Table of Contents
I didn’t know Darren Kingman before chatting with him, but I loved the work he produced at Root Digital, his UK-based digital PR, SEO, and content marketing agency.
So, I used our chat to drill down how Darren and his team generate ideas.
It turns out that much like myself, Darren is a content junkie, always on the lookout for interesting, inspiring content. He then breaks it down to understand what, if anything, he can extract for future campaigns for his clients.
If you’re struggling to create interesting, creative content, this is an episode to pay close attention to.
Content Mentioned in the Post
Darren mentioned a ton of great pieces, which I compiled below:
- ChatGPT Statistics – https://www.tooltester.com/en/blog/chatgpt-statistics/
- Hiring icks – https://rootdigital.co.uk/work/digital-pr-recruitment-campaign-hiring-icks/
- Lying on resumes – https://rootdigital.co.uk/work/american-digital-pr-survey-resume-lies/
- Best digital pr examples – https://rootdigital.co.uk/resources/best-digital-pr-link-building-campaigns/
- Average UK salary – https://rootdigital.co.uk/work/content-marketing-average-uk-salary-case-study/
- Living With Dementia – https://rootdigital.co.uk/work/digital-pr-living-with-dementia-photography/
- Science of scare – https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/
Full Transcript
If you’re interested, here’s the full transcript for you to read and check out for yourself.
Vince: Hello everyone and welcome to the BuzzStream podcast. My name is Vince Nero and I’m delighted to invite Darren Kigman, the founder of Root Digital here to join us on the podcast. How are you doing Darren? I’m doing very well, thank you Vince, yourself? Yeah, doing good, we’re slogging through a hot and humid summer out here on the east coast of we’re
Darren: doing the opposite here in the UK where we’re slogging for a very wet summer.
Vince: Yeah. Before I get into this, I just want to remind everyone to like, and subscribe, we have a newsletter that goes out. The more we can get this stuff out, the better. Great advice from folks like Darren, the more we can keep doing this.
So it’s just a reminder, share with your friends, give us a comment. We’re all very open to answering questions and comments and stuff. So Darren, I, we just, we first met on this podcast, but I’ve been Following you and following your digital big fan of all the stuff that you guys do. I think what kind of sparked us connecting was this LinkedIn post that you had put about a statistics post that you guys did.
And this concept of being the first mover for a client. And I. Start formulating some questions. I like to do these podcasts and kind of like topical, topic focus. And first I was like, Oh, let’s see, let’s dig into some of these like statistics posts and I feel like you can only go so far with some of those.
So looking back at my notes, I was like, man, root digital has really done some awesome stuff. And like, I think we can make this whole podcast about just how you think about content, how you ideate. And so, yeah, let’s start here in this. It’s LinkedIn posts that you talked about.
So being the first mover, and this was a Chat GPT statistics post — let me just let you kind of present what that is and we can go from there.
Darren: Yeah. So this, so first mover content is the idea that you’re kind of working without data. As much as our standard process would. So there’s not really much to go on in terms of, other pieces of content out there that are kind of leading the way and showing you that there are links on offer or that there’s search volume to be to be working with as well.
So, the chat GPT statistics page is kind of, as it sounds kind of a one stop shop for journalists. So, and that’s what the concept. Is of kind of evergreen or inbound link, link asset pages is a one stop shop really for journalists that are searching for a topic that need a reference point for the data that they’re going to be writing about the idea.
generally that you want to work with. And when everything went out the window with this page in particular, is that you, like I just mentioned, you, you really want a couple of things, you want to check box of things that you can point towards to to showcase that there’s going to be an opportunity.
So our standard process would be something along the lines of it’s akin to a keyword research projects where. But from a link building perspective. So you kind of starting with a seed list of keywords. But rather than being, kind of product focused or service focused category page type stuff it’s a statistics style queries that you’re trying to merge with with topics that would be of relevance to your domain or your clients, your client’s website.
So you’re working with kind of statistics, graphs, charts, images, By year by state, merge those with a bunch of topics that are relevant to you. And then you can start to do a keyword reader, typical keyword research process where you’re finding all the search volumes to see whether or not there’s demand, obviously zero doesn’t mean zero, but when you’re doing that scale, you kind of have to start somewhere.
And then what we would typically do would be scrape the top 10 ranking URLs of of all of those SERPs and the number of links that they’ve driven, and then you can start to discern whether or not there’s a link building opportunity for this keyword or this group of keywords. So those are kind of the two main boxes that you want to be, that you want to be checking as well as a couple of other things.
So the two other things that we typically look for in, in these sorts of opportunities are Is the server dominated? So for instance, is there a government website, which typically happens to be the way that they’re soaking up 95 percent of the links. Therefore, you just know that there’s no opportunity as well as can we rank, right?
And that, that can go in a multitude of different directions. A starting point from a data perspective would be the kind of authority of the domain or the authority of the page that you’re up against, which you can, You can extract a scale and work into a spreadsheet. Like I said, with chat GPT statistics, most of that didn’t apply.
There was, I think there was one ranking URL, so we knew we could rank, but there was no search volume and there were no links on offer. So that kind of concept got born out of the fact that We could see journalists were typing, writing about chat GPT it was going, New York Times, BBC, Fortune, people were starting to, there was a buzz starting to happen around it.
And that’s kind of where it came from. And we thought, well, if we’re quick to the game here. We could create a page, become that reference point, and create that cycle where, journalists are writing about this, they need stats they link to us, that becomes self referencing from a ranking perspective.
We’ve got the links, we’ve got a good piece of content, and then we can maintain the position at the SERPs.
Are you surveying people to get chat GPT statistics or are these statistics that you’re finding from various places on the web?
Darren: Yeah.
Various places often. But it’s a combination of secondary and primary research a lot of the time. So sometimes we’ll do a survey, if there’s When we’re mapping out a piece of content like this sometimes there’ll be somebody who’s done an element of the research and that’s already out there.
So one that was critical for the chat GPT page in particular was that we saw a post very early on and that’s kind of what, where we knew that data was. Going to be needed for this topic was the number of days it took Jack chap GPT to meet, to reach a I think it was a million or 10 million users or something like that.
And it was kind of, like the worldwide web down the bottom seven years and it’s your Facebook four years, Instagram, nine months, chap GPT, five days. So that, that research was already there and you kind of had an inkling that journalists are going to start writing about that type of thing.
quickly, but then you take it in other directions as well, like how much energy usage. ChatGPT having a day, what impact is it having on the climate projections in terms of how much money the company is going to earn as well, that stuff was out there. But when you collate it into one place you multiply the number of journalists as well that your page can appeal to.
So then not only have you got the tech writers from the kind of the core subject of what chat GPT is, but you’ve also got. Climate writers talking about the emissions that are being produced or pollution as a result of the technology, as well as finance writers, because they’re writing about, it’s going to make X billion over two years or whatever the projection is.
That research was out there, collate it into one spot and away we went. With others, we do surveys to fit in one of those data points. So if we think, oh, there’s a data point here that doesn’t quite exist, but we think it will be of interest to So these writers will run a survey and we’ll supplement our page with it.
Vince: Yeah, I mean, this, I feel like this strategy, like the, specifically statistics posts, seems to be something that, I mean, now I’m getting, I feel like pitches, email pitches from Agencies that just do that, right? Like they just do statistics posts. So where do you think this could go wrong? Right?
Like I’ve seen, there, there are sites that do this exclusively, but I think there’s a difference between what you’re saying and crafting this kind of thoughtfully versus just here’s a hundreds of Statistics— 150 statistics that I just found randomly on every place on the web. They’re not checking the sources. There’s no story to it.
So tell me a little bit about how these statistics pieces can go wrong.
Darren: Yeah. Well, like you said, you know what, just there, your sources as well, and being transparent about how you’ve worked this out. And that, that goes across these pages as well as creative camp. If you’re transparent in your methodology, Then you’re kind of appealing to the investigative journalism side of what a journalist does.
And that is you’ve done the research you’ve dug into this topic. Here’s where you found this data point. Here’s where you found this one. Here’s how you calculated your data point. And if you’re transparent with that, then that’s, that’s kind of, that’s how a journalist at a New York times, at a BBC, at a Guardian is going to look at it and then be able to use what you’ve got.
If you’re kind of listing it, you don’t have sources, you don’t have a methodology, then they’re working blind faith in terms of what you’ve published, and that’s not ultimately going to work very well for you when you want links from those sorts of applications, at least. There’s other things that you can do as well to kind of minimize something going wrong, like a pitfall of this is is data, like I said.
So search volumes and so on and so forth. Sometimes that doesn’t exist. So you can look into historical data. As well. So, it has like Christmas or Halloween or something like that. Those kind of things come around regularly. You can kind of forecast that a trend is going to happen in those areas.
And therefore, if you’re creating a piece of content like this, you’re kind of minimizing your risk by having something that you’re projecting towards.
When you say something like, it has no search volume, right, how are you confident in pitching something like this?
Darren: Yeah, well, thankfully in this situation the client they were very aware of chatqpt and they were open to it So they kind of knew they had an inclination as well that this there was a buzz around this that was worth jumping on You can get data points, as well. So although search volume might not have caught up yet You can look at the number of Posts or articles that are going live on this topic, just by doing a Google search.
Yeah, so if you confine it to a period of time, so, if it’s a super hot topic, the last seven days, last 24 hours, something like that, how many articles have gone live talking about this topic? And then compare that to the previous seven days or 24 hours.
And you specifically look at news articles.
Darren: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Use the news article on Google search and then do that. I think it’s tools, drop down timeframe. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a tool in a way that you can use, but that gives you in terms of how can you be confident putting this forward to a client? Really a client needs data, right?
They want to see that. Okay, cool. If you invest your time and effectively their money into doing this thing, is it going to give us links? Is it going to give us an ROI? Bye. So. And you can’t just say, well, I think this is going to work. So if you’ve got that data, if you’ve got a data point like that, which isn’t as forthcoming when it’s a first mover content style piece, there are things you can do like that to give you a bit of a a direction, at least for the client to, to get on board with.
Vince: Yeah. I was going to ask, I guess, too, is, I don’t know. Do you use something like Google trends? Like, are there other tools that help you find trends like that? Outside of, I guess that’s step one, right? Is identifying the trends.
So where and how do you identify these trends outside of the reporters talking about it?
Darren: Yeah. So. Well, like you said, search volume is kind of normally my number one place to see whether or not demand exists on a topic and that can be creative campaigns as well as evergreen opportunities as well. Right. So like I mentioned before, Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s day, there’s going to be a, there’s going to be a spike, but in that nature, trends can also be a curse as well because everybody else.
In the digital PR space is also jumping on these things. So trends, it can be a multiplier, but it can also mean that you’re up against it in terms of the journalist inbox. So you really have to find a way to cut through, but yeah, so keywords everywhere is a tool that I use that just gives me an overlay on Google search in terms of the demand for a keyword over, possible.
Five years or something that I’m looking at. Reddit is for me, it’s like a, I personally read it. So I think keeping your ear to the ground is just essential in digital PR as well and again, creative campaigns, evergreen assets. That’s a place to go. X, Twitter, what’s trending.
That’s going to be, that’s going to be a signal too. So there’s various different tools that you can use in order to identify trends, but I would say be careful because other people might be going after them too.
Vince: Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that because I think that’s an interesting problem to have it’s I feel like when I ideate, I’m always thinking of that kind of like, where can this go wrong?
Right? And the fact that other people are going to be doing this can be a big reason to dissuade me from doing something that so like, how do you go about it?
Is it a matter of coming up with an angle that, nobody else is going to go after, like, getting really niche into some specific broad topic?
Sometimes.
Darren: Yeah. I mean, we’ve had that scenario where we thought we’ve got a topic where we were going to, I think it was last year, actually, we were doing a campaign around Christmas and it was Christmas markets. So obviously journalists are going to start writing about Christmas. It’s coming. We were researching months in advance for scams.
It was like how many people are being picked, pick pocketed, the rising scams around Christmas markets and stuff like that. And I think it was two weeks before our campaign went live, somebody else’s went live, and we saw it being written about in Time Out and everywhere else.
It’s like, damn, and that is just the risk, sometimes you can think that you’ve got a unique angle and then somebody else just Picture to the post and then you don’t what I tend to look for is less, less along the lines of, what, where is the trend, what’s coming up, but the vast majority of the content we do is more like what’s the social kind of undercurrent of the news and what has a longer term.
timeframe that we can hook into. Cause if a trend comes and goes and you have a situation like that, thankfully we did spin it. We had a way of, we had a way of doing it. So I can’t remember what we did, but we found a way of doing it at a delayed timeframe, which enabled us to generate some links, but if you focus on more of the undercurrent, Rather than the trend, because if you miss it, you’re gone.
Then you’ve got a content that has more longevity as a longer timeframe to it. So, things like homelessness or, a property housing crisis, things of debt in national debts, that kind of stuff. That’s it’s trending, but it’s been trending for years. So if you look over a longer time horizon, then you’ve got something that’s not going to peak on a day like Valentine’s day or something like that.
And you’re going to have more success because you’ve got more longevity to it.
So when you start with a client, do you try to identify all those trends where they could play in?
Darren: Not necessarily. No. So like that will come or elements of that will become clear through ideation just as you start to dig into, Oh, this is what competitors are down or you might already have an idea when you’re talking to a client, you think, I think this is really going to work for them.
So you’ve got a bit of a bit of a steer, but yeah, it’s not for us. We don’t do your kind of any kind of big research piece. When we start working with a client that will become clear, we’ll have a kickoff. Talk about, what have you done in the past? What don’t you want to talk about as well?
Because obviously you’ve got to stay away from certain topics. But then you start to dig into what have other people done? What’s worked in this space. Or we’ve worked in that industry, if it’s the travel or something, or finance, nine times out of 10, the digital PR has already worked in that space previously, and they kind of know what’s going on.
So you’ll have a steer from the get go most of the time.
Vince: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit more about that because I like this idea of I’m always a big fan of looking at what other people are doing. Kind of trying to break it down and figure out what I like about it and what, what works about it. I know, I’m reading through some of your case studies in how you think and ideate about some of these for some of these clients, there was one in particular that you created a campaign around hiring icks, right?
Like putting this in quotes. And you said that this was based off of just some coverage you saw about, it was on like Yahoo about LinkedIn profile icks, like things that. Turn people off.
So how do you use other content that you see out there as a springboard for an idea?
Darren: Yeah. It was a, it was an interesting one because it kept on coming up in ideation for a couple of different people.
They would say, Oh, maybe we could do an icks campaign for this client. I’m not sure. But we had the one for hiring. So we have a client who wanted to gain exposure to the HR and the recruitment. Well, and that so we kind of emerged what felt like, we’ve seen some of these campaigns out there obviously performing well as being written about on top tier media publications.
Can we repurpose that? And that’s really the game with digital PR a lot of the time. It’s like there’s no real new ideas. It’s just. You’re building on the good ones that you’ve seen, and that can be topical, in this case, obviously, ICS was a topic and a way of repurposing that towards HR, but it can be your methodology based as well.
So if one I, one I really love thinking about is heart rate monitors. I saw a piece years ago that was it was called the science of scare. And what they did was they put heart rate monitors on people, 50 people, and they watched various horror movies. And then what they found out obviously through the heart rate detection was which one led to the highest spikes and highest sustained heart rate across the movie.
And I love that methodology.
And I’ve always tried to look at, when I’m working with a client or I might be doing ideation or something, I think there might be a heart rate or a kind of a wearable technology that we could do something in here. So kind of, more physical research. So that, that can be a way of repurposing a piece of content as well.
With the icks one, it was more about, finding out both ends of the spectrum for that client as well.
So it was more serious in terms of, what’s putting a hiring manager off, Could that be that you didn’t make eye contact, you were late, something like that. But we also asked things in our, so we did a survey with our one about, if somebody says yes to a cup of coffee or a cup of tea is part of their interview, have they asked for two sugars or something like that?
Kind of make someone think twice. So yeah it’s just kind of, you’re springboarding off of a topic or a methodology a lot of the time, but I think that’s what the vast majority of digital PR really is.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree. I feel like this can sometimes fail, right? Like you see people trying to springboard off of existing content, but they don’t necessarily hit the mark.
Where do you think this could fail? And like, what are some things that people. that are doing content ideation should think about or be aware of when you’re talking about repurposing other ideas for your client?
Darren: Sometimes you can, like you said there, so you can just get it wrong. And that might be that you’ve got a concept, which could be a really good concept, journalists are going to talk about it, or they already are talking about it.
And you’ve got a good hook, but you might get the methodology completely screwed up.
Because there has to be that those things have to marry up. If you don’t have a solid methodology that a writer, that a journalist can look at, understand and get behind and think, yeah, there’s probably no better way of doing that content of getting to that data point or that hook.
Then cool, you know that’s a piece they’re going to write about. But if you completely fail that if you do a survey of a hundred people or something like that you I don’t know in the US if you get these adverts but it’s normally like a beauty brand where it’s like 87 percent of 134 people agree, but that’s not a big enough sample size, right?
So you could fail just because your methodology doesn’t stand up. I think the biggest pitfalls that that you could have by kind of repurposing, not repurposing, but springboarding off of content, it’s just being stuck in the idea of the kind of original idea that you saw.
And then not taking it any further. And that’s a real, it’s more of a limitation than a pitfall. But like if you get stuck on a methodology and it’s that, you have to copy that exact methodology rather than taking it somewhere. Like I said earlier, if a heart rate device.
Is cool, but you know, what about a stress device? Can where else can you take that or measuring the data on a different scale? So seeing, what exact point of a movie, what’s the scariest moment in all of Hollywood horror history, that could be a way of taking that concept further and not just getting stuck on the fact that, that original concept exists and that’s the way they did it.
There’s other things that you can do with that. with content.
Darren, how much of your day do you think you would, you spend looking and kind of analyzing other people’s content?
Darren: Good question, Vince. I don’t know. I mean, when you scroll LinkedIn, I probably scroll LinkedIn like once or twice a day.
And that might be, you might see somebody else’s, Campaign and say, okay, cool. Don’t you want to dig into that? Or, once a week, a newsletter might drop in your inbox. And then you away you go, right? You’re kind of, you’re stuck for the next half an hour. It’s not like I have a set.
Set time. It is more of an ad hoc thing for me, as a percentage of time. I really have no idea. I’d say it’s lower than I would like it to be. ’cause I like digging into concepts or I like finding them and thinking, oh, okay how did they do that? How, what, is that just fantastic or is there anything that I would’ve done differently?
And yeah. It’s not enough Vince.
Vince: I mean, I guess I asked ’cause I, I used to spend probably too much time doing that ’cause I just. And I’ve thought about putting out something like that for BuzzStream readers, like adding it to the newsletter of like, here’s a roundup of a couple of cool, but it can be time consuming.
I mean, to find them.
LinkedIn and other people’s newsletters are probably are two good places for people to find content ideas. Do you have any other areas that you tend to look?
Darren: We built a resource around it two, three years ago. So it’s like the best digital PR examples. So we co related a list from a bunch of different sources.
So that was newsletters. It was ones that I’d known about once that I created in the past and thought were worthy of being in that kind of thing. I didn’t just put all of my campaigns in there. But you know what ones that we thought were worth it. So a lot of the time when I’m doing ideation, I’m thinking about, well, what did somebody else do in the space?
I’d go to that resource. And in the background, we’re always kind of sharing things. So as a team, if you’ve got a team, if you’re a freelancer, it can be harder, but as a team, people sharing stuff. So at root, we’ve got a bit of a culture of, if you’ve seen a campaign in the wild that you thought was really good, you Share it because I personally, I’d love to break it down.
I’d love to look at it. I’d like to see what’s going on, how people might be doing a new methodology or repurposing methodologies or topics and so on and so forth. So that can be another source for them, but yeah, they kind of just come out of the woodwork somehow.
Vince: Yeah, no, I’m very similar at Siege. I tried to kind of push that culture like in Slack we’d have a channel specifically for that and I even tried to get it so that I would hook up Slack using if this than that where it was like if somebody put something in the great content slack channel It would be like Send it over to our, a spreadsheet that’s just populated with
It’s always inspiring to see other people’s stuff and like these really creative methodologies. I think one of the areas that people can get hung up on is kind of like the feasibility of some of these. Like, I remember seeing one that was like, somebody went around and swabbed like a subway, New York City subway, and then checked it to count the germs, whatever.
I’ve seen that done in cars. Now I’ve seen it done toilet seats, cell phones or whatever, like all these things to tell how we did it. You did it on money.
Darren: and gifts, actually
Vince: and gifts. Well, so talk to me about that. So like that is. Outside of the box, I think enough where obviously it’s going to get great coverage, but it’s harder than just sitting in a computer and getting data, right?
How do you think through the methodology when it’s not like a straightforward cost?
Darren: Yeah. We had no idea either. Yeah, that can be a bit of a minefield. And sometimes I just get swept up in the fact that it’s a really good idea.
And that’s just, let’s just go for it. Right. And as an agency owner, you kind of have to try and focus on the margin, right? Is this going to cost over the percentage that we want it to cost for a campaign? But. A lot of the time I’m kind of, I’m like, Hey, it’s all right. Let’s just buy the device.
Although it costs more money, but let’s do it. Cause that’s a really cool campaign or you might reuse the device in that instance, right? So we did two campaigns, it certainly starts to work out, but yeah, it’s a tough one. So normally we’ll come up with the concepts and we’ll think through.
Is this something that we can reasonably answer in the way that we would in the time we have, you know, if it’s something that really requires a lot of research or somewhat a university to study and become the source of the answer with, then, we can’t do that. That’s not feasible. If we were to take that to a journalist and say, we’ve worked out.
How protons collide and, it’s just, that’s not coming from a digital PR agency or one of our clients, right? That should come from somebody else who’s done that over years. So you kind of have to narrow it down by what is the hook? What is the output that you’re really going for here?
And are you a feasible voice of that? And if so, then, let’s break it down. How will we do that? Is a survey good enough? Could we know we can do surveys. Is it, if it’s something new, like using a heart rate monitor, maybe we buy a one or five heart rate monitors and we’ll do, 50 people, 100 people in different batches, rather than buying 50.
Cause then all of a sudden that becomes very expensive. So it’s a combination of different things that you’re trying to solve. But from a methodology standpoint, it’s normally there’s a way of, There’s a way of doing it as well. And that makes sense for you to be the voice of.
Do you think those types of big creative campaigns are dwindling?
Like these really creative methodologies and I just get the feeling that less and less people are doing the Like, less and less people are willing to take the risk. And more people are playing it safe. And, going with more search driven stuff not to say that’s bad, like, it’s maybe in, in a lot of other ways it’s smarter, but like the digital PR campaigns that are really inspiring are the ones that push this envelope and like do some manual research that hasn’t been done.
And I, yeah, I just, I mean, do you feel that way or do you feel like it’s still alive and. Well, and I’m just being a curmudgeon.
Darren: No,I it’s, it, I think it’s alive and well, but I think there are two digital PR seems like it’s split in two at the moment. And I think that mostly it’s not really the style of agency, but the style of model, the pricing model and the way that you agree with clients that starts to dictate the directions you’re going.
Your campaign’s going. So what I’m seeing, and I’m quite mindful to stay on the side of maximum potential with a campaign. Because on, on the flip side of that is minimum link targets, right? And I think that what that does is creates campaigns that just get over a hurdle, but they don’t necessarily want to achieve a hundred plus links.
They just want to achieve 10. And that would change the methodology that you take, then you’ll see a lot of campaigns that just the methodology is search volumes gone up for this topic over time. Cool. Let’s get a comment together, send it out to a journalist. We’ll get a couple of links. That’s not really pushing the envelope, but they don’t need to, because that’s not what they’ve agreed to with their client, or that’s not what they’re being measured by.
For me in my career, I’ve all, going back a long time, I’ve always focused on those kinds of bigger campaigns, the ones that can generate a thousand links or do something like that. So that’s kind of my, my, my foundation within digital PR, but then moving that into a pricing model, it’s more about, well, how do we then become a, an agency that’s more about achieving the maximum rather than achieving a minimum.
And that’s difficult. If you’re in a client’s shoes and you’re thinking, yeah, I can spend your 6, 000 on a campaign with this agency, and they’re going A guaranteed eight links versus us who might not be guaranteeing links. We might have a different model. How do we maintain the way that we want to do campaigns whilst also making sure that a client, it makes sense for a client and they’re not, They’re not seeing us as a risky option.
So I think it’s less about the creativity and more just about what the genesis, what, where’s the, what’s the actual motivation behind the camp?
Vince: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like maybe it’s then the client side, like their clients are maybe less willing to take the risk and put the money in a campaign that might fall flat versus.
One that’s going to consistently get them. It’s maybe the safer bet, but yeah, it’s an interesting time.
I think it seems like digital PR is more people are jumping into it for sure. At least in the U S I know from our, we’ve done a couple of conferences and just. Having people come up to us and saying like, I don’t know what digital PR is, but I know I got to do it, like, so it’s interesting to see people jumping into this, but so I wanted to talk to you to now, I think it’s a good segue into this idea of like a newer client, a newer site.
If there’s a new, small site that’s thinking about doing digital PR, does the content ideation change for that? Can they even get anything out of it?
Darren: Yeah. So absolutely. Right. Like, I know you’d mentioned the client that we did a campaign for who who we, they wanted to expose to the U S they wanted a U S market and they were established in the UK, but effectively.
They’re not a household name even in the UK, but how can they gain exposure in the U S start to rank and everything and effectively gain through digital PR. We did a lying on resumes campaign for them. So it was studying, or I think we did a survey actually of how many people have lied on their resume in order to get a job and the consequences and so on of that, which went fantastically.
It’s more about the concepts. And the methodology. And those are the two, those are the two kind of key criteria for any creative campaign, even if you were working with a big brand or a small brand journalists, in my experience, they don’t really care if it’s coming from, a last minute.
com, massive travel company or from a startup travel agency. That’s got, one, one shop on high street somewhere. If you’ve got a good concept that journalists are talking about and the way that you’ve worked it out. Makes complete sense, like we were talking about earlier, and you’ve been transparent in that, then where’s the, there’s no problem from a journalist perspective that you’ve got data, you’ve got a hook, you’ve got it on a topic that they want to talk about and there’s no problem in the way that you’ve worked it out.
Therefore, they’re going to use, they’re going to use the content. So, yeah, it doesn’t really matter from a creative campaign standpoint, it gets a little trickier when you go into the evergreen style kind of focused
If you want to rank for a statistics page on a smaller client website, that’s where it’s harder because they don’t have the authority to sneak in and really compete with some of the bigger publications or domains in a space.
However. It’s still absolutely possible. You just have to find the opportunities. Like, like I said earlier, if you’re doing a big kind of data analysis of the landscape and you’re finding out where are the opportunities here, where’s a SERP that only a couple of larger domains are ranking in or something like that, then there might be a way in for the same client, actually we did a piece three years ago, I think we launched it.
For average UK salary, which as a search term, it’s like 50, 000, 80, 000 search volume per month. So it’s a big one. And for I can’t remember what their BR at the time was, like 34 or something. Can you play a cert that a website like that really shouldn’t be able for, but. When you actually dig into the cerp, you start to find some opportunities.
So, I think it was gq were ranking Forbes, maybe Intuit as well. So it’s like, sorry. Indeed not Intuit job boards, right. So, right, right. Paying on the money for that kind of thing. But when you look, when we were looking at the page, they were pages of just text, paragraph after paragraph.
And it’s like, this isn’t very good for a journalist who wants to come one in two seconds find this, that. What’s the average UK salary away they go and they’ve got their source. There were no, no real images. There was nothing to engage with. So even if you’re a small website, you can dig into what’s ranking and see opportunities for improvement.
So, so for us, it wasn’t only just having. Key statistics at the top of the page and offering that answer it was, well, how does the average UK salary change by gender? How does it change by age or geography or, where else does this query go? Like typical content marketing 101, right?
But they weren’t doing it. So even though we didn’t have the authority, we didn’t have the brand in order to compete, we have the know how to find the opportunity and to improve on what was there. And therefore you can break.
Vince: Yeah, that makes total sense. I mean, for a smaller brand, especially finding those little areas where you can stand out in different ways, and maybe that’s going to be your core differentiator.
Do you find that these sites, so like, So you are targeting a statistics post as a small brand. Maybe it is somewhat difficult, like the higher keyword difficulty, but somewhat competitive cert.
Have you ever. experimented pitching these statistics/evergreen posts to jumpstart the process and maybe get you on the SERP, which can start that flywheel?
Darren: Yeah, you can do it. So we’ve done it in the past. So we we’re doing it at the last month or two. We have a statistics post on the client’s website, which is focusing on France tourism and with the Paris Olympics coming up. Why it was, why we went live with it, kind of eight or nine months ago, kind of foreseeing the trend there.
But now’s the time we didn’t spec it that way. We didn’t, we don’t think of these as outreachable why they’re cheaper for us to charge clients because the time isn’t, is not as much time needed for the campaign. However, because there’s an opportunity there to go out and say, Hey, this exists is we’ve got this stat, these stats around France and Paris tourism.
They might be relevant if you’re writing about the upcoming Olympics. So really, you have to find something to hook into with stats. Otherwise, as a standalone stat, often, they’re not newsworthy, there’s nothing that we haven’t researched this some of the time we haven’t researched it, we’re using somebody else’s data and just collating it.
So we can’t really go out there and outreach as our own. But if there’s a, something to hook into with it, then for sure, sending it out there, getting that flywheel going so you can start to build the links, your rankings go up as a result, and then you become a go to resource on the search that can very much help, but you have to find a way of doing it.
Vince: And so it’s a matter of, like, say, for this upcoming, the France tourism one, it’s a matter of, like, maybe finding five or six key stats or something and throwing those to a journalist that might, tie into a story about the Olympics. Yeah.
Are you pitching the whole post? You’re not putting together like a infographic with all the stats on them or something.
Darren: No. I mean, on the pages that we publish anyway, for these ones we’ve always got a key stats section because, if you’re a journalist you jump on this page.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Straight away, key stats, here’s, this one, and then they can use it and away they got methodologies down there if they want to check it out, but and effectively you can copy and paste those key stats stick it in an outreach post, with, hey, I saw your stuff. I know you’re, you might be writing about that, personalize it in this instance to, to make it connect.
And then you can, paste your stats and away you go. And then. It might not be an immediate thing with the outreach of these types of pages with a creative campaign you want in an hour if you get a response back from a journalist, fantastic, you’re probably not going to get that with a stats page.
It’s more like, okay, I might write something in a week. I’ll store that post from Darren there, and then I’ll come back to it. That’s probably more the way that’s going to work.
And do you keep track of those?
Darren: Yeah, for sure. I mean, Buzzstream. You guys, I mean, obviously using your platform, you can see When somebody opened it, when was the last time you sent the email and so on and so forth.
So you just kind of tracking it in this, in the same way that you would have created campaign. But then obviously you’re still doing brand searches around your client to see what’s going live. And then lo and behold, you’ll start to see some front tourism stats being used.
Vince: Yeah, it makes total sense.
I want to jump to another piece that I saw that you guys did.
I’m looking at these pieces and that same mindset you’re talking about, like, how did they do this? Like, how can other people do that? What can you take from this? So this was a really interesting post that you guys did on dementia, people with dementia and how they see the world.
And it was this really creative idea. The way that you had it kind of set up, it was like this photographic interactive slider where you can kind of see, like, this is what Normal person looks, this is what someone struggling with dementia, how they would see, dots on a wall look like ants or something.
So I want to dig a little bit deeper into something like this, but let’s start with like, where does a creative idea like that come from? Because that is again, like a little outside of the box.
Darren: Yeah, it’s a hard one to break down, right? Because that’s what ultimately you don’t know. But Like we were talking about earlier, I think it’s just repurposing.
Years ago, I was involved in a campaign that we did, which had that slider element to it. So once you’ve done that and you’ve had success with it, you start to look for other opportunities that are along a similar vein, right?
That one was called Life Without Beans. So we did a campaign for a client where they were heavily involved in bee sustainability.
It’s kind of one of their kind of social mantras or things that they were trying to support. So we looked at what would happen to food if bee decline continued and eventually bees were eradicated. So we, We hired a photographer, we made a burger, we cooked some chips, we made a dessert and a breakfast, and then we did the same thing, but without with the elements of that, of those dishes that that bees are heavily involved in.
So things like the orange juice, cross pollination is key for orange juice or oranges to grow and thrive. And then on the slider, you see the orange juice glass. Full, and then on the other side, it’s empty, and the slice of onion in a burger is gone, or the tomato is gone, or that kind of thing.
So I knew that in that instance, for that kind of methodology, where you’re comparing two things, a slider is an instant way for a viewer to get the story. And when you start, we were working with a client for the dementia piece who, they have residential homes across Canada. So, for that kind of piece, you start thinking about, what could we do?
Can you even visualize dementia when you start to, talk to the experts and it’s like, yeah, they someone’s suffering with that illness. They would start to see this or that, a shadow could appear as a never ending black hole or things are moving on the walls and that kind of then sparks.
I’ve done a campaign in the past which has this slider element, maybe if we visualized the home as it would be for a healthy brain to see, and then what someone may visualize aspects of within the home. If they have dementia and then use, utilize the slider and away we go. So I think it is mostly just about repurposing, but trying to utilize what’s new or what you’re trying to achieve for another client.
And the point of that piece was actually that it’s not really for people suffering with dementia. It’s it’s for people that aren’t suffering with dementia. It’s for the adult children who. Ultimately, the decision makers, when it comes to their parents who might be suffering with dementia who need extra support, so they’re going to see the piece and start to, it’ll click with them.
This is what, mom or dad or whoever might be going through. And then it’s a, it’s a piece to stick in their mind. So again, it’s kind of reverse engineering, who are we trying to appeal to as well as methodologies and topics that you focused on in the past.
Vince: And so once you build these types of kind of interactive pieces or elements that you can use, a slider or whatever it else is going to be, does that kind of factor into the costs of building an asset for a client?
Like, do you kind of think through like, okay. Normally this would be like a much larger piece cause we have to put some development hours into this, but like, because we have this stuff built in already, it’s going to be a lot easier. I guess I’m asking because I always found that challenging to kind of pitch something.
How do you pitch these big ideas to clients? What do those conversations look like?
Darren: Generally, we have a set price or a set number of day. We basically the price is based on time really, but a creative campaign for us typically takes, X number of days and then we build a set price. So when we pitch a concept to a client it’s the decision of cost is no longer on their shoulders, it’s on our shoulders.
So if we feel like we can. We can fulfill that concept in the way that it needs to be done. That’s on us. We’ve pitched it to the client. If they’re behind it, topically brand they like it. They look and they think that it has legs. They get excited by it. Then you’re cool. That’s now it’s for us to solve.
So yeah, before we even pitch a concept like that, we have to think through. Ballpark wise, is this feasible? We’ll do even more of that after we pitch as well as sometimes you do have to say, unfortunately, we can’t get this data or something, but here’s a way around it, or here’s a way that we can spin that concept into something that’s still interesting, but might not be the original one.
There is only a real element of that you can do before, before you pitch it, because you might do all of that time in you’re finding a photographer, finding, how much is all this food going to cost them? So how much is the studio before you pitch the concept? And then the client says, no, I don’t like that one.
Vince: Yeah.
Darren: What a waste of time that is. So you kind of have to think through ballpark wise, it could, can we do this? And then that’s where I was saying earlier, I might push the boat out a little bit more. If, it’s 5 percent over what we would normally want to spend, but it’s a really cool concept and I think it will really work then that’s absolutely fine.
But the, ultimately the risks on us.
Vince: Yeah. I felt that’s a hard thing to teach. I did a lot of training and newer PRs when I was with Siege and like people would come in and I remember doing this, when I first started to, it’s like, you have these grandiose ideas. Right, but teaching people how to put a cost on it or like, determining the methodology.
It’s like, all right, that’s a great idea, but how are we going to do that? Like how are we going to do that with it and stay within budget?
Do you have any tips for folks new to digital PR struggling to keep creative pieces within budget?
Darren: Yeah. I think I haven’t really thought about it, but I think where it comes from, unfortunately for those people that are new to it is experience. Once you’ve done a campaign or you’ve worked with a couple of designers. You start to know roughly how much something’s going to cost.
So we know before we do a survey, roughly how much it’s going to cost us to get 1, 000, 2, 000 responses. Then we, we’ve already made that decision. We know the methodology works. It’s going to work with our campaign, our budget and so on. So away we go. With photographers or studios, we’ve worked with a few now.
So we know roughly how much that’s going to cost and how much time it’s going to take and stuff like that. So I. I mean, if you’re someone new to it, or you’re trying to push the boundaries with a methodology, maybe it is just talking to people who have done the campaigns in the past for the agency or the company you work with and say, how much did that designer cost?
Or have you ever done a piece where you’ve gone to a location and photographed something? And how much time did that take? Or what was involved in that? And just trying to break down the pieces to try and gain that upper hand, that knowledge, before you’ve actually exposed yourself to the methodology.
Other times, I’ve done it. Like we spoke about before with the with the medical device, I’ve never, none of us had ever done a campaign where we’d swabbed something. And to be honest, it was more expensive than I thought it was going to be, but well, what we did actually, we saw, I think it might have been the same campaign that you saw that you were talking about where they swapped the subway handles.
So we dug into the methodology of that and they said the device or the type of device, I think it was that they used. So then we, we researched the device. How much will that device cost? Lo and behold, it’s like a thousand dollars or something like that. So then, you can start to quite quickly gain.
What is that feasible within the budget that we have available here? The unknown for us on that was how much the actual swaps cost is quite a lot as well. And what we have stored them in a fridge. So it becomes a bit more, but you can break down other people, other similar pieces that are out there in the past.
Read the methodology, look up the products, look up. How they did it, go on up work. How much is a designer to do this typical campaign? You start to get some figures or loose because of this.
Vince: Yeah. And what advice would you have for people that are looking to push the envelope, but you know, or maybe just hesitant because they know like, with agencies or even as digital PR, it’s just like, you kind of have, like you’re saying, like there’s a couple of sets or types of content that you know work.
Well, it’s like, oh, we’re gonna your head immediately goes to I get this new client. What can we use this, our germ tester for, it’s like, or we can do a statistics post.
How do you recommend that people Break out and like get into newer types of content while still kind of feeling safe about it?
Darren: Yeah, and what it for me it kind of comes back to the what it is that you’re trying to achieve with it You know if it’s if the hook’s really strong and that’s the methodology, right? The methodology has to be wearables, or it has to be a germ tester, or it has to be something that you have, you’ve never used before, but that would be a really cool concept.
That’s half, part of it is your intuition as well, right? Like, you just know that concept’s going to work or you’ve seen a similar piece that’s done really well. Like, like we’d seen the subway piece. The germs on the subway do really well. And I think there was McDonald’s testing different fast food restaurants or something like that.
And you see that piece do really well. And you think, well, if we repurpose that methodology, that takes an element of the risk out, out of it as well. And then you can start to convince yourself that we’ve seen the methodology works. We’ve seen, these types of publications can get behind that methodology.
If we repurpose that to our topic and the thing that we’re, our client or our domain. is focused on, then that’s a solid methodology for our publications and our target audience to get behind as well. So that can minimize the risk there. Just the fact that you’ve seen somebody else being successful with it.
Vince: Yeah. And you touched on that idea of like finding an audience specifically, how deeply do you go into these ideas? So you do have somebody that comes to you and says, Darren, I really want to do this. I want to test money, the germs on money.
Do you validate an idea based on the size of the pitchable audience?
Darren: So for more, for us, it’s more from a, kind of, you start at SEO and it’s more topical relevance. Target audience would be part of that. So like I mentioned with the dementia piece, who, who is this really going to stick with? Like I, a member of my family was suffering or kind of a year into suffering with dementia at the time.
So, I know like for me, that’s really going to hit home as a topic. And I know for other people who are in a similar situation, that topic is if you can visualize it and you can understand that person is seeing ants on the wall, that’s why they’re freaking out about those dots.
That’s going to stay with you. So you need to understand from with that campaign in particular, the audience are key for it. But a lot of the time it is. Is this topically relevant for our client? If we get contextual links and on domains that are focused on this topic that we’re trying to, is related to the topics we’re trying to rank for.
Then that’s going to be real nine times out of 10. That’s the driver of why you’re focused on a particular campaign, I
Vince: guess what I’m getting at is like, do you have like a list of sites in your head when you’re like, okay I’m going to create this one. So, like, we’re going to pitch it to these, I know that this audience kind of exists.
Do you build that type of validation list/outreach list before, just to kind of justify that this idea will work?
Darren: Not necessarily, no, I don’t think I’ve actually built an outreach list at ideation. You know that, like we were talking about earlier with chat GPT statistics, There’s going to be other directions that you can take this piece, which is going to open up the field.
But that’s, it’s less about kind of creating that list and just knowing, I suppose, through experience that there’s a lot of finance writers. There’s a lot of climate focused writers. There’s a lot of technology writers. So you know that you’re, Your potential I don’t, I’m kind of trying to avoid the same journalistic Paul, cause it sounds quite wordy, but your Paul is going to be quite large for a piece of campaign, a piece of content like that.
So yeah, for me, it’s not really about getting the numbers or getting the exact journalists or the publications, but you have a lean towards knowing that you have this tech campaign. Is going to be of interest to a lot of tech writers and therefore there’s a lot of tech writers.
If someone is new to digital PR or thinking about getting into it, what do you recommend for understanding audience and pitching prospects?
Darren: Ear to the ground, like, reading what’s going on like I said before, a personal, I don’t know if it’s a benefit or a fault in my own personality, but Reddit is something that I spend a lot of time on. So, You kind of, you see what topics are getting a lot of engagement. Who’s writing about these things?
What website was this being posted on? Is it a New York times? Is it a buzzfeed? Is it, where is this kind of stuff going? And you just get a sense, I suppose, just through submersing yourself within news that There’s a lot of scope for this topic or, this industry, there’s a lot of publications.
There’s a lot of people talking about this thing, even if you went to Reddit and you just looked at how many subscribers are within the technology subreddit versus the politics subreddit versus, and then, and keep going, that’ll give you a good gauge on how big is this potential topic. And you do, you have to do that for clients as well.
So we’ve got clients that are like plumbing clients. You can’t create a piece. based on the number of people who are really technically interested in plumbing. You have to open it up. So, You start to think about, what other news verticals can we interest in a topic for a plumbing client?
And that, that can go in quite a humorous direction, like, how much time people spend on the toilet.
Vince: That’s right. Especially in Reddit. I’m sure you get some good ideas.
Darren: You can yes. But when you start thinking about kind of your general news, lifestyle news, that kind of thing. Then you can start to open up to, to, to larger audiences, but you’ll get a gauge just by kind of submersing yourself in the news and what’s going on social channels.
And it sounds like you look at the types of coverage that other, similar posts get right?
Darren: Yeah. Kind of use that to start, I guess sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. You can build a list that way.
Like, campaigns that you’ve done in the past that, were very successful, where they landed, who picked them up or competitor campaigns, how successful were they, where they landed, who wrote about it. And immediately you get an outreach list pretty much off the back of, off the back of that.
And you’re taking something a slightly different topic in a new direction or something, but that journalist, they covered that beat. So they’re going to be, they’re going to be a prospect for sure which again can minimize your risk.
Vince: Right, right. With these kind of less, I guess what I’m getting at is a lot of clients want quantifiable, like I’m going to give you 10 grand and you’re going to come out with X amount of links, which that’s always been the hardest thing for me.
I know personally, it’s like, do you guarantee links? Do you not, do like, is it a per, on a per piece basis, or should we be spreading this across by quarter by, what monthly links or something yet?
Do you guarantee links? How do you estimate coverage for a post?
Darren: Yeah, we don’t that’s a challenge of digital PR at the moment I’m finding like there are like we were talking about earlier if people are guaranteeing minimum numbers of links, it starts to take content in a completely different direction.
I think you get this divergence of content quality as well, but also what content output. So we’ve done research very recently. Like last week we completed a piece of research in terms of what our campaign, how our campaigns perform in terms of link ranges.
So what percentage of our campaigns achieve zero links? One to five, six to 10, a hundred plus.
And we’ve got that against the industry as well. Somebody did this research. I think it’s nearly 5, 000 campaigns. And what the digital PR campaigns typically achieve.
Vince: yeah, it was, it might’ve been AIRA.
Darren: Yeah, there’s one that was like how many links to you? Typically get, campaign, it was like one to five, but you know,yeah. How do you get one?
I think it was UK digital PR agencies and the range as well. And I was previously using that as a benchmark.
There was a newer one.
It was like two weeks ago, somebody, someone shared and I wanted to see, well, how do we measure up against that? So when, and It’s, I think it’s 217 percent or 213 percent more of our campaigns get a hundred plus links than the study showed. So when I’m talking to clients, a lot of the time it’s more about, here’s how we perform.
But we don’t have the guarantee, but on average, our campaigns get, I think it’s 70 LRDs on average for the campaigns, which is huge. And I didn’t know that. And that’s amazing. But then you start to compare that again. So what does the average campaign elsewhere get? And if they guarantee in 10, it’s going to be roughly around that number.
So you can have the guarantee of 10 or yes, there’s an element of this might not work, but if you’re, if we’re doing a couple of campaigns over the course of your six months, 12 months or something on average over time, you’re going to get a bigger ROI with us. However, that’s not a perfect argument either.
So I’m, the challenge then to me is how can I design a digital PR pricing model that eliminates the risk for a client and puts it on us. If I have that research, if I know that we produce that number of links per campaign, then really the risk should be on me, not on the client to believe what I’m saying, but on me to perform.
So I’m trying to look at different ways of doing it at the moment, whilst not guaranteeing a minimum, but allowing us to achieve the maximum. And that might be based on a, a per cavalry coverage type model, where, if we achieve this coverage, that’s the dollar figure based on the range that it will be in.
And then we’ll go up to a seating or something like that. So if we don’t perform, you don’t pay that’s the way that I’ve started to think about it, but it’s. It’s a tricky one.
Vince: Yeah, that’s smart. I mean, that’s the thoughtful way to do it for sure. Put the onus on you as the agency. And I like that.
I appreciate that. Well, Darren, I really appreciate you kind of pulling back the curtain and letting us know a little bit of the inner workings here of how Root works and content ideation. This has been super helpful and thoughtful chat. So thanks so much for coming on.
Darren: Thanks for inviting me, Vince. It’s been as we were talking about earlier, anytime you get an hour to just talk about digital PR, it’s a great hour.
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