Our Exact Approach To Digital PR &
Acquiring Editorial Placements

It all starts with something of value.

We call this content, but realistically it can be anything from your brand itself, a founder, a tragic event or a funny video. For the purposes of this process we’ll refer to any of these as “content” moving forward.
“Content” is a term that’s being thrown around a lot in the marketing space. Content marketing to myself can mean a very different thing to you or to a competitor. Our content marketing is based on achieving organic rankings for pre-determined profitable keywords, this content then ranks in Google, drives users into your sales funnel and converts them either on touch point 1 or in the future.

Content marketing, digital PR and link building are all forms of organic marketing – Meaning once implement, will continue to drive revenue and sales for your business in the future regardless of whether more campaigns are added. This, in my opinion is what makes digital PR so powerful – One campaign implemented months or years ago, can still continue to bring in traffic, leads and sales each and every month.

Content, in our process, is an asset that’s hosted on a client’s website. This is key as when a content asset is referenced (linked) we want 100% of those links to point back to your website and not a third party where the content may be hosted (press website, youtube, medium.com etc).

This content asset has one role; to add value to the reader.

As much as content marketers tend to overcomplicate this process, that is the sole goal of a content marketing piece. When this is achieved two things happen:

• Visitors are more likely to buy.
• Visitors are more likely to link and/or share.

Both are incredibly important KPI’s but for this process we’re focused on the linking element.

Remember, content isn’t some 500 word thrown together blog post. Content is something that is interesting, noteworthy, linkable and shareable, that if seen in a printed magazine or newspaper, would force-the-read, not because it’s so controversial but because it’s simply too interesting, useful or targeted to you as an individual for you to just scroll or flick on from.

This is obviously essential as the more interesting, unique and link-bait worthy this piece of content is, the more press media placements it will generate, as well as the easier it will be to generate links from other strategies.

“Your content should force-the-read” – Tom Buckland

Part 1.1 of the content curation technique involves building the overarching strategy for the campaign.

What single piece of content we will be using to leverage our outreach and force-the-read, ensuring potential link prospects and customers take note.

Ensuring the correct content asset is used will result in potentially dozens more powerful placements and links in the future, as links are directly correlated to monetary KPI’s this can result in tens or hundreds of thousands in additional revenue.

In this process our team is looking for one of three elements to be in place:

• Link worthy content that already exists.
• Content or pages that are generating links naturally already.
• Interesting/close enough data/content that can be tweaked instead of entirely rebuilt from scratch.

During the content audit & on-boarding process, we work very closely with the client’s internal content or marketing team to determine the perfect content piece. Taking a piece of content from “good” to “incredible and link worthy” is a lot quicker and easier than building a new campaign from scratch. Therefore during the content audit we always look for pieces that are already good that can be built into authority pieces that are link and newsworthy.

Two elements that work incredibly well are:

• Leveraging data driven content pieces (interesting infographics, educational videos etc)
• Reverse engineering a technique or piece of content that worked well in a different vertical/niche and replicating the campaign.

All these elements from; competition analysis, reverse engineering what already works in an industry, cross-vertical aligning (taking something that works in one industry and moving it into another), content exploring and more allow us to build a content topic that we know before even starting will result in links from press, authority media and multiple dozens of site owners worldwide.

“Don’t reinvent the wheel just realign it” – Anthony D’Angelo

Stage 2 involves finding the specific link opportunities (both websites and individuals) that would be the perfect fit for our piece of content. This may be the site itself but what generally works better is finding specific writers, influencers, journalists and bloggers who are respected in an industry.

These influencers tend to have a larger, more dedicated following and will result in a higher amount of referral traffic in the long run too, and of course a high proportion of great editorial links.

During stage 2 we also build out micro-paid advertising campaigns as part of the digital PR and link building strategy itself. Without getting into too much depth as the full blog post is linked above, this simply involves getting the initial word out on Facebook, Instagram & other paid advertising channels for five core reasons.

• It naturally gets picked up and linked to.
• Gains social traction; shares, likes, comments etc (which we can leverage in future pitches).
• Click through traffic from social is an up and coming ranking factor and hence will help long term rankings.
• Brand awareness & sales from those click-throughs.
• Social proof we can use in our pitches to both media and non-media lists to increase conversions (below).

Link outreach and press placements involves leveraging our content piece and previous relationships with non-media-based contacts to generate powerful, relevant links outside of press

Part 3.1 involves leveraging our content piece and previous relationships with non-media-based contacts to generate powerful, relevant links outside of press.

These links are incredibly powerful and move the organic rankings needle very quickly when implemented correctly. We have outlined these strategies in multiple posts on our blog. If you’re looking for any more information about those specifically, feel free to get in touch.

The most common strategies utilised are the following:

• Resource link building,
• Round-ups
• Guest posts
• Content acquisition techniques
• Local link building
• Unlinked mentions
• Competition analysis.

During the outreach stages themselves, specific issues or elements can change and vary. Occasionally campaigns are tweaked mid-outreach to change the overall pitch dynamic. This is done to improve conversions of email pitches when something seems off during the process or conversions are lower than expected.

These are continually tweaked during the entire campaign to deliver the best ROI for the campaign’s investment.

In select cases we’ll run a 3.4 stage to the campaign

This occurs when content is gaining so much traction and attention in specific mediums that virality is very close. If this is the case you’ll see referral traffic and link figures start to increase exponentially from a couple of dozen links for the average campaign, all the way up to hundreds in some cases, as content becomes viral.

This is always the overarching goal of a campaign but given the nature of virality, content needs to be in very select circumstance. Many businesses do not want to add a controversial or potentially brand damaging element to result in an exponential increase in links. This is understandable and something we cover in detail in the onboarding process.

Stage 4 involves analysing the entire campaign. What major links were achieved, what went well, what went not so well and analysing the overall success of the campaign. We’re 100% transparent with how we work and do not defend poor performance. In some cases, campaigns flop but in 92% of cases in 2018 we’ve helped our clients generate at least 30 links within a three-month campaign period, 22% of which have come directly from editorial media.

One full campaign structure from stage 1 to 4 takes 12 weeks. All campaigns are built on this structure and we run 2 campaigns per contract for clients. As a result minimum contracts are 6 months long, and investments start at £3,000/month. Smaller link building campaigns start from £1k/month but do not follow this same process outlined above.

All content, design, development, prospecting, outreach, licensing, software, negotiations, project management & link acquiring costs are included in this fee.