Table of Contents
Is hero content dying?
Not according to Amber Carnegie, Creative Lead from UK-based digital PR agency Verve Search.
Hero campaigns are evolving. They’re not just one piece of content anymore. Instead, they’re campaigns that tag various business groups, such as social, paid, and brand. Or as Amber put it, “Hero campaigns have changed quite a lot in terms of the digital PR space… they can’t just be one thing anymore. They have to be supported by an entire strategy.”
I had an excellent chat with Amber about how you can and should utilize hero content to drive your digital PR campaigns.
Main Takeaways and Actionable Tips
Based on our convo, I tried to extract some actionable tips paired with some quotes from the transcription below.
1. Focus on Relevancy Over Quantity
If you’ve been listening to my podcast discussions thus far, you probably noticed a trend by now. But links should be relevant to your audience and industry rather than just chasing high numbers.
- Quote from Amber: “Clients are getting much more focused on what they want to achieve with the PR strategy, rather than sort of what, again, five, ten years ago, it was just kind of a mass upload.”
2. Create Multi-Tiered Campaign Strategies
Amber has some great ways to think about using your hero content to drive a multi-tiered campaign structure. You start with hero content (like an interactive tool) and build supportive blog content, reactive pieces, and expert commentary.
3. Collaborate Across Departments
This tip is fairly simple: involve social, paid, and other teams aligning campaigns across channels. This will ensure you not only get the most reach, but the client feels the impact of digital PR across more than just links.
4. Leverage Existing Content and Data Whenever Possible
Use your company’s internal data to uncover unique angles for campaigns. You can also lean on existing content that is “PR-able”
- Quote from Amber: “You’ve got this whole hub of insights, data, and you don’t do anything with it… Sometimes it takes that third party to bring it to life.”
5. Plan for Longevity and Seasonality in Campaigns
Develop campaigns that can be updated annually or biannually for sustained traffic and relevance. Similarly, plan campaigns around predictable seasonal or annual trends to stay ahead of the curve.These were the ones we saw had the most impact on our digital PR and SEO analysis.
- Quote from Amber: “There are ones that we can update on a yearly basis… these are things that are going to be consistently updated in terms of tariffs, legislation, and so on.”
- Quote from Amber: “We know that people are going to worry about what time the boiler is going to come on in the winter… so how do we get ahead of that?”
6. Use Creative Workshops for Ideation
Don’t skimp on brainstorming. Amber and the Verve team have “creativee workshops” or brainstorming sessions to generate ideas, starting broadly and narrowing focus.
- Quote from Amber: “We run creative workshops before we go into ideation. Shoes are always the thing I get them to work on because everybody wears shoes, so it’s a really common topic.”
There’s of course way more, so I highly recommend listening to the full pod!
Transcription
Vince Nero: Hello everyone and welcome to the BuzzStream Podcast. I’m your host Vince Nero and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Amber Carnegie. The creative lead at Verve Search. How you doing, Amber? Thanks for coming.
Amber Carnegie: Hey, thanks for having me.
Vince Nero: Before I get started, I just want to remind everybody to like and subscribe, leave some comments, share with some of your friends.
The more people we can get talking about this stuff and subscribing and watching and following, the more I can have great guests like Amber on. So, smash that like button, share with your buddies, and comment. Thanks. So, Amber and I, we met virtually about On a zoom call. I was and still am. Hopefully, by the time this goes live, I will have published this piece.
I’m working on this content ideation piece, and I was interviewing a lot of different people from different agencies. It’s kind of get different strategies and insights into how people think about content ideation and Amber, you, uh, you Really stood out to me as someone, you know, obviously you’ve been in the digital PR space for a long time and had a really, you know, smart way of thinking about content ideation.
And we got to talking about a bunch of different things and strategies and stuff. And we’ve talked a little bit about hero campaigns. And that sparked some ideas for me that I wanted to really dig into that. And, you know, me personally, when I was with Siege Media back three, four years ago, I think it was when I left our kind of ideology, I think, with content was go for High average and not home runs.
And hero campaigns to me feel like that kind of approach where it’s a big swing. And sometimes it can be a big swing and miss. And that’s why I think there has, or have been people declaring it dead or not useful or what have you. And we were just talking about this before the pod, like I was. Trying to find those old tweets that I remember or like blog posts.
I remember seeing people talking about this and there’s been this ongoing debate. So I thought, why not bring you in your boots on the ground and and you really, like I said, super smart about content creation and strategic mindset and everything. So yeah, let’s get into hero campaigns.
Amber Carnegie: Sweet. Just to get some compliments.
This is great.
Vince Nero: Yeah, yeah. We can end it there. So, okay. Let’s start, I guess, general, like if people don’t know what a hero campaign is, and let’s talk about what a hero campaign is in your eyes and, uh, how that compares to other strategies, I guess.
What is a hero campaign?
Amber Carnegie: I think I’ll probably try and cover that, but also that Hero campaigns have changed quite a lot in the terms of the digital PR space.
So I started my career in marketing in general about eight years ago. Um, So recently I was at a conference called Sheffield DM and David White from Connective3 did a really interesting talk about the new age of link building. I think he called it. I can’t remember completely, but I can send you a link after.
And part of that was about looking at the history of digital PR and it gave me like this really reflective moment of, especially around what heroes are and what they. What they are now compared to them. So I feel like to give people who might not know what a hero campaign is I think in terms of digital PR years ago, it would have been something with mass appeal great digitals Sometimes its own website web or micro site a unique build there’s like something that’s a bit more eye catching and I think Back then we were looking at something, just one keyword, one area on a site.
And it didn’t necessarily, or we hoped that the client’s team, brand team were thinking about these other things, but I don’t think we were necessarily enforcing it and I think the hero campaign then sort of got wedged into whatever we were hoping, like I always say, if I have to explain my job to someone who might not know, I say like, we just feed Google and actually we were almost, we were just pivoting what the campaigns were.
To feed whatever we needed for whatever update had happened. And then I think we’ve got back to a space now where brand and, uh, digital PR and SEO are all working together more. And in terms of just link building, we’re not just thinking of it. Then we’re thinking about this change in the customer journey.
So they’re not just searching for something online anymore. We need to be able to see that campaign across search, social. Um, if they’re seeing it in paid, are they seeing it reflected in the content that comes after it online? So I think heroes have really changed in that. They can’t just be one thing anymore.
They have to be supported by this internal, not internal, but entire strategy around it. So I think in terms of what is a hero now, it needs to be an idea that is not only strong enough to be that mass white light appeal. It needs to be something that is broken down into that entire strategy that if a customer sees.
part of the campaign somewhere else and falls on it in line, they’re still gonna respect that and see that content and know that it’s respectable, it’s trusted, and they know they’re at the right place to make that decision for purchase or service. Um, so sort of gone all the way around, but I think what a hero is, is massively changed.
So it’s hard to say. Is it done? Because I think they’re very different to what they were previously known as. So it’s that when I see those articles, I think, well, maybe they were in their first iteration, but as they are now totally different.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I mean, it even makes me think of like the skyscraper technique, like when that first came out.
In 2011 or whatever it was, you know, it was this idea of like building something that was 10 times better than something that was else that was out there. And then, you know, like 10 years later, Brian Dean put out a new like skyscraper technique 2. 0 to be like, this kind of still works, but not in the way that it used to.
And I think it’s. It’s so important to kind of evolve your strategies with the times. And, um, this multi touch kind of, uh, collaborating with all the different avenues or, or arms of a company seems to be where you’re going to have the most success. You can’t necessarily just be the link building team.
We’re just going to do link building. You’re going to have success. If you partner with the pay team, the social team and what have you. That sounds like what, what you’re getting at.
Yeah. Yeah. When you think of hero campaigns, like at Verve, when you’re working with clients, is it the kind of thing where, you know, I mean, do you even think about it as a hero campaign now?
Or is it like, this is the strategy for digital PR campaign? You know, like, is it somewhat of a misnomer or like, does it kind of pigeonhole it if you’re just calling it a hero campaign?
Is the term “hero campaign” a misnomer now?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So sometimes it depends on, I love saying it depends on these things. Um, it depends on what they’ve come to us for.
So it might be, Hey, we’ve already got this wider scope going on and we think there’s some content in there that could be PRable in that way. And it’s almost like actually we need an expert to come into this wider strategy we’ve already got going on and we will help there. But when it’s the full, um, full strategy approach, we’ll actually break it down heroes, maybe mid tier, more blog size campaigns with smaller, maybe regional data focus, then we’ll be looking at the always on or reactive.
I think every agency’s got a different name for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then also, what’s their content strategy looking like at the moment? Have we got any suggestions of what could be in there? Or can we provide any? And it’s also like that, that midpoint of this is what we think should be happening.
What are you already doing? And can we sort of become an extension of a team rather than an agency. Um, so I think that’s much more the direction our strategy is going in with clients and working sort of that hero down. So I think rather than the idea of putting all your eggs in a hero basket, you’ve got all this other strategy that it’s going to support it.
And like I said, that customer journey, if they’re seeing it from the hero, or if they’re seeing it from expert commentary and reactive that stories or narratives full circle. Always. So I think that’s the way it’s moving. Might not be the same for other agencies, but that’s how we’re feeling on our end.
Vince Nero: So it sounds like it starts is, is what you’re saying. It kind of starts with the hero campaign and then you kind of iterate outward, uh, with, with kind of the different, like, this is going to be the social wing of, of this hero campaign.
Okay. I mean, you, you kind of touched on this already and it, It sounds like Verve is kind of maybe mitigating for some of these risks, but what are the potential downsides of a hero campaign?
What are the potential downsides of a hero campaign?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So it’s, a lot of it is budget build, um, things that some of the biggest things we come across are, um, things that we can’t do with the client site. I think a lot of people will have the same opinion as me is that some of the biggest businesses in the world have the worst backends. It shocks to know how many sites that you can’t do things on.
And that’s when we really have to look at the hero and see, is it valuable in that state? Are we going to have to approach it in different ways? The other mitigations with it are. Actually, sometimes that’s the risk with digital PR. You can’t always know that it’s going to work. We’ve seen like, like I’ve said, um, we’ve seen these waves of sort of the digital PR timeline where things were like, we know if we do this, we’re going to get 800 links.
And I think if we did them now, we’d maybe get one.
The risk of the job, I guess.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this: I’ve been preaching this idea of the value of links changing.
Lately, you know, there have been fewer journalists and fewer sites offering helpful content updates, which has decimated many of these lower tier mid-tier sites.
Do you feel like a link number, like a target link number for a campaign has kind of gone down and the value of a link has gone up?
Has the target number of links for a hero campaign shrunk?
Amber Carnegie: A hundred percent. We are working on more. I feel like as well, I keep seeing these people saying like, we don’t work off KPIs anymore. And I think, then I get into conversations with clients, I’m like, well, we might vary on those KPIs, but some still need to be measurable.
And other measurables are coming in, but we still want to be looking at relevancy. So often we’ll have like, A list of sites that we want to approach and hit or like, um, a DA level that’s always, that’s always part of it of like we’re hitting those quality sites, but also the relevancy. So it might be, Hey, we don’t want any of the top tier press, but we really want to hit these really niche, um, energy sites that nobody else has covered on.
Um, so it is, it completely varies client by client, but I do think the value of a link has gone up in the terms of people are really. And clients are getting much more focused on what they want to achieve with the PR strategy, rather than sort of what, again, five, 10 years ago, it was just kind of a mass, mass upload.
I think that goes hand in hand with Google updates but also comes back to the root of everything. There’s a customer at the bottom of that, and we want to be where they are essentially. So, I think that’s definitely a massive change in the past eight to ten years.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah.
I’m so glad you said that. I mean, right. I also think that’s why some of the older digital PR got a bad rap. Um, and still might in some people’s eyes, is that you get some of these campaigns that are highly successful, quote unquote, because they have a lot of links, but then you start digging into them, and you’re like, this isn’t relevant to your customer at all.
Right. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Like, how do you judge relevancy when you’re kind of thinking about it? Oh, yes. This, this Question to, I think it was James Brockbank from DigitalLoft.
If your customer is everybody, right? Like you’re a shoe company or something. Your ideal customer could be anyone from 18 to 60 or something.
And they’re going to spend their time wherever online. Does that mean you could just create wherever, like create content that fits wherever, you know, you’re going to get links from all these different places. So like, technically that’s where your customer is. Yeah.
What does that relevancy mean to you?
Amber Carnegie: That’s really interesting as well because there are so many relevancy conversations happening at the moment.
And I’m so intrigued on how people measure it, um, when bespoke, especially down to, like you say, The shoes is one of, um, we run, I can probably get into this in a little bit, but we run creative workshops before we go into ideation.
So we run a creative workshop with our client first and shoes are always the thing that I get them to work on because everybody wears shoes. So it’s a really sort of common topic to hit on, but with relevancy, we start, especially when we’re ideating, we actually use a term that we call like the, the line of relevancy.
So we start off with our main topic, which could be shoes, but then we go through the client strategy. We look at new product or service releases and their audience base. So, I think as we move more from keywords into audience insights, we’re going to definitely break down more into where audience members are going to be.
So it might be that everyone wears shoes, but are these a specific trainer brand? Or are these like, um, I can’t remember the name, but like the super sustainable, uh, Running shoes that like multi feet. Are we like, and that’s how we’re going to sort of break down relevancy and actually look, okay, are they super eco-conscious?
What kind of websites are they going to be looking at and really break down that audience rather than just everyone wears shoes and everything, despite the fact that it could be so widespread. Um, and I think that’s where strategy behind that ideation comes from. And knowing that we’re going to be getting the right customers in the right places.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I love that kind of. Digging even further into it. And yeah, there’s always going to be a niche the further you dig in. How do you recommend to say it’s a new site, right? Like, um, small business, I feel like small businesses and startups are the two that have the hardest time. Running digital PR campaigns.
Um, so even if you’re talking about like a hero campaign for them, what are some ways that they can think about building a digital PR campaign from their audience up?
Can smaller companies benefit from hero campaigns?
Amber Carnegie: That’s really interesting because one of my favorite things about smaller companies or startups is their stakeholder signoff is much shorter.
Um, so the ability to do sort of more with their internal data, um, they are closer to the day to day, so they can sort of advise on, you know, what where they want to hit and sort of what they can approach with. So I think that’s the biggest things for sort of smaller or startups is short stakeholders.
You could be looking at a larger hero campaign using internal data, but when we could be supporting that with expert commentary that could be turned around quite quickly because we’ve got such a small chain between us. Um, and also the, when they’re that small, they probably have really great. Insight on the onsite content and what could be a blog could have been a hero and looking into what’s inspired that.
And usually we go like, Oh, we could elevate this and re approach it the next year or whatever like that. So that’s one of my favorite things about the smaller businesses or less exciting industries are usually the things that could be really. PRable or pitchable are often, often oversight, like have less oversight because people don’t think about them.
And we come in and we go, Oh, that’s excellent. We should, we should do that now. So yeah, one of my favorite things about the smaller and startups.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I, yeah, I like that idea of, of coming in and kind of sounds like you do that a lot at Verve. It’s like identifying interesting pieces, but maybe aren’t/weren’t giving enough focus or love at the start. And so is that something that you do a lot with clients as kind of deliverables?
How often do you work with existing content vs building new campaigns?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So often it’s reclamation on stuff that already exists, or we’ll come in and say like, look, you’ve got this whole hub of insights, data, and you don’t do anything with it.
Can we, can we look at it in a new way? Can we approach it and develop it into a different visual? How, like, it’s almost like you’ve got some amazing stats, but they’re not being utilized in the right way. And it sometimes takes that third party to bring it to life. Um, so we have often done that or, um, used it as a strategy alongside, um, Our hero campaigns as well.
Vince Nero: Yeah, I love that. Um, one of the things I made a note, you were talking, you talked about, you know, having these campaigns play in, play with other areas of the site, uh, or areas of the business. I’m sorry, like the social team, the paid team. Can you talk a little bit about navigating that or kind of coordinating that?
Because small businesses, like you said, like sometimes they don’t have as much red tape.
When you get into bigger businesses, the ones that are, you know, fun to play with, if you get into Nike or something, it’s like, that’s a tangled web. I’m sure you’re not going to get as much buy in to run a campaign across all the avenues.
So can you talk a little bit about kind of the messaging there and like how you’ve broken down some of those barriers?
How do you recommend coordinating digital PR campaigns with social media teams?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah, I don’t know if we’d say broken down’s the word, but prepared for them is probably the the strategy. So, um, from ideate, from pitching the ideas, we often already provide mock ups within the guidelines and styling.
Um, so when, That’s our biggest thing of when they do sign it off, we write, okay, from that point, yes, we’re working with our contact, but is our contact therefore doing all the additional steps that we need them to do? And how can we support them doing those steps? Um, so often the big thing is regulations, um, and tone of voice.
Guidelines, although the bigger the business, I always think the less the tone of voice, um, seems to be set in stone, but it usually sits with a person. Um, so it’s making sure that we can support our person on their side of the business and getting in front of those people. So yeah, I’d say rather than breaking down, it’s preparing.
So from that first iteration of the idea, we usually have example mock ups. And then as soon as we, at each stage, we’re sort of, it’s, it’s Backing that up again, saying like, Oh, we got any further? Like we’re still working on that hero. We’ll be creating those pieces as we go. If the business need to, sometimes their teams say like, Oh, we’ll do them.
That’s fine, which is great as well, but we’re still working with them. So yeah, I wouldn’t say breaking them down and saying, “Be prepared.” And, um, just remembering that. We’re busy on our side, but the client—we’re maybe 10 percent of the client’s life, and they’ve got a million other things going on.
So making that as easy as possible for everyone is usually our best bet.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I mean, that brought back some like PTSD for me. Like what about those clients that kind of relying on them to do some stuff, you know, the success of your campaign or a big piece of it. Relied on them to create the social posts that was going to help, you know, tie into whatever, and they’re just dragging their feet.
You know, how, how do you mitigate some of that? Where it’s like a lot of this is on the client. The success hinges on the client’s involvement and they’re just not. They’re not able to do it for whatever reason. And so, you know, like you said, we’re only 10 percent of their bandwidth right now.
How do you work with a client when you rely on them for data or assets?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. Again, it’s been being consistent, like having that empathy that we don’t know what else is going on in the business.
So I think first instance, it’s like, what’s the wider picture? What are their, what’s stopping them from getting this through on their side? Um, and. Is it worth spending our time and energy on if it’s not going to work in social, for example? Okay. We’ve still got that allowance of resource. Can we move it to paid if we’ve not thought about that area?
So it’s kind of figuring out what’s going on internally, what they’re, what’s stopping them internally before we can reapproach it from our end. Because sometimes there are things that you just can’t control. They might have a massive social campaign about to go live and they don’t want anything else going on with it, or they might have email, an email marketing campaign and.
We just have to make sure that we’re flexible, I guess, and one of our Biggest benefits of being an agency and sort of being that extension of a team is that we have the time and resource to pivot for them. Um, so often we will just sometimes have meets and we’ll say, okay, we can’t do the social assets anymore.
What can we do with the video? Can we do a paid campaign instead? So yeah, it’s just kind of. Having the empathy that there must be something else going on.
Vince Nero: Yeah, no, that’s great. That’s great to hear. Yeah. I love hearing when agencies work almost as like another arm of the company that they’re working with.
Right. Like it’s just so important to have it feel that way versus like, Oh, where’s the business delivering a service. Right. That those are the, the agencies that I’ve talked to who are most successful. I think. Go at it in that way. So, uh, another thing I wanted to ask you about was the kind of like broader SEO benefits of this, right?
So we talked a little bit in the beginning about how. Hero campaign has changed, right? Like it used to just be, here’s this one big thing.
And sometimes it wasn’t super relevant. Maybe it was relevant, but like really the main KPI was links in this new kind of evolution or like evolved hero campaign.
What are the SEO benefits of hero campaigns?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So. I think I’ve already spoke about sort of this tiered strategy approach where we start with the hero and maybe have some mid tier size blogs, reactive or always on pieces and then sort of the expert commentary sometimes that comes into the always on. So the idea is thinking like, okay, what’s already linking into that hero or is it sitting within a certain page, uh, Sort of category within the site and what do we want to do with that?
And it’s sometimes even as simple as like, you’ve got all these blog pages and none of it interlinks, and actually we’re going to bring this full circle by bringing in a hero campaign that sort of brings it all the way around. And then it’s also talking about, okay, when we break this down to the blog content and the always on, where are people, where are we directing people?
Is it to a homepage? Is it to another category? And it’s about. That relevancy that everyone keeps talking back to and is the common sense of, is the customer going to stay on the page? Is the customer going to make a purchase? If we’ve driven them from like social to here, are they getting the right answer to what the post was they were looking for?
And I think that’s sort of that full circle again, it’s kind of replicated in every area. In digital PR, in SEO, in brand, are we doing everything we can to make sure that they’re in the right place at the right time for the right thing? And I think that replicates in the SEO strategy within that as well.
Um, so hopefully from that things should all be successful, but I know that’s not always, not always the case. Um, and we get a lot of sort of technical like issues that go in there. Other side of it as well, and hopefully if we can pair sort of digital PR with brand and maybe the technical SEO side of it, and like actually look at the health of the links behind them and anything that’s not quite right within the content, we can sort of bring more of a holistic approach over everything rather than sort of, sort of picking the smaller things.
Like I said, it’s not just we do digital PR anymore. It’s that wider. Why is it sitting here? Why are we doing this? And I hope that benefits all of the SEO within that.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s so many aspects to it, like that you just touched on that for you to get the full SEO benefits of these campaigns.
It’s like, there’s technical, there’s probably design, you know, UX stuff, page speed. Like I remember when I was with Siege, we used to have something in the contracts with our clients that was like, you know, these are the expectations. These are the KPIs that we’re, you know, uh, aiming to hit, but there’s also an expectation that you maintain like on page SEO, best practices, site speed, you know, like all that technical stuff.
What are some of the big things to look at for, you know, say they’re an agency or say you are, uh, your own site, right. And you’re doing digital PR campaigns like these. What are some of the big things that you typically look at with Verve?
What things need to be in place to get the most benefits out of clients’ digital PR campaigns?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So luckily at Verve, because we’re in sort of a wider group of agencies, we can rely on other agencies to support us.
Big flags like that come up, and something we’ve taken notice of is how sites are built. So I think I’ve said before, it can sometimes be the wildest thing when you go to uploading and someone goes, Oh, actually, we can’t put static images on a site.
One of the biggest things we’re looking at is actually what companies are capable of and asking a lot more technical questions about what that back end looks like.
Who are the stakeholders for that?
Are there sprints that we need to start working in before we even think about where we’re going to sit within development?
And also like the history of link building. So sometimes you can, we sort of look into the back end of how, what have they been doing previously?
Was their strategy paid?
Were they just buying, like, five or six years ago? Were they part of that trend of buying loads of guest links?
So, that’s part of it as well. And it might not be necessarily a red flag to, to, for something that was done quite a few years ago, but it’s definitely going to have impact on how we approach things.
And maybe part of, it wouldn’t be a KPI, but something we would suggest is to start, that could be another, an entire project in itself to look at and see how that is actually affecting the site, so I don’t think that answers your question directly, but it’s a lot of the different elements that are coming to it.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I mean, Right. Maybe there is no easy answer to this because so many things go into it. I, yeah, I like to think that people are aware of their site’s limitations, but to your point, like, they usually don’t, right? Like the fact that, oh, yeah, we can’t host images, you’re like, Like, what, you know, like, that’s a bit but and you hired us to do digital PR.
Um, that all makes sense. Um, the other thing that I’ve heard you say a lot is kind of the structure of the campaigns. Um, and obviously, it’s not just a hero campaign. There’s all these ancillary. There’s blog posts. There’s reactive. And, you know, I’ve talked to many different agencies. Now, in the past, like, 9 months, I’ve been here with buzzstream.
I feel like everybody does it slightly differently. Um, obviously, but so I’m always interested to hear how different agencies kind of structure their deliverables or whatever you want to call it, you know, and I’ll give you an example, like with Siege. Back in the day for me, it was just, like I said, we, we kind of went for that like middle approach, right?
Like not swinging huge, but we would do like four blog posts a month for them. And, like, each of them would get a certain amount of outreach that we do. And we’d have just like link KPIs. We got more sophisticated and like started bringing in organic traffic, you know, and, um, keyword driven stuff. But so it sounds like with Verve, there’s always going to be.
Kind of a multi tiered approach. Is that the approach that you take with every client? Is that something you recommend to everybody where it’s like a hero campaign or supportive posts? Supportive, reactive, you know, always on social and paid. Like that kind of sounds like that’s everything, right?
Do you need a mixed digital PR approach or can you rely on just hero campaigns?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So it’s kind of, yeah, there’s like holistic all round approach.
Um, I wouldn’t say we always have the social and paid.
It’s almost like these are additions that could be done with the content because obviously not everybody has social and paid.
Every budget possible, or it’s like you can split your teams and doing that. But yeah, so usually how we approach it is we’re looking at those heroes and sort of maybe, can a series of blog content support them and then something that we also bring in with the heroes is.
Okay, we’ve got this data, but for example, if something gets updated, but we can’t update the page due to budgets constraints, could we do reactive? So for example, we did like sweariest TV shows and when the, um, final of succession was on, we like ranked that, but we couldn’t update the onsite content. So it was like, actually, can we do reactive, but as updating to content that already exists online.
Um, so that’s sort of an approach we’ve had. Some clients we can update as they happen, which is even better, but it’s almost that reactive approach to our new films come out, how can we do this with it? Um, so we often think of it like that, but also terms that would sit.
I guess the way we have to approach it is our quite long stakeholder chains.
For some agencies, like my previous agency, we could turn things around in an hour.
Now, we’re looking at a couple of days to do anything, which is not the meaning of reactive, really, is it? So we actually have more of a proactive approach where we’re actually looking at seasonality or trends that the business has.
So we’re looking, asking people, okay, at what time of year do you see light searches for this go up on site?
And we’re being more proactive in preparing expert commentary from the client in that way. So it’s almost pre thought reactive. We know that people are going to worry about what time the boiler, like the first time the boilers are going to come on in the winter, they’re worried about, um, at what temperature the pipes are going to freeze.
And like, those are the sort of generic pieces that come out every year without fail. So how do we get ahead of that? Um, so it’s, that’s how we sort of approach reactive, proactive within that strategy block. But then we, it also means that we’ve got leverage. That we have the resource in house that when something does happen, we can put someone on it and they have the resource to push it through that stakeholder chain because we’ve already done the pre work on the other things.
So it’s kind of, um, we’re doing the forework to be able to be reactive when we can, but like I say, we do have much longer stakeholder chains that, um, make life quite difficult sometimes.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. It’s like reactive light.
You’re not quite reactive, but yeah, not quite. Super productive. Um, yeah, so you touched on something I want, I want to make sure I understand and maybe you can help give an example for people of like an idea of like, here’s a hero campaign, hero idea, hero content, and hero supportive blog posts.
Yeah, let’s start there. Like, what can you give an example of what that might look like?
What does a hero campaign strategy look like (vs individual piece)?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah, I’m trying to think without like, putting a client name in. Yeah,
Vince Nero: I mean, maybe, could we use like the, the boy, like, Maybe the main, the hero campaign is, or like use the, the, the swear words in
Amber Carnegie: Um, so I’ll go with sort of the boiler one where we were looking at, you can have a look at like boiler usage, what that’s like, um, we’ve maybe would start with a tool that would be the hero of looking at what your boiler is going to cost you for a year.
What’s your CO2 output. Um, could you be saving money by changing to, um, A tariff base where, um, so for example, you use it at midnight more. I don’t know why you would do that with a boiler, but this is my example. Apparently looking at that, so we’d probably have like a hero or a tool like that, that would sort of a user would be drawn to that would also have on site the content blogs that would be related to like how to reduce boiler usage.
What’s the optimum water temperature to make sure your bills stay consistent.
Tools and tips like that as the content on the site, then we would also have expert commentary on the page that would relate to that and also would be outreached with additional points.
So a sort of press person person journalist. There we go A journalist might come back to you and say hey, I want to do more on this, but I want it specifically for This area of the country, because I’m regional. Um, so we would then find that data and come back to them on that. So that was kind of a really poor example of sort of a hero tool, mid content, uh, mid level blog content, expert commentary, and the reactive that’s already in there as well, without telling your client name.
Vince Nero: So are you, are you actively building and pitching? That like main tool, for instance?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah.
Vince Nero: Okay. And then for like the blog posts, it sounds like those are kind of more planned. To be maybe like tied to seasonality, tied to major events or something, you know, boilers and movies were that terrible example, but you’re kind of using those blog posts as kind of pitching vehicles for like reactive.
Amber Carnegie: Yeah, there are always like additional leverage, like you might be looking at the health of your boiler, but you might also want to like those things you could, you could use the tool to find out, but you might reach it because of that content. Um, it’s kind of, we do that. We can either work alongside the client with our internal content team, or we sort of say, what’s your upcoming content strategy is this, this, and this, and that, because it would be really beneficial for us.
Um, so it kind of works. Both ways, we don’t always create it, but like I said, we like to sort of be that extension of the team where we can help if they do need the additional resource for it.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. And is that stuff sometimes also search driven?
Amber Carnegie: Yes, a hundred percent. We’re looking at long tail keywords to see what people are looking for.
And if it doesn’t exist on site, especially when we’re ideating and we use those key, like long tail searches to look and that it’s not been responded to on site, it’s definitely on us to, as the agency to be saying them having a miss it, like there’s a massive gap missing in their content.
Vince Nero: I think a challenge that a lot of people run into, say you do create like a hero campaign that’s maybe some type of like calculator, right?
Like or tool, like you said, like, um, remember we did something a long time ago about like the energy usage in your house and specifically like they call phantom energy where it was like, if you have something plugged in, but it’s not on, you know, it’s on like standby mode. So you could like put in all of your, like, how, how many light bulbs you have, how many computers do you have plugged in?
And it would all calculate, you know, so those types of assets for me, at least back in the day, I mean, we were pitching a ton of infographics and like, that was an easy thing to pitch because it was a standalone thing that, you know, a blogger or journalist could pitch. But you couldn’t really do that with like a tool, right?
Cause it’s an interactive, it’s like a stand standalone thing. Um, so it sounds like the blog posts kind of help, uh, support those like call them like less pitchable assets. Is that kind of the thought process there?
Does building supportive, pitchable blog posts make it easier to get links to a tool?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. Sometimes they’re less exciting and they’re, they’re, they’re giving people really important information that they’ve come to find.
That’s why we’ve created a tool in the first place: People are searching for it. Um, but the results aren’t always exciting. Also, because it’s people’s personal data, we’re not necessarily collating that into data that’s going to be used for the campaign.
So yeah, it’s sometimes leveraged to get people to the site, but also, um, this is where we start to see the more niche companies, like niche press, covering the tools and things because, you know, it’s fitting their niche 100%, but what is interesting is that we are finding that there are ones that we can update on a yearly basis.
So these are things that are going to be consistently updated in terms of like tariffs, in terms of legislation that’s updated. Um, there are things on site that are going to continually be refreshed and reused.
So hopefully they’re not just going to be around for one PR cycle and sort of fall into the back of the website.
They are things that hopefully should be maintained and focused on continuously, hopefully.
The blogs do help with the coverage, but, um, I think once it gets those legs moving, it becomes its own thing, which is really interesting.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Fantastic transition, by the way, Amber, into kind of what I think we initially thought about talking about on this podcast, which was updating these.
And, and cause I think I did maybe did like a LinkedIn post about, uh, that kind of tracked the organic search boosts. I saw that when people updated hero campaigns, year after year, they were doing the same campaigns.
You keep it on the same URL, but you’re just updating it.
And you could see like, you know, they would probably repitch it, but even sometimes without repitching it, you would just see these organic traffic boosts because all of a sudden Google seeing this fresh content, you know, it’s, it’s updated.
So, um, I’d like to get your sense of like how to identify the campaigns to update. And then specifically like what you update in the campaign.
How do you identify hero campaigns to update and what do you update?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. Uh, so another thing that we quite predominantly work with is we have an exceptional data team who are incredible at what they do. And one of the big things that we look at is when we’re doing updatable pages that can be refreshed is can, are the sources.
Going to be updated yearly or bi yearly, and is there still going to be a narrative within that story that we want to tell and which bits do we want to update? So a lot of those sources are things like yearly government data or, um, things that happen regularly. So like the census updates and, um, also a lot of the stuff we work with are, um, FOIs.
So as much as anybody can go out and do that work, it’s a pretty hefty bit of work to do and it’s getting harder and harder. Um, for digital PR to do this on a mass scale. So those are the sort of big three that we look for with an idea of actually, can we re approach this year on year? And sometimes it’s not always the first thought when you were having a hero.
Um, it could be that we’re sort of looking at the date and thinking, gosh, we could do this again next year because the story is going to be completely different. Um, so that’s kind of. How we identify the campaigns to update. It’s not always at the start. It could be sort of mid review, um, through, or even after the first year of ideation and we go, actually, we should do this again.
Um, so I think that kind of answers how we’ve identified the campaigns. Also the sources we update within them.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Um, and for US listeners who don’t know, this was something I had to learn myself, the FOI, Freedom of Information Act. Um, can you explain that a little bit? Cause that’s something we don’t have in the U S.
What is the Freedom of Information Act?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So it’s an, uh, we can apply to, I think councils, police, police stations, basically any government body with a series of questions, um, according to their data that they keep and we can, they have to supply that data. I think it’s in within 28 days. Don’t hold me to it though. Um, because this used to be done all through email and they’re slowly changing it to like a form system, which is making it harder to do en masse.
This is harder to do for national campaigns. Um, and if they do, they can say no, because it’s going to be too much resource or, um, if it passes the date. So. It’s sort of a way that you can get interesting regionalized data, but you have to be very big learning from my eight years of doing this is specifying how you want that data to be received because that will determine how long it takes you to analyze it.
Because each council or police entity could come back to you with a different form of data. So things like that, I like big learnings within that. So yeah, hopefully that covers basically any government body. You can ask,
Vince Nero: yeah, that’s really interesting and adds such a interesting strategic layer to coming up with these data studies.
And I have my like spreadsheet of sources, you know, that, uh, free data sources or paid data sources, but, um, being able to access, I mean, I, I guess in the U S there’s probably areas where you can just straight up ask people and just. see if they’ll get back.
But yeah, with the UK, like they have to give you the data, right?
Amber Carnegie: Yes, they are required to either give it, or provide a reason not to. So it makes it quite clear when you’re processing that, like not available, um, makes it very clear for your methodology.
So yeah, I’ve had some areas in the States that will, um, have a similar process, but obviously not consistently across it. So it’s not something we’ve been able to apply to a US campaign.
Vince Nero: Yeah. And then maybe you could just speak to kind of the results that you see from this kind of updating, uh, campaigns approach.
What are some results you’ve had from updating a previous campaign’s data?
Amber Carnegie: Yeah. So one of my favorite things about doing this is that they sort of snowball. Um, so I looked into two campaigns we’ve been doing. I think one of them since 2019 was the first one and we’ve been doing them yearly or bi yearly since.
And they’ve Following the sort of conversation of that, the sort of value of a link, we saw like some years 50 to a hundred, then like 80, then sort of down to 50 again, but they’re still up there. Like that’s a really good number for a hero as well. When we’re seeing just that as, as a hero on its own. But what’s interesting is we’ve, as we’ve had that ability to build on it year on year, we’ve been driven more insights and more commentary because we’ve made the climb.
Even though they are an expert within their industry, we’ve sort of bolstered that even further. So because they’re updating it yearly, journalists are seeing that and they’re coming to us for like additional commentary on what we’re doing. So one of my favorite ones we do is looking at empty homes within the UK, how many empty homes there are, what tax that’s giving the government.
Um, and basically we try to find out who could actually be homed. Or housed anybody who was on the council housing register in the UK to be actually could they be living in these homes and looking at the homeless epidemic within the UK. So that was really beneficial. We’ve got some really high impact links from that, which I think.
are more beneficial than some of the previous year’s bigger, bigger press that we’ve got. So being able to amplify our campaigns year on year and sort of bolster the client with that has been even more beneficial. I think from just, rather than just being like, look, we’ve, look, Google, we’ve refreshed the data.
Actually those signals coming in as well, I think have been really Really impactful and created some amazing results. And hopefully we can continue to do that. I hope so.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I mean, and is it just yearly updates or do you look at stuff for monthly? Quarterly?
How often do you update?
Amber Carnegie: We’ve not, there’s the campaigns that we’re working on a minute.
We haven’t worked on anything that’s been so big more than yearly or bi yearly. But we have, um, for example, with some of the film campaigns, we update those sort of quarterly and see what’s been did. And they’re not always every film. Um, a lot of things we work on a specific keyword. So that is cool. It’s kind of like a touch base.
Like, can we touch base on this? We’ve had enough films come out related to X that we can put on this. Um, yeah. So those are the smaller based ones, but yeah, when it comes to sort of government data, house pricing, anything based on like legislation, I think, I can’t remember how often the census is, but like they set, they sort of set the parameters, not us, right,
Vince Nero: right, right.
Yeah. Well, Amber, I don’t want to take up much more of your time here. I know you’re ending your day in the UK, so I really appreciate you coming on and chatting. I’ve gained a new. I think for the hero campaign as it sits in like the larger strategy, or I should call it like hero campaign 2. 0 or something.
Like, um, I really liked your explanation of like how it’s evolved. Cause I think that is something that should hopefully change a lot of people’s minds of, um, how to, to think about digital PR in general. You know, it’s, it’s not, it shouldn’t just be, you know, This singular thing, it should be something that connects to all the aspects of the business.
If you can do that with your, with your client.
Amber Carnegie: If you can do it.
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