If you’ve spent any time in digital PR, you’ve probably come across this question.

What address do you send your pitch emails from?

Send from a branded email address, and you might be more recognizable. But that’s not always an option.

Send from an agency email address where you’ve built a relationship, and you may have a foot in the door.

Either way, our data shows that the sending address significantly affects whether the journalist interacts with the pitch.

In this piece, I’ll try to help answer these questions once and for all.

Quick notes on methodology

We analyzed more than 16,000 PR campaigns and 5 million emails sent through BuzzStream over the past two years, comparing agency-run outreach to in-house brand outreach.

List quality is another major confounding factor. I limited this to agencies and brands running very similar digital PR campaigns, such as data studies and reactive commentary.

To minimize this bias, I filtered out massive blasts, affiliate pushes, and outdated lists so we were comparing real PR outreach rather than database dumps.

We calculated both weighted and unweighted open and reply rates across all remaining campaigns.

Weighted rates reflect actual inbox performance across all emails sent, while unweighted rates reflect the typical performance of a single campaign.

Let’s get into it.

Overall Results

Overall, 92% of campaigns are sent from agency email domains.

Here is a table of the overall results:

However, when we dig into the data, we find some surprising differences in how they perform.

Emails From Agency Addresses Get Better Open Rates

Overall, emails from agency addresses have about 15% higher open rates than those from brands.

• Agency address: 41.54%
• Brand address: 35.68%

Because agencies tend to send larger campaigns, weighted open rates will naturally skew higher for them. That’s why I compared both weighted and unweighted rates.

Interestingly, the directional difference held in both cases.

There are potentially many reasons for this, but the main one that comes to mind is that agencies are just better at writing clickable subject lines.

Also, agencies can typically choose whom they work for and decline brands that may not have “news-worthy” content, giving them an advantage by potentially having better content to pitch. (It can also potentially impact brand recognition, which we’ll see may play a role in replies.)

The easiest way I thought to test this was to compare open rates between agencies sending from their own addresses vs agencies sending using brand emails.

This agency impact appears to hold: emails sent by agencies have higher open rates than those sent by brands.

Here’s the table:

So, why do agencies get better opens?

I think it is because of better subject lines.

When I manually reviewed a sample of the subject lines, I noticed some trends.

For instance, here are some of the agency subject lines ​​that illustrate the broader trend we saw in the subject-line data (slightly edited to obscure them a bit):

• “Exclusive: 1 in 3 people say the ‘worst gift’ is getting nothing at all…”
• “Event ticket costs — the price gaps are surprisingly extreme”
• “Urgent: Last-minute tips students are using to secure better course placements”

I see many of the same takeaways from our subject line study that directly connect to those written by agencies.

Concepts like urgency and emotion can go a long way towards helping an email stand out.

Compare that to subject lines sent from brands’ addresses:

• “Regional Connectivity Performance Index – Quarterly Update”
• “New survey: Health symptoms linked with day-to-day caregiving demands”
• “Digital Habits Report – Annual Findings”

Consider a subject line like this: “Regional Connectivity Performance Index – Quarterly Update”.

Give it the urgency/emotion agency glow up, and you’ve got something like this:

“Fresh Data: Regional Connectivity is Up a Surpising 85% in Q3.”

The simple addition of the adjective “surprising” makes it more clickable.

But opens aren’t the only metric we care about, so let’s look at reply rates.

Emails From Brand Addresses Get Better Reply Rates

Emails from brands generate ~60% more replies per email sent than those from agency emails.

• Brand address: 1.07%
• Agency address: 0.67%

Reply rates at this scale are tiny by nature — according to Muck Rack, about 50% of journalists never respond to pitches (good or bad) — so the more important thing to look for is whether a pattern consistently shows up across thousands of campaigns.

In this case, the brand-domain advantage held steady even when slicing the data multiple ways.

Some may look at low reply rates as a non-issue.

But, I think there is something more to this, because even when agencies send from brand email addresses, they get better reply rates:

Here’s the table:

As you can see, the reply rates for anything brand-related are about 0.86-0.87%.

So what’s the deal here? Why do brands get better replies?

I think brands get better replies due to a mix of two things:

1. Brands have built-in authority and recognition—as evidenced by the fact that agencies get better opens and replies when sending from brand domains.

2. Brand domain emails typically provided less information than agencies and left things open-ended with lines like:

• “I can connect you with one of our experts if you need further details.”
• “Would you like the full dataset or additional commentary?”

Should you do this when emailing journalists?

Our experience indicates it’s probably not the best strategy.

You should always aim to provide the journalist with all relevant information in a single email.

In fact, in a fantastic conversation with Hannah Smith, she outlined a process where you attempt to write a story based on everything you provide in your pitch. If you can’t, you’re not providing enough information.

Does Campaign Type Matter?

Another theory I had that was contributing to this increase in response rates was that reactive campaigns and commentary pitches elicit more responses.

In that case, both the agency and the brands would have similar reply rates for reactive campaigns.

But when I dug into that, that wasn’t really the case.

Brands once again had a higher reply rate than agencies.

Therefore, I don’t think it has to do with reactive.

What About Sending From Gmail?

But wait! A third option has arrived.

What if we send from Gmail or a personal email? Won’t that make us seem cooler and more relatable?

Unfortunately, Gmail accounts were used in only 8 of our 16,500 total campaigns, or about 1,797 emails sent.

Open rates were 24%.

(This is extremely small, so it’s not statistically reliable enough to draw strong conclusions. I’ve included it here mainly for completeness, not as a recommendation.)

With that out of the way, let’s wrap this up.

The Best Course of Action? Think Like an Agency

No dataset like this perfectly isolates every variable — industry, story format, list sourcing, and domain authority all play a role — but when the same directional patterns appear across thousands of campaigns and multiple slices of the data, they become difficult to ignore.

Based on our data, the best of both worlds seems to be sending an agency-optimized email but from a brand domain.

Those get the highest open and reply rates.

However, it’s easy to take away from this study that simply changing who you are sending from will get you better results.

That is not the case.

I think the story here is that agencies are better at writing more clickable, actionable email subject lines, which helps increase email opens.

That said, sending from a brand email address as an agency may give you an added edge in response rates as well.

We also didn’t get into the industry or type of content being pitched, which can affect open and reply rates as well. If that is something you’d want to see, let me know!

Want some more tips on sending better subject lines?

Check out this data study, guide, and podcast episode:

• The Art of Writing Subject Lines That Journalists Will Love
• 6 Million Subject Lines Analyzed: What Actually Gets Journalists to Open
• Optimizing Subject Lines with Helena Maniglia

Happy emailing!

The post Should You Pitch Journalists From an Agency or Brand Email Address? [Data from 5M Emails] appeared first on BuzzStream.

One of my favorite questions to ask PR pros is simple: Where do you start?

When a new client comes in, those first steps matter more than people think.

In this episode, I sat down with Aira’s Head of Digital PR, Chloe Osunsami, to walk me through her digital PR audit process.

She talks about how she understands a brand, sizes up competitors, and turns all that data into a real strategy.

This isn’t just something you should do at the start of a client engagement; you should repeat this process throughout the engagement to ensure your strategy stays on point.

If you or your team feel like your digital PR strategy is wavering, you might want to give this a listen!

What are some of the first things you do to get your bearings with a new client?

Great question Vince. So I first start with making sure I really understand the brand and the client.

So I like to understand where they’re at, how they’re doing, their objectives and any particular focuses before I jump in and why they believe PR should be a part of that puzzle.

Once I really know that I can then start to look at specifics to do with them. However, can’t look at that bigger picture in a vacuum.

because we as buyers don’t really operate in that way either. So we need to make sure we’re looking at them versus their competitors.

So I will start by pulling out maybe three to five top competitors that I will  benchmark them against during an audit and make sure that they are either direct competitors or challenger brands that are coming up through the ranks.

Because you can’t compare apples or oranges to a whole fruit bowl, so we need to make sure we’re comparing our product-specific competitors when we’re doing this.

So I’ll pull those out and then I’ll start to look at the bigger picture.

So I will start by looking at things like these things really interest me to start with things like organic traffic versus paid traffic to see where they’re getting their traffic from.

I will look at keywords in top positions and I will look at backlink profiles as well as inventions and PR in general.

Then I’ll really start to dig down.

So I have a look at that bigger picture basically to almost check the playing field, right?

To see how they’re doing versus those compressors, which ones are doing well?

Then dig into the PR-specific details to see what correlates with those doing well.

Once I’ve had a look at that, I will then go into the referring domain profile in more detail.

I will review quality, relevance, quantity, and link intersections.

So, where competitors have links that my client or brand doesn’t.

I will review brand mentions and volume, where they sit, and the content and stories that are helping them land them.

I start broadly and ensure I take their objectives and what they’re looking for into account. I then narrow it down and look at, say, the bigger picture versus competitors, and then I go even more granular with the PR, the stuff that we can kind of have an impact or an influence on.

How important is it to consider SEO metrics?

Well, if you are doing work for a client and they do have search objectives, you’re tied into those search objectives.

You really need to make sure that they have a really strong foundation and website from an SEO perspective too.

And so I’ll work, I don’t necessarily do all of that stuff myself. I’ll work with someone from the SEO team to make sure that they have that stable foundation and everything is in working order.

Equally when it comes to things like keywords and focus areas, it’s really good for us to know which brands might be focused on the particular focus areas that our brand is focused on.

They might have more keywords around specific topics where they rank highly, in those top traffic-driving positions.

And then I might look at their activity a bit more to see what they’re doing and what might be helping them to get those positions, because that’s what we want to do around those topics.

So it kind of helps to shape questions and then what I look into to be able to see what we could potentially be doing to get where they are essentially.

How often do clients’ PR goals coincide with SEO goals?

We have a mix. I think one important point is that one size doesn’t fit all.

So I can’t say that like for one brand who comes to us because they want coverage and that is their main objective that like I would look exactly the same things for them as I would for someone who we need to make sure that we are tied in with our search. So we are taking a blended search approach.

However, I still do take an interest in those things. I think it’s just the way I am inclined.

I still take an interest in those things because I know even if we’re targeted and we need to get coverage, they’re still that bigger picture.

We’re still trying to that brand get that coverage because they want to, they want to improve their search visibility and at the end of the day, their traffic and their sales.

And so I’m always going to have a little look even if it’s not as in-depth as say for a client who really is into the search side.

What are some of your go-to tools for people doing an audit?

I’m not sure there’d be many that people don’t know about from what I currently work with, but I will say like you can shape your audit to fit what you have access to.

So I currently use Ahrefs and Moz.

I do lot of manual research and we have an internal tool that I can use when it comes to search and keywords.

Obviously Google Analytics and GSC is great help for your own brands and clients.

But I try to keep a consistent view because I don’t have access to that for the other brands.

I try to make sure I look at them through the tools.

I have used other tools previously that do a great job too. Comparisons like Ahrefs, Semrush, etc., are also great.

So you can shape what you look at.

They all work slightly differently, but at the end of the day, they do very similar things.

Obviously AI is a very hot topic about when people do and don’t use it.

I do occasionally use ChatGPT or Gemini to speed up part of the analysis, but I would never use it to pull the data.

And one of the things I would say if people are looking to do that is just make sure your brief is really hot and you make sure it delivers an output that you can then sense check.

So whether that’s in a table with all the sources or it’s working out.

Make sure you can really thoroughly check what it’s done for you because it can lie.

What if a client comes to you wanting to show up in AI citations?

Yep. So I do look at AIOs and LLM features as part of the audit  now.

But in my opinion, and I think a few people share it, I don’t think anyone’s really got it nailed just yet with the reporting on it.

So it’s quite, it’s quite difficult one to do.

The numbers go up and down because it’s not like a linear view.

It’s like you’ve increased this much and the percent split is really helpful.

So, how much you appear versus your competitors, but equally, you have to be so careful because it doesn’t always take into account the right sentiment yet or the types of mentions.

We use an overview and an internal keyword tool to assess visibility versus competitors for relevant queries.

But I’m just very careful when we do obviously report on anything like that at the moment or look into that.

But it is an area that I’m really excited about because I do think it’s really going to develop and quite quickly in the coming months.

So I’m saying now they don’t have it nailed, but it might not be that long, really, before, like, we’ve got a much stronger way of looking at that and reporting back on that too.

Do you measure backlink relevance in your audit?

We do try to quantify relevance.

Again, I think it’s a really difficult one and I don’t think there’s a set way that anyone does it, which I think is a common theme in PR, right?

It’s not a set way that anyone seems to do it. But we do try to quantify relevance.

It’s more important than quantity, and just as important as the quality of backlinks plays into that quality, right?

We make sure to review the backlink profile and don’t just focus on the numbers, because those numbers aren’t going to make as much difference as they used to.

How much of your insights come from your own research vs what the client tells you?

I think that lot of our clients come to us for our expertise.

They’ll look to us for our strategy and recommendations on how to execute it.

That said, we always do take into account their expertise.

Obviously they are the ones in the brand every single day. We make sure to pick their brains and identify who they consider their competitors. So we can make sure we’re looking at those, even if we’re also looking at other competitors too.

Any product-focused company might have a new launch coming, and we might need to make sure we’re shifting in that direction.

So that might shape the strategy or the direction of the strategy and then we would shape everything around that direction that they’re going to go because it aligns to the broader business goals.

But when it comes to things like drilling it down to tactics and things the team would pretty much direct that and what works best for that industry as long as obviously it worked with what the client could also approve and deliver.

Is it OK to ask your clients questions?

I would ask as many questions as you want. When we first start with a brand, we conduct a brand immersion session so the team can ask every question they have to get under the skin, because your client works at that brand and lives and breathes it every single day. And you’re not going to know them as well, know the brand as well as they do from doing your own research because you don’t work there.

And that’s okay.

I think it’s totally okay to be asking questions, and if you don’t get them all asked at the beginning, it’s also, I believe, okay to go back and ask them questions later on, because at the end of the day, you’re going to deliver better work for them.

And as long as they’re positioned in the right way, then it’s absolutely fine.

How important is it to involve everyone who will be working on that client early?

So it’s so important to get the team working on it on those initial calls.

You’re so right, Vince, because otherwise they don’t get the same understanding that the others who’ve been on those calls have.

And it allows them to ask the questions too.

At the moment, we do have quite a senior team at Aira.

However, we’ve always tried to make sure that whoever is in the team and whoever is potentially going to work on that client is involved in the conversations.

And when we start to pull together what we think is going to work for them and the way that we want to go based on the audit that’s been carried out, which they might be involved in parts of as well, then we make sure that they’re involved in those conversations so that we all shape what we think is going to work in terms of tactics and ideas as well. So they’re always involved in things like brainstorms too.

What advice do you have for junior team members who are afraid to ask questions?

So I used to do quite a few things actually with my team. So I would use Google Forms.

Google Forms are great because they can be anonymous.

So if people really don’t want to speak up in a team environment, so internally not in front of the client, you could use a Google Form and get people to submit their questions, which you could then answer in a team meeting.

And then, when we answered them, we made sure everyone realized it wasn’t a silly question. If people start to realize that those aren’t silly questions, there are no silly questions.

It’s all about learning and shaping what we’re going to do; then the confidence starts to build.

We did a lot of mentoring, and that wasn’t just with more senior team members, like really senior team members, but maybe from other teams as well, so they could get to understand the bigger picture on what they’re doing or how that feeds into other things, which helped them to feel confident with the questions they were asking.

And that helped because I think it made them feel they weren’t being judged for their knowledge; it wasn’t someone more senior on their team, so they could ask questions from someone at a similar level. So that helped too. And then in one-to-ones, just really trying to, I guess, build that bond and make sure that people felt comfortable enough to bring up something if they weren’t quite sure.

We’ve always been a pretty open culture where you could just say “I’m not sure on this” like “can we talk about this” or “I actually think we need to do a little session on this”.

I think that’s really important because then it should help them to grow and understand more, and equally understand that, yeah, no question is a silly question because it’s gonna help you develop.

Has AI drastically changed the way that you do things at Aira?

Chloe Osunsami (21:19)
So obviously, I think because of the increase in AI, digital PR has become really popular again because it is what’s going to help if that is the objective to get included in AIOs and on LLMs, because of obviously brand mentions, highly correlating with appearances there.

I think that, in terms of the audit, not much has really changed in digital PR.

If you’ve got a solid PR strategy where you’re trying to get your client coverage to increase visibility, which could include coverage and links, then that is what’s going to work.

Not much has changed regarding the audit, as you’re still aiming to proceed with it.

I’m still aiming to get them in the right places in front of their target audience to increase brand visibility.

The only thing that’s really changed is that we were talking about looking at inclusions in AIOs and LLM features, and if they are currently there or if they have what kind of split they have versus their competitors, and so things like tha,t but I wouldn’t say it’s changed strategies all that much.

What can you learn from a client’s referring domains?

When I’m reviewing their referring domains, I’ll likely include brand mentions as well, since we prioritize coverage and links overall.

We look at where they’re sourcing them and then dig into the quality and relevant places we think are similar to where we want to target for our brand, based on the target audience and the product.

And then what is being covered in those spaces?

So how are they getting that coverage in those spaces?

Are they doing big data led campaigns or are they doing more reactive thought leadership?

Are they really like on brand stories or have they got less relevance so that they can get into some of these places? What is it that’s grasping the journalist’s attention and getting them in front of their target audience?

And is it something that we would want to be doing?

Is it something that our client is possibly missing or just haven’t been doing enough of?

And then I’d also have a look to see if there are any quick-win opportunities.

So from those, is there anything that we could be doing immediately to make sure we’re in similar spaces?

What would be a quick-win example?

If we have a client who works in a space that can deliver expert commentary on a topic that is really relevant to them.

So we might have spotted them talking about something.

We might have a slightly different spin on it.

Or if we know it’s currently a popular topic, we might look for more and start monitoring reactive opportunities around certain topics for expert commentary.

That would probably be one of the best quick win opportunities, which would be thought leadership if the brand has someone who is authoritative and can talk about those subjects.

So yeah, that’s probably what I would go for.

What is the conversation with clients like about quality vs quantity in links?

We get a lot of those questions. I feel like, and this might just be me and the people I’ve spoken to, we’ve had a lot of questions recently about guest posting as well.

It almost feels like it’s coming back around for some industries and brands.

And we might get asked, say that, our competitors are doing it though.

Like, is it not something we can do?

And it’s always a hard conversation, especially if the brand brings it up.

But I would say that there are some, there are definitely some tactics and I think when you see types of coverage, I think, I don’t even think you need to be a PR to really see that something is relevant.

You’d go, oh yeah, it makes sense for that brand to be there versus, oh, I’m not sure why they’re featuring in that place or I’m not sure why they’re talking about that story.

Essentially, it comes down to where their target audience is, so we always want to be there as well, because we want to be on that journey as well.

Ssome tactics don’t just don’t fare well for that  and a lot of time, like the newer digital PR tactics versus like the older school SEO tactics.

The newer digital PR tactics tend to sit better within getting us in front of the target audience because you’re shaping it more, and it’s getting you into those quality relevant websites rather than the—I’m trying to position it carefully— directory of blogs that are potentially in a similar space but not quite as relevant.

How much does relevance play into this?

Definitely needs to be a front-end target audience.

Like you were saying about the example of your guest post with Ahrefs, for instance.

Like that’s relevant, and yes, that is an end of the guest posting scale, which would be yeah, thought leadership, and would be more appropriate, and something we would consider, whereas it’s probably the other end, where you’re just trying to get the brand out there to anyone and anywhere.

And things are starting to be picked up and ignored, I believe.

And I think that it’s going to go more in that direction.

Just like back in the day when people were using forums and comments to build links, it’s going to start to be kind of like just pushed out.

And I think as long as we’re focusing on the things that will make a difference and are the right thing to do moving forward, you’ll put yourself in a better position.

It’s always been about the audience?

Google wants to show the audience what they want to see.

So they’re going to get their information from where that audience is.

So in my mind, and I believe in many others, we need to be where that audience is, because that’s why Google is getting their information from, because they want to be showing their audience what they want to see.

Can you talk a bit about using existing content for pitching?

Absolutely.

So we’ll always have a look through their existing content to see what they currently have.

And there are three things we tend to look for.

First of all, if it’s a topic which could be of interest to the target audience currently or moving forward.

So is it unique or different or extremely timely?

And it’s really important that it’s of interest to the target audience because then it’ll be of interest to the media or the websites that you then want to feature on.

Number two is if it’s got expert or thought leadership or data behind it to make it more credible and give it a unique angle.

Or can some of it be turned into a quote?

If it is unique and different and it’s from the brand on their website, can some of it be turned into a quote potentially from someone?

I say from someone, from a real person at the brand.

I know there has been a lot conversation around that recently from a real person at the brand who has authority to talk about these things.

And then finally, like, is it up to date or new or can it be refreshed to make it that way?

And as long as it hits those three things, we will we will try to try to use it.

Do you repeat this kind of audit?

Yeah, I’d say it varies so much as to how regularly I need to do it because it depends on how quickly the industry is moving.

Some industries are much slower.

I would say you don’t need to keep looking all the time.

I’d say definitely try to redo it once a year. And I would jump into insights monthly at a top level.

⁓ Just to keep an eye on say if there’s a new competitor, a challenger brand, we don’t know how quickly a challenger brand can move up with their ranks and then you want to make sure you are keeping an on them and if not monthly then definitely quarterly. ⁓ But yeah I’d redo the whole thing every year just to make sure that you’ve got the right strategy for the following year.

Vince: Is this a deliverable that you offer to clients too, or is this something you just recommend as a PR, you know, freelancer or agency, you’re just kind of doing consistently?

Chloe Osunsami:
So I have delivered it before and some clients really find it interesting. Some brands just don’t have the time for it. They’re not as fast about seeing all the data and the graphs and things. They just want to know what you want to do and a couple of top level reasons why you’ve picked those things. So having the data to back it, to be able to say, we’ve done this and this is why, they’re happy just to see that bit.

Is this a formal process internally?

Yes, yeah, we make sure that we review everything. So we have annual reviews, so we’ll make sure we work it around those and what the plans are for the next financial year. And yeah, just make sure we rerun it so that we’ve got that new data to back all our decisions.

What is something that I haven’t asked you that would be good to cover?

I think that there’s a couple of things that I’d probably add would be just don’t be afraid to evolve.

It’s not necessarily something you’ve missed Vince, but I would just say don’t be afraid to evolve the audit over time.

Nothing stays set.

It’s totally okay for it to change. And that’s definitely one of my favorite things about it. You might say present it internally to someone and someone might ask you a question and you’d be like actually, I really should look into that.

I’m gonna keep, I’m gonna start looking into that moving forward.

That’s quite a good thing.

And like, don’t think that that kind of feedback or that questioning is bad against the work you’ve done so far.

And then I would say always think about the story as you go too.

So it kind of feeds into that really. What are the data points actually saying? And what is the story helping you to shape? So I say to everyone in my team who does an audit, like put yourself in the client’s shoes.

If someone wants to show this to you, like what would you ask based on what you were presented?

Are you interested in seeing something else from that or interested in finding out a little bit more and then just dig more into that? There’s no real, not really like a this is finished point, which is annoying, but equally it’s almost like you can then delve into and shape the bits to be able to form.

The post How to Start a Digital PR Client (Step-by-Step Audit Guide) appeared first on BuzzStream.

What makes a compelling survey idea? It might just be as simple as getting people talking.

While researching this topic, I came across Talker Research’s study on The Perfect Movie Length. It has gathered over 133 referring domains since 2024. I dug a little deeper and realized that Talker Research (in conjunction with its sister agency, We Are Talker) has created tons of great surveys for its customers and its brand.

As their website states, they create “data-driven insights to inspire ideas, create content & spark conversations.”

So, I reached out to their Head of Content, Rick Maughan, to discuss survey ideas: how they come up with them, what makes a good one, and how teams can replicate Talker’s success.

Our conversation was a fascinating one, filled with actionable takeaways that anyone looking to use a survey as part of their content and/or PR mix.

What does Talker Research do?

Yeah, great. Thank you for that very kind introduction. Yeah, Talker Research is, as it sounds, a research agency at its core. So everything we do is foundational with data, primarily online and survey-based. That’s our kind of bread and butter.

And we, at our heart, deliver survey-led news, from an idea all the way through to hopefully getting coverage and getting the story talked about. And that’s really why we chose the name Talker.

We want to produce content that drives conversations, is engaging, and really gets thought leadership out there. So that kind of defines us at the heart of everything we do, whether it’s insightful or engaging data sets.

Or really revealing information that helps organizations progress their internal motives.

So we work across a number of things, primarily consumer-facing and consumer-led.

So we probably sit most comfortably in the lifestyle and consumer space. So you alluded to things like movie surveys, but we also have a lot more under the hood. We do work across a range of clients and industries.

Do you also help brands secure coverage?

We do. So yeah, this is where talker research differentiates a little bit. We have a kind of sister agency: We Are Talker, with which we work hand in hand, and we ensure that if we are involved in a project, we help to get the survey out there as well.

Now it’s mostly in terms of over time building a really good reputation with the media for our talkers, for kind of a hub of great usable content that people like yourself come across and want to be alerted about. That holds us to a certain standard in terms of the integrity of our research and the quality of stories.

We’ll only put things in the talker newsroom that we feel represent us and the research well.

But yeah, that’s kind of where we sit. So we do a little bit more. We’re much more ideas-oriented and invested in the outcomes of the research.

Then there may be a traditional researcher who would provide you with the data, and then you would go on from there.

How do you come up with an idea for a survey?

Yeah, golden question, isn’t it?

Where do you get your ideas?

And I think it’s a combination.

We still like good old-fashioned people in a room throwing ideas around.

And again, I will try not to burden us with tons of talker-related synonyms, but it is a conversation. But it’s about what sparks that talk.

What feels real when we are brainstorming, whether it’s a client brief or whether we’re bringing our own input and insight, does it generate talk?

Do people want to chip in, share their anecdotes?

We know we’ve got something.

When we’ve forgotten there’s a brief and we’ve been talking for 10 minutes and everyone’s been inputting because that shows it’s interactive.

People want to contribute to that topic.

They have things to share.

They have opinions.

And then we know we’re onto something interesting that’s worthy of insight, you know?

And in there is a calculated, careful mix.

So we’ve got a team that are dedicated to doing this day in, day out.

It really is our core focus. So we live and breathe it.

Researchers, of course, ⁓ news and editors and journalists and comms people.

We’ve got a really nice mix of perspectives and people that come in with different takes.

And that kind of really helps.

Of course, we’re constantly tapped into the agenda.

We ingest news in every pore. And we’re also, of course, monitoring data-led coverage wherever it may come from, whether it’s one of ours or someone else.

So we’re living and breathing the space, I guess.

Is collaboration important to the process?

I think so, I think so because you just, just for a sense of, you know, perspective and not to feel you’re shouting into the void.

I mean, obviously we have AI and things like that.

Anyone can throw in and have singular idea sessions, but there’s something about resonating with that human creativity that, that like seeing people’s eyes either light up or die inside when you know, you’ve thrown out a terrible idea, but also having that, you know, I love how AI will be like great idea. No matter what you say.

No, we want human.

It’s so important to create that space where you can go and tell you what happened to me.

And I wonder if this is an idea and just by public feedback.

And creating that space to creatively.

You have to share a bit of vulnerability kind of, or I liken the best ideas to like stand-up comics, and it’s that level of human and behavioral observation.

My old news editors of the past, I’m old enough that we were given physical DVDs sometimes just to spontaneously generate ideas, and we would go and watch the set.

See what ideas generate into data-led stories.

Obviously, we, as a team, sometimes do things like that. We might take a one-hour special each and kind of come back and see if that ‘s things like that because those people are masters of daily observation. That’s really what good research is, you know.

What percentage of news-driven ideation happens versus daily life?

Yeah, it’s a good mix.

I think we do the news-driven agenda, reactive stuff mostly for other publishers.

So that’s another window that we have is we work to provide them with data for their editorial purposes.

So we see what they’re kind of looking at and what’s resonating with their audiences. So the new stuff does drive us. We will put out polls purely for Talker Research, you know, in terms of, look, this is just a topic that demands a survey like now let’s do it.

But we also think a little bit more evergreen.

I was really interested in your excellent YouGov analysis, and now the timing versus the evergreen study really gets us off.

And that’s somewhere where we sit. think you want everything to be timely. Of course, it helps from a news perspective, but in the realistic marketing or market research world, you need timelines and projects.

There are many, many kinds of hands on the project; you have to be a bit more realistic about the speed of these things.

So in that case, we’re really looking for the sweet spot of kind of evergreen, but with that timeliness within a kind of month period, you know, something.

Cost of living isn’t going away anytime soon.

If it’s a story that’s dead in a week, you really have to make it there, then we probably aren’t always as suited to it. Yeah, it’s hard to give a percentage. We’re more towards long-form research than towards the day-to-day news-agenda type.

How do you make “boring industries” less boring with a survey?

Yeah, it’s a really good question. And obviously it varies depending on the client and the industry, but yeah, take construction or something like that. We specialize in B2C, but we also get a lot of B2B clients. One client that springs to mind is used by contractors within the building industry.

And there are specific financial invoicing tools used by those specific types of contractors.

We’ve done a lot of great work with them, just broadening it to, like, how do you make it a people story, not a product story?

We will find a panel of actual contractors and get their takes and insights; valid data that resonates with the key target audience there and drives trade and specialist coverage.

But we’ll try and relate what they’re saying to a wider, potentially forecasting type of story.

They were seeing certain things that indicated potential recession indicators.

So, for example, that was a story that applied more to the average person. So we would take something like their forecasting, their positioning in an industry that can be predictive for economic things, and we would apply it then to a kind of average news reading audience.

At the same time, we would also poll general respondents, and we would look at topics like affordable housing in their area, and we’ve just done a story of that that’s made incredibly well across a suite of publications, because that’s the way we can make that relatable.

We get the tool on the radar, they get consumer coverage, they get industry-specific coverage, and they see value on both fronts.

So it’s a bit of both, a bit of give and take.

If there’s no interest in the consumer side of things; we might play more as direct researchers and less creative advisors, you know.

Do you validate if an idea has been done before?

Absolutely, yes. On any campaign we do.

We always have media relations input.

We’ve got an excellent media relations team who, again, day to day, it’s data stories and dealing with the media.

And they pick up so much feedback and they have great relationships.

And we’re in that privileged position where we do speak directly to publishers on a kind of almost weekly basis in some form or another.

So we get that kind of feedback from editors about what they’re looking for.

And that obviously changes, not just, you know, it changes newsroom to newsroom.

We’ll have some who are, like, obsessing over quantitative data.

Others, like, we really want qualitative input.

Can we access the respondents? Okay, we need to build up authority index on articles. We need first person account. need original quotes, we need this, etc.

It goes through phases where we’re like, okay, we need.

Then that ripples down to our client-led stories where we’re like, okay, can we make sure we can access respondents and do qualitative takeaways where we can and ensure that when we get a journalist, there’s nothing worse than a journalist coming to you going, love this, can I speak to someone who did the survey?

And you’re like, sorry, no, we didn’t have the right content permissions on that one because we didn’t think of it at the start.

So things like that give us some format and then yes we are always looking to see, it been done before?

In what way?

And how can you bring a fresh take to it?

Context is everything; making sure it has the timeliness for this year.

Why is it a story for now? We live in that space of like, okay, well, another tax season’s coming.

We know those same sorts of sets, we will have tax clients, the same kind of tax data, and questions that they’ll want to write.

Or have the same sort of hypotheses.

It’s about trying to put fresh spins on things wherever we can. So that’s really, you know, what we’re constantly trying to push.

How important is it to get personal insights or quotes from the survey respondents?

Rick (18:45)
Yeah,

I think it’s definitely something to be open to.

I think a blend, even if it’s inside the research, doing free text or open answer questions and allowing respondents to contribute, because that gives you some gold in terms of just the creative, unpredictable, brilliant responses you can get, all the insightful stuff, all the poignant and heartstring-pulling data we are craving.

And I think that’s where surveys still work so well.

We crave a bit of collective experience.

We’re all funneled down these media-individual journeys.

We get our algorithms serving us everything in the way we like it. And that’s only going to increase. Look at offerings like ChatGPT’s Pulse. Think it’s all going to be in the styles we want it in the way we want it.

We do crave bit of like, well, what’s that person’s experience and is it human and where do I relate in terms of that experience?

Not in a divisive or oppositional way, but if you do disagree with it, it’s also a piece you want to interact with.

That’s why data is so good for hanging up averages.

You mentioned the movie one, you know, the perfect length is 92 minutes. I might disagree with that. I might think that’s weird.

Why is it 92, not 97, not 120, but it makes me want to know that experience and kind of understand what people are thinking.

I think it’s whether it’s on the quantitative side, with a nice collective average that I can engage with, or it’s about providing journalists with the ability to get exclusive quotes or to interact with the data further.

I think it’s a mix that is the kind of short answer.

How important are sample size and methodology?

It does vary newsroom to newsroom, but I think wherever possible credibility is still the biggest driver?

You want to know that’s been responsibly handled.

Journalists are perhaps more suspicious than ever.

They’re being bombarded by pitches.

They’re being bombarded by data.

No journalist that I’ve ever met has ever said, I’m short of stories.

They’re not. They’re short of time, resources, and the ability to build those stories, but they’re not short of content.

People use the analogy of a teacup over a fire hydrant. Like, there’s content everywhere, but they need help on what’s quality and what’s worth covering.

So, anything that builds that authority, know, methodologies that cite, of course, I’m, you know, declare bias here, but proper researchers, people that subscribe to transparency initiatives, people that, organisations that you know it’s been properly handled and are completely transparent and open about it, I think is really crucial.

So first and foremost, being upfront about your sample in the news copy as well, in your press release. Not burying it or hoping that the story kind of does all of the work.

I think that transparency is key.

I will say story is still king. Story is what matters.

There’s no magic trick to getting a journalist’s attention. It has to be a good story. So that kind of matters most. But when it comes to samples in terms of sizes,

I think it really depends on what’s being said and who’s saying it. For the general population, our sweet spot is about 2,000 as a standard.

The reason it’s that number is it gives you enough at kind of regional level and other breakdowns.

It kind of projects better if you are making larger claims that might be representative of a broader population, rather than a thousand, for example, really stretched thin.

In any individual reporting sector, to achieve statistical significance, we need a minimum of 80 respondents to have any confidence in responsible reporting.

So that’s something that we adhere to.

But it really depends on who’s doing the talking, because if it’s for example, a study of a hundred ICU nurses, that’s relevant and that they’re worth listening to and you don’t need thousands, right?

You have to be wary that your data won’t split.

The smaller your sample is, the more niche you get.

And it’s surprising actually how quickly you can get niche. You might start with a survey and go, it’s going to be 2,000 people.

For example, it’s tech use over the holidays.

Okay, so they need to celebrate a holiday. They need to have a phone, a smartphone, which is, you again, you assume is a collective experience, but, you know, then you’re rooting, rooting, rooting.

Suddenly, your key headline or takeaway, you’re like, oh, hold on, it’s not of the full 2000, it’s actually only 400 that made it this far.

So you have to think early on, before the research, and this is why, you know, consultative input and really thinking things through before they go live.

Because once that button’s hit, you really have to make it work with your data set, but thinking about panel is really important and does take a bit of knowledge there, yeah.

If you’re unsure about the sample size, can you compare it to other similar stories?

Absolutely, yeah.

I think that’s as good as you can do, just looking at the existing, yeah.

Do you have a sense of how a survey will turn out before you run it?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, there’s definitely some consideration of that because, know, at the end of the day, we have to make sure it’s a story and a data set that works, you know.

I think the first kind of flag or thing that helps guide us is, you know, does it feel real?

In terms of a hypothesis, is it something that we believe will emerge in some degree of truth?

It doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly.

And I think this is where sometimes a lot can be a bit misguided, the need to prove your product or your concept in the data and people fall into the trap of, well, we need a data set to say our protein bar is the best protein bar.

So what we’ll do is we’ll either poll a list of the best protein bars and ensure or pray that ours comes top.

And then invariably it doesn’t. Then you don’t wanna mention a load of competitors. Then you’ve gone down an alley that’s like really hard to come back from.

And even to start with protein bar says protein bars are great.

I mean, it’s not a story, right?

So what we would do potentially in that instant, we would say, look, put it in someone’s hands.

Who’s using that?

So, gym goers, people who are kind of health-conscious, how can we build that into a slightly wider narrative?

It might be, you know, we’ve done stories around, well, is there anything in like, January’s coming up, getting back to the gym in the new year?

What can help fuel our kind of health and fitness goals?

Perhaps we’re a bit anxious about that after a while. It’s with phrases like gym-timidation that have done very well for us in the past.

So something like that, know, six in 10 Americans have gym-timidation.

They’ve freaked out by mirrors, worried they’ll be in the back of a fitness, you know, influencer video. It’s a very real fear, you know? And then, so, yes, we get a little bit away, and I know that that’s, you need context, protein bars want to talk about people eating protein bars, but you have to meet the audience where they are if you’re serious about earned coverage.

Do you ever test out a survey first?

We don’t tend to do much of that. We might if it’s a like a very new sort of hypothesis that we’re like, we’ve really never done anything in that area.

Can we, even within the panel, make that feasible?

Do we have many of the people who would be eligible, for example?

So we do run a lot of feasibility studies. Still, in terms of trying to forego the opinion or kind of guess the opinion, with something like that, I mean, for us, we do a lot of it, more traditional market research and brand awareness versus competitors.

To us, that’s that kind of first stage of that journey would be to conduct that research and we can do that and give that market share and share a voice analysis, for example.

Really, where we’re kind of brought in in the creative part of things, we consult on a, look, can we move it to something that we feel will really help you get you out there that isn’t so self-serving? We strike that balance.

We give that data, we would still have a lot of protein bar data in any project we undertake, but we would make sure we have a way to kind of, a less biased hypothesis, always has a bigger chance of working and getting them out there.

So it’s just a different way of working, but there are many ways to safeguard against the results not coming out.

The biggest hit to that is that I really like it, so it must come out that this specific individual thing reaches the top, you know?

How can people rethink the story when it’s not what they initially thought it was going to be?

It’s an excellent question. And of course, there’s maybe areas where, I will say it happens surprisingly on rare occurrences with us.

I think we have the luxury that we do tend to do more questions per project, particularly if we’re committed on a creative level and distribute.

Vince: So maybe one way to safeguard is by asking more questions.

Rick:
So yeah, you know, 20 for us is the sweet spot and kind of gives more than enough.

And when you factor in using a variety of question methods: direct yes or no’s, multi-choice lists, statement agreement ratings, five point scales in terms of how strongly you agree with certain elements, are sliders, etc.

For us, we’re usually pretty assured that something interesting will emerge from the data that supports the overall hypothesis.

But the key is to kind of agree a broader hypothesis that isn’t a live or die one.

That’s a common thing we see, but we guide clients wher “you’re kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, if you go down that route,” because even if your bar tops it, then often it’s like, well, it’s not enough.

We don’t want to say only 50 % because that means we’re saying there are two sides to every stat.

So if you go too direct, then often we get the like, well, it’s not, we thought it’d be like 96%.

And that means half the world isn’t eating our protein bar. We can’t go out with that. So what we tend to do is move into the, you know, the more kind of accessible areas.

Things like, you know, we get, we’ll see it a lot with like streaming companies, of course, who are like, okay,

Why don’t we do like best movies, best TV show of all time?

Okay, great, let’s do it. but we, sorry, we don’t have Breaking Bad on the screen.

We only mention our things.

In which they don’t do a list. Looks contrived. As soon as it looks contrived, a journalist’s job is literally to sniff out BS.

They see you come in a mile away.

You know, no one’s running that.

I think if you talk about the space where the product is, the movie nights in that instance, or the kind of watching times, or the perfect length of a movie, or debate points within that industry, you know, it can be knowledge on protein. How do we know our levels? Do we know how much supposed to eat, do we struggle on that front?

It doesn’t have to be people who eat protein bars feel better, know, if it says protein bar.

It has to be a bit smarter than that and a little bit more accessible to the average newsreader and the editor scrutinising it.

You could even split, for example, I love a great split. Obviously then you’ve got age, you’ve got gender, you’ve got reach, household income.

There may be 10 questions, 20 questions, but then you times that again by the five splits you’ve got, you’ve got stories all over. So it’s being able to dig into those and add.

Sample size helps at a regional level, definitely, but even from an age perspective, there are many generational headlines.

Gen Z headlines were everywhere, that kind of comparison, and where are things going.

In the UK, you see a lot more tabloid-like, Gen Z are killing the cup of tea, it’s dead, or things like that. But generationally, no matter your country, it’s interesting to see how things line up.

But you can get more creative than that by splitting on things that, you know, perhaps don’t jump to mind.

It might be splitting by your level of protein intake for your protein bar. And maybe there is a correlation that higher protein intake leads to longer workouts or more satisfying workouts. Or even if you don’t want to go into performance led, doing like how your playlist influences your gym approach.

Why don’t you correlate your style?

Do introverts and extroverts have different types of approach in the gym? Know, like, are there ways in?

One of the best stories we ever did, and I love it, is a simple split by do you make the bed or don’t you make the bed? They’re kind of either or ground, right?

And that just blew up because, you know, people share it with their partners.

People are, you know, that you’re usually one or the other. You’re often married to a different one.

You know, it’s that kind of beautiful take on things.

And it’s not just related to your sleeping habits, but you split that by your success at work, the number of promotions, who’s more punctual, all the kind of pretty, you know, just that reaction you gave there. Really, what we’re looking for is that that’s a talker. So that’s the sweet spot for us.

It does vary a little bit from the direct product and appreciate that in the SEO world and the digital PR world, there’s definitely like guard rails.

If we could just talk about anything, my job would be easy.Vince Nero – BuzzStream (37:12)

What is a question that I didn’t ask?

I think, I mean, it’s not so much what you didn’t ask, but in terms of where we see our kind of work going in our partnerships and the kind of people using us and organizations.

I think it’s like, what’s the intention?

And we see ourselves increasingly supporting, you know, dedicated thought leadership, brand newsrooms.

It used to be that the B word was a bit of a dirty word, you know, dealing with journalists and trying to build partnerships and get our stories out there used to be like, okay, so they’re really data-led. When do I mention there’s a brand on them?

And I think that world has changed. Think there’s so much great content being produced by really specialist, talented people on the brand side.

And now I think we’ve moved past a lot of the like, we just have to like shoehorn our product into things and say like, it.

Now there are just amazing newsrooms doing great content on the brand side. And I think it’s really about long-term intentions and building the kind consistent, consecutive pieces of coverage. Of course the AI and geo element is playing a part, but that way to kind of amplify content is really where we’re positioning ourselves much more.

And, you know, that’s not just digitally, we’re seeing such appetite from broadcasters and, you know, that really plays into our kind of talk value thing.

We’re really using data as the foundation for campaigns.

You mentioned trend reports.

People are looking for new ways to raise the profile of their internal talent.

We don’t really want to hear direct from a company anymore.

We want to hear from thought leaders and people. It’s that human connection and intelligence that we’ve talked about. And we want to meet them where the audiences are across platforms. So that’s really how to incorporate data as a foundation across campaigns, podcasting, so many different mediums, sales enablement, all of that.

I think it’s about thinking about data on a broader level and not just in a direct context.

The post What Makes a Compelling Survey Idea? with Talker Research’s Rick Maughan appeared first on BuzzStream.

Muck Rack puts out amazing studies throughout the year, including their State of Journalism, State of PR, and their more recent What is AI Reading, which was published around the launch of their new AI citation tracking tool, Generative Pulse.

(And if you’ve ever read my content, you’d see that I quote or refer to their data all the time.)

So, Muck Rack’s VP of Comms, Linda Zebian, graciously agreed to come on our podcast and let me pepper her with questions about some of their findings and what we can learn from them.

We ended up with a really great conversation about pitching, building relationships, and the future of the PR industry.

What’s your take on this influx of pitching?

Well will say that it seems like every year we do this survey that this number increases and I think it’s multifaceted the reason. First of all the pool of journalists and the pool of media outlets is contracting right. ⁓ It costs a lot of money to create news and information and put it out there ⁓ and you’re seeing newsrooms cut jobs and shutter ⁓ what seems like all the time.

So as that contracts, PR folks are left with fewer and fewer journalists to reach out to.

So therefore, naturally you’re gonna get more pitches if you are one of the few journalists who are lucky enough to be left. And I also think that PR folks, it seems, I don’t think that there are more PR folks than before, but I do think that like that ratio of, we haven’t looked at this number in a few years, but the last time we studied it, maybe two or three years ago, the ratio between PR and journalism was six to one. So six PR people professionally. I think it was census data that we were looking at.

Six PR people to every one journalist.

So there you have it.

So that’s probably why I mean there’s an in in in flow increase in what we say probably podcasters and sort of these new media types and also you’ve got like content creators or influencers which is which allows I think an expansion or a stretch of where PR folks can send their send their pitches.

Which I think is a great thing And then you have a lot of journalists who maybe are not working in traditional newsrooms who are launching sub stacks or their own independent

newsletters, which is another great thing too, but I still think the bulk of it is just lack of journalists, actively working journalists.

Vince Nero:

Yeah, I mean definitely like we’ve seen this in the news there, you know, and part of it seems to be AI is driving the redundancies. But on the other hand, it’s just like, you know, AI is taking a lot of traffic away, right from these publishers from these news sites. So there maybe isn’t as yeah, there’s not enough ad money coming in and that’s also causing part of it. Is that kind of yeah.

Linda Zebian:

Well, right. You have to look at where people are, where people are consuming news. I mean, the vast majority of folks are getting their news on social platforms now.

And I mean, I think the other challenge too is like, where are these social influencers getting their news?

If there is no reporter on the ground ⁓ offering a independent view ⁓ or wearing a press vest, bulletproof vest in a war zone reporting, who’s gonna give you that information, right?

And bias is a whole nother conversation, but still like who’s going to be your eyewitness to what’s going on.

So I think it’s an ecosystem and if you pull one piece out of an ecosystem, the future is bleak.

Vince Nero:

Yeah, and I will say from my perspective, I think there is a good amount of people from the link building SEO world that are kind of jumping into digital PR headfirst because of all the news—Muck Rack reporting itself— showing that getting coverage in high end news publications is something that is highly correlated to showing up in AI citation.

Linda Zebian:

Yeah, no, and I’m very curious to see how the whole thing shakes out, like the lawsuits between the New York Times and OpenAI, for example. Like, are the LLMs going to pay the news publishers for the content that they cite every single day, all day long, at every millisecond, or not?

Because what does that mean? Like, you know, the same issue when Google came out and, you know, all the traffic was going to Google and all the ad dollars were going to Google instead of the news sites and the news sites are struggling and they’re the ones paying for armored cars and all of these things, you know, and Google gets all the money.

So, and all the eyeballs, because, you know, they’re all connected.

So I think it’ll be interesting to where it shakes out because if 95 % of citations, LLM answers are coming from unpaid sources.

And then 30 % of those are journalistic.

So, a third of your citations are journalistic, and LLMs are relying so heavily on credible news outlets for their information.

What happens if that stops happening? You know what I mean?

If news stops flowing through, because there’s nobody like available to pay journalists a salary.

Just what happens to like, know, it’s just, these are the questions that we asked ourselves at the New York Times, and I still believe in, you know, person to person, what does that mean at the end of the day?

It means pay for your news. Subscribe to something. Subscribe for Netflix, subscribe to subscribe and pay for your news. Somebody has to create that for you.

Vince Nero:

I saw someone talking about this on LinkedIn the other day about best way to get around the paywall. It’s like you’re biting the hand that feeds you!

Linda Zebian:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a bedrock of our democracy, a free press. And so when you start to take that for granted, think that folks take it for granted and they don’t realize ⁓ how lucky we are to have a free and independent press, particularly in this country and what it means when you don’t.

Why do you think irrelevant pitches are such a big problem still?

I think that…There are a handful of bad actors and folks who are not putting priority on quality pitching and making big promises that they can’t deliver on and ⁓ placing their bets on number of pitches sent versus number of stories secured. So pitch houses exist.

PR agencies that are known as to be pitch houses.

So, you know, like when you’re first graduating from college and, you know, people know who they are, like, you know, they’ll do anything to sign the contract to get the brand to sign with them.

You’ve got somebody who doesn’t know quite know how the sausage is made, how a new story gets made and how PR actually works and media relations actually work.

They overpromise and they, you know, work the junior PR people really hard and they say you have to send X amount of pitches to X amount of journalists and that’s how they’re measured on performance.

Does mass pitching, if you pitch 1,300 creators and journalists the same story, will it potentially increase your potential to get a response?

Maybe. Does it feel right? Does it?

No, does it hurt your reputation with the rest?

And your reputation goes with you, not just from the brand that you’re working at or the agency you’re working at, but it goes with you as you move through your career as well.

I mean, for my communications team, if we don’t feel like we’re like 60 to 70% sure this pitch will land, we don’t pitch.

Our time is much more valuable doing other things than pitching.

How many emails do you think PR pros put out per campaign?

You know, I don’t know.

I don’t have insights into what the average PR firm is putting out. I think that PR firms do a heck of a lot more than pitching and aren’t always given the credit for what they do in terms of the creative work that they produce and these kind of 360 campaigns that they do. I I’ve judged some award competitions where I’ve seen anonymous submissions that are incredible.

And these PR teams…

Like there are some PR agencies that just knock it out of the park and they’re so, know, so, you know, I don’t, I’m not sure, but I love to see a low number.

And in Muck Rack, we have a, we have lots of checks and balances in the Muck Rack system so that all of our customers and users understand how many people they’re pitching and like every time.

So it’s like, we’ll stop you and say, you’re about to pitch X number of people.

Are you sure you want to send this pitch every time you pitch in Muckrack?

Because our philosophy is you should not pitch that.

You should always be very mindful of how you pitch because our customers are not only PR folks, but we have thousands of journalists using our platform as well, because we started as a journalist platform, and we still have thousands of them using it as profile/portfolios.

So it’s a journalist tool as well.

Our goal is to have a community, not to spam journalists.

So even when I send one pitch in Muckrack, the little pop-up comes up and says, are you sure you want us, you’re about to send one pitch to one journalist, are you sure? And it’s automated and it’s automatic, but it’s good. It reminds you of what you’re doing and helps you be a little more conscious of your actions.

Email addresses are valuable!

Like that’s somebody’s personal email.

The lower the number, the better.

Because it means it’s targeted, it means it’s specified to that specific journalist based on what they cover, what they’re interested in, what their audience wants to read.

There’s no way that, if you’re pitching over 50 journalists, the story is right for all 50 of them. Sorry.

What’s your take on pitch quotas?

I get the need for almost anything in a contract to get a contract signed.

If it’s pitch quota, that’s just sad.

That’s just so sad to me. Like, coverage quota is one thing, but a number of pitches should never, in my opinion, should never be in a contract.

Like, we’re gonna send 25 pitches this quarter. Like, that’s,  I’m sorry.

Coverage is one thing. you can try to link coverage to campaigns or launches or something, that’s one thing. And that’s a normal KPI.

Is relationship building a thing in PR?

I do think that it is relationship building. It is not just trust. It is relationship building.

And what I mean by relationship building, I mean reaching out to a journalist when you have nothing to say to them, that you have nothing to sell them. That is sales 101.

That is, “hey, I saw your great piece on the new, sneakers today and I just wanted to say like the way you described the laces was really cool and I enjoyed it and I shared it with my friend.”

Or, “hey, I saw there were layoffs at your publication today and I just wanted to say, reach out to say, I’m thinking of you and let me know if I can support you in any way.”

Whatever it may be, commenting on their LinkedIn is not necessarily building trust—that is building a relationship and a rapport with somebody.

Nor is it taking them out to coffee, by the way.

There is a middle ground, and I get the trust thing, especially in the AI world where like everything is spam and trash and slop.

I get that whole thing, but there’s absolutely relationship building in PR, and I completely disagree with anybody who says otherwise.

What about the fact that journalists don’t have the time to respond?

Linda Zebian (20:31)

No, they don’t have time.

But what they might have time to do is read a subject line that says, Hey, saw the news about the layoffs, hope you’re okay. And even if they don’t respond, they saw it.

How do you feel about the fake flattery in journalist pitching?

You still have a motive there. No, I would not do that because they’ve already written that story. That doesn’t feel genuine. You’re still going at them for something.

Do you still find that most PR professionals are reaching out to people they don’t know?

Okay, I think that it’s both ways.

Think that you absolutely there are times where you have to reach out to a reporter you’ve never worked with before.

But I think that how you do that is you acknowledge, hey, we’ve never worked together before, but I have, I’m working with a new client or I’m working on a new brand and I have this news or I would like to introduce you to the CEO of X company and this is why.

I think that that’s completely normal and appropriate.

They understand what your motive is.

But I think that what I’m talking about is building human connection and humanizing yourself and also empathizing with them.

You’re probably getting paid more than them.

You’re probably having a better work-life balance than them, according to all of our data.

Because we do ask about, we do have two work-life balance studies of PR and journalists.

So just, you know, create building human connection really does go a long way with these folks.

Should people forget about smaller niche sites if they want to show up in AI?

I mean, it’s actually quite the opposite. So it’s like, well, I should say it’s both.

You of course still want to get into like the big, you know, Reuters, FT’s of the world.

Those stories certainly do resonate in AI-generated answers, but AI also likes rewards niche-specific outlets, tons in our research.

Good housekeeping was an example.  TVTechnology.com was one in tech, remember. Tech Target in the tech space.

So, like, if you think about it, those niche outlets are like the bread and butter of certain industries.

So they’re really experts on what they do.

So if you’re in travel, you’re travel writers, you’re travel blogs, I say blogs lightly, you know what I mean by blogs, or like small sites that are just about travel.

If you’re in chat GPT and you’re looking for best tips for X, Y, and Z, they probably aren’t gonna go to a big giant news site that sometimes writes about travel.

They’re gonna go to the travel experts to pull from.

So that makes a lot of sense. You really, what does that mean for PR people?

It means keep doing what you’re doing.

Target your trades, target your newsletter writers, ⁓ target your big massive outlets when it makes sense.

It doesn’t mean your strategy should necessarily shift.

But it just means it’s another insights channel that you can rely on to look and analyze data.

And that’s what Generative Pulse essentially does is it allows you to understand your brand, competitors, your competitive brands, look at them in a dashboard, understand your visibility, understand your visibility over time, all of those things, understand the outlets, the journalists, down to frankly, the domain, even if it’s not a media outlet, like a Wikipedia or a Reddit or whatever.

Understand who the writers are that are influencing your LLM outputs, and then you’re able to contact them directly in generative polls, which is cool.

So that’s like, that’s the future.

It still doesn’t change what you’re doing, right?

You’re still telling stories.

You’re still being an authoritative voice, still building messaging for your brand, still targeting journalists, still writing credible narratives, all of those things are still the same, which is great.

And for all of those people trying to like sell PR people, I just have to say, like, we can see through you.

You denied us for many years.

We were ignored by anyone trying to sell to marketers. We’ve been working and we’ve been doing this job a long time.

It doesn’t change necessarily what we’re doing, but it empowers us to keep doing it and doing it better.

It helps us get a bigger central seat at that executive table. It gives us metrics that are usable, transferable, and understandable.

So it’s all good for PR people right now. I think it’s the marketers who are scrambling.

What did I miss? Is there anything I should have asked but didn’t?

I think that there’s an element of, for PR folks to understand is there’s an element of earned that a lot of folks don’t realize that they could be targeting as well, which is sort of the corporate blogs and content piece of it that is not paid, that is not traditional journalism.

So like at Muckrack, I’m doing this podcast with you. This is a kind of a piece of, we would call corporate content, meaning you’re not necessarily a journalist, but you create content for a company that you run, right?

So that has value for the LLMs as well.

Like, if PR agency writes about Muck Rack, that’s a piece of like a corporate blog that validates Muck Rack as a great tool.

That’s showing up in the LLMs as well. So that’s another kind of, you’re talking about content marketers essentially. So make relationships with content marketers.

Build relationships with your partners and get content, build content out there that LLMs can scrape because it’s not journalistic.

Still, it’s authoritative, it makes sense, it’s written in the right way, it’s got that hierarchy of information, it’s super searchable, super scrapable.

Do it.

Why not?

And sometimes it’s paid, like I talked to some folks in like consumer CPGs.

Like, sometimes if you’re talking about like Target or something, they won’t put you on target.com if you’re trying to sell basketballs.

I think that’s like a totally different thing. think that’s like a paid relationship thing or a partnership you have to have in place.

But some, hey, there might be like if you work in travel and like visit, you know, florida.com might be interested in writing about you. That’s not maybe not a journalist. It’s maybe a content marketer that works for the bureau, for the tourism bureau. They, you know, reach out to them, see if they want to write about.

You know, flip-flops brand. Why not? You never know. There’s lots of opportunities to partner up with folks. So don’t just limit yourselves to journalists, traditionally.

The post How to Pitch Like a Pro with Muck Rack’s Linda Zebian appeared first on BuzzStream.

Of all the questions PR pros ask, the best time to send consistently ranks near the top.

And since PR professionals send millions of emails through BuzzStream, we have a pretty good sense of when recipients (i.e., journalists) are active.

I dug into the data to really get to the bottom of the best times to pitch journalists, broken down by a few factors: time, domain, and freelancers.

Quick Note on Methodology

For this study, we analyzed both open rates and engagement shares. Although we’ve omitted opens from Apple’s MPP, open rates can still be less reliable. So, we are using reply rate more as an additional confidence metric that journalists are indeed active around that time.

To get the actual open time, first, the user’s send time is marked. Then we track the seconds until the first open. This lets us track open rates in each hour.

First, we broke this down by open and reply rates, but as you can imagine, we end up with skewed data when certain hours of the day have lower send volume.

So, we went with engagement share.

• If an hour has a high send count but a low open share, the audience is not engaging at that time.
• If an hour has a high open share, it means a meaningful portion of all opens occurred during that hour — even after accounting for volume.

So, about 36% of our opens came from messages sent at 8 AM, making it not just effective; it’s when recipients are actually active.

Best Time to Pitch Journalists by Hour

The best time to pitch journalists is between 8 and 9 AM local time for the publication.

Here’s what that looks like as a chart:

Not all that earth-shattering, right?

When I spoke with Rosie Taylor, UK-based freelance journalist and author of Get Featured Substack, she confirmed my suspicions:

“I check my emails pretty constantly through the day, but later emails tend to arrive when I’m in the middle of working on something else, so it’s easy for me to forget about these. Anything that’s already in my inbox when I get to my desk at 9am is most likely to be read and potentially acted on – but I will pause what I’m doing later in the day for a very strong story.”

I highly recommend checking out her guide on press deadlines.

As you can see, the highest engagement rates occur between 8 AM and 9 AM.

Next, I wanted to confirm the days of the week to see if those had any fluctuation.

Best Time to Pitch Journalists by Day of the Week

The best day to pitch journalists is Monday.

Here’s what it looks like as a table:

Journalist activity is virtually non-existent on the weekend.

Last, I wanted to see if freelancers differed much from the in-house journalists.

Best Time to Pitch Freelance Journalists

The best time to pitch freelance journalists is Monday at ~8 AM.

I calculated this by assuming that all Gmail, Yahoo, and other non-media-publisher email domains were freelancers.

This may not always be the case, of course, but for this study, it is the closest approximation at scale.

What we saw is that Monday is still the best day, but there was fairly consistent engagement throughout the week, minus Friday.

Here is the table version of this:

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that freelance journalists are night owls or work irregular hours.

And while this may be true, the majority of them seem to work hours that align with the daily news cycle:

Here is the table breakdown for timing:

Since we don’t know where these domains are based, we need to rely on the data.

We are just using open engagement share because replies are less reliable at a smaller scale, but as you can see, the peaks correspond to 8 AM in both the UK and ET time zones.

So, again, the early time frames appear to be the best time for engaging with a journalist.

The next check I wanted to do is the US vs UK timezones.

Best Time to Pitch US vs UK Journalists

The best time to pitch to UK journalists is 7-9 AM, while US-based journalists 9-11 AM.

Here is the table for US vs UK timing:

We do see a difference here in engagements. I’m not 100% sure why, and this stumped most journalists I asked as well.

It appears that UK-based journalists are early risers.

When comparing the days of the week, there was no difference.

Here is the table for UK vs US day of the week:

Monday is still the day that gets the most engagement from journalists based on opens engagement share.

To help understand a little more of the UK vs US fluctuations, we can actually look at the domain level.

Best Time to Pitch Journalists Based on Domain

The best time to send for each domain still appears to be 8 AM.

To determine the most reliable “best send times” for major publishers, we analyzed the top 50 most-contacted domains and measured their engagement behavior at every UTC hour.

For each domain, we calculated the number of sends, opens, open rates, and open shares.

Here is the table for the best times to contact journalists based on the domain:

To ensure the results reflected real signals rather than noise, we further applied two reliability filters: each domain-hour needed at least 10 opens and a confidence score ≥ 0.40, based on the relative volume of sends at that hour.

As you can see, again, pretty much consistently ~8 AM.

With that out of the way, I can now explain that most of what you just read should be taken with a HUGE grain of salt.

Tips for Identifying the Best Time to Send Emails

You can pretty much ignore all of this at the individual journalist level.

Why?

Because there is SO much variation between journalists, industries, and the publications they write for.

As Rosie told me, “the best day (and best time for that matter) changes depending on which publication and journalist you’re pitching to!

The key thing to take away is there is no magic rule that will work for everyone – you need to get to know the publications and journalists you’re pitching to and work out when is the best time to email them.”

Some journalists live and work in different areas, living in one time zone and writing for another.

Some may be night owls.

With that in mind, here are some tips for the best time to send your PR emails.

Research Job Titles

Biographies and job titles can be telling.

For instance, here is Daisy Maldonado from Good Housekeeping. She’s writing about a fashion topic.

But, only when you click on her name to read her bio do you see that she is the weekend editor.

If you email on a Monday morning, your hot story on Oprah-approved Amazon makeup bags may get easily lost.

Read their biographies

Not all reporters live in the same area that their publication is based either. Biographies can sometimes help get you that information.

For instance, Ruth Graham, writes for The New York Times, but is based in Dallas:

In our webinar on hyper-relevance in outreach, I showed a screenshot from Colin Czarnecki of digital PR agency, Noble, who breaks up his outreach into timezones, which he’s said works wonders for his campaigns.

This is why it pays to research each journalist individually.

Check Publish Dates

Another tip is to dig into publish dates. Sometimes these can give you some intel.

Say I was trying to reach out to Matt Meyer, one of the authors of this story on the Trump government shutdown, from CNN.

When I go to his author page, I can clearly see that all of these previous posts were posted on the weekend.

Although publishing times are solely up to the editor, the publisher, and the publication itself, they may give some insight into the journalist’s publishing cadence.

Some journalists publish only once or twice per month (usually when they are freelance contributors), so that may change your pitching strategy.

Instead of a one-off pitch, these kinds of journalists are the ones you may consider trying to build a long-term relationship with.

Check their Social Media

Sometimes, you’ll get lucky and it’s listed in their bio.

In other situations, it might be a little more nebulous. For instance, Eleanor Pringle writes for Fortune covering news, the economy, and personal finance.

Though there are some hints of previous UK work experience, her bio doesn’t say where she lives.

Digging into her recent articles doesn’t help either, as they appear to cover US-related topics.

It’s only when I look into her LinkedIn profile that I see she actually lives in the United Kingdom.

This is the way to get your emails in front of the right journalist at the right time.

When to Email For Breaking News

For most breaking news, most of this data goes out the door.

In those cases, you want to be first in line at any time of day. There is no need to wait, because it gets crowded—especially for high-visibility breaking news.

As Mark Rofe explained in our podcast on reactive PR, topics with high media interest (such as a celebrity engagement or an interest rates announcement) will likely be the most competitive.

For more help with this, check out our guide on reactive PR.

How ListIQ Can Help Determine the Best Time to Send

Say I’m searching for journalists talking about mortgage rates:

I want to make sure that I select job title, bio, recent articles, author page, LinkedIn, and location.

Then, it spits out a Google Sheet with information and links out to quick checks to drastically speed up the qualification method.

For instance, here I know that Kim is a Utah-based reporter, which puts her in the MST time zone.

Then, there’s a PBS reporter covering the U.S. housing market, but based in Los Angeles.

If I email him, I’m going to ensure it hits his inbox around 9AM PST.

Every Journalist is Different

Although we have the data, the takeaway here should be that you can use it directionally.

Email is getting crowded, so it’s important to lean on relationships that you build up over time.

Engage with journalists on other platforms, like social media or Substack.

The post When is the Best Time to Pitch Journalists? (A Study of 4.5M Emails) appeared first on BuzzStream.

Digital PR is super easy, right?

All you really have to do these days is get a city study and blast it out to 3000 people.

Heck, for a large city index study, this LinkedIn post is telling me I can send it out to 10,000 people!

Then, I’ll just sit back and watch those links roll in, right?

We know it’s not that easy.

In this post I’m going to show you why.

If you’d like to jump down to the deck, click here!

A Quick Story

Let me start with a quick story.

We had a customer come to us looking to do the same thing I just laid out in that scenario.

They were following what they saw on LinkedIn and wanted to send thousands of emails per day for their campaigns.

But before they could even get anything sent out, they were banned by their email provider.

They changed their tactics a bit, but ultimately they were banned again by Google.

It’s easy to call out these blatantly wrong decisions and blatantly wrong tactics and strategies.

(I promise I’m gonna come back to that story because there’s a happy ending to that one customer.)

But the fact of the matter is, the people who even think they’re being relevant and targeted are not being relevant and targeted enough.

And we analyzed 31 million emails to prove that the smaller, more targeted campaigns outperform these large generic blasts by a significant margin.

The Old Strategies Aren’t Working Anymore

The reason that I think many of us are finding this stuff challenging is that the old strategies are just not working.

We’ve had plenty of customers come to us at BuzzStream saying, last year, I would send out campaigns and would get a hundred likes.

But nowadays you’re getting 3, 5, 10 maybe, if I’m lucky.

So the old strategies are not working.

And if you are feeling this, you are not alone.

In our State of Digital PR Report, we found 71% of people said that it’s more challenging.

When things get tough, the urge I think, is to send more emails.

If you’re not getting responses, you’re not getting links you need, you feel like you need to expand your reach.

We are seeing that more people are doing this.

Email sends her up 18% since 2023.

It used to be this easy: you would go into a media database, you would do some keyword search and find people in their bios and make this big list.

Or you could maybe go into Twitter, do the same thing, look at their bios, and you find journalists, and export these lists and blast it out.

But it’s just not how it works these days.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

News sites are cutting journalists.

So there’s this shrinking pool of journalists, and the ones that remain are overworked.

They’re jumping around, they’re covering a lot more beats and a lot more areas.

And on the other side of the coin, we’re seeing this massive increase in interest in digital PR.

We’re seeing so many agencies that were link building agencies now positioning themselves as digital PR agencies.

And there are many more people looking for digital PR services.

So it’s this shrinking pool of journalists and a lot more people in the space.

And what that’s adding to is just the pitches here, we’re seeing 15% more pitches according to Muck Rack.

And this is the kicker here: half of the journalists seldom or never get relevant pitches, according to MuckRack’s State of Journalism.

So this should really tell you all you need to know about the state of the industry right now.

I think the issue is we typically spend most of the time building 10% of our list.

The VIPs.

And then you fill out the rest of the list with people who might answer and they might not.

What’s the big deal?

On the one hand, journalists are going to mark us as spam, and they’re going to ignore you.

But there are also other repercussions.

Google, Yahoo, and now Outlook have all rolled out these penalties this year for people sending generic email blasts.

And the very worst case scenario, is that you get banned, which obviously is not what we want as PR pros.

We need to be way more targeted than we think

Let’s look at the data.

We ran a big study of over 31 million emails and 80k campaigns and found that smaller, more targeted campaigns had:

• 16% higher open rates.
• 68% higher reply rates.
• 17 times more links.

You can read the full study here.

I don’t want you to take away from this that the smaller lists are better because that’s not what I’m saying.

I’m not saying you can just cut your list in half.

These lists tend to be smaller because it typically takes a long time to build these more targeted, relevant lists.

Relevance is not what you think it means anymore

Let’s put ourselves in the journalist’s shoes for a second.

I’m gonna introduce you to Rosie Taylor.

As her bio page states, she is an award-winning journalist specializing in health and consumer topics, particularly issues affecting women and families.

Now let’s look at her inbox.

Scan this the way Rosie might, and tell me which emails are relevant.

My guess was about five.

But realistically, when I asked Rosie about this, there were no relevant stories.

Nothing in that inbox had anything to do with women specifically.

And you can see from her stories that this is the focus:

And not only that, she actually explained to me that the type of journalism she does is writing exclusive news and features.

And if you dig into her content, you do see that this is the case here:

And none of this stuff is something you’d find on a media database.

I don’t see anything in here about women, specifically women and families?

Types of Relevance

Let’s break down these relevance types.

Let’s pretend you have a client and you’re working on building a media list for a data analysis about Taco Buying Trends (I wrote this deck when I was in San Diego.)

Topical Relevance

So if I’m pitching this, I might be looking for someone who covers food.

So I’m looking at San Diego Eater.

Mona Holmes came up in a food search because she covers the James Beard Awards.

But this is too broad.

Yes, James Beard has to do with food, but I’d rather go for someone like Kim Smith, who’s covering a study about why avocado sales are down.

This is hyper relevant to my taco trends study.

Geo Relevance

Let’s get into geo-relevance next.

Here’s someone covering food news on CNBC: Jane Smith.

She’s covering America’s top 10 fast food chains.

This is a pretty, pretty big net, right?

She’s gonna be covering a broader scope.

From a geo perspective, I would much rather reach out to Jeff Cox, who’s covering Southern California’s surprising fast food boom.

So, matching it from a geo perspective.

Next is timing.

Timing Relevance

So, tax day food deals. We all know these kinds of social media days that we try to hook onto.

This is not the kind of stuff that you wanna necessarily anchor to because it’s gonna be too broad.

He’s talking about food deals, but has nothing to do with tacos.

Really what we want is the person talking about National Taco Day.

This might be a much more relevant piece for someone like Mike Snyder.

Lastly, this is the most essential concept.

Format Relevance

Actually, Rosie Taylor, who I mentioned earlier, just had a whole piece on this from her newsletter.

We wanna match the format.

So here’s Noel from Tasting Table, which is a relevant publication for a Taco Trends piece.

And here, Noelle, she tends to cover these listicle guides:

That’s not what we want.

We would much rather carry pitch this to someone like Martha, who covers news, specifically the popular Midwest chain that file for bankruptcy.

We want to give her the scoop:

So there is a big difference, and that type of thought process is gonna help you hone in and cut down your list.

Real Life Examples of Relevance

So now I’m gonna show you some real life examples.

GPU Survey from Fractl

I had a chance to speak with the great team over at Fractl, and they shared with me this one piece that they did.

It’s a survey piece covering GPU preferences.

They really nerded out on brand trust, budget limits.

You could see some of the stuff that they got.

Who and what are the most critical factors when choosing a GPU?

What sources do you trust when choosing a GPU?

And Kip shared the template with me, and you can see there’s a big focus on this in their template:

And he told me the way they really broke down their media list was by looking at relevant publications and then doing a site search to hone in on the right journalists.

And I love this approach.

But there are some caveats here.

If you’re doing this, not every writer is going to cover third-party studies.

So, like here I’m looking, I did a site search for gamer GPU, and I could see a lot of people, but a lot of these are reviews, right?

This is not the format that we want.

Some people only cover these product releases or reviews.

However, Jon Martindale, who covers third-party studies on other sites.

And you could see that’s the person who ultimately ended up covering their piece:

Third party, the guy that’s covering third party studies, that is the important one.

They sent about 53 emails total for this campaign and got almost the same amount of links and coverage.

Pretty impressive.

The Quietest Places in the World’s Loudest Cities

Alright, next is Olivia Lott. She’s a fantastic PR in the UK.

Olivia shared this piece with me. It’s called The Quietest Places in the World’s Loudest Cities.

Typically with this type of thing, you’re gonna pitch to local journalists in the cities that made the list, like Spokane, Edinburgh, and Phoenix.

They have these particular areas in the city that are super quiet.

So you’d reach out to these local journalists.

While researching, I’m looking at people who cover these types of “best cities”.

So here’s Mims Copeland, and she’s covering things like the best aviation museums, the best barbecue joints, best ice cream joints.

Ultimately, Mims is the person who covered Olivia’s piece.

But there’s more to this story.

The coverage in the Oregonian led to this newsletter, PDX Today, which is part of this 6AM network.

So basically, once Olivia found out that PDX Today was part of a network, she reached out to the editor and asked if they wanted findings for all of the cities they covered.

Olivia then created this big data set for all the different areas that they cover, and she was able to get a lot more coverage.

I love to see this type of personalized outreach because this is the kind of hard work that it really takes to get these kind of results.

She got over 150 links overall, but no city she reached out to had more than 25 emails.

I think that this again, speaks to this hyper relevance and hyper targeting.

Chamber of Commerce Study

Collin Czarnecki from Noble shared a piece, Cities with the Largest Gender Pay Gaps.

(I’m sharing a lot of these city-related studies, because not only are they super popular, but there are different takes on these. And I like to see the strategies that people are using.)

This is a typical city index study.

But you’re not just spraying and praying to everyone in Frisco or Irvine, for instance.

What you’re doing is trying to find reporters who have a history in covering these same types of topics like gender equity, labor, metro cost of living.

You can see in his email template that there’s this piece here that says “equal pay day.”

I did a quick Google search for equal pay studies, with the custom date range set to last year.

And boom, here’s this guy, Chris Morris.

He covered Equal Pay Day (actually International Equal Pay Day) last year.

And lo and behold, this is the same Chris Morris who covered Collin’s piece this year.

So that, again, that’s the type of kind of timing, relevance, maybe that you wanna, you want to work into.

I also like wanted to call out how Colin does this hyper target breakdown based on people’s time zones:

As we know, not everybody’s in the same time zone, especially when you’re doing these city studies.

So you’re sending something at nine o’clock to someone from the East Coast, it’s gonna get to them at 6:00 AM on the West Coast, and so forth.

The results were 70+ links, but ultimately about 30 emails per angle, which is pretty killer.

Major League Looks

Alright, last one, I wanna share this piece from Rise at Seven.

Not only do they do great work, but this one is near and dear to my heart as a huge baseball fan: The Major League Looks piece.

So they did this fun study where they basically came up with this list of the best-looking mascots and managers in the US.

And the way Madeleine Dykes explained to me how they built their outread list was that they focused on local journalists and national reporters, specifically on culture and trending news.

They also took it a step further, and what I wanna call out here is the personalization for each local team and stadium because I think this is very important.

And you could see when you jump into the different templates here, they have one for everybody on this list, right?

Milwaukee’s, Seattle’s Mariner Moose, Wally the Green Monster from Boston, and here’s my favorite (I’m a big Phillies fan), their template for the Philly Phanatic:

I’m a little sad that he came in second place.

As you can see, he lost a Baxter, which, I pretty bummed about.

But let’s go into how they did it, right?

Here’s someone. Fox 29, Philadelphia who covered their piece.

Suppose I’m reaching out to somebody in the Philadelphia area. In that case, I’m finding these news stations and looking for people like Amanda Hurley, who covers consumer regional news in the Northeast News sector.

She’s my target.

It helps that she clearly also covers Philly’s related news; you can see, looking at the related articles right here:

So that’s the hook and ultimately, she covered the story.

This is that geo targeting that I was mentioning before, but also topical targeting.

That’s the type of thought process you need and digging into it.

They sent about 49 emails for this Philly area specifically and got 19 links for just that angle.

I think that’s pretty solid overall.

The piece got about 60 links, and is still cooking because it was sent right around the playoffs.

This requires a mindset shift

So for a lot of people, this is gonna be a mindset shift because it takes a lot to do this type of thing.

And for us, this is a mindset shift for BuzzStream.

We are putting some pretty big bets on this being the future of outreach and creating new products for this type of outreach.

We see on the other side how challenging digital PR is getting and why we’re getting fewer returns on the same type of outreach.

So I want you to reject these pieces of “advice” that you see online telling you to send a million emails a day, or bragging about the millions of emails, because it’s just adding more noise.

We have these conversations in-house, too.

It’s like, why aren’t more people doing it this way? If it seems so simple, right?

Why aren’t more people doing it this way?

Ultimately, I think it just comes down to time.

Agencies are so focused on billable hours and that sort of thing, but this takes time.

Say I wanted to do some kind of reactive piece on the flight cancellations happening in the US, for example.

Typically, I run a news search for “flight cancellations”.

And if I’m trying to do a reactive piece, I’m clicking into each of these results, looking for the author, reading the article and the journalist’s bio, and then asking myself:

• Is he a good fit?
• Can I pitch him my reactive piece?

Then I’m gonna read all of his recent articles, scan through 10 or 20, depending on how frequently this person publishes stories.

Then I’m digging around to find the email, since it wasn’t on the bio page.

So now I’m doing some search like this, and you’re going down a rabbit hole, opening a thousand tabs for everyone who’s done this this can take a lot of time.

Then I need to find Alex’s email. Then I’m gonna go to the next journalists and dig around. Repeat the same process that can easily take 10 minutes per journalist.

And if you’re doing a hundred journalists, that’s a lot of time.

How can ListIQ help?

ListIQ is our new media list building tool designed to help PR professionals build hyper-relevant lists from Google News.

Let’s say we’re doing this reactive workflow again for flight cancellations.

I’m in Google News search.

I enable list IQ and tell it which of these URLs I want it to analyze.

Then I’m gonna go over to ListIQ and say, okay, now I want:

• The search summary.
• I want to know their activity check. Are they still active at the publication?
• I wanna know their bio,
• Their job title.
• Obviously I wanna know their email address.
• I want some recent articles.

Then I click Create Sheet. It’s gonna go and do this heavy lifting for me, and boom, I have a Google sheet now with the article author for each of these.

I have their email address, and these are verified email addresses.

By the way, this is not guessing or using pattern matching like hunter.io or RocketReach.

We’ve seen in a lot of our studies that that stuff just doesn’t work, especially for journalists.

Now I can see all of the information I need to build my relevant email list:

We can see if they’re still active within the past 30 days at their publication.

Are they still publishing things? This is especially obviously important for reactive.

Then we see their bio, and here I’m being able, I can clearly pick out, Alex here, he covers breaking news.

Here’s Josh, he covers transportation and political issues.

There we go. Boom.

There’s our connection to travel issues.

So we also have recent articles and all this to show that this is what it takes to do.

This is the targeted outreach, right?

This is what we need. This is how you need to be thinking. This is what ListIQ is all about.

You can ping me and LinkedIn and let me know you want access. I’m happy to run people or their teams on how to use this stuff.

But also, you want me to build you a list, I’m happy to do that too.

The Story Has a Happy Ending

Now I said I was gonna come back to that story from the very beginning because iit does have a happy ending.

So, remember these people that got banned from their email providers?

We talked to them and showed them the data? You could see that before, a lot of their campaigns’ templates had 490 sent, 892 sent, 25% open rate, no responses, no links, no clicks.

And after we’ve walked them through what it really takes to do who this targeted outreach, they’re seeing way better returns, more clicks, replies, better open rates, and clearly a lot smaller, more targeted media lists:

So I said that this was tough, and it is a mindset shift. I want to share a handful of people that I think you should be following.

Resources for the Mindset Shift

Here are some of the best resources for this mindset shift.

Digital PR Explained

Digital PR Explained Podcast

Britt Klontz has a fantastic podcast called Digital PR Explained.

And the reason I really like Britt’s work is because she in a lot of her episodes, they might go a full episode on one piece of coverage and the amount of time and effort it took for someone to score one piece of big coverage.

And I think again, we have to get back into that mindset as digital PRs, we need to steal some of this mindset from the traditional side of things.

Get Featured

Get Featured Substack

Rosie Taylor, as I mentioned, has a great Substack called Get Featured.

She was the journalist mentioned in this deck, but she also does this kind of side project where it’s just tips on how to get yourself featured and get coverage.

Collin Czarnecki

Pitched Newsletter

I mentioned Collin’s piece of content earlier, but he also has a great newsletter called Pitched.

Colin was a former journalist as well, so he has some fantastic ideas around that.

Mark Rofe

Digital PR Newsletter

Mark Rofe, is the OG in the space, especially in the UK. He has a digital PR newsletter.

It goes out about twice a month.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream Podcast and Newsletter

And of course, the BuzzStream podcast and newsletter.

Gotta give myself a shout out there. And I appreciate everybody who sends me their tips and stuff for this newsletter.

Questions?

Let me start here because I have a handful of questions that people had asked and submitted.

How to have conversations with clients?

The question here was that a lot of clients come into this stuff with very high expectations.

Yes, having these conversations with a client that you are going to expect fewer pieces and I think I’ve done a lot of research and I can share some of this stuff with people and hopefully this helps, but I think the expectations do need to be lower for clients these days.

And I think there are fewer links to go around.

I’ve done a lot of research on this, the value of a link, the cost for a link, but not only cost, but the value because of the cost.

It has bumped up extremely high.

And, there’s some studies that I’ve done looking at if you were to go buy these links on a marketplace, some people are charging for high-end news links like this, $10,000, which is insane to me, but that gives you a sense for what you should be expecting.

And I think it’s totally reasonable to show and compare some of these things with potential clients.

But all that said, like at the end of the day, you need results, right?

Aside from ListIQ, how do you find relevant journalists?

There’s this acronym I’ve been working on, it’s this F.I.T. acronym to things to look at and it follows that, those hyper relevance, but it’s, you wanna make sure they’re in the right industry.

And that’s something that you could do, as a general sweep, just based off of a category.

Say you’re going to a website you look under the categories that you want first and finding a journalist that way.

Site searches I think work really well.

Just you go to the specific site and do a site, colon and then write the site in and then the specific keywords that you’re looking for.

But I think the bios in recent articles are really gonna tell you, what you want because you’re gonna be able to match that kind of topical relevance, but also for the most part, you’re gonna be able to get some of that format relevance too.

So you’re gonna be able to understand the types of articles that these people are looking at and the types of articles they share.

And another big piece of this I think is the search operators that can help.

So when you’re thinking about search operators. You want to be thinking about the types of headlines that you might be getting for the piece that you are pitching. So for instance the example I use a lot is say you did a study, general study for us audience.

If I were to search most Americans.

Typically that is how journalists a lot of the times, will share a survey.

And so my go-to search query for that is most Americans plus whatever topic, most Americans plus flights.

If I did a study around flight times, missed flight times or whatever, delays at airports, there’s also, new survey survey reveals look for these key phrases that are gonna help you uncover journalists who have covered the same type of content, the same format that you are pitching. Okay, there is another question on here.

Is it best to send emails directly from Outlook, Gmail, et cetera?

We’ve dug into this a bit.

I think all of them at this point have very similar restrictions and spam guidelines.

So it really depends on how you’re doing and who you’re reaching out to.

But at the end of the day, any type of bulk sending I think is gonna get you flagged.

From your providers, so it doesn’t seem like there’s any deliverability or open rates that are better from one platform to the next.

It is all really pretty similar.

It really varies depending on the person behind the emailing. So if you ever see studies like that, I would take those with a grain of salt because, two people could be sending from Gmail and one of them is blasting out emails and the other one is doing a great job and, that’s gonna skew the data in a big way.

Okay, cool. Let me check on the chat here to see if we have any questions in the chat.

How to find the right journalists on a media database?

Great question. Mina, I covered this a little bit, I think for the most part, a lot of people do still try to use media databases.

The issue I think, is that there are some that are just not as accurate as others.

So I think thinking about how you use it, still, I would still recommend doing a deeper search.

Like, maybe use a media list to gather people, but you still have to go through and evaluate them based on recent articles and the types of articles.

A media list, like we said, does not show that kind of stuff.

It does not show the format.

So you do need to get in there.

And that’s why anytime I’ve ever built a list, it’s always from scratch.

I feel like if you’re using a media database, you end up doing a lot of the same extra work.

Thanks everyone for showing up and stay tuned for the next one.

Here is the full slide deck below:

The post Why Hyper-Relevance Wins in Digital PR: Webinar appeared first on BuzzStream.

Rich was kind enough to invite me onto his podcast to chat about digital PR, which is how we first met. But, after speaking with Rich, I realized that he has a wealth of experience in building his own conference that I thought our audience could benefit from.

I’m really interested in this as a way for companies and organizations to differentiate their brand, stand out, and more importantly, get those coveted brand mentions.

If you’re interested in events or conferences, check this one out!

Why did you initially start the conference?

Yeah, because I don’t know that it’s right for everybody. And when we first started, it was a 400 people, which is a pretty big event, especially in Maine.

I think the reason I started is I like putting on events. I like being on stage.

I enjoy being able to share ideas and teach people.

And I find the stage one of my favorite ways to do it because I like the interactivity of it. And I had gone to a bunch of, I was going to suddenly going to these national events, either as an attendee or as a speaker, things like blog world, SMX and South by Southwest and social media marketing world.

And I just kind of got the impression that, well, I saw that there weren’t a lot of Mainers who were going to these events.

And so my thinking was, what if I just created my own event, maybe a little bit size down, downsized for Maine, and put it on myself?

And that became the impetus of the Agents of Change conference. So I started bringing in speakers from away to bring in fresh ideas.

And it just became this thing that I enjoyed getting up there on stage, I got to headline my own event.

Also got to bring in speakers from all over the country and have them share their best ideas with other marketers and business owners from Maine. That was kind of the original reason for doing it. And then over time I discovered it actually became a great lead magnet for Flyte New Media, my agency as well.

How do you use a conference as lead gen?

For me, of the things that I noticed, I’m sure you do the same thing or most business people do is when people come to you and say, you know, we’d like to, we’re interested in working with you.

You always ask, how did you hear of us?

And I found that more and more people were starting to say, I’ve been attending the agents of change for years, but I’m finally ready for a website or search engine optimization or social media, whatever it might be.

And because I was up there on stage and because I was, you know, branded as Flyte New Media and branded as the Agents of Change.

That got us into a lot of boardrooms and offices that we wouldn’t have gotten into otherwise.

So it was kind of creating this thing that didn’t require you to work with Flyte, but it still branded Flyte as a thought leader.

Somebody, especially me, who was connected to thought leaders and cutting-edge marketers from around the country, sometimes from around the world.

And that just raised Flytes profile and it raised my own profile.

So those things work together as well. And then it also becomes something that people want to talk to about.

Nobody’s really interested when I go to events talking about the fact that I run a digital agency.

Half the people there run digital agencies.

But the idea that you put on an event and once people hear that, you know, at its peak we had, you know, 400 people or so coming into this event and I was getting some of the top known speakers from around the country, at least in marketing, to come to the event.

That’s something people want to hear about.

They start talking and it’s a great way of just kind of breaking the ice, so to speak, with a lot of people who may end up either doing business with us or maybe they become vendors of ours or partners of ours.

So it just opened up a lot more doors than would have if I just stuck to a podcast or just stuck to posting things on Facebook.

Are conferences good for everybody?

Sure. Well, first of all, I just want to say it’s a lot of work.

There are conferences of all sizes and you kind of alluded to that.

And I remember going to, you know, blog world that at the time had thousands of people. Or I’d go to South By, and it’s like 10 times that.

There are huge, huge events, but there’s also small regional events that might just have 50 people or a couple hundred people.

So I think it really depends on what you’re looking to accomplish when you want to kind of create your own buzz.

And also it doesn’t have to be super big because it’s more important.

It depends on what your goals are.

There’s the raising of your profile, there’s your branding.

Because of this, I was able to negotiate deals with local TV stations, with local press and all this sort of stuff, and I got extra press because of it.

But there’s also that situation where maybe you just want to get 10 of your best prospects in a room and teach them as well and call that an event.

So you don’t have to start big and you can kind of see if this is right thing for you.

But if you have a message to share with people and part of your process is education, then events can be very powerful for you.

And back in the day when, because people started coming to me, they’re like, how do you put on your own event?

And there was a time when I was actually teaching people how to put on their own events.

And I said, you know, there’s three S’s that I keep in mind.

• Seats
• Sponsors
• Speakers

So those are the three elements that you need to consider.

So, speakers, are you going to be doing this by yourself, which is totally fine. In fact, we’re actually putting on a smaller event.

Right now we’re calling Flyte School Live.

It’s just me and two of my co-workers and we’re doing a half day on content marketing and websites and conversion and measurement.

So it could be very small, maybe it’s just you, maybe it’s a teammate or maybe it’s more like a big event where you bring in speakers from around the country and tap into their audiences.

Sponsors you don’t need to have but it’s a great way to generate revenue for the conference. Conferences take a lot of time and effort. Our goal is always to at least break even.

If we can get sponsors, they can help us pay for speakers because if we’re bringing speakers in from away, we’ve got to pay for their flights.

Not every conference does this but pay for their flights, pay for their hotel, pay for a few meals.

Sometimes for a keynote we might pay for that.

I know for other conferences they don’t pay anybody, and sometimes they pay quite a bit.

And then seats is just everything you need to do to fill that space as much as you possibly can. So those are the three things that I recommend people pay attention to before they ever start trying to sell tickets.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made in the past when putting on events?

Yeah, I think part of it is just making sure that you’re actually serving an audience because everything falls apart if you don’t have an audience.

You can get away without speakers. You could be the only speaker.

You could pull people from your team.

Sponsors are nice, but the bottom line is you can make your money off of ticket sales or there are other ways of doing that.

So those are nice to haves, but if you’re not going to get people into the seats, then everything’s going to fall apart.

There’s no reason to bring in speakers if you don’t have an audience for them to speak to.

I would say make sure that whatever the topic that you are going to cover, that it’s really relevant for your ideal customers.

We have a client here at Flyte and they manufacture cement and like paver blocks and things like that.

And they put on an event every year for their audience. Their audience is landscapers and hardscape professionals.

So when they put together this audience or when they put together this conference, all of the presentations and all of the speakers specifically talk about how to run a better business if you’re a landscaper or a hardscape.

They get up and talk about some of their own products, but then they bring in other speakers and other companies likely who won’t compete with them.

I’ve even spoken there spoken there a few years as somebody who comes in from a marketing standpoint and what a landscape or hardscape or needs to consider when it comes to say local SEO or paid search paid social those sort of things.

So I think they do a great job. They don’t even charge their their attendees for this.

They get money from people who want to get an exhibit exhibitor booth.

They get money from sponsors, but they’re willing to take it as a loss leader because it builds loyalty for their audience.

So it really depends what your objectives are but just making sure that you’re serving an audience who’s gonna show up either show up and pay or show up and be an audience that then maybe exhibitors or sponsors would pay to get in front of.

How do you balance putting your brand out there, but not making the show about you?

Rich Brooks (11:13)
Right, and to be honest, we’ve kind of separated church and state in that, right?

Because it’s easy to have called this event Flyte school, like we ended up doing for our own small event.

But originally this started as kind of like a side project for me because I was like, I just want to do something different.

And then ultimately ended up pulling it back into Flyte because I needed help running it.

I don’t see a problem with branding it with your own company name and doing something like that. If you’re trying to make yourself the center, if you’re trying to raise your profile, and obviously there is something lost.

If a local reporter talks about the Agents of Change in a story, there’s not an immediate connection for the reader that that’s Flyte New Media.

So there’s an argument that you probably should be doing it under your own brand.

I don’t think you need to hit people over the head with it once they’re there.

They’re gonna see your branding. I mean for Flyte we have a booth there.

The people who work at our company are often the people who are like basically the volunteers so to speak, know, helping people to their seats or answering questions, making sure that everybody gets lunch served on time, all those sorts of things.

We have a booth. We answer questions. One of the things that we do is you can schedule a free consult with a number of members of my team, whether it’s for branding, web design, digital marketing, and we just do that kind of as a service.

But again, we’re establishing our credibility.

It’s like, we know what we’re talking about.

You can get a free sample of that right now. Imagine what it would be like if you worked with us.

And that’s why the goal was always like, let’s just pay our bills when it comes to this thing, because we can consistently get business from these conferences.

Almost invariably, somebody buys a website, hires us for SEO, hires us for some other sort of digital marketing either right after the show is over and then or sometimes years later but they know that when they’re ready to make that decision or leave their current agency they’re going to at least consider Flyte New Media and that helps raise our profile and it gives us other things to talk about on social media as well.

Vince Nero 
Yeah, and again, just the through line there is that people are telling you what you ask them where you’ve heard of us and they’re saying we’ve heard of you through your conference.

Rich Brooks
Absolutely. And then of course, we spend a lot of time doing measurement marketing as well.

And so we’re seeing traffic coming from our website for Agents of Change over to our Flyte New Media website.

So we can see those kinds of things too.

And then there’s just always anecdotal stories that somebody has me on a podcast because I’m Agents of Change.

And that’s more interesting than say Flyte New Media, but obviously, there are benefits to, you know, all boats rise with the tide.

How do you get people in the seats?

So obviously, we’ve got a website for the Agents of Change.

So we have a destination to drive people to where they can learn about the conference as well as the podcast.

And we’ve done a summit in the past too. They can learn all about that.

There’s some place to send them. We are regularly posting content on social media.

The primary driver of Agents of Change content is the podcast that we do.

Obviously you were a guest, you saw some of the stuff that we do.

We do promotions on social media, generally unpaid promotions for the podcast. We send out a newsletter to all of our subscribers.

We also leverage the Flyte New Media list very often when we send out our email newsletter for Flyte New Media.

Then, down underneath the main story is some of the more recent episodes that we’ve done on the podcast for people who are interested in learning even more.

And then when we’re ready to actually launch the website, we do a little bit of buildup, getting ready, you know, don’t forget to sign up for this mailing list.

We’re going to give everybody who’s on our list a head, you know, we’ve got a certain number of discounted tickets. We’re going to alert our list before we go public with it.

So it’s an incentive to get on the list and then we send those out.

And then it’s, you know, basically that grind of email marketing, you know, every month the price goes up.

At the beginning and end of each month, we’re talking about price points for the rest of the month, the speakers, and other things that are going on.

We work with the speakers to create collateral for them to share on their social media and other content as well.

And then because I do have that opportunity to be the tech guru on a local news station once a month.

They have been kind enough almost every year to let me go on and talk about digital marketing and then tie it into the conference.

And then we take that five-minute clip that was on the local NBC stations, and then we spin that into even more content to raise awareness.

And quite honestly, sometimes it also comes down to running ads on social platforms. And it also comes down to doing some manual LinkedIn outreach.

And in years past, I had a script and it was copy and paste to all marketers and owners in the state of Maine, just, you know, copy paste, copy paste.

More recently, I actually kind of broke my own rule and I leveraged an automated service, which basically was doing the same thing.

It was just taking me out of loop from having to copy and paste every single day for hours on end while I watched, you local sports, Duck Soup.

So that was just a tool that I use to kind of like manually do or automatically do those outreaches to people and giving them a reason to drive traffic to the website. And then we did some retargeting ads as well.

Aside from what you’ve already mentioned, what are some of the time-consuming aspects?

Well, and it’s not just that, it’s all my team’s time and it’s dealing with the event space and choosing the right meals for everybody and don’t even get me started on how difficult it is to make everybody happy when it comes to lunches.

Like everybody was like, it doesn’t matter. It’s fine.

When we asked them on the intake sheet and then all of a sudden it’s like, they get there and like, I have the salad.

No, those are for the vegetarians only.

What do you mean?

You know, it’s just like, I once got yelled at because they only had soda.

And she’s like, you know, you should be having healthier. This was a long time ago.

We now have many healthier choices, but you know, it’s like, you can’t make people happy when it comes to food.

The best you can do is not piss them off.

So yeah, there’s a lot of logistical issues and then helping all of the virtual assistants plan the trips for their people and working with the hotel and then, you know, I really, I don’t pay my speakers.

So I like to give them gifts. So we work with all these local Maine based companies to get these gifts.

So we can give them these awesome gift bags filled with things. then, it turns out well you can’t bring beer on you know six pack of beer on the flight.

So I guess you’re gonna leave those here with me… just a lot of little things you’ll learn over the years.

How do you go about choosing speakers?

There’s no avoiding high maintenance. I mean, hopefully I’m not one. I don’t know, I should be careful what I say.

No, we’ve been, we’ve been very good for us.

We don’t have a call for speakers, which we get so many people who want to speak.

And our rule has always been you come on the podcast first.

And I don’t know if I learned this from Mike Stelzner or we both basically play from the same handbook, but coming on the podcast allows me to really get to know somebody and determine if they’re going to be a good fit.

Do they have something to share with my audience or are they just a hype machine? And it’s not just about whether or not they’d be a good fit.

For me, I’m curating an event with limited speaker space. There are only so many speakers, only so many slots, so I can’t have two or three people speaking on Google Ads because it’s not a Google Ads conference. I kind of, in my mind, have like two or three people I wanna bring in, but I have the topics that I think may…primarily as main businesses, although we certainly get people from all over coming, but I focus on the main audience these days.

What do main business owners and marketers need to know to succeed?

And so that’s kind of how I start to put this together.

Vince Nero
Yeah, I love that. First thing that came to mind was, you know, I went to music school, I studied jazz saxophone and like we’d have these performances and it was, you you put together a set list, just like any band would and it was, you know, make sure you’re going to have a slow song and then a fast one and then, you know, it’s in a waltz. And so it sounds like it’s kind of similar thing when you’re putting on a presentation.

Rich Brooks 
Yeah, for me it’s a very curated experience that I’m trying to create at my own event.

I’m not saying that’s the only way to do it, but for me, it was like What is the conference that I want to go to?

I mean, when I put together my podcast questions, when I pull in the guests, like it’s the same thing.

It’s like, what do I want to learn from this?

Because I’m pretty, you know, even though I think I’m maybe a little bit ahead of some of the people who listen to the podcast, basically it’s for people like me.

People were trying to figure out marketing so they can get better at it, their business and people who genuinely like marketing. So if I’m making something that makes sense for me, chances are making sense. It’s making sense for the people that I’m serving as well.

But a lot of it, also ask questions.

We send out surveys.

We’re like, who do you want to see speak?

And it’s funny because Mainers don’t seem to care about the personality. It’s really about the topics.

I had Jay Baer come in one year—internationally known speaker—Nobody had ever heard of him.

I tried to get sponsors specifically for, finally, just by chance, I happened to have one bank and the guy at the bank’s like, so, who you’re thinking of bringing in?

I’m like, well, I’m thinking about bringing in Jay Baer, but you know, it’s like, it’s like, oh my Jay Baer, I’ve read all his books and he actually got the bank to sponsor Jay.

So outside of that one guy, honestly, like Mainers don’t seem to be interested in like big names per se.

They’re interested in the topics and the content. So again, understanding your audience and serving your audience is going to go a long way.

How do you choose between a virtual and in-person conference?

So we’ve only done one virtual summit as Agents of Change.

We’ve done other virtual events.

I think I’d like to do the summit.

In some ways, was a lot less work for my team because obviously there’s no travel logistics.

There’s no hotel.

There’s none of that piece.

I was told that we should pre-record all the sessions beforehand and I would interview them. And then we did three days. So basically it was 10 presentations a day, three days in a row.

I had to be on the call for each one while they recorded it, so it would feel like it was all happening seamlessly. Then I had to watch them again as I was editing them and then I had to watch them again as I was hosting it for three days straight.

That was too heavy a lift for me. Next time I do it, I’m going to do it a little bit differently.

But in terms of how to choose it—nstead of it being a local audience, this was more of like a national or international audience—but I’m like, what do these people want to know?

And how can I pull in the best speakers possible?

But it was the same rigmarole. I mean, they all came through the podcast as guests. I had gotten a chance to vet them all.

And I built the day upon itself. Like each day had a central theme.

One was about driving traffic to the website, the next thing was more about like traffic and conversion, rather website and conversion, and the last day was kind of like measurement and everything else.

So I really again tried to create that curated event that I thought would be valuable because I didn’t expect many people to watch all three days from beginning to end so I really wanted to do it where if you’re only going to choose one day that you can do it or even a half day what makes the most sense for you.

So those are some of the approaches that I took.

Some of it’s going to come down to budget. I mean if you are a local provider of services I’d rather see you do something in person because there’s just an energy that comes from an in-person event that you could not replicate on a webinar.

I mean, we’ve all gone to webinars or virtual summits and let’s be honest.

The first question we have is: do I have to be there live, or can I get the recording?

I know I’ll never watch it, but I’ll still sign up for it. You can have my email address.

And that’s fine on some level, but it’s not the same.

And we all know, like, even if we’re present for an event, a virtual event, we’re checking emails, we’re doing this other thing.

It’s like when you get people in a room and they see everybody else paying attention, taking notes, raising their hand, asking questions.

That’s a much different experience and you’re really building a brand there that you can’t replicate very well at least in a virtual event.

That being said, there are great benefits to a virtual event.

I mean it’s great for list building. It doesn’t cost people anything to get there so you’re able to serve a wider audience.

There’s not a one size fits all here.

You are going to have different based on your objectives. You’re going to decide what’s going to be better for you but that would be the first question that I start asking myself.

Vince Nero
I had a question: Does putting on events work for all businesses. And I think you kind of answered it in terms of like, do you have something unique to say? Do you have something unique that to offer to your customers?

Rich Brooks 
Or do you need to educate your audience, right?

Like we’re having it right as we speak.

I’m in the office, but back home, we’re having a tree removed. I kind of wish I was watching them take this tree down.

The tree was going to come down on its own.

Otherwise. I don’t think the tree company needs to be putting on a live event, right?

They’re not going to serve their customers. They’re not going to earn any business that way.

There may be some other things that they could do that would earn them PR, earn them buzz, earn them word of mouth, but I can’t imagine that there’s enough content for the general public, their customer.

Now if you were the creator of a new way of cutting down trees and you put on a live or a virtual event that was geared towards tree removal specialists, that makes sense to me. It’s education, it’s promotion.

So I think you always have to look at what you’re doing and who you’re speaking to and what they need from you to make a business decision or make a buying decision and then you can decide are events something that I should be investing in.

Do you think a podcast is necessary to run a successful event?

No, definitely not. I think these are two separate things that just happen to be under the same banner for me.

And I’ve used one to feed the other as far as vetting speakers and a way to promote the conference as well. So I think that they work hand in hand really well together, but

I got started on the podcast just because it was an easy way for me to create content.

It gave me the ability to ask experts questions they might not answer otherwise, but once you give them an audience and make it a mutual exchange, they’re much more forthcoming.

It also allows me to get on a call with people like you, where it’s like, we don’t really know each other, but let’s kind of bond because, as it turns out, not only do both like superheroe,s judging from what’s going on in our backgrounds, but in fact, I just got this in New York City and I picked up this new Spider-Man on the cover of a New York Times art.

But anyway, and we also did both did jazz saxophone, which I just learned today. So, you know, it’s like, I find that the podcast is like, even though it’s not really social media, in some ways it’s a very social medium where you, where we can connect and build bonds and opportunities that we might not have.

And I’ve hired guests in the past.

You know, it’s like, I’ll have somebody on there.

They become a Facebook, they’re a Facebook ads expert and I’ll be like, “Hey, can you do some training with my team? Cause I’d like to up their game,” or something like that.

So I think that for me, it’s just becoming, I wouldn’t say, well, it’s an easy way for me to create content that’s valuable for the brand and valuable for flight new media. And it has a lot of other benefits as well.

That’s been one of the biggest reasons why I keep doing it.

And in fact, we’re actually as of the date of this recording, tomorrow, we’re going to drop our 600th episode, which is just crazy to me.

That’s like basically 12 years of doing a podcast. So I’ve been doing it for a while and I moved away from blogging, which I used to do three to four times a week, I’d create a blog. And now I’m doing one podcast a week, there were times when I was having two podcasts at the same time, that became too much.

And as we started tracking our time more accurately, I never track my time just as a company owner, I rarely have to, but we decided we track every minute just to see what we were doing. And it turns out I’m spending like two and a half to three hours a week on the podcast. Like triple the amount of time I thought I was spending, but I still think it’s a valuable investment of my time in terms of creating content, building relationships, both with my guests, as well as my audience.

There’s just, learning new things on regular basis.

It’s been a phenomenal experience for me, and I hope to be able to put out another 600 episodes.

Vince Nero
Yeah, well congrats on 600!

Alright everyone, thanks for listening. Good luck out there.

The post Starting Your Own Conference or Event to Boost Your Brand with Rich Brooks appeared first on BuzzStream.

I started my career working in marketing for small businesses. I found that they were often overloaded and cash-strapped, which was both a blessing and a curse.

It helped me stay laser-focused on how to get the best results for your money, but without someone who is in the weeds, you often miss out on many opportunities.

PR was often overlooked, but with recent developments in AI, it has risen to the top of many small businesses’ priorities.

In this post, I’m going to outline some of the key ways that small businesses can use digital PR to get coverage online, build brand awareness, and show up in AI citations.

Why is digital PR more important than ever for small businesses?

Digital PR used to be closely tied to link building and SEO. While it is still tied to links, unlinked mentions are becoming increasingly crucial for appearing in AI citations.

So, digital PR is starting to look different.

One of the significant studies released this year by Ahrefs revealed a strong correlation between brand mentions and appearing in AI Overviews.

So, building a brand, whether big or small, has become increasingly important if you want to appear in AI Overviews.

Backlinks still matter, but brand mentions are more important than anything else.

Thus, I’ve started using the term “building coverage” instead of “building links” when discussing PR.

With that in mind, here are nine tactics for small businesses to get in the news and win coverage.

1. Tell Stories About You or Your Business

Every business and founder has a unique story. It may not even be able to do the business itself. It might be about the person behind the idea or the story behind the company’s formation.

These stories can become the basis for coverage and links to your business.

Army Vet and Extreme Marathoner Launches a Startup

Here’s a story from GeekWire about a startup built by an Army vet and extreme marathoner.

This is part of an ongoing segment that covers the Pacific Northwest startup scene. It’s lines like this in a story that can help any new business stand out:

“Earlier this year, Woody completed Alaska’s Iditarod Trail Invitational, a 350-mile ultramarathon on the famous dog sled course.”

But not all stories need people who run marathons to get coverage. Let’s look at some more.

Fat Peach Bakery

A bakery in Chicago’s South Side got coverage from the Eater. The story, however, digs into the founders’ roots and inspiration.

As you can see, the hook is in this line:

The two met while working together at a Chicago bakery. Castillo, a Mexican American, grew up in suburban Blue Island. Breuer grew up in North Dakota after being adopted from South Korea.

Castillo visited Mexico City as a child, and the bakeries there — using simple ingredients and techniques — left an impression. He wondered why he couldn’t find similar pastries in Chicago.”

This is where a simple bakery opening announcement goes from good to newsworthy.

Charhause Cookie Opening

In another example, the CTInsider covered a bakery opening in Bolton, CT.

The hook here is evident right in the headline: a Connecticut native leaves corporate job to open a bakery.

It also serves as the opening of the article:

“After deciding that the corporate world of insurance was not for her, Kate Cofiell took a leap of faith and began the steps last year to open her own business—a bakery and cafe called Charhouse Cookie, located at 299 Boston Turnpike.”

This connection with Connecticut, along with an inspiring story, helped secure placement in a prominent local news publication.

How to do it:

Find the stories between the lines.

Interview owners, customers, and employees to understand the stories behind the brand.

Put yourself in the journalist’s shoes and always try to answer: so what?

Another store opening or business starting isn’t something to cover.

Dig deeper.

If you are covering someone who started a small business, what were their motivations? Do they do anything interesting outside of their business?

Look for stories that inspire emotion. As you will see, this idea of emotion runs through most of the content you want coverage for.

Who to Pitch?

Typically, these stories are covered locally or by niche publications (or both).

For instance, the ultramarathoner/army vet Gavin Woody, mentioned above, also got coverage in Outside Magazine’s blog:

But here he is mentioned in San Diego by Fox5:

When pitching to industry-specific sites, most journalists or editors will do.

When pitching to local news, look for those specifically covering the local beat.

Typically, local news journalists who cover this sort of thing will also cover events. Be sure to read bios and look at recent coverage.

You can also try searching by the type of coverage you are looking for. For instance, if I were trying to pitch a startup in Portland, I’d search:

This will help uncover journalists who may be more interested in the kind of story you want to pitch.

2. Tell Stories with Proprietary Data

Proprietary data provides journalists with precisely what they are looking for: something new and fresh.

All data has a story. The kinds of stories that resonate with readers tap into emotion and are timely.

These emotions can range from surprise to anger, to fear, and frustration.

Most companies have access to some sort of internal data. The trick is to publish it in a way that is digestible and interesting.

Here are some examples:

Slice’s Pizza Index

Slice’s Pizza Index is part of a larger project called the Slice of the Union, which presents a comprehensive report on how Americans consume pizza, based on their proprietary data from users over the past year.

Slice isn’t actually a small business these days, but there are a lot of great ideas to take away from this big study.

All proprietary data has a story to tell—even pizza. The Pizza Index is a proxy for the national economy (Slice’s take on the Economist’s Big Mac index).

The Pizza Index was actually featured in sites like Crain’s and CNET, and the complete study garnered coverage from notable outlets such as Axios, Food & Wine, and local news sources like Cleveland.

But the whole Slice of the Union has many different angles and stories all taken from their proprietary data: favorite toppings, most “pizzaful day”, cities with top pizza sales, and more.

Grubhub’s Soup Requests

Back in 2016, when Grubhub was still relatively small, they conducted a study that always stands out in my mind.

They compared their data with Zocdoc’s data to show that soup orders increased each year during cold and flu season, as reflected in Zocdoc’s usage.

This study was prominently featured in The New York Times’ Upshot and in many other news outlets at the time.

How to do it:

There are several ways to generate ideas, including starting with your own data or competitor content.

If you don’t have many resources, I recommend using ChatGPT as your guide.

Feed ChatGPT your data and ask it to help extract insights that may elicit some emotion. This works surprisingly well.

Then, use a tool like Canva or Infogram to visualize the data.

All of these tools I mentioned are explained in more detail in my PR tools post.

Who to Pitch?

It’s definitely about finding the right fit from an industry perspective. But then you need to drill down to make sure the writers share third-party data.

For instance, the Pizza Index was covered by a freelancer who covers mostly food-related topics.

As you can see, she also shares data-led stories:

It’s all about hyper-targeting your pitches to the right journalists.

3. Publish Data to the Public as a Resource

As above, proprietary data can be published as a resource available to journalists and researchers writing about the topic. This is known in the SEO world as “passive link building”.

The idea is to create a resource that aligns with a term a journalist will want to search for (either on Google or in an AI chat) and cite in an article they are researching.

These are terms like:

• X Statistics
• X Trends
• X Data

Say you are a local car dealership; you may have data on which inventory sells the quickest.

What are the most popular colors of cars that have been sold?

Are there certain times of the year that are more popular than others for buying cars?

All of these kinds of statistics make for great nuggets of information for journalists.

iSeecars Best Family Cars

Here is iSeecars’ ranking of the best family cars, based on its own data and methodology to create a “Family Car Score”:

This kind of data eventually got written up by publishers like USA Today, specifically calling out the Family Car Score:

This proprietary scoring system builds trust and helps stand out. But the data itself is something everyone can use.

Clio’s Legal Trends Report

Clio has been publishing legal trends reports for almost 10 years.

Their first was published in 2016, back when they were relatively small. It gathered data from over 40,000 attorneys and helped establish industry benchmarks.

Fast forward to 2025, and they have broken it into various-sized reports.

This content gets cited all over the place online, from extremely relevant, authoritative sites like the American Bar Association:

But it has also garnered news coverage from Yahoo Finance and others.

Unsurprisingly, it also ranks well for keywords around “legal trends.”

This is the kind of tactic that has gotten them repeat links.

Backblaze’s Hard Drive Reliability

Backblaze has been publishing its Hard Drive Life Study for over 12 years. They’ve even written a great post on how the strategy has grown.

The stats pages cover information such as the number of hard drives and their failure rates. They even have data available to download.

This kind of data has helped them rank for keywords related to hard drive reliability, so whenever someone Googles the term, their data is ready for them.

How to do it:

Look for internal data that can be replicated monthly, quarterly, or annually.

Present it in a way that journalists or researchers can easily find, typically in a blog post.

Your site usually needs to have a higher domain authority to rank for these keywords, but today we are seeing keywords with lower authority appearing in AI citations.

Be sure to include helpful graphs, images, and statistics that would be interesting to any research covering the topic.

For more on this strategy, see our passive link building post.

Who to Pitch?

Typically, you don’t need to “pitch” this type of information as it exists for journalists to find. That said, it cannot hurt to pitch if your data is interesting.

The same principles apply here as in the previous tactic: you are looking for journalists who cover third-party data.

4. Get Survey Data From Third-Party Platforms

Technically, this is still proprietary data. But not all teams have access (or time to access) their user data. The second opportunity here is to use a third-party data source to collect your own survey data.

Platforms like Pollfish, SurveyMonkey, and YouGov offer self-service survey capabilities that enable you to get started, craft questions, and gather answers with minimal effort.

Let’s look at some.

Lumicera Pharmacy Poll

Lumicera is a smaller business in the pharmacy space. They used Pollfish to conduct a survey and publish a study on people’s interactions with pharmacists and costs.

As we found in our YouGov study, emotional hooks can significantly help these posts get shared and picked up by journalists.

Lumicera taps into curiosity with their headline, and the data itself presents the frustration involved in pharmacy interactions:

When it got covered, we can see that journalists from relevant publications gravitated towards these emotional hooks:

However, it’s not all about emotion; timeliness plays a part as well.

Verra Mobility Distracted Driving Survey

Here’s a survey from Verra Mobility around distracted driving.

Verra Mobility offers “smart tech” mobility solutions, so the connection to driving is clear.

For the survey itself, they leaned into emotions like fear and danger associated with distracted driving.

Then, the timely hook is that it was launched during Distracted Driving Awareness Month.

Ultimately, it yielded coverage in relevant industry publications, such as Fleet Owner:

Clearly, the coverage leaned into both the timely hook and the fear of distracted driving.

How to do it:

You can get survey inspiration anywhere, really, but you can start by looking at what the news is covering in publications you wish to get noticed by.

Then, work backwards from the headlines and the kinds of stories they cover. This will give you a head start on creating content that a journalist may want to cover (or not cover).

For instance, if I wanted coverage from CBS News, I could do a site search for the word “survey” and find several surveys they’ve shared around money and work:

Analyzing these will help craft the questions found in the survey itself, leading you towards headlines that can get clicks and shares.

If you’re interested in learning more, we have an entire post on ideating survey content.

Who to pitch?

Here, you are looking for journalists who have covered other third-party survey data.

You can do some searches online for something like:

Industry + ”survey finds”

Industry + ”data finds”

But you should also look at recent articles by journalists to ensure they are sharing third-party data. For instance, the author at FleetOwner, who covered the distracted driving piece, looks to cover third-party data frequently:

Also here:

These are positive signals that they would be open to sharing a data-led story from you.

5. Respond to Journalist Requests

Responding to journalists directly is one of the best ways to increase the odds of getting coverage.

Journalists often request quotes from experts via social platforms like X, email services like Source of Sources (SOS) and Help a Reporter Out (HARO), or quote request platforms like Qwoted.

For example, if you search for #journorequests on X, you’ll find a list of journalists actively asking for new quotes:

In these cases, you directly email the journalist with the requested information.

Note, based on our study, we found that most of these requests come from UK-based media sources.

SOS and HARO are email digests with requests that come in on a daily basis:

When clicking into them, you can see more detail about each request.

Some outlets, like Qwoted are actual platforms which allow you to go in and search for requests from a database:

These kinds of placements end up as coverage in the various outlets.

How to do it:

Sign up for X, Qwoted, SOS, and HARO requests.

Then, create a daily workflow that monitors relevant requests. (Or sign up for a tool that aggregates these, like PressPulse.

IMAGE

When responding, never use AI as that will most likely always get you blocked, marked as spam, or kicked off the platforms.

We gathered helpful tips from the platform owners themselves on how to successfully find respond to relevant journalist requests.

Know that just because you respond doesn’t mean you’ll definitely get covered. You are vying for attention from all of the other PR pros and brands on these platforms.

Who to pitch?

Depending on where you look,

The other option is to introduce yourself to journalists so that they reach out to you directly. Let’s look at that next.

6. Introductions to Journalists

Of all the guests I’ve had on our podcast, one of the recurring recommendations from PR pros is to introduce yourself to journalists at the onset of starting a PR position or new client.

Essentially, you are proactively letting them know who you are and why you (or your brand/client) are important to them.

For instance, Amelia Selby, Head of PR at SEOTravel told me:

We are always “putting some feelers out to say, ‘Hey, I know you often like, you know, insight from experts. These are my experts. If you ever need any support, I’m here, potentially sending through a few quotes.’

We’ve established really good relationships just by doing that.”

Check out our whole podcast about PR on a small budget.

Further, Domenica D’Ottavio , PR Director at Journey Further, told me they do media intros fairly often.

“Introducing yourself to a journalist without pitching is one of the best long-term relationship builders in PR. It’s not to sell a story, but to say hello, show we understand their vertical, and let them know we can be a helpful resource when the right story comes up.”

“It’s short, personal, and service-minded. Typically it’s personalized. We don’t send out loads and loads of media intros, we only select for the most relevant journalists. This sets a tone of helpfulness, and ensures we know their beat inside and out.  We’re hoping to create a natural way to follow up later with a relevant story.”

How to do it:

Find key journalists that you wish to get coverage from. You can do this by simply doing a Google News search around your industry.

Read through their stories and see if they provide quotes from experts within the industry.

Then, you’d pitch them something like this:

The idea here is not to pitch, just to let them know you’re available as a resource.

7. Putting on Live Events

Some folks I talk to don’t consider events as part of PR—and definitely not part of “digital” PR. But this is a missed opportunity in my opinion.

These events can not only get you in front of your key demographic, but can also get you on news publications and high authority websites.

Small Business Week City Hall Pop-up Shop

Here’s a pop-up shop event that’s happening during Shop Dine SF. It features almost 50 local businesses at San Francisco’s City Hall.

Participating in events like these not only gets them facetime with customers, but they can also yield high-value online coverage.

For instance, here’s a post from SF.gov, a DR 84 site, that covers the pop-up shop. Each of these small businesses gets a valuable link back to their website.

Crafty Atrium Popup Shop

The Crafty Atrium is a monthly popup shop that happens in the Embassy Suites in Laredo, Texas. This event brings in local shops and brings tons of exposure not only to the brands in the community.

Then, it gets coverage from local news, like the Laredo Morning Times.

Who covered this?

An events and breakding news reporter.

Two Cheezy Guyz Charcuterie Workshop

A local food shop in Michigan, Two Cheezy Guyz, put on a charcuterie workshop as part of their annual Festival of the Arts.

This gives their team a chance to showcase their knowledge and build trust with potential customers.

Secondly, it got them coverage in a local newspaper, which, for a small business, is like gold!

How to do it:

For live events to be effective, you need to partner with the right people and places. One of the easiest ways to do this is by looking at where your competitors are doing it.

Additionally, you can try searching for live events in your area. Most towns have farmers’ markets, seasonal events, and holiday-related events that are perfect for live booths.

Who to Pitch?

With live events, you are typically looking for journalists who cover local events.

For instance, the journalist who covered the charcuterie workshop covers the “arts and entertainment” beat.

But we can also confirm that he covers local happenings when looking at his recent articles:

These two signals should get to the right journalists.

8. Sponsoring Events or Charities

Aside from being genuinely positive, sponsoring local events and charities is one of the most effective ways to engage with actual customers.

These events often feature high-authority sites and/or receive write-ups from high-authority news outlets.

So, they make great PR plays for small businesses.

We spoke to Chris Brencans, founder of OntheMap, a local marketing agency, on our podcast about this. He said, “A more evolving trend in local SEO is community outreach and participation in community events because Google wants to see some local signals that you’re a real brand.”

Here are some examples:

Free Uber Rides from Pemberton Personal Injury Law Firm

Pemberton Personal Injury Law Firm partnered with Uber for Business to provide free rides on the Fourth of July.

I spoke with Karla Fernandez, Digital PR Director with Onthemap.com, who spearheaded the campaign.

“Many of our clients are lawyers, home contractors, or medical professionals who depend on local visibility to drive new leads. For our client Pemberton Personal Injury Law Firm, we partnered with Uber for Business to provide free rides on the Fourth of July – one of the most dangerous holidays in the U.S., when alcohol-related crashes increase by nearly 40%.

The campaign struck a chord because it delivered real value to the community and an actionable solution to a major problem instead of being about self-promotion.

The best local sponsorships and activations are those that are highly relevant to your work and target causes that are timely, local, and helpful, making both the community and the media want to spread the word.”

Herald-Tribune Athlete of the Week

Another example I found was from the Central Florida Behavioral Health Network, Inc., which contracts with local community service organizations to help with mental health and substance use disorders.

They sponsor a weekly announcement from the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Florida, called the Herald-Tribune Girls Athlete of the Week.

This is an interesting one because it is actually a partnership with the Herald-Times, which ensures that the Central Florida Behavioral Health Network gets a press mention each week.

The winners receive recognition on social media and the news (which I’m sure goes a long way towards their personal growth and potential scholarships), at the same time raise awareness for the Central Florida Behavioral Health Network.

Krumpe’s Do-nut Shop 5K

Another way to get your business in front of people is by sponsoring local events like races.

Krumpe’s Donut Shop in Hagerstown, MD, sponsors a 5K race.

This yearly race gets them a lot of press mentions and links, but more importantly, it gets their product in front of (and in the belly of) their community.

Who doesn’t love a donut after a 5K?

How to do it

Lean on existing examples from the community for inspiration.

A simple Google News search for the term “sponsored by” can help you find local events in your community that are sponsored by different entities:

The most effective ways to collaborate are when you have a mix of audience relevance (your customers will also be interested in the event) and semantic relevance.

For instance, the Uber Rides offered by the personal injury lawyer mentioned above connect to the community but also connect to the business in that personal injury can occur from drunk driving.

Some brands take more creative liberties that stretch relevance.

For instance, the KSAN Collision of the Week segment covers big hits and “collisions” from local sports teams. Keating Paint and Body, an auto repair shop, sponsors it.

So, the collisions in question are by humans, not automobiles, but it’s a fun connection that still works.

And, at the end of the day, it probably reaches the right audience.

9. Consider Podcasts

Podcasts are an ever-growing source of citations as they continue to grow as a medium.

Not only can you pitch yourself or your client as a guest to get your brand out there, but podcasts can also become valuable sources of content if you choose to start one yourself.

We’ve covered this extensively in our post, so I won’t get too deeply into this here, but virtually every audience has a podcast these days.

For instance, if I owned a website that sold yarn or knitting supplies, Listen Notes says there are over 700 podcasts about knitting.

MoreBeer President on BeerSmith Podcast

Following my example above, here is a podcast where the president of MoreBeer, a website that sells home brewing supplies, Chris Graham, appears on a podcast called the BeerSmith Podcast.

Chris gets a mention on the site, but more importantly, he gets exposure with an extremely niche audience of potential home brewers.

BuzzStream Digital PR Podcast

I don’t normally like to insert our own examples in these posts, but the BuzzStream podcast was something I started early 2024.

At the time, there were more traditional PR podcasts but not very many “digital PR” podcasts out there.

So, I decided to create our own.

This not only gets BuzzStream directly in front of the kinds of customers we want, but it has also helped me build a lot of valuable relationships with potential future customers and thought leaders in the industry.

And podcast recording and editing software like Descript and Riverside has made the process extremely easy to produce a high-quality product.

How to do it:

To find relevant podcasts to pitch or podcast topics to start your, you can Google the topic + podcast and get a pretty good sense for what is out there.

The aforementioned Listen Notes is also a great podcast search engine.

Then, to pitch yourself as a guest, you’d want to find a topic that hasn’t been covered yet and pitch that. Include your credentials and specifically why you think their listeners would benefit from having you or your client as a guest.

Quality not Quantity

For a small business, it feels like you are putting out a lot of money to create and develop a survey campaign or sponsor a charity, but realistically, small businesses don’t need a lot of links to rank and show up in AI.

In fact, links are still among the biggest drivers of local searches.

Many may look for shortcuts and buying links. These are more costly than you might realize, and the gains are not what you’d expect. We conducted an extensive study of these link marketplaces and found that about 80% of the placements are of poor quality.

That said, as more and more studies come out, showing up in AI is less about backlinks; it’s all about brand mentions.

Think more about the story and less about the links and coverage.

The post 9 Small Business PR Tactics That Get Links, Coverage (and AI Exposure) appeared first on BuzzStream.

Aside from being the SEO Director at The Telegraph (yes that Telegraph), Harry Clarkson-Bennett, also has a fabulous newsletter called Leadership in SEO.

In July, he had a great take on building brands with SEO in the AI world which prompted me to reach out and invite him onto the podcast. It seems like everything I write about now has to have that qualifier of being in an AI era, AI world, or post AI but it’s true: AI has changed everything.

Even if many of the strategies are similar, there still needs to be a different thought process. In this episode, Harry really helps walk us through all of this. We discuss creating demand for a brand, differentiating yourself, and how brands need to stand out. We also get into some SEO topics, given that he does SEO for one of the top publishers in the UK.

(Selfishly, the other benefit of having Harry on the podcast is that he was able to share some secrets about how The Telegraph works.)

This one’s great for everyone.

How do you create demand for your brand?

Harry: I think it really depends on, like, what your brand is or who it is, right? But obviously, if you’re a publisher like us, it’s quite a different world too, if you’re an e-commerce brand that sells specific products. But ultimately, what we’re trying to do is build a product that really services our audience and solves a problem.

And I think to start wit,h whatever their main problem is. And it might be that they wanna feel like a real affiliation with someone as a publisher and be part of something. Or it might be that they have identified a product they need or something that gives them what they really desire.

But ultimately, I think it’s about solving a problem. And I think if you’re solving a problem, you really need to know who your audience is to understand what their problem will be. So there’s always been like you would do the user Sona stuff. And I always thought that stuff was interesting, but never.

That’s valuable. But I think there’s a good way of doing it where I’ve seen a couple of things on Miro and a couple of companies where they’ve talked about pain points and why the important thing or what you can do is to identify, like, yes, who they are, but what their main pain points are. So you can try and solve those.

And I think if you have that as a basis, like that’s an excellent starting point. And then it’s all about like, ’cause you could still create a really good product, but if no one finds it, it’s kind of like. It’s kind of pointless. So once you’ve got that, if you have a good product, you’ve established who your audience is.

I think then it’s about figuring out how to be, like, front and center. And do you remember? I’m sure you remember, do you remember like Google did that whole messy middle thing a few years ago and they’re like, oh, it’s tough to figure stuff out in the middle. Don’t worry about it. But now I think the middle’s pretty wild.

So I think now it’s really like. How well do you know your audience? How well do you know where they spend time on what platform? Like, basically, how can you influence them in the right place? And a lot of that is like, yes, like good organic social campaigns or maybe Reddit now has obviously got huge through search, but has always been pretty prominent for certain areas.

But now people like YouTube, TikTok, all the search engine alternatives now, possibly AI, depending on what you do in LLMs. So I really think that it’s like figuring out what platforms you need to be on. Testing and then testing. Maybe also just figuring out who already influences them, like you can build spark, I think, is a really cool tool for this.

Rand Fishkin, this new one, he’s been working. We’ve been using that for a while to build audience segments—where they spend time — and to look at advertising opportunities, and I think that’s been quite helpful in just framing how we should work and thinking about. I think SEO has always been kind of overvalued as a channel or certainly for the last like 10 years.

Like it’s always provided good last click attribution, ROI, ’cause that’s where people have gone once. They’ve kind of figured out what they want. To some extent, outside of the kind of comparison query, people find stuff anywhere now, right? So I think there’s a bit of a recentering most brands have to do, which is like, how do we really?

Figure out our audience and how do we figure out where they spend time and that’s where we need to be. So probably those four things, you’re probably on a, on a good path, I think.

Vince: Well, so you’re in a really interesting position in that you’re at a major publisher, news publisher, the Telegraph. You’re also the SEO guy there.

How different is the mindset for a big brand versus a small one?

Harry: So, like, big brands still have a huge advantage, obviously. I think the standard way that small brands can be big brands as if they’re like super agile. Particularly in the new, like, vibe-coded world of being able to build stuff and launch it quickly and test stuff, which I do, which I think is.

Really interesting, small, that’s where small brands can win if they’re fast and agile. But big brands are still like, like we get, you know, off the top my head I can tell you, but hundreds of thousands of monthly branded searches. You know, if you compare that to other huge publishers in the UK like the BBC or The Guardian, they’d get significantly more than that.

So you still, unlike you still have a major advantage, but people have had alternatives for quite a long time now. And I think it’s that kind of creator economy where people really trust individuals. So much more than they did. And news is a, as an industry, just direct news searches in Google has been declining for quite a long time.

And that’s not because people aren’t interested. If anything, people are like more interested in the consumption of information than ever. They just have so many alternatives. Like do you get all of your news from Google anymore? Going through that method, but probably not. People have individual accounts.

Could be TikTok, could be X, whatever. It’s gonna be like. People just have alternatives now. But I think the big brand advantage is still huge for us. That’s it, if you were launching something brand new, I think your way to market is still difficult. If we’re launching something brand new, it’s a little bit easier to get it out there and to get your name across.

And the same goes for any of those big publishers, so, or any big brand who’s launching this stuff. But I think if you do it right, there’s been a flattening of. If you understand how to grow a small brand quickly, there’s definitely been a flat thing of the difference in scalable size between those two types of brands.

Where is the Telegraph in the pecking order?

Harry: so BC is definitely number one. Then I suspect it’s probably the Guardian, but it could also be the Daily Mail and The Guardian.

All those brands are pretty big in America. The Daily Mail’s huge in America, but it really depends. Over the last few years, there’s been a fairly significant shift in terms of what brands rank for specific categories. So there’s probably a point before I was in news and publishing where. If you were a big brand, you’d be ranking for anything.

Like it doesn’t matter if it’s a political spot, everyone obviously has elements that they’re stronger on. But I think if you spoke to people across different publishers like the Sun, the Daily Mail, us Guarded, what people are able to rank for has definitely shifted over the last few years. And I know Google, the Google League and Google kind of scoring systems, and they have these maybe like baseline foundation metrics, you know, let’s say zero to one.

If you’re not above a certain threshold, then you won’t appear in top stories. For example, for a political work. There’s definitely been a shift in the way sites have been able to rank for certain things. I couldn’t speak exactly to what it was. Unfortunately, I wasn’t hearing that, those kinds of houses on days.

But um, yeah, there’s definitely been a shift, but I think like politically we’ve always been pretty strong and big major events. But like generally if you’re talking like celebrity stuff, it would be the Daily Mail. If you’re talking just huge widespread news consumption, B, B, C as like the license fee, payout payer channel or brand is definitely the strongest in the Guardian, I would say are probably the biggest ones.

 how is the Telegraph providing value to its customers?

Harry: It’s such a, such a good question, right?

Because what I’ve always thought or how I’ve always tried to create value with content.

Specifically, let’s say, I think there’s two strands to this.

We focus on the content side and the technical side.

The content side of things for me is all about, okay, once you have, let’s say, everybody can structure an article pretty effectively, which is not entirely true, but like as long as you understand how to structure an article effectively to make sure that it’s easy for people to consume, it’s easy for bots to consume.

You are on a good path already.

On top of that, I think you consider stuff like information game.

And the uniqueness of content and how we could, like, how can we add value?

And adding value is a understanding our audience.

So everybody has access to the same keywords, the same tools, the same FAQs, whatever that might be.

But I think the way you can differentiate yourself slightly is to understand your audience and figure out which of those queries are gonna be most applicable to them.

And for big publishers, obviously, you have pretty different audiences for specific areas.

Like, our product review stuff isn’t behind a paywall, so that’s like a bigger, broader audience.

So we have to have a slightly different approach there than in other areas.

So if you can structure your article effectively, if you understand your audience well enough to know what queries you should be answering, and at like a really basic level.

For us, you’re kind of seen as a premium publisher for a slightly more affluent audience, which means that you might be able to tailor your context somewhat based on that.

We’re also a publisher who is right of center, which means you might be able to tailor your queries or questions to that type of audience. So really then it’s about knowing your audience. Then it’s about the information gain side of things and how can you add unique value, and I think a lot of that comes down to.

Like being quite canny like we have an audience team internally.

We have a community team where we have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. We have access to such a huge amount of data that we’ve done some really good stuff. Some of that is like did an article on the best inset providers.

So you can just do a survey of our audience to figure out, okay, who do they use?

How satisfied are they?

How can we bring this to like, not many other people have access.

Not many other publishers have access to that level of information.

It’s really about making use of what you have.

So we do, we try and do quite a lot of stuff like that where possible, and then we try and leverage things like comments, internal site searches, like to figure out what our audience is saying and to try and bring that to the fore to just make, to just have something a bit different because particularly with everything that’s happened over the last couple of years, not that difficult to spin out sort of possible informational content.

So for us it’s about being like, right, how do we take it to a level where. People won’t pay for it directly, but they might register, but it might drive a significant enough amount of traffic.

And I think that’s, that’s where we have to be good and where we’re probably judged more harshly and rightly so. And then there’s the, uh, the kind of technical side of things where it’s like, how do we make our site faster? How do we make it more efficient? How do we make things, how do we make ourselves stand out as just like a premium experience?

With all the kind of EEAT metrics and authorship and everything that comes with that by being like, how do we shout about who we’re and what we’re good at?

Does the Telegraph need to promote its content much?

Harry: So, absolutely. And like interestingly, a used car dealership is quite, quite a cool comparison. I do.

Because it sort of plays into earlier what you discussed about like you have to build this giant audience.

And I used car dealership as like you probably have quite a specific local audience who have quite specific local needs.

So you don’t need millions of data points to be able to craft something.

That’s a kind of interesting story for people who live in like a tiny place in the middle of nowhere, arbitrarily.

So, like, again, knowing your brand and your audience doesn’t have to be fancy—like, not about collecting data or trying to create something a bit different.

It’s like standing out is the end goal for everybody here. Which I think for publishers means that everybody gets more opinionated.

Like, I think what we’ll probably see if we’re not already is that everybody goes a little bit further away from the center, because you kind of have to have a voice to survive, and then you lean further and further into your like maybe harder audience, because that’s maybe where the money is.

So I think that’s quite an interesting thing that’s been happening or will happen.

And in terms of the promotional side of things, sticking stuff high up on our homepage.

When you’re a big publisher, it absolutely has a big impact on search and discovery.

And I would say that it’s like the prominence of your link on a big homepage. You know, it just crawled every few seconds. Obviously, if you put your big story up there, it’s gonna be your biggest story.

And that’s because if we just talk in search terms, Chrome gets a ton more information about clicks and user engagement behavior really quickly.

And I think the way Discover works, or a specific theory, is that, uh, obviously, Discover’s huge for publishers now.

But the big part of the way it works is like taking a, let’s say like a statistical performance, like a Bayesian model of performance where you’re able to sit there and be like, this is, there’s an expectation of each article, maybe based on the sub folder it’s in, or the brand it works for, the brand it sits under.

It’s not that difficult for Google to predict what this article should do.

So if you can force that article to overperform in the first 10, 20, 30 minutes, IE, high up on the homepage, you push up your social channels, you stick it in a newsletter.

I think that’s an excellent indicator for Google in its algorithm that it has a chance to go viral, so it’s more likely to be put on a viral platform, like Discover.

That’s obviously like a bit of a theory, but I do think that’s pretty much how Discover Works is, as more of a social-type algorithm, and it’s much more click-based.

But definitely, for most people, they want to work with or link to the Telegraph.

Similarly, with the BBC or the Guardian, and although it’s much easier for us, it’s obviously much easier for them as well.

So it’s, it’s so much easier, but it’s also you’re competing against much bigger fish.

What’s the value of a backlink if you want to show up in AI?

Harry: So I think the first, the first port of call, I suppose, like figuring out whether it’s valuable for you to show up in AI, and like right now for us, there is basically, no value.

And I think that’s probably the same for most publishers.

Not everybody, but for most — particularly publishers who rely on subscriptions and/or advertising, which is basically everybody —it’s that these platforms don’t send traffic; they’re not designed to send traffic, which makes it a bit challenging to generate, particularly advertising revenue.

And if it’s subscription revenue, then what people would say is, like, oh, but it’s essential to be visible as part of the corpus or whatever, maybe.

But nobody cares about that, and you can’t really track that very well, despite what people who have AI prompt trackers will tell you. I don’t know.

I’ve tried using it. I don’t think it’s that helpful, but I’m aware that’s definitely true. I’m only speaking for publishers here, so that’s kind of different if you’re an e-commerce brand.

I do think it’s different for sure, but in terms of the value of a link, yeah, I think, I think the link has sort of followed like.

There was a point when it was probably still the most critical trust signal, in all honesty, for getting people to talk about and cite your brand.

And I think just generally the mention of your brand with the right basic level, with the right keywords, either side of it’s pretty helpful.

So I think the value of a link has indeed declined over time.

Still, I do think it’s having something of a Renaissance in terms of like digital PR and big scale campaigns will be huge and like you can see already with how AI or how LLMs give answers is that they really do use the, like they’re quite spam in that you can really, if you just get featured in like any top 10 list for the best agencies or whatever it might be, you’re pretty likely to get featured in there.

Will Reynolds has interactive. Does some really cool stuff. They did a really good thing about, like, it was a test of, they put some, basically just some words, in the footer. They ran two things, so they, they were like, okay, our agency does a lot of work in the finance and banking industry. So they did like case studies, interviews, spoke at specific events, talked about all this stuff, but then also just put like eight words in their footer about what they did.

And nothing else was mentioned in LLMs.

But those, the footer stuff was picked up in like 12 hours, and he was like, yeah, I mean.

So I think we’re, we are not ready for like good quality SEO for this stuff yet. It’s kind of, it’s kind of old school in terms of how these things work, which makes sense.

But I think the value is less about the link.

Obviously, you want the link for search purposes to drive referral traffic to be relevant. You still need that. But I think the value is more about being cited, being talked about, being mentioned in the right publications. Like I think that’s still. The most valuable thing, which I believe it has been for a while.

How long will the spammy tactics that people are using to show up in AI work?

Harry: So I actually think maybe you follow Dan Petrovich on LinkedIn a bit. So, he’s really funny, and the stuff he does is super cool. But I, he basically just wrote an article about. And it was just about the latest version GPT 5, which was basically that it has stopped training on prior data.

So up to September 2024, whenever it was, that was the cutoff. And after that, as I look, we basically consumed everything. Now, this is really expensive, and shock horror brands are pretty pissed off that you’ve been stealing content and using it to train your models and then basically exploiting companies for it.

So the reason I bring that up is that they will probably use the Google search Index. We’re already using Bing. I think the role of SEO is still just to get, make sure you are ranking pretty high up., ’cause I’m sure that using ad index is a far more sensible way of doing things.

And Google is actually, recently, Google really sucks with spam, but it’s still way better with spam than LLMs. And probably the reason why Google. Pretty crappy with spam at the minute is people just got so good at abusing it. So I, I do appreciate that. It’s difficult, but I do think they’ve kind of given up a bit, and they’re investing so much more into AI that, like, the spam updates are just a bit more like whatever.

So I guess I imagine they’ll get a handle on it in the future, and I think absolutely it’ll be a bit of a spammy problem for a while. But I wonder if the way around it is actually that there’s just a better integration with search engines that just have a much better way of handling spam. And that kind of filters out a lot of the nonsense that might happen.

So maybe just featuring on these, like featuring in better quality pages, is going to be the way forward. So yeah, I think you’re right. Like the kind of elevator and stairs option, maybe the elevator at the top has quite a hot ceiling, but once you reach that, you really wanna get out before it hits that point, because I’m sure that will happen.

And like most of us, I don’t have the option of. You talked about.

I talked about it, but you also talked about it on like black, black, and gray hat techniques. And that’s definitely the one regret I have of my SEO career so far, is that I’ve not really got into that. And obviously, as with a brand, when you work for big brands, that’s not an option.

If you work for an agency, you just don’t have these options.

Like you can’t really fuck around, you remember the fuck around, find out growth that that guy does, where it’s just like. There’s a point on the graph where it’s like, you know, you probably don’t want to get here because at some point you’ll find out.

Um, well, we’re seeing a lot of that, too, lately.

It’s super interesting and you can see, like, you can see how badly it’s been abused over the years and working in, so the industries where this is most prominent are the industries where there’s the most money to make. And that’s like iGaming, gambling, casino, that type of stuff. Where frankly they’re like, who knew people like Tibet, right? Turns out they’ve really liked to bet, and people really like gambling.

Um, those industries are aware that, like the people who are just unbelievably good at this stuff, are so, and I notice it if I, if you search for like. At any point over the last few months, when I’ve searched for like Best Casino, something like some, some variations on that you will inevitably find, it’ll be like Hong Kong embassy org cranking, like position seven with a one-page site.

Somebody’s bought and just spun like the best casino websites for Exxon. And there are people just building, just constantly building. It’s like private blog networks that match domains. They just have, like, this year, they just built because if you have one thing, like you can’t be reliant on. A single site for this, but some of these sites make like $10,000 a day from what I understand, from uh, just ranking for like a few specific terms.

So, actually, if you can just build something by an authoritative domain, spin it and turn it pretty quickly, even if you only get a few months out of it, it can be so profitable that it’s just kind of worth it. So it’s an exciting industry and not one I know much about, but when I am pretty shady, there’s, um, a garment clinic called Timothy Malus.

Something he did a fascinating look into. I probably won’t name the company ’cause I think there’s a lawsuit at the moment, but he did. He did a fascinating look into an iGaming and casino affiliate company, and like the dirty nexus of stuff that goes on, that is wild. Like wild, wild. So yeah, it’s interesting.

That’s definitely an area I’d like to get more into.

Right now, Google doesn’t care about this stuff.

They have bigger fish to fry. It’s AI robust.

So it’s like, I understand why I disagree with it because they’ve just done such a bad job of dealing with it recently. But I, I do appreciate, it’s probably pretty difficult, um, to be able to manage and people are really fucking good at dealing with this stuff.

So, like I said, they’ll be, they’ll have hundreds of sites. You can afford to lose 20, 30, 40% of them. You know it’s gonna happen. But you can spin this stuff; you keep doing it. And like there, there’ll be people with such valuable assets, which is super, super interesting in that world. That’s why. But I do really like it, but I agree.

It’s like there’s an algorithm. If you are smart, if you’re a brilliant mathematician, you are a good statistically, people figure out how to reverse engineer this stuff. You have a bit of a playbook, and you just go for it, and then you just iterate on it slightly every year. There are some interesting people I follow, a guy called Charles Float.

Found recently in the industry for long, from what I know.

Do you think it matters more to show up in AI to get links from these big publishers?

Harry: Does it matter more?

I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you for sure. I suspect it on the balance of things. Because it’s another area that still has value in search. It does have some value in AI to something, to what extent. It’s difficult to tell, but, like I said, becoming a bigger, more trusted entity is significant.

And uh, I wrote a newsletter about, um, Google has a patent about how it scores evergreen articles.

It’s, it’s, it’s super interesting and lots of this stuff. It’s not like mind-blowing. It’s probably what people generally expect, but the important thing for most things is like link acquisition over time, and there being like a steady link velocity from high-quality sites over time.

So there’s like one-off big spikes and not that important. So. Obviously it’s great if you get people to see who you are and understand your brand. Still, actually, if you’re just having singular spikes, you really need to figure out a way to be able to have those kind of hero pieces of of PR work or digital PR work that do give you those big spikes and give you more exposure to people.

But you really need to figure out a way to create content that people just naturally link to over time. And I think for PRs and big publishers, there’s probably not a huge shift in like how to go about doing things. I think the most. The most interesting things that I’ve, since I’ve come here have been initially like people’s reluctance actually to link to stuff, which has always, I’m like, it’s kind of like with links being kind of the backbone of the internet, so to speak, the open web.

I always found it quite strange that people were really reluctant to link.

I think that’s, it’s not just us, right? I think that’s been the case for many publishers.

Press Gazette did a study on it last year, and we did not score well, but there were three or four worse than us, and one of the ones that were worse than us was messaging me to ask for a link, saying it was unreasonable for us not to link. I was like, well, you can’t do that after I’ve seen that you’re worse than us.

Like, we’re bad. Don’t. I think there’s just been like some pretty bad SEO advice that’s gone out in the industry over the years and it’s like perpetuated where people think it’s kind of like people think you lose page rank if you link out to another website. That was a bit like, right, and it wouldn’t have been expressed like that, but it was like they think it makes our page less valuable if, if we’re referencing someone’s work or something that they’ve done, just link to them.

It’s like, it’s like manners, right? And like you, they’ve done the hard work just like what they’re doing. This isn’t a big, so that’s been an interesting shift. And I do think it’s, I do think the link is less important than it was, and I do feel, like the general mentioned, and being cited in the right place is still essential.

Publishers still have big publishing targets. They still need stories. I think if you are, if you’re in PR and you work in pr, the fundamentals of what that looks like hasn’t changed in terms of making it easy for publishers to link to certain things. But I mean, AI is indeed like the world’s biggest buzzword and it certainly makes your job if you use it well.

Easier, and I’m pretty sure for PR there must be some fantastic things that you can do with AI generally to make your life a little bit fresher.

Do you feel any of the drop in reply rates that the PR side is feeling?

Harry: So, no, not really. Only because. Basically, the only people who message me about this stuff are other publishers. So it’s basically other publishers being like, Why, why didn’t you link to our thing? We all do like hundreds of stories a day. Everybody, I don’t know how we track, uh, we do track the pattern of publishing volumes, and there was one, there are a couple of sites in India that everybody’s been like, how the fuck are these guys doing?

How are they doing well in the uk? And we found out, they were just like, oh, we just spin the stories up with AI, and they were doing like 25,000 stories a month or something like that. And the rest of us are like, you know, 1, 2, 300 a day, however many it’s in the UK—something like that. But I don’t, I don’t really feel it.

And I think we’ve made strides in being like, ‘please link two people.’ But I would, yeah. I’m surprised if that’s Yeah. Maybe a little bit surprised that that’s in that that’s what people are feeling.

So it basically hasn’t come across my desk.

Has the Telegraph been feeling any redundancies?

Harry: No, but we are going through a sale process at the moment, so right. Who knows? We shall, we shall see, but yeah, hopefully not. But we are, in fairness, a big subscription paper that is in a pretty healthy position, so I’ve been led to believe.

So, right. Who knows? But I, that’s in fairness. That’s a perfect point. And maybe it’s in terms of PR and reducing, like I know Rick just happened to reach, there are a couple of other publications that have lost out quite significantly. Maybe it’s just fallen down the pecking order a little bit in terms of what people care about and are interested in.

But I would’ve thought we’d like news about the need for stories and the constant desire to do more. I’m surprised, like, I dunno, maybe pitching just needs to get even better.

Vince: I mean, I think that’s the thing. There’s a little bit of that, like people reaching out to the wrong people all the time.

You know, you’re casting a wider net than you should be. Mm-hmm. There are false ideas about how many links you need to get, and the focus is still on volume and not, you know, quality versus quantity. But the other thing I guess is like, I mean, so the journalist layoff thing is adding, oh, the influx of people.

Getting into digital pr, like I think there’s a lot of kind of like link builder mindset of people kind of coming over and being like, oh, I can do this. You know? And they use the same kind of tactics that they use for blogger outreach or for whatever. I mean, the same kind of stuff you’re getting, probably that doesn’t, you can’t really do that with a journalist.

Harry: No. Yeah, you, I think it’s, this is definitely not changed. If anything, this is probably more important than ever, but it’s always about. The story, selling the story well, and making it easy for somebody to be like, Oh, thank Christ. Like, we’re not a high-volume publisher. But if you’re pitching to a high volume publisher who some people might be doing, like, I dunno, 5, 6, 7, 8 articles a day individually, you really need to make their life easy and understand what it is.

So for us, it might be a bit different, but I do think there is. It’s like I’ve been saying about understanding our audience. Well, like the digital PRS audience, in this sense, is the journalists or the publication. So like having a really clear idea about how many articles they have to do a day, what those articles are like, what articles do well for them in terms of traffic or subs because of their audience, like understanding who they are and who the publication is.

It’s still, I think, the number one thing for PRS to go. That’s how I can craft something really sellable. But you’re right, it’s quality over quantity and the kind of link building. The link building bullshit. Just numbers, quantity, just like, please link to my, it’s like it’s got, it’s gotta be better of all the, of all the times to like really figure out how to sell.

It’s definitely now, and that’s not a shot at any like digital prs really hard, but really cool. It was one of my favorite, my favorite areas to work with in a place I used to work. We had a digital party, which is a bit of fun in the SE and publishing industry, like get a link, ring the gong, go for a bit, which was good fun.

Enjoyed it.

Do you feel that as an SEO, crazy news cycles make your job harder or easier?

Harry: I think both of those things are true, right? In that, so the way I set the team up here is that you have, like, news, SEO is so different from normal SEO, which is like news, SEO, evergreen, SEO, technical, SEO.

But they’re all wildly different in terms of what they do and what type of person they need. So having that split in the team is quite helpful. When the news gets crazy, what we’re the team are like. We’re optimizing quickly for individual things, uh, like figuring out what stories are gonna do well, what are the spinoff stories?

How do we make sure that the right articles are featured in the right places? The headlines are good before they go live. Once it’s gone live’s out there, it’s a bit late. In lots of cases, Google might not crawl their headline again, so it’s like, this is where we are with this stuff. So that’s almost like the front line of when things get a bit, when things get a bit wild.

So it’s like on the election night over here. It was just like, alright, so are you gonna be working all night? And I was like, am I you? What? I’m, what do you mean? They’re like, oh, most of the time they’ll do like, you know, work till like six in the morning till six in the morning. You gotta be joking. They go made it to that forum, like, I gotta go home and feel sick.

So it definitely does change, uh, our team and how people are able to work. And obviously stress levels are higher. But I suspect there’s just like, it’s kind of like an understanding because I still think the same applies an understanding of the paper, the publisher, the stories of what’s happening. But like I said, news means that you might have the best intentions in the world.

You might create a really cool story. It might be all out the window within 10 minutes because like something crazy’s happened, like what’s happened in America the last couple of days. So yeah, I, we do feel it, but I think as like an internal, somewhat internal. You probably don’t, you definitely don’t feel it as much in terms of getting our stuff pushed through like digital PR might do, but yeah, maybe there’s something about being canny about who you can target and how you target them, what the angle is.

The angle for us would be pretty different if you pitched someone in my team, in the SEO team versus like somebody who’s in charge of publishing on the desk and think having an understanding of how those, how publishers are structured so you can get your story through like, I’m sure most of this is still run on relationships one way or another, but then if you have an understanding of.

Who the decision makers are definitely easier to get a story pushed through.

How does a site like The Telegraph run its news desks? 

Harry: I couldn’t tell you other publishers, but I can give you a broad overview roughly of like how these things tend to work.

Whereas there’s obviously a split of desks. So there’s like news teams, sports teams, whatever that might be in terms of the category of content that they work under. But then there’s, there’s like commissioners, publishers that there’d be some, one of those two who’d be in charge of the whole desk and who’s in charge of all the stories that go out throughout the day.

So there’d be someone on each desk who’s like the key decision maker to say yes or no. And someone will bring them stories, they’ll get pitched maybe. 10, 20, 30, 40 stories a day, whichever desk they work on. And then it’s up to them to then go, we’re doing this, we’re doing this, this is what this will look like.

Um, I think figuring out like whose role is, who is the commissioner, who’s the publisher, who is somebody writing the article? ’cause some of the pitches probably make more sense to go to like a specific journalist who’s writing something. In contrast, others are really going directly to a commissioner or to a publisher.

But it’s quite convoluted. And I’ve been here for three and a half years, just over. Been in the editorial section for, actually, I couldn’t tell you how long, I still don’t get exactly how things are structured. There are a lot of editors, managing editors, like there are a lot of different people who, it does get quite confusing.

But I think if you try and figure that out, you get, I don’t get pitched now. No one pitches to me, it’s a sad, lonely world up here in s Well, I was gonna say, I good.

And then thinking about this, if you were pitching to an SEO, what you’d be pitching to them is like, it’s kind of like, it’d be quite a boring, straight story I suspect.

So, unless you can try and make that a bit jazzy and a bit interesting. Lik,e explainers are not normally the sort of sexiness of digital pr. I imagine that’s a hard sell. So that, that would, if someone was pitching us quite regularly, I, you’d have to sit there and be like, it’s probably not the right, it’s probably not the right ball game.

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I put out an open call on LinkedIn to find people to talk to me about reactive PR in the US, and one name kept coming up: Madeleine Dykes at Rise at Seven. So, I knew I had to convince her somehow to join the podcast in the very little free time she has.

You see, reactive PR is always on.

PR pros who use this tactic as part of their overall brand awareness strategy know you need to be locked into the news pretty much 24/7, always on the hunt for creative ways to insert your brand into trending topics and events.

However, Madeleine helped me realize that this can actually be fun…like LOTS of fun.

Interested in learning more?

Check out our related podcasts about reactive PR:

• Our second podcast ever, talking about reactive PR with Mark Rofe
• Leah Daly of FatJoe talks reactive PR in the UK 
• Katie Storey discusses newsjacking and reactive PR

The post How to Master Reactive PR in the US with Madeleine Dykes appeared first on BuzzStream.