Inbound PR

Introduction

I come from a public relations (PR) background. I spent three years working in PR agencies across Germany and the United Kingdom. I loved it but I saw the flaws, too, and so I moved away from the industry, transitioning into something more modern: inbound marketing and agency business consulting.

It turns out I was wrong. For two and a half years, I consulted over 200 agencies in my role as a Channel Consultant at HubSpot—the inbound marketing and sales software as a service pioneer—and I realized that I'm never getting away from PR. I still researched it and I still wrote about it. I still saw the flaws and I still wanted to fix them.

Thankfully, I saw a way. A way that can transform the public relations industry. A way that can transform the PR agency model.

It started with a simple realization: the way we make decisions has fundamentally changed, regardless of whether that concerns our personal or our professional lives. We've become a lot more sophisticated and we feel empowered to go online, do our research, talk to friends, read recommendations, tweet at companies with questions, and demand answers to our problems through the content that we find. We don't want to be marketed at; we want the freedom to choose, based on our own online experiences.

Content is the name of the buying game today.

And who's better suited to create fascinating content and use it to engage with the public than PR practitioners?

Marketers, advisers, and digital professionals struggle ...