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 with content creation, but they are good at numbers, data, and measurement—something PR professionals are still at odds with.

Enter inbound PR, where content meets measurement and helps PR people show the real return on investment (ROI) of their efforts in the new digital era.

So, there are two main reasons why inbound is the perfect fit for PR:

1. PR people excel at content creation.
2. PR people suck at measurement.

PR professionals are the best content creators. They are natural storytellers—this is how it has been since the first press release. Writing and communication skills have been at the forefront of PR practitioners' skillsets, but not so much for marketing, advertising, or digital agency professionals.

On the other hand, PR people are very bad at measurement. Showing the tangible results of their efforts in a way that makes sense to the bottom line has been the single biggest challenge for PR since its very beginning.

Especially in the digital era, you can't be using outputs or metrics such as advertising value equivalents (AVEs) or impressions; you must be able to measure outcomes and show the real impact on the business that is often defined by an increase in sales.

Inbound makes measurement possible; however, it doesn't work without content.

By now, you as a PR agency owner who is struggling to take your agency to the next level are hopefully hooked, so let me ask you some questions:

1. Do you blog?
2. Do you use social media?
3. Do you have a landing page on your website?
4. How much time do you invest in doing PR for your own agency or communications team?

Let me take a guess the answers:

1. Hmm, when we have time.
2. Yes, but mainly just to curate or share our own stuff.
3. No, no time for that and what's the point.
4. We just don't have time because we are too busy with client work.

Now you might be thinking, “Why do I even need any of that? We have our clients, our team is busy, we can't invest time and money into something that won't bring us much results.”

This is the number one challenge for agencies—we don't have time for our own PR and marketing.

I know agency life, and believe me, I sympathize with the workload, and I know how demanding clients can be. But for me, not having time is an excuse. Think of it this way: you really want to lose weight, so you need to fix up your diet and work out five times per week. However, you are super busy at work and at home, so you know that to achieve your goal you need to develop some new routines and adjust your daily lifestyle. That includes finding or better yet making the time for working out and preparing healthy food and snacks. There are two possible scenarios here: you find excuses and don't make the time and so you don't see any results, but you are still frustrated and angry as nothing is happening; or you've made a conscious choice to change and make the time (for example, through calendar planning) and you are seeing some fantastic progress.

As a PR agency owner or CEO, which one will you choose: being stuck in the state where you've always been, or will you embrace change?

I hope it's the latter because doing your own PR with your own content and promoting it on your own channels is the best thing you could ever do for your team or agency. Why? Because inbound PR can help you build brand awareness, generate leads (customer or media), nurture them, close them as customers or publishers, and then delight them to retain them with even better services, stories, and strong relationships. Most importantly, you'll be able to track the ROI of all those activities. And once you can do this for your agency, then you'll be able to develop the inbound PR services and the internal capabilities to deliver them for clients. That's how you'll grow your PR business in the twenty-first century.

This book is about you. Just as inbound is.

In a typical inbound fashion, each chapter will educate you on particular topics that all build upon each other so that you can move from learning to doing.

In Chapter 1, we'll look at the definitions of public relations and inbound marketing, what the two disciplines do and where the similarities are. We'll also see what binds them. We'll lay a foundation of common knowledge.

Chapter 2 is dedicated to PR's biggest challenge—measurement—and covers the current status quo, the history of communications measurement, how measurement works with inbound, where the opportunity for PR lies, and what the future of PR measurement looks like.

In Chapter 3, I'll take you on the journey of how I came up with the inbound PR concept, its definitions and benefits, and why you as a PR agency (or any communications agency) should adopt it.

Once we have this theory covered, I'll introduce you to the inbound PR methodology in Chapter 4 and offer you a lot of practical advice and tips on how to run inbound PR campaigns, how to create remarkable content, and how to tell inbound stories. This chapter has a strong focus on how to work with journalists, influencers, and media people in an inbound way as well as how to create inbound PR newsrooms.

Chapter 5 will delve into the importance and development of a strong positioning strategy for your agency that will then ultimately help you generate new business, nurture leads, and close the leads in your sales funnel.

Finally, in Chapter 6, we'll cover how to define and package inbound PR services into 12-month client retainers and how to develop the knowledge, capabilities, and skills your people need to be able to deliver inbound PR and to drive client results.

PR is ripe for transformation. Are you ready to embark on the inbound PR journey?