Marketing and communications are changing - upon that, we can all agree. But what's the best way to adjust your marcomm strategy to be most effective with today's always-on consumer? There are multiple schools of thought, but our money is on inbound marketing and its close cousin content marketing. Here are three reasons why a 33-year old PR firm is throwing in with the online marketing crowd:
- The old ways don't work as well anymore. In the words of HubSpot, a leading platform in inbound marketing since 2006, "instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be." This makes so much intuitive sense to us.And even the old methods of media relations - the tried and true mainstay of PR - must be upgraded in order to build true relationships with media and influencers in this digital age.
- Inbound and content marketing are a perfect fit with PR. As our own Bryan Haviland noted, these wily new digital ways are a natural extension of what we in public relations have always done: a perfect blend of strategy, content and relationship building. We just have some really cool new tools we can use to bring our strategic communications programs to life.
- Nothing's more important than being found.In the old days, we had to market hard to get out in front of consumers and key B2B audiences via the media we knew they were watching or reading. Today, our targets can come right to us - we just have to make sure we're easily "findable" (there's a word we never would have used ten years ago!).Integrating online and offline marketing, keeping up a steady stream of content and optimizing absolutely everything for search are critical today whether we're talking public relations or marketing. Inbound marketing factors all of that in - and more.
We've barely scratched the surface. We'll be blogging a lot more about the intersection of inbound marketing and public relations - and we hope you'll join the conversation. We'd love to hear what you think about inbound in the comments below.