If your PR agency disappeared tomorrow, would your clients miss you? 

How quickly would they replace you? 

Not easy questions, I know, but they're important when you think about why you are in the PR business, the value that you're currently providing and the type of agency you envision in the near future. 

Are you a nice to have, a should have or a must have? In other words, are you irreplaceable?

The irreplaceable agencies are the ones who not just deliver remarkable work but whose work's remarkability clearly drives bottom line results.

The agencies that clients fear to lose are the ones who can very easily measure and tie their activities to the impact they're making on the client's financial goals.  

But in the ever-changing digital and technological landscape, what do PR agencies need to do to survive and most importantly to evolve to be fit for the future? 

I've been running this blog for five and a half years. 

As my audience started to grow, I began receiving emails from people either sharing content that I might like and want to use or pitches for guest posts. 

I was so excited back then! They liked my blog and wanted to be part of it! They wanted to contribute for my audience! 

With time and with the growth in traffic and subscribers, the number of pitches increased, especially after my talk at INBOUND16. 

Which I'm happy about for sure, however, my inbox now gets flooded with bad emails. Really bad emails. 

Pitches that are spammy, mass emails that were clearly not just for me, untargeted or irrelevant suggestions. 

Because I worked in PR and specialised in blogger relations, I'm amazed at the terrible pitches I'm getting so I want to show you some examples of what not to do and give you some tips on what to do instead.

PR skills are still lacking and the gender pay gap is still heavily prevalent, especially in agencies. 

These were two of the findings that struck the most out for me when I was reading the results of the eight State of PR survey done by the CIPR - the largest professional PR body in Europe. 

When we look at what PR people do daily, the research reveals a 10% jump in the number of respondents spending most and some of their time on strategic planning - going up to 60%.

No surprise, though, that content creation and media relations are at the top of this list, respectively at 82% and 73%. But what's surprising is that measurement and evaluation hasn't moved much since last year and is still at the 50s.

I've always said that PR people are the best content creators but are really bad at measurement even though they all say that's the area they need to improve. However, if you're not spending time on time on it, how are you going to improve it? Reading this research makes me feel like Inbound PR is making more and more sense. 

To that point, quantitative and qualitative data analysis are among the top weakest skills and competencies. 

With the global adoption of digital, a lot has been said about the PR industry. Unfortunately, not always positive.

Take, for example, keeping up with social media and online channels to develop appropriate skills and offer the type of services that clients nowadays need has been a painful challenge. Not to mention then measurement which has been PR's biggest problem since its very existence.  

So how does PR stay relevant? 

To figure this out, we need to first analyse our current reality. 

When we think about the past two decades, there are two key things brands and their PR people need to consider:

• Our consumer and purchasing behaviours have changed, massively.
• If you don’t have an online presence, you don’t exist.

Let’s start with the first one.

When I started working on the Inbound PR concept, my initial thought was that PR pros are really great at content creation and storytelling but they were pretty bad at measurement. I remember that from my days working in the industry.

On the other hand, inbound marketing people are well versed in data and numbers - this is what I saw from working with hundreds of agencies as a consultant at HubSpot. 

Then I decided to dig into the two disciplines. 

What's Public Relations? 

As per definition, public relations is the strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its publics. This comes from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) which is the leading PR organisation in the world.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) in the UK – the other leading PR body – argues that:

"Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics."

As you can see from the definitions, PR is all about reputation and engaging in meaningful relationships with various publics.