2. Let’s Get Social

Use social media not only to engage with your audience but also to spread your message and content further.

When using social media for public relations and inbound marketing, be sure to use hashtags that your audience is using and make sure you are posting to social media sites that are being primarily used by your personas.

Integrate your news and thought leadership into your existing social media promotions and use your social media platforms as a way to get your brand in front of even more relevant people.

3. Don’t Kill the Press Release Just Yet

Fun fact: Press releases aren’t dead. People will try to tell you they are, and let’s be honest, just putting a press release out over the wire and crossing your fingers no longer works. But this doesn’t mean that you should toss them altogether.

When creating a press release to talk about your newest content or product launch, write it to be picked up by a news outlet but also optimize the copy for search engines.

Your audience likely isn’t finding you by reading thousands of Yahoo! News articles, but your readership is going to Google. Give your audience another chance to find you by offering up your press release as part of its journey.

Once your release is distributed and popping up in search engines, you can also use that content in other areas. Create a SlideShare, blog article, or video with the same information talking about why the news is important to your audience.

As you gain more visibility from public relations, you will get more inbound clicks to your site, and you'll ultimately get more leads.

4. Optimize for Search

As we touched on above, never forget about the search engine. Again, you can use the same news or content multiple times—the key is optimizing that content for the right keywords each time.

If you put a press release in your website's Newsroom, write a blog article about why that news is important for your industry, or create a site page specifically about the news—always optimize this content for search.

By optimizing for search, you are helping ensure people get the information they are looking for, which all goes back to successful public relations.

5. Don’t Knock Media Relations

Yes, marketing is changing, and with that, PR is changing. Although a good public relations consultant knows to not lay all of their eggs in the media basket, they also knows it's still a large part of a public relations strategy.

So, the key is making sure you make the most out of your media articles. Integrate them into your inbound marketing campaigns. What is the article talking about? Take what the article is showing and use that as a way for people to make it back to your website and become leads. Did the article talk about your innovative new product? Share case studies from your website on social media and talk about how your product made your customers’ lives better.

"So delighted to be featured on @ABC [link]! Get more of the inside scoop on how we developed our latest product to help serve @customer [link case study]."

This is a great way to build on the authority of the media outlet that mentioned you, get traffic to its article, and get traffic to your website.

Inbound marketing and public relations don’t have to live in separate worlds. They can work together to make each other better and ultimately drive more leads to your business.