Which is right for your company: Inbound marketing or inbound public relations?

In an ever-changing marketing world, choosing your strategy, planning for success and implementing it could be the difference between positive and negative revenue results. If you’ve tried traditional marketing methods, such as cold calls and cold emails, with little or no success, it may be time to learn about inbound marketing and inbound public relations.

Inbound marketing vs. inbound public relations

Although inbound marketing and inbound public relations have commonalities, they’re very different. Both follow similar methodology and bring visitors to your site, yet each takes different steps to achieve results.

Inbound marketing focuses on buyer personas and the buyer’s journey. With inbound marketing, the process is seamless and flows continuously – strangers to visitors, visitors to leads, leads to customers and customers to promoters. You complete each stage of the process with the use of blogs, CTAs (calls to action), email, surveys and more. Inbound marketing brings the buyer to you.

Inbound public relations concentrates on media personas and the media’s journey. Inbound PR brings journalists to you. By researching your media personas, you tailor your content to entice journalists to reach out to your company. The inbound public relations process is all about conversion – strangers to visitors, visitors to media leads, media leads to publishers and publishers to repeat publishers. In addition to blogs, social publishing and email, the inbound PR process adds news releases, a newsroom on your site, events and inbound links.

Which strategy is best for your business?

Although inbound marketing and inbound public relations are different, the good news is that you can combine them for tremendous results. Using both to your business advantage will drive traffic to your site, leading to customer conversions. Approach your online content with both the buyer persona and media persona in mind using all stages of the buyer’s and media’s journeys. Start driving customers and the media to you and set up a HubSpot tour demo today.

Alan Helquist is an entrepreneur and marketing professional with extensive experience in copywriting and public speaking. He graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor of Arts in English and passionately writes and speaks on anything from sports to public relations. Alan has been a member of the Axia team since June 2017. Connect with Axia on Twitter @axiapr or tell us what you think in the comments below.

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