Every forward-thinking PR or marketing professional will tell you that top-down, “push” messages no longer work.

We live in a world that’s gone inbound. A world where to be successful with your communication you need to rely on methods that pull people into your brand rather than interrupt them with irrelevant content.

This is exactly what Inbound PR is all about – it’s a whole new philosophy on how to do PR in the modern, digital world.

Its methodology focuses on two key areas – content and measurement.

Remarkable content created and shared on the right mediums is the most successful way to reach your audience, or as we normally say in inbound – your personas.

Measurement then is essential to 1) gauge the success of your campaigns and 2) improve as you go.

All of this sounds very logical and kind of simple but its actual execution is what most companies and professionals have major difficulties with.

Through my work as a PR professional and an agency business consultant, I’ve found that most businesses struggle to transform towards Inbound PR because of fear.

I've been doing some work on influencer marketing recently and specifically on why use it, best practices, examples etc.

I'm not going to go in the discussion around whether influencer marketing is the same thing as PR or not, whether it should be PR doing it or the marketing department. 

I'll just say that when I was working in a PR agency back 6-7 years ago, I was engaging a group of young beauty bloggers in a very similar fashion as influencer marketing preaches. 

Anyway, back to my research.  I've published a list of influencer marketing statistics before but I figured it's time to update that and share a new list that's more recent. 

So when I came across an infographic from smallbizgenius I knew I had found what I needed. 

It's a long and detailed infographic with more than 80 influencer marketing statistics. 

You can check out the infographic below but first, here are the stats that got my attention:

10 Top Influencer Marketing Stats:

Do you remember the days when Twitter had just come out and people were trying to figure out how to use it for business?

I do. In fact, I became fascinated with social media for business. I was still a student but I could already see the massive shifts happening in the communications world.

Even though I studied International Business, my passion for comms made me follow big names such as Brian Solis and David Meerman Scott who were pioneers in how to do PR the modern way.

And so I decided to pursue a career in PR. I read every book on PR that I could get my hands on, I interned in PR and I worked part-time in a PR agency during my final year at university.

I tried to learn everything I could.

I did everything - I wrote press releases, I pitched national and regional media through email and cold calls, I worked with bloggers, I managed social media channels.

It was great. I learned a lot.

But I could see that even though I worked so hard and my agency team did too, we were basically just slaves in the eyes of the client. They didn’t consider us strategic advisers. We were just implementers and every time we tried to convince the client to do something new, it was close to impossible.

Republished with permission from ITPR's blog. 

Inbound PR has changed the way we deliver campaigns for the better. Whether it’s being able to track and present our results or the way we interact with journalists, we’ve seen a significant uptick in PR results and, more importantly, client happiness!

As we’ve spoken about before, the concept has had a profound effect in generating new business, but there are still a few challenges with Inbound PR that we’ve seen cropping up again and again when trying to implement Inbound PR campaigns. 

What is Inbound PR? 

Inbound PR is an evolution of traditional PR in an effort to keep up with constant changes in the digital age. While traditional PR has purely relied on coverage to prove its worth, Inbound PR goes beyond that to delve deeper into the metrics and outcomes that help meet business goals.

Don’t get me wrong – any PR campaign should aim to get you a bucketful of coverage, but if you’re not tracking who’s clicked through to your website as a result of that coverage, how will you be able to prove the effect of it?

This is a guest post by Liuda Nebozhak from Crello.

Every start-up undergoes some trial and error in its first 1-2 years. Those are probably some of the most difficult and crucial learnings of any new business. 

There's a ton start-ups need to figure out, including their own PR and marketing. PR especially plays a key role because as a start-up nobody knows you and you need to get the word out about your existence, your products and the new value that you add in the market. 

Our company Crello - which offers a design tool specifically for marketers and bloggers - has gone through multiple trials and errors but we've learned a lot.

We recently announced and celebrated reaching the major milestone of 1 million users over the course of just 20 months.  However, it took us some time to find our product-market fit and we are continuing to tweak it to this day. Along the way, we are leveraging our product development with the help of PR, brand ambassadors, and market research, amongst others.

Below are my 5 key takeaways for getting your start-up off the ground.