Media Relations

We've spent a whole chapter on how to do media relations the inbound way, but the main point is that in the digital world, there's no need for nonstop journalist cold calling and mass e-mailing to pitch your story. Don't chase journalists. Give them a reason to chase you or the business you represent.

Just as with customers, you can pull the media in with relevant content that they can find when they do research. You can do this by turning your (dry) press releases into more engaging, keyword-optimized blog posts, videos, or even infographics and additionally creating an inbound PR newsroom on your website where you can store all of this, including your press releases, for future reference and a search bank for the journalists that poke around your website (see Chapter 4).

And then of course, you can still do your media outreach, but do it in a way that the journalists you want to target prefer, meaning that you need to do your research about them, too, and be on point on the right channel, whether Twitter or LinkedIn or with a comment on an article they've written. You're moving to digital or social media outreach as a service.

Research and Reports

This is another type of content that PR people usually take care of—the presentation of big research and reports (for example, yearly reports, sustainability reports, and so on) and then sharing them with the media.

What I find most shocking is that so many of those highly valuable PDF files filled with lots of information are just put on the website as a free downloadable link, and anyone can get a free copy of a report that's taken months or a whole year to create. And you can't even measure how they end up performing.

Here's a solution for you. Keep the PDFs, but instead of offering them as a free hyperlink, create a landing page where you ask people to fill out a form with their name, e-mail address, company (or whatever information you need) and only those who fill it out can get the report. By doing this, you don't give away valuable pieces of content for free, but you exchange them for contact details that you can use to engage with these people further as they've clearly shown interest (they filled out that form, right?).

This is how you add lead generation to your services.

Guest Posts

Speaking of all the content just mentioned—press releases, infographics, research, and reports—don't stop at hoping to gain some earned media through inbound media relations.

Go a step further and offer to write guest posts on relevant online magazines or blogs for your clients. You'd be surprised how appreciated such pieces of work are (provided they are relevant and of interest to the publication's readers).

This will allow you to share your client's content in their own words (written and controlled by you), achieve more reach and audience attention, and most importantly, get some link building going because usually the publication will reference you as the writer and link to the website and social channels you agree on. Having a number of authoritative websites linking to your client's website is extremely important for SEO and getting their page higher in search results.

This way, you not only add guest writing but also SEO as a service offering.

Brochures and Catalogues

Another thing I've seen PR people do a lot is creating collateral. Brochures, catalogues, all those print materials being transmitted here and there. Don't get me wrong, such materials are needed at events, for example, but why leave it there? Why not turn them into infographics, PDFs hidden on landing pages in your inbound PR newsroom, or even better, mobile apps for people to browse and learn more or quizzes and bots to find what's best suited for their needs?

Interactive content is growing in importance so now is the time to repurpose all those materials and collateral your client already has for the online world.

This allows you to integrate content audits and repurposing into your services.

The world we live in today is a constant fight for attention because of a complete saturation of content; information is everywhere, all the time, from anyone, brands and ordinary people alike.

To build a sphere of influence in such a tough environment is a hard job. That's what you are promising your clients.

To stay relevant and manage to break through that attention bubble, you need to find ways to be where your client's customers are and that means stepping out of your comfort zone and embracing all the possibilities that digital offers.

Having done an audit of your existing services and considered how you could turn them from an outbound version to an inbound option or what other offerings you could add, now it's time to categorize them.

Often this exercise will allow you to create an inbound retainer—a repeat package of services that you deliver monthly for a certain amount of time, usually a year.

Full Inbound PR Retainer

A full spectrum of inbound PR services could include:

Attract Inbound PR Services

• Persona development
• Content strategy (decision-making journey)
• Content plan
• Blogging and guest writing
• Press releases
• Interactive content (infographics, videos, bots, or apps)
• Keyword research
• On-page SEO
• Social media publishing
• Social media management
• Pay-per-click (PPC)

Convert Inbound PR Services

• Content creation (e-books, videos, infographics, and so on)
• Lead generation with landing pages and CTAs
• Inbound PR newsroom, build and manage
• Media database management
• Retargeting
• Content audit and repurposing

Close Inbound PR Services

• E-mail marketing
• Lead nurturing
• Thought leadership
• Social and digital media outreach
• Events
• Exclusives and interviews

Delight Inbound PR Services

• Social media management
• Research and surveys
• Link building
• Community management

Ongoing Inbound PR Services

• Weekly check-ins and performance reporting
• Campaign performance reporting
• Crisis communication
• Monthly strategy/review meetings
• Monthly measurement
• Quarterly ROI reporting

Once you have a list of the overall services that you want to provide, you should ideally break each service into all the small parts that it includes. For example, persona development is made of research, client meetings, customer surveys and interviews, analysis of data, and putting together the persona document or one-pager for distribution to the client and their marketing and sales teams.

By doing so, you will ensure that you don't forget key pieces of work that need to be done and also that you need to charge for. Often, agencies end up over-delivering and being underpaid for activities they perform but simply forget to add in their service packages and pricing. This happens when they don't have visibility into all the things that they are doing for their clients because they forget to monitor and track the time it takes for each deliverable. If you break your services down into its smallest parts, you and your team will know what to track and will be able to identify exactly where to stop and say no.

In addition, such a detailed list of services will enable you to package your offerings better.

Phase 1: Workshops

After a few conversations, you and the potential client have seen that you are both interested in working together. To start the relationship, you can offer them paid workshops, for example a strategy or a persona development workshop where you all come together in a room to discuss the given topic. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to show your expertise while leading the workshop and guide the client to getting the most out of the day. It's also a great opportunity for both parties to meet different people from the teams and test the dynamic of work. You both are trying to decide whether working together month by month for 12 months would actually be productive, collaborative, and enjoyable. Twelve months is a long time to be spending with someone so the engagement better have some chemistry from the beginning.

Phase 2: Campaign

Toward the end of your workshops, you should have defined some sort of a plan of action, for example, now that we have created a first draft of our personas, maybe it's time to develop a full paid campaign for a particular persona. This would include a lot of the attract and convert offerings such as content strategy and creation, blogging, press releases, landing pages, social media, and a little bit of e-mail. A campaign like this could be one to three months long. Within such a period both parties will continue to work together on a regular basis to get to know each other. The goal is to achieve results with the efforts that you are promising and to see if the client will keep his word as well. The latter is especially important when the client is required to deliver content to you. If the client doesn't respect deadlines, then it's your work and ultimately the client's results that suffer.

Phase 3: Retainer

Provided that the campaign has gone well and both parties feel that this can be a fruitful engagement, now it's time to put your retainer proposal together. At a minimum, this should include: goals of the client, what you are going to deliver, responsibilities and deadlines, as well as people involved from both parties and monthly cost. When the client signs, this is when you can go into your ongoing retainer delivery with weekly check-ins and monthly performance calls and ideally an account manager to be the main point of contact for this client and the rest of your team members who are involved in the implementation of the different services.

Phasing this in is comparable to the development of a romantic relationship. You are basically asking potential clients to “Like us, then love us, then live with us.”

When you phase in a new client engagement this way you ensure that both parties fully understand what it would be like to get into a 12-month client-agency relationship and have already found a way to work together. It's a much easier setup into a retainer agreement that will prove successful for both parties.

And if at any stage during the first two phases something isn't going well, then you are not bound by a long legal agreement that you have to stick with. You can walk out. You've gotten paid for your workshops and/or campaign, the client has received strategy plans, content, and campaigns, and more, and now they have what they need to either continue on their own or find another agency.

This gives you the power to say no because you'd find out early enough that your team would not enjoy working with this client and that the relationship would be doomed for failure from the beginning. You have space to find better-fitting clients and focus your energy on positive relationships.

What you want to avoid by going into retainers is to work on a project basis. Projects that last for a month or a few months are never a sustainable way for you to have money in the bank because you never know what's going to happen next month or what to do if your biggest client cancels. You can't plan and when you can't plan you can't grow.

With retainers, on the other hand, you have a long-term outlook and know what's coming in. This allows you to build a scalable business model with the time and the resources to expand and develop even more capabilities to delight your clients and create true talent within your internal team.

Key Required Skills

To stay up front you'll need to teach your people the ABCs of inbound PR (see the Appendix). You should also get them to:

• Take courses for Google Analytics, Keywords, and Ads to grasp website analytics, SEO, and paid media better.
• Complete the inbound Marketing and inbound Sales certifications from HubSpot, which are free, to learn more about setting goals, lead generation, and content for inbound.
• Learn the PESO model inside out and start thinking beyond media relations and press releases but develop new, more creative ideas.
• Master tools like Moz, SEMrush, Hootsuite, and Buffer to feel more comfortable with technology, automating activities, and measuring them. PRStack.co is the best resource to give you a list of free and paid tools.
• Truly understand the inbound PR methodology by having them run an inbound PR campaign for your agency.

Going a step further, you should look at how you deliver inbound PR services. It shouldn't be a list of things your people need to figure out when to do. You need to identify when they need those skills and how they build upon each other.

When you have new hires, develop a training program for them month by month for the first three months. This will be their onboarding process. Start backward: What do they need to know and be able to do by the end of month one? List this in its details. This will give you cues as to what you need to teach them so that you can figure out how best to provide training, whether it be through courses, training sessions, mentoring, one-on-one meetings, and so on. Then continue with the rest of the months. Most importantly, document this process to avoid wasting time and energy doing this again for your next hire. You can simply use this plan on an ongoing basis moving forward, and, if needed, just make small adjustments to it.

You can apply a similar approach with your current team. Give yourself a deadline of when inbound PR needs to be adopted and work from this as an end goal, going backward to create a logical learning journey.

Once you've developed your inbound PR services, take that list and add two additional columns next to it. For each service, list the knowledge and the skills your people need to offer these services with confidence. Next to that, write down how you are going to enable them to succeed. Are you going to send them to do courses (online and onsite)? Are you going to bring in an expert to do that or are you going to run your own training program? Are there resources, books, certifications your people might use?

In addition, assess the current skills of each and every one of your people. You might be surprised that one of them has the knowledge on a particular topic to train the rest so you won't need to bring in external training.

This allows you to identify the gaps between what you currently have and what you need.

Build learning into your agency culture. Allow your people to share learnings from clients and projects they are involved with in a regular weekly or monthly meeting.

Go a step further than what happens in your agency and explore the broader marketing world and trends by running a monthly meeting that covers all the news around social, marketing, communications, SEO, and so on so that everyone is able to keep up-to-date. Have one person prepare for this and present to the group. The next time it should be someone else and so on.

Knowledge sharing is essential if you want to deliver remarkable client results.

At the end of the day, it's your knowledge and skills that clients buy because they don't have them.

You need to train your people and you need to create an environment where you enable them to learn and share knowledge with each other.

You need to challenge your team and create a culture where they can grow and develop a career by staying at the front of new technological and societal development. Otherwise, they'll find someone else who can give them such an environment.

Don't leave your people to figure everything out on their own. Guide them and then let them learn, be involved, and be challenged.

Mapping Out Your Client's Life Cycle

The beginning is usually the most intense time with a new client as you are just starting the engagement, and there's a lot to learn about them and to do to get them started.

You'll also probably have multiple people from the team involved—ideally one account manager or project manager to be the client's main point of contact and work with the rest of your people on various tasks; probably a writer, and if you do any design or web development then these specialists, too, and so on.

Here's where the fun begins. Write down each small task you do during month one, how long it takes you, and who is part of it. For example, the kickoff strategy and goals meeting includes the client, the agency's CEO, and the agency's account manager for this client—it takes four hours to prepare, three hours to run, one hour to follow up. Preparation and follow-up always get forgotten but if you consider them among all activities, they add up hugely in terms of time and internal resources. Continue then with the rest of your activities that you initially do such as campaign and content planning, keywords and media research, press release writing if a story is already there, and so forth, and put these in your time tracking software (if you don't have such a program, get one as soon as possible because without one you are not going to be able to track how long it takes to complete certain inbound PR activities which, in turn, will hurt your ability to plan your next client engagements and your pricing).

Do the same with months two and three, during which you would usually finalize all content planning, strategies, persona development, and finalization, and you will create the first inbound PR campaign.

After the initial setup is done, months four to six focus on getting into a normal routine with regular account management meetings and campaign activities. Depending on the client and whether they have fully outsourced to you, these would be weekly, biweekly, or monthly meetings or calls. Each call needs to have a goal and an agenda that allows your account managers to effectively run it. For example, the first call of the month could focus on setting objectives for the month based on the yearly priorities and agreeing on the tactics you would need to implement to achieve the objectives. The second call could be about generating ideas and brainstorming new things you could try, for example, Snapchat. The third call should be about checking on the progress of the objectives that were set up in call one and if there's anything needed to do more to hit them. The last call should focus on the performance review and analysis of the entire month that would allow you to see what has worked well and what hasn't, both in terms of the campaigns and also in terms of the ongoing relationship with the client. Reviewing the first inbound PR campaign at this stage will allow you to make some informed data decisions about the next campaign to improve results even more and will guide your regular calls, too.

Months seven to nine are all about learning from the past months and the results achieved, what needs to be optimized and improved, particularly by reviewing the initial goals that were agreed on in the beginning. Toward the end of month nine you need to start thinking about the renewal of your retainer that's upcoming in three months. You need to be looking at the value that you have been providing and how you can provide even more so that the client will choose to stay with you after the 12 months are over.

As soon as month 10 hits, you need to start preparing for a renewal conversation with the right decision maker at the client and do everything in your power to ensure that the next three months are highly successful.

Ideally, you'll have monthly reporting meetings or calls to share success and results on the tactical level such as placements secured, traffic increased, leads generated, social media campaigns run, and so on. These should happen between the people heavily involved in the actual work such as account managers at your agency and your main point of contact at the client.

However, this success reporting is not enough, so every quarter you should be having more strategic reporting conversations with the C-level people at the client where you should go over the high-level goals that impact the bottom line and how what you've done so far has affected them. This is where your expertise in measurement needs to shine.

It's also where you can discuss things like upsells of services and increasing your retainer because you are sitting in front of the right decision maker with the signing power. During these meetings, you are not supposed to be talking about the next newspaper article you are planning but about how collectively your agency has significantly increased the client's revenue, how their investment has totally been worth it and can be seen through the value that you have brought.

Mapping out your client's life cycle month by month and your involvement in it will help you create a process for your retainers, projects, or any client touch points.

By documenting this, you allow your employees to be autonomous because they know what needs to be done, at what stage, and by when. Also, when you hire new people, especially account managers, they'll be able to easily jump into this process because they have very clear written guidance and expectations of the work they should be doing with clients.

You can use simple tools such as Google Docs to write down your delivery process and playbooks or you can use your project management tool to create templates of tasks for different processes or stages, for example, months one to three as onboarding. I'm a big fan of teamwork projects and Realtime Board for this.

Finally, ensure that you track time religiously. You do want to know how long your employees are taking for particular activities because if you don't, you'll simply be hurting your own bottom line. The ideal scenario is to test these services on your own first, and track the time so that you can be accurate when pricing these for clients.

Delivering inbound PR services is all about constant learning. If you want to delight your clients, you'll need to achieve superior results, build professional but friendly client relationships, and really prove your expertise—that will make clients come back for more.