For decades measuring the return on investment (ROI) of public relations (PR) efforts have proven challenging as a means to do so accurately simply did not exist. Inbound PR aims to challenge this by bringing PR efforts (such as content creation and media relations) and inbound digital marketing together.
By bringing these two together, a company decreases PR’s biggest weakness – which is measurement – and reduces inbound digital marketing’s weakness which is content creation. Traditional PR is outbound and emphasises achieving media coverage whereas now the company’s website is the most important aspect of the company.
Public Relations in a company
PR becomes one of many tools by which to create media coverage. The media coverage is not, however, the main goal anymore. The aim is now to streamline traffic to the website via the said media coverage. The practice is not limited to PR efforts only but also includes different marketing efforts such as paid advertising, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), social media marketing and email advertising.
The PR industry is still grappling with this idea, but a mindset change is necessary as times are changing. Nowadays, PR encompasses much more than just traditional media coverage but all types of media in the PESO model to guide traffic to the company’s website. These are paid, earned, shared and owned media. Paid methods of PR are bought advertisements, earned are free or low-cost publicity, shared are strategic partnerships and owned are content the company creates and publishes on their available channels.
