The Inbound PR concept is now one year old. Happy birthday to my concept! (Tomorrow is the day!) 

As we've defined before, Inbound PR combines the best of two worlds − public relations and inbound marketing − and alleviates PR's biggest weakness (measurement) and inbound marketing's biggest challenge (content). 

One year deserves a proper celebration so I decided it's time for a monster blog posts of 2,800 words that digs a little deeper into the fundamental principles, tools and tactics of Inbound PR and provides multiple tips. 

For that, I thought I'd use the alphabet since becoming one year old is a good time to start learning the letters and put the basis in place. 

Here we go! 

The ABCs of Inbound PR: 

Thanks to my awesome colleague Alba Vargas Jimenez for this awesome guest post! 

As a Channel Consultant at HubSpot I see hundreds of blog articles being pumped out to the net every day.

Agencies and clients plan elaborate content strategies which require time and resources to materialize. They do so because they want to ‘rank’ on Google; they want to be ‘first’; they want to be found…You name it.

It’s understandable that they do so since they constantly hear that “Content is King”.

This post will introduce the 5 reasons you are not giving your King the throne it deserves to bypass all your competitors’ content.

Before I break it down let’s get a little bit of context on how search engines work. 

How Search Engines Actually Work:

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.

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. 

We are entering a new era of globalisation – a digital one – McKinsey says. Practically non-existent 15 years ago, digital flow of information and content now exerts a larger part on GDP growth than the centuries-old trade in goods. 

What we once called normal is no longer normal, it's traditional and old-school. Digital is disrupting the way we lead our lives and the way we do business. 

The outbound methods of pushing messages via TV, radio or direct mail no longer work. People ignore all that. We've become a lot more sophisticated because technology and online have offered us a lot of choice to design our ego ecosystems where we decide what to consume and what to ignore. 

The problem for business is that right now there's way too much noise everywhere which creates a huge challenge when trying to reach your audience. Hence the need for a partner in solving this challenge – an agency that's an expert in communicating your messages to the right audience at the right time with the right tools. 

But this presents yet another challenge: the list of agencies out there is huge too. Not all of them, though, are experts in the new world of digital, and among them, fall some PR agencies too. 

PR agencies still have this weird aura around them, being seen primarily as media relations experts and not getting respect. 

I've worked in the industry myself and now being on the other side consulting agencies on how to grow their business, I see the pains again and again every day. And they all revolve around one thing – the inability to measure and track results. 

I've made two big realisations over the past 12 months observing all this: