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Inbound Success Podcast


What do the most successful inbound marketers do to get great results?

You’ve heard the stories about companies using inbound marketing to dramatically increase sales, grow their business, and transform their customer relationships, but not everyone who practices inbound marketing knocks it out of the park.

If you want to know what goes into building a world class inbound marketing campaign that gets real, measurable results, check out the Inbound Success podcast. Every week, host Kathleen Booth interviews marketing folks who are rolling up their sleeves, doing the work, and getting the kinds of results we all hope to achieve.

The goal is to “peel back the onion” and learn what works, what doesn’t and what you need to do to really move the needle with your inbound marketing efforts. This isn’t just about big picture strategy – it’s about getting actionable tips and insights that you can use immediately in your own marketing.

May 28, 2018

Is it better to invest in inbound marketing or public relations?

Actually, that's a trick question! The answer is "both."

In this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Maria Thimothy of inbound agency OneIMS shares how her team is using public relations to get better inbound results for their clients and what it takes to manage PR within an inbound agency (hint: it involves creating an outreach team).

Listen to the podcast to hear how OneIMS approaches both PR and inbound marketing, and the impact it is having on client results.

Transcript

Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success PodcastI'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Maria Thimothy, who is the customer success manager at OneIMS. Welcome Maria.

Maria: Hi, thank you Kathleen for having me. I'm very excited to be here today.

Kathleen: I'm excited to have you. I would love it if you could tell our guests a little bit more about yourself, your background, as well as about OneIMS.

Maria: Sure, definitely. So as you mentioned, I'm the client success manager at OneIMS, so really my role is to help develop campaigns for clients - mostly inbound campaigns, so obviously everything including content marketingcontent strategiesinbound marketing campaigns, the whole shebang. 

I work with all of our account managers to develop these unique strategies for our clients because we don't have a specific niche, so we have clients from all kinds of industries. Our job as account managers and as a company is to apply the inbound methodology and best marketing practices to all kinds of industries.

We have clients in manufacturing, printing, B to C, healthcare, software, all kinds of things, so again, it's really about applying best marketing practices and inbound methodology to their own business.

Kathleen: Tell me a little bit about some of what you consider to be your more successful inbound experiments that you've run? You all work with, as you said, a lot of different types of companies and different industries, and from what I learned when we first spoke, there are certain areas where you as an agency are very strong.

Maria: Correct. I think where we really shine and where we've seen a ton of success are industries where you think they're very established because they've been around for a line time. These tend to be the print side, so obviously there's a lot of print companies out there who technically have been in marketing for a long time, doing traditional print media, direct mailers, postcards, all that kind of stuff. But of course, everyone keeps saying, "Is direct mail dead?" All of these things that, "No one checks their mail anymore, so why bother sending out postcards? No one's going to get noticed."

Then the other side to manufacturing, again, we have lots of clients who are very successful manufacturers, however, they've never ventured into the online world because they've aways really thought about, "Oh well, people should know us because we do such a great job, and we do such a specific job in the industry that of course they're going to find us," and they don't really believe that there's a place for digital marketing for them.

On the print side they think that, "Hey, we know everything about marketing, that's what we do for our clients. We do marketing campaigns for print." If it's a financial institution, things like that, but manufacturing as well.

Kathleen: Yeah, I like that focus, because people always think of those as the unsexy industries. The question of course is always how are you going to create content that people want to read when it comes to manufacturing, when it comes to print? What are the topics that draw your audience in?

I'd love it if you could touch just a little bit on that, and how you take what people think of as these boring or unsexy industries and create content that people seek out and want to continue to consume?

Maria: I love that. I love how we put it as sexy industries, because we really don't consider ... especially the manufacturing side, we have flooring companies, we have companies that do very specific processes to finish metal and things like that, which are definitely not exciting to read about. You can't really put a fun spin on the content, or even you're limited in type of content as well, as far as what they can produce.

But really, one of the biggest things is that because there isn't all this content overflow that we have, for example, in the marketing world, where there's millions of blogs you can read, there really is a need for content. There really is a need to educate the audience.

We have found a great demand for the content that we produce. Of course, at the end of the day, it's based on the needs of that audience. To you and I, it might really sound like, "This is a little dry," however, it is really content that is needed and content that people are seeking because there aren't a million resources on these things. You do need those experts to tell you about it, and that's really where the content strategy comes in, in helping them to find who are we talking to. What type of questions do they have? What pain points do they have? How do we best answer those and produce content that really answers those questions for them?

Kathleen: Yeah, full disclosure. I say these are "boring and unsexy" industries, but I personally actually love manufacturing, and I do think that there's this kind of growing ground swell of people who are interested in this kind of stuff.

You see TV shows like How It's Made, and things like that, where people are increasingly wanting to learn "how the sausage gets made" as they say, and so it will be interesting to see how that impacts the number of these more traditional industries, that engaging content creation, and the way they go about it. I think there's a real opportunity to pull the curtain back and show what the process is that happens before the thing -- the widget, the thing that's getting made -- makes it to somebody's doorstep, or into the package that gets delivered. Especially when it comes to content that's, for example, video content. I think there's a major opportunity there.

Maria: Yeah, definitely. Again, I work with a lot of clients in the flooring industry, so things like epoxy flooring. People usually don't sit and talk about floor types, and slip resistance, and chemical resistance, and all these kinds of things, but it's really interesting that there is quite that audience out there. We've developed a lot of content. For example, we have a specific client that gets over 3,000 views a month for a very in-depth blog about flooring. Again, it's not a super broad audience that we're talking to, but clearly there's a need there and that's why we keep getting these recurring visits over and over, month after month.

Kathleen: When you and I first spoke, one of the things you talked about was a particular specialty that the firm has developed, which is digital public relations. I'm so interested to talk about that, because even though we are the Inbound Success Podcast, and we talk about using inbound marketing to get results, I think one of the biggest takeaways I've had, really from day one of doing this, is that inbound alone often isn't enough. Or, what people consider to be pure inbound marketing, that pure content creation, putting it out there and waiting for people to come. 

So many of our guests have talked about things like paid advertising, and account based marketing, other things that have to do more with what we might think of as outbound marketing. Public relations, for a long time, was not considered to be very inboundy, but increasingly, at least from the guests I speak to, I'm seeing that you've got to have that flexibility, and combine approaches, and take a little bit of inbound and a little bit of these other things, and that's what's really driving success.

Maybe you could rewind the clock and tell us how the agency first got involved in PR, because not a lot of inbound agencies really do public relations, so I'm curious how you got started? Also, what types of services are you delivering?

Maria: Really, how it all got started was one of our services was SEO -- search engine optimization. As you're probably aware, Google has been making modifications to their algorithm for years, trying to make sure that it's delivering the best results and best websites for the end user. Back in the day, link building was a practice of, as long as you have as many links as possible to your website, that was it. Doesn't matter where they came from, whether they were relevant or not, it was just about quantity. Obviously they changed that and it all became about relevant websites that are linking back to you as well as the value that you're providing. It wasn't just about, "Hey, can you give me link?" And, "Here we go, we're done."

So, that's really where we started exploring other ways can we secure these links in following best practices to make sure that our clients are doing well with their SEO campaigns.

People think about, "Okay, can we secure media placements? A pickup on a story about us? Speaking engagements?" Things like that are more of the traditional PR side, whereas again, our initial goal was really working on that SEO benefit for our clients, and obviously gaining those back links.

Our approach was, "Okay, we're going to find these publications online," so it could be a blog, could be a magazine. Obviously they have to be very industry relevant, so we have to find places that our clients obviously would normally find their audience, and then not just pitch about, "Okay, here we are, the greatest company ever, you should write a story about us," but it's about how we provide value to that particular audience's need. Can we provide expertise on something? Advice on something?

That's really how it all grew, and today that's our core strategy. As you mentioned, the more we get into marketing and things change, you really have to have a wholesome marketing outlook. So we really look on the paid, owned, and earned side of marketing, and this is really more on the owned side. We're letting our clients be known by getting them mentioned in industry relevant sources where, most likely, their audience is going to be. We're giving them expertise, thought leadership, and the relevance that gets their name out there and really celebrates their brand and what they're about.

Kathleen: Are you looking for primarily editorial coverage, where a publication is doing a story on the customer? Or is it more contributed content where your client might have content that they want to have republished, or guest published if you will, on another site? Or is it some mix of those?

Maria: It's really a mix of everything and it varies by client and opportunity. So we have a dedicated outreach team that really focuses on doing a lot of research, trying to find these outlets, then also trying to do media lists of, okay, these places sound good. Reviewing their editorial calendars. Trying to pitch specific stories or angles that we can take.

On the one side, there are places where there's somebody doing a story on a specific topic and we might be able to be mentioned as an advert, so we might get a blurb about "here's what we have to say about the topic" -- a contributed piece, where it's fully based on what editors are looking for, and we help them develop the entire piece and get it submitted to them and get published on their own site.

Or sometimes we get specific "ask the expert" sections and so on. These are the opportunities, and they all vary by client and editor-by-editor, but it's usually a variety of places where it's like more of an expertise, a small brief mention from an article that's being written, or we contribute the full piece.

Kathleen: What do you find really works in terms of outreach strategy? I imagine that these people that you're approaching in the various publications get contacted all the time by people who would like coverage. Have you all as an agency developed a particular approach that's really successful in terms of getting a response and securing placement?

Maria: Yeah, definitely. As you mentioned, a lot of these places probably get hundreds of requests a day of like, "Hey, would you like something from us?" But what we focus on, and again, going back to the reason why we began doing digital PR, is the whole idea of getting those quality backlinks for SEO purposes and being relevant. What you typically see from our outreach team is that they set up some sort of mass email that goes out to all these publications. And so that says, "Hey, we'd like to contribute something." That's pretty much the only thing that they're sending. It's a mass email that's sent out. We really focus on creating that one-to-one relationship. Obviously, it takes a longer time to actually produce it, and more manpower, but it really is much more successful, because our outreach team is able to pick out the specific publication or site that we're trying to outreach to -- a specific editor or publisher, whoever we're trying to contact -- talk a little bit about what we've seen on their site and why we believe we would be a good fit for that website and how we can contribute value to them. That really resonates with those editors or writers, because they really see, "Hey, I'm not just getting a mass email of like, 'Hey we saw your website. Let's consider us for giving you something.'"

So we go the extra mile of getting that one to one relationship. And a lot of times what happens is we might submit a piece today, and then those same editors come back to us months later, and it's like, "Hey, we really loved your piece. It had great metrics from our site." So we've actually gotten some clients to actually have stable columns on other websites. Its really nice that they get this recognition and consistent content publication outside of their own website.

Kathleen: When you do manage to get some kind of coverage, any particular strategies for structuring that coverage in a way that it drives traffic back to your clients? I mean, are you including certain calls to action or links, or things like that?

Maria: Definitely, so obviously we have to work with every editor and publisher, because they all have their distinct guidelines, and rules. Some are more flexible than others. But obviously one of the things is to make sure there's a link back to the site, to the client, and potentially there's something specific for referencing, so if you have a resource that we have available or data that we might be able to share -- research, an infographic or something -- we always try to incorporate that into the content itself so that, yes, we're giving you some piece of advice or information on this website, but you can also learn more about it on our own website. And that tends to do well because again, we're just trying to add value to that audience that is looking for information on this topic. So that works really well.

Obviously, we also try to make sure that we share this content across all of the social platforms that the client might have, because that gives it more visibility and more credibility to their own audience as well. From time to time, depending on the client, it might be a good piece to feature on, say, an email campaign that we might be doing as kind of an add on. So we try to, just like any other content, you really need to promote it as much as you can, and similarly, that's how we do it with these pieces.

Kathleen: What kind of an impact has that had on your clients? Do you have specific examples of how that's driven either traffic or leads or customers?

Maria: Yeah definitely. We had a flooring company, and they do epoxy flooring, so it's kind of a seamless flooring that goes on. It's usually more commercial or industrial facilities. And we had them published in a publication about retail and restaurant facilities. An owner of an ice cream shop actually saw the article, contacted them, and said, "I have 16 ice cream shops across the U.S. Are you able to do this job for me?" So that was obviously a great success. They've actually been very successful. They were also published in a pet publication, again, talking about flooring for pets, chemical resistance, all this kind of stuff, cleanability. And they were able to secure a local job for doing all of the kennels and so on, to kind of redo their entire flooring systems. So they've been very successful at getting direct jobs out of these press publications.

We've noticed -- again, because they're in the manufacturing industries -- that a lot of these people who read this content, they look for very niche publications that they know that, "Hey, if I'm in the restaurant business, I must read this restaurant facility magazine, because that's where my information is." And when they see that there's an article about you in those magazines, they really add that credibility that they're like, "Hey, they're in here for a reason. They're not just here because somebody put an ad on this magazine. No, it's really an article that's in depth, quality, and valuable." And that gives that client kind of the extra boost of, "Okay, yes. We know what we're talking about." So that's been a great example for them.

We also have a packaging company. We did an article for them in Target Marketing Magazine. And it got a lot of traffic, so to date, even though the article was published about a year and a half ago, they still get about 200 visits a month to their site from this particular article.

Kathleen: Wow.

Maria: And I know 200 visits might not sound a ton. But remember that when you're reading something online, and you're reading an article on a certain website, you typically don't go and then be like, "Oh, let me learn more about this company." It's typically, you're reading about this topic. Sounds interesting. You go on to the next article, and you keep going. But they still get referral traffic. They also got a very good job opportunity with a financial institution that needed to do packaging. So new launch kits for their credit cards for their high end customers. So they were able to secure a very nice job out of just getting this placement, and of course, that referral traffic, which is always nice. 

Kathleen: That's great. Can you talk a little bit about how you're tracking that, all the way from traffic increases -- like you mentioned 200 visits a month -- to lead generation, to the deals, those new customers you mentioned. How, in each of these cases, are you as an agency connecting those wins with the articles?

Maria: Yeah, definitely. So like I said, with every article that we post, we ensure that we include tracking links so that we can actually then really attribute that "Hey, you know what, this many visits came not just from this website, but from this specific article that we published." That way the client has a very clear view of like, "Oh yes. That was the article we wrote about this topic, and it's actually getting us something." And when you use a platform like HubSpot, we can really go down to the nitty gritty of like, "Hey, we got this many visits from this one article to how many new contacts became a customer. So we're able to track it that way. Even though sometimes people might come back later and say, "Hey, I saw an article about you in such and such magazine," we really educate our clients on how important it is for us to do great attribution, because it's only gonna help all of us. If they're able to give us that feedback on how they got a lead, even if it wasn't directly through the website, it's really helpful for them to tell us so that we can make sure that we obviously repeat those types of activities.

So we've trained them very well -- even if it's a chat lead that they have, or a phone call that they might have -- to tell us about it, and make sure that we track it, so that again, at the end of the day, we see that all of these things that we're working on are really working. So we do our best to track digitally, but we know that things do happen offline. But again, we depend on our clients to give us that extra info. And the good thing is that we have very close relationships with our clients, so they're always very open and willing to tell us how much that deal was that they were able to secure. So that's always really nice, that they know what we're doing for them, and they're willing to give us that information, because they know that that's gonna help us help them.

Kathleen: Yeah. And I imagine some of the placements you get are in print publications, and so it becomes even more important to ask that question, "How did you hear about us," et cetera. But it's funny, because I used to have an agency for a long time, and I worked with some clients that did more traditional advertising, and we would talk about asking people where they heard about you. And I had one client who had a very aggressive print advertising budget, and she used to talk about how funny it would be. They'd say, "Where did you hear about us?" And somebody would say, "Oh, I saw your ad in XYZ newspaper." And they would just kind of chuckle. They would write it down. But they would never have advertised in XYZ newspaper. You know, it was in the visitor's head and they had transposed where they heard about it, because so often it's a combination of sources, and the way they remember it is different than the way it actually happened. So I always find that attribution process very interesting. And it's certainly not a perfect science by any stretch.

Maria: Yeah, definitely. And yes, a lot of our clients do get published both online as well as print. Some of these publications have both options. So it does happen that they will be published in an article in a magazine, and they will get some sort of leads or calls or something. And again, they'll do their best to ask. But sometimes you've seen so many things, and you're like, "Well, I think I found you in ..." But as long as you're trying, that's really the most important part, because some people won't even bother. It's like, "Okay great. I got a lead. I don't know where it came from, but I don't really care."

Kathleen: Oh great.

Maria: And you really do care about those sources.

Kathleen: Yeah. Agreed. And oftentimes, it's multiple sources. That's the other thing that I think is interesting. Nine times out of ten, it's not one thing that led somebody to call you. It's an accumulation of things. Being able to draw that information out of the prospect is so important.

Maria: Right. And with this digital PR piece, you can think about it too as that validation that a lot of prospects need. Because you know, they might be already in the market doing the traditional searching, going through the buyer's journey about, "Okay, I have a problem. I have a need. Let me research some potential solutions to my problem or need." But they still need to get to the point that they're comparing company A versus B, and trying to see, "Well which one would be better for my particular problem?" And that's also where that particular digital PR really stands out for a client, where it's like, "Hey, you know what? I have company A. I don't see anyone writing about them. I don't see them anywhere online except their own website," versus I have option B, which they seem to be everywhere, print, online, they're getting coverage here and there. It really adds that trust factor, that some other competitors might not have if they're not doing this type of kind of branded kind of initiatives as well.

Kathleen: Yeah. It's a really great legitimatizer when you go to a website and it's like, "As seen on," or, "As featured in," and they have all the different publication logos. That's always very powerful. 

Now, does the PR work that you all do include things like awards, or is it really just articles and editorial coverage?

Maria: It's really articles and editorial coverage. Again, we're working on providing that value, just because we've found it to be much more difficult to always pitch about our company, and it's like, "Oh hey, we just got this award." And most people are like, "Great. Great job." But no one's gonna want to know about it.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Maria: So it's really more about what can we contribute to another audience. And again, we really work on finding that particular angle of like, "Okay, well I know we do flooring, but we do flooring in the healthcare setting. How do we try to speak to that healthcare audience, but give our input on a flooring subject?"

Kathleen: Yeah. That's something I find interesting, because when you think about PR, it would be easy to think, "Oh, it's a flooring company. Let's go get published in flooring magazines." But a lot of times, when you take that approach, you're speaking to your competitors, which doesn't necessarily get you the greatest results. Whereas if you're in those industry specific magazines that the client probably would not otherwise be very familiar with, that's where you're really reaching the end customer. So how do you go about choosing which industries to focus on, and picking those targets?

Maria: Yeah, definitely. So, again, we try to, you know, our team tends to get creative about who we outreach to. Because also, one of the things that we found too is that sometimes when you focus on things that are directly in your industry, a lot of these opportunities are paid. They're like, “Oh yeah, great. We'll publish you, but it'll cost you five thousand dollars for a feature.” Not all clients are willing to do that, obviously. They need a budget for that.

So, really what we try to do is like, “This is our product, or our solution, how can it be applicable to different markets?” And then we try to identify, you know, “Okay, well, what's in this market that we can, you know, outreach to?” So, you know, and flooring, for example, for this particular client, technically they can do flooring in any space.

So it's about trying to find these outlets that we can then turn the angle up, like okay, well you're in healthcare, how does flooring come into play in a healthcare setting? Or you're in the pet industry. How does flooring affect having a kennel or something like that? Or if you're in a mall,  how does flooring affect your mall?

So that's really the angle that we try to take. It's really one thing -- flooring -- but how do you apply it to different industries? And then provide that unique sense that many people might not be thinking about. If you go directly to a flooring magazine, then you have 20 competing articles about flooring, and which one's the best flooring? Do you have carpet flooring? Do you have vinyl flooring? Do you have this kind of flooring? That kind of flooring?

But then when you see an article in a magazine that's a different topic, then you're like, “Oh, I never thought about, you know, flooring in my facility.” It really makes a difference. You know, same thing with, you know, say this packaging client. They do packaging, but they do packaging in health and beauty. They do packaging for spirits and wine. They do packaging for household products. All these kinds of things.

So if you kinda think about how their solution or product is applicable in different industries -- that's where we can find more creative outlets. 

Kathleen: And what percentage of the placements you're getting are paid versus no-cost placements?

Maria: We really focus only on paid, so 99% of our placements are completely free for our clients. From time to time, we might come across opportunities that require a fee. Obviously we let our clients know that, “Hey, you know, there's some potential opportunity, are you willing to do it?” But our purpose is really to work it into our existing campaign, so they're all free press for them, essentially. Free advertising.

Kathleen: And what percentage of your clients are you doing digital PR for?

Maria: So technically, anyone who is having a content strategy and doing any online optimizations or SEO. That's part of their ongoing budget, just because, again, this is the best way that we found that we can comply with Google's algorithm, and quality checks, and so on. At the same time, it kinda gives them that extra boost.

And I can't tell you how many times our clients are so excited when they see this article. They're like, “Oh my goodness, I was just published in X, Y, Z Publication,” and they just love that feeling of sharing it with the rest of the company, you know, liking it on Linkedin. It really also just kind of boosts their morale as a company, and adds validation to their own services.

Kathleen: So, you're really working this in to every client relationship you have as an agency?

Maria: Definitely. Like I mentioned, we're really working in the paid, owned and earned. It's kind of on the earned side of like, “Hey, let's try to see what we can get from these press initiatives.” And so it's really ongoing. That's kind of how we present it to clients. When we get a new client we want to make sure they understand these are the kinds of things that we'll be working on, because we don't want to just work on these two little things we know will help, but we know you really need all of these things.

Kathleen: Yeah.

Maria: So we let them know ahead of time that these are ... you know, this is kind of our stratagem. This is how we work, and this is what we know is going to benefit you. And that's how they understand that this is part of our ongoing relationship.

Kathleen: Great. And I imagine that's somewhat of a differentiator for OneIMS as a company, because again, not a lot of inbound agencies are doing PR.

Maria: Yeah, definitely, and when you think about it, too, some clients come, and they're like, "Oh, well, I have a PR agency that we work with already." And they're paying a substantial amount, but they're just getting this small PR piece, whereas when they're coming to work with us, they're getting that small PR piece, plus they're getting inbound, the constant strategy, the paid side -- they're kind of getting everything in one package.

Maria: And they certainly love that too, just because from a client's perspective, the more vendors you have to deal with, it's more of a headache. And also, most of our clients are very long-term. I have clients that I've worked with for six plus years. They're with us, and they really love to work with us because they know that we know them.

So we've learned everything about them -- what they do, even if it's a very weird, bizarre thing that they do that nobody else would know about. They know that we know, and they can trust us to make decisions for them. So it's really nice that they're like, “You know what, they know exactly who we're targeting, how we do our business, what we want from our business.” So that really makes the difference for them.

Kathleen: Great. I'm curious. I always ask my guests the same two questions at the end, and I'd love to hear your answer, because you really are living in the inbound marketing world as somebody who's at an agency. You see so many different examples of companies doing inbound and you've also got the agency perspective. Company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now?

Maria: So, obviously, there's lots of great examples. You know, my top answer is kind of that one role model Drift. A lot of companies are doing really great with their inbound marketing. But recently, my husband and I have been on kind of a search for a new house, so we've been in this home search mode. And we started using Redfin, and we've really been impressed with all of the things that they have to offer. Not only do they allow you to do your home search online, but they constantly try to send you new options, you know, "Here's new homes that we found for you. Here's the things that ... the houses you've loved, just as a reminder, here's ..." If I like a house, and my husband happens to like the same house, you get an automatic email, like, “You've got a match.”

Kathleen: It's like Tinder for home buyers.

Maria: Exactly.

Kathleen: Swipe left, swipe right.

Maria: Exactly. You know, next steps... you can schedule a home tour. All of these things that really make it easy on the end user. We really appreciate it from a marketing perspective, like, “Hey, you know what, I don't have to be the one to push all the buttons. They're getting me to have all the information I need.” So I think that they've done a really good job with their automation and not just automating things, because it's easy to automate a bunch of emails to go out. But really making them relevant and valuable to the end user.

So, we've been impressed with everything they've done on their end.

Kathleen: Oh, that's great, I'll have to check that out. I have not bought a new house in many years, but I always love looking at houses that are for sale.

Maria: I always want to do house shopping, like, "Ooh, I wish I could have that one."

Kathleen: Yes, exactly. I could always dream.

And being in the marketing industry, how do you stay up to date and current on best practices? What sources of information do you turn to to stay educated?

Maria: There's just such content overflow in the marketing world. You know, there's so much you can read. My inbox, actually, I have a kind of recurring reminder of "read this, read that." I sign up for a ton of newsletters that I know have really great content. I can't always get back to them the same time they're published, but I have this thing. I'm like, “Okay, remind me, you know, on Saturday.” I can just take some time and read some of these articles, some updates, but a lot of what I read is general marketing. Things like AdWeek.

And then obviously I go into very specific industry content, like HubSpot, Search Engine Journal (because we do a lot of search engine  optimization), podcasts (listening to things like Gary VeeSeeking Wisdom from the Drift founder), Inc.com and Entrepreneur. So, really, I try to kind of take in a lot of general marketing, like what's happening in the marketing world, but then also going to the very niche areas that we work, whether it's the Google blog and reading about adwords, and updates to the algorithm, because those things directly affect what we do on a day-to-day basis in our agency. But those ones are nice to read the big picture in marketing, and consumer behavior, and how things are changing.

Kathleen: Yeah, I've been binging Seeking Wisdom lately, as well. So that's a great podcast. And I just did an episode with Dave Gerhardt from Drift. So, if you haven't heard that one, check that out.

Well, Maria, thank you for sharing all this, it's been really interesting. PR is something that I'm interested to learn more about. So this is really helpful for me. If somebody's listening and has a question, what's the best way for them to reach out and get in touch with you online?

Maria: Yeah, definitely. So, I can always be reached on LinkedIn. But you can always email me directly. My email is Maria@OneIMS.com, pretty easy to remember. You know, obviously, we've been doing this for about five years, just doing kind of the digital PR piece as our agency. So we've kind of gotten a good process. I'd be happy to answer any questions or help anyone out who's interested in the topic.

Kathleen: Thank you, that's very generous of you. And I will put links to Maria's LinkedIn profile and her email in the show notes in case you'd like to reach her. And that is it for this week. If you enjoyed what you heard, please consider giving the podcast a review on iTunes, or Stitcher, or the platform of your choice. And if you know somebody who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to interview them.

Thank you, Maria, for joining me.

Maria: Thank you so much, Kathleen, for having me.