The model is presented flawlessly and the explication of why certain forms of content are optimally presented at various point along the buyer journey is perfectly done.
I love this chapter because it features concepts that my agency and me personally have embraced for quite some time and they’re objectively superior means garnering the quality and quantity of media and/or influencer coverage that clients are going to expect. Think more along the lines of researching your reporter targets, knowing their beats, the areas they prefer to cover, subjects where they might need some help, etc. – as opposed to a generic press release blast.
It avoids confusion, yes, but it also hammers home how critical it is that the agency itself do its own inbound work. Agencies who don’t are going to fall off the radar screen. Even if such an agency could survive, it’d be hard pressed to convince a client that the agency is the right choice to provide inbound services and the challenge of actually so providing would be likely insurmountable. Agencies need to practice what they preach.
I’d recommend this book to any practitioner of strategic communications, even if just for his or her own personal and professional interest/education. But if you’re leadership at an agency that’s still mired in the older world of PR, I’d treat this as required reading. I have a strong inkling that there aren’t going to be any folks who will regret having read this book. It’s a book that I expect is going to be on practitioners’ desks (or smartphones) for at least the next decade. Bravo to the author.