Table of Contents
Olivia Lott told me she’s a “ride-or-die” BuzzStream fan, and the more I spoke with her, the more I understood why. Her approach to digital PR is highly personalized and highly strategic. (PRs who take the personalized approach typically get the most out of BuzzStream.)
I initially wanted to talk with Olivia because she does not take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to digital PR. This struck me as an exciting challenge. How do you scale an approach while still tailoring it to a client?
Our conversation went deep into how she thinks of personalization, SEO and digital PR, and, of course, client strategies.
Olivia’s added benefit of working as a journalist before switching to PR gives her an edge. She’s now a freelance digital PR professional working with big and small clients.
You can catch up with Olivia on LinkedIn.
Main Takeaways
Here are a few of my major takeaways from my chat with Olivia.
1. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity in Outreach
Olivia believes in sending personalized pitches to specific journalists instead of the “spray and pray” method.
Personalization in outreach isn’t limited to using a journalist’s name. There are plenty of personalization techniques. Olivia studies each journalist’s style, preferred story structure, and past topics to make her pitches resonate.
This includes adapting pitches to regional nuances or angles.
2. Leverage Existing Content for Cost-Effective Outreach
Olivia often bases outreach on a client’s preexisting content, a tactic she calls “editorial outreach.”
You can drastically reduce campaign costs while effectively securing links and media coverage by repurposing blog content, product pages, or other site material.
Adding expert commentary to older posts can revitalize the content and attract new attention.
3. Align Digital PR with SEO Goals
Olivia views digital PR as a fundamental part of SEO strategy.
She looks at things like link velocity or competitors’ link profiles to identify gaps in her clients’ strategies.
This insight guides her digital PR tactics, such as hero campaigns or expert commentary, so that she can complement SEO goals, drive quality links, and enhance brand visibility.
4. Balance Strategy with Flexibility
Olivia builds a unique plan for each client, but she adapts her tactics based on the client’s changing goals, budget, and the effectiveness of ongoing strategies.
This flexible approach helps address unique challenges and maximize results within budget constraints, ensuring each campaign is tailored to meet specific objectives.
Resources Mentioned
Earth FM called “The Quietest Places in the World” – https://earth.fm/the-quietest-places-in-the-worlds-loudest-cities/
Transcript
Olivia: It’s great to be here. Thank you. I’m a ride or die BuzzStream fan. I’ve been using BuzzStream for my entire career and yeah, still rely on it. So glad to have you.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. Paul May, our CEO, founder for people listening, watching.
He actually suggested I reach out to Olivia. He was like, Olivia’s like you said, like a ride or die buzz stream. She does outreach the right way. Like I feel like she encompasses what we try to preach or what I try to write about on the blog. So I was like, all right, Olivia, we got to chat. So we got to chat a few times before this and formulate some ideas for what this podcast might look like.
Our initial chat went all over in different places. It was really interesting. One of the first things that really popped out to me was the fact that you worked as a journalist briefly before making the transition into being a PR. So I’d love to understand a little bit about that journey and maybe what that’s taught you as a journalist.
Digital PR now because I feel like that’s such a big piece of experience to have for sure.
Can you talk a little about your journey as a journalist to PR?
Olivia: Yeah. So yeah I did a journalism degree at Winchester and loved every minute of it some of my classmates would probably disagree. It was basically like a full time job. Not many lectures very much full on journalism yeah, it was a good time and I went straight from there to being a video journalist at Mail Online. And It was a baptism of fire, let’s say but definitely massively influential to have a journalism background in my PR career now.
I think. it’s definitely set me up for a good start in the industry. And I entered digital PR a bit by mistake, if I’m being completely honest, like during the interview, I was asked if I thought I could get links on news publications and having been news desk side and I’ve actually added links into stories myself.
I just thought, sure, like, why not? I can do that. Not really having any sort of respect or consideration of actually how difficult it is. But my first links were on. The FT Financial Times, Hello Magazine and International Business Times, all for insurance brand clients. And it seems like, I think at the time that set me up for a very good start.
My boss at the time was pretty chuffed with that, but earning good quality links isn’t easy. But having trained and worked as a journalist myself helps massively, you get that benefit of just being able to do that. Getting it and understanding how newsrooms operate, knowing what factors make a good story and not simply like a puff piece.
But to be clear, that isn’t to say that PRs without a journalism background don’t get it by any means. There are hundreds who absolutely do. And when I first started in PR, it took me time to get marketing and what it means to represent a brand. But I think a journalism background certainly has advantages in this industry, and I’m thankful to have had that experience.
Vince: Yeah, understanding what a journalist looks for. I feel is maybe the key from everybody I’ve talked to. It sounds you call that out a bit there. What would you say? If you had to give some feedback or some wisdom to somebody who’s just starting out in digital PR field, what would be some of those tips that you give based off your experience as a journalist?
What have you learned from being a journalist?
Olivia: Never underestimate how important it is to tailor what you’re doing. And I know we hear this constantly from many digital PRs and there’s a reason for that. I feel like digital PR generally is branching into a hyper tailored camp and then a spray pray camp. And I’m definitely more in the tailored camp.
And like when I think about the kind of Spray prey tactics like I have been there myself. There have been media lists that I’ve made, which are like 1000 2000 contacts long and you hit the send button and hopes of the best. And but when I think about the very, very first time I ever sent a pitch in my first job, there was no spray and pray.
I tailored it. I thought about it. And that’s what got me the links, even though I didn’t have any kind of digital PR background. I knew what journalists wanted. I understood how to tailor my approach. And so I fell into that spray and pray for a little while because that’s what people in the industry preach them.
It’s a numbers game was the kind of message, but pitching outreach isn’t a numbers game. In my honest opinion, it’s more qualitative than that. And oddly enough, like a lot of people who I hear that. It’s a numbers game approach from more let’s say pure, not that we’re not pure, but like pure SEOs, and there’s, I’m sure they’re very good at what they do, but I think there’s an irony in that sentiment, at the same time, they’ll readily explain how traffic alone doesn’t mean your conversions will increase and people landing on your, if you’re, if people landing on your site, I’m the type of audience.
And of course I agree with that, but guess what? Pitching is the same. So just like a service or product is about targeting the right audience. Pitching is about targeting the right journalist with the right story. For me it’s a lot more nuanced than just saying, okay, let’s just send it to thousands of people and see what happens.
Yeah. Do you think that’s spray and pray technique that’s still around today?
Like you said, although it’s moving, do you feel like that’s a spray-and-pray technique? Media databases don’t do a good job of segmenting or categorizing audiences. Or is it just that people don’t have the time, and agencies are rushing to squeeze whatever they can out of the hourly work?
Is the spray and pray technique still around today? If so, why?
Olivia: I think it’s definitely a combination of the two. Personally I use a lot of media databases to build my lists. That’s part of my media list building process, but I don’t rely on them only. And that’s because, for a start, journalists move around all the time anyway. And if I worked at a media database company and I was trying to keep it up to date all the time, it would be a massive struggle because it just changes constantly.
But a lot of them don’t even have some of the some publications on there at all. And again, it’s because there’s thousands and thousands in the world, like, how, you’re never going to have a complete picture. And I think, as much as it’s nice to strive for this sort of platonic ideal of the perfect media database, it just doesn’t exist.
And you can’t just rely on saying, Oh, give me some travel journalists and just export and it’s done, you don’t have to do any qualifying. You absolutely have to do that qualifying because it’s just, I don’t know, you’re like, you’re probably not going to get a lot out of it. I feel like.
that for me, there’s no kind of professional integrity in saying, okay, here’s a list of 5, 000 journalists. I’m just going to hit it and hopefully get three links out of it. Like for me, I wouldn’t personally be proud of that. I’m more proud of if I’ve targeted the message correctly and have got a decent number of links from a more kind of thought about list.
But yeah I can see the budget squeezing thing and, trying to get it done as quickly as you can. But then I think, If we know that’s not the most effective method, like it seems like a kind of waste of money anyway, even though it’s faster, but I feel like it may, for some agencies, that kind of tactic might be bringing you some results now, but ultimately I think that method is unsustainable, like you could get blocked, you could harm your professional reputation, your campaign will get the results you could if you actually put effort in.
There are things that are out of our control in PR and can hinder the campaigns of 13 to 9 in the right way, a royal might die, or a journalist you thought was perfect for your campaign is, out of office for a month having a nice sabbatical in Italy. Good for them. But what is in your control is the consideration you put into your pitch and your media list.
So if you can control that, why wouldn’t you?
Vince: Yeah, touching a lot of stuff there, but that last one. It sounds like it’s more of like a mental shift between, we talk about this all the time, like quality over quantity, but even when you’re talking about talking with clients getting that one link hitting that one journalist, I feel like a lot of people don’t think that way.
The key to this campaign is going to be getting coverage from this one journalist. Where there’s the other camp where it’s just I want as many links as I can get. And obviously that’s the dream, right? Every campaign goes viral and it’s coverage from everybody, but.
The more we start to think about it from a targeted perspective and more strategic. Yeah. We’re going to help the whole industry. I think, and maybe that’s tough and idealistic thought process. And, but I just, I totally agree with you that spray and pray. I don’t feel comfortable doing that, and I think it hurts the industry as a whole, and that’s why outreach PRs get a bad name.
Right.
Why is the “spray and pray” outreach approach so detrimental?
Olivia: I feel like most journalists as well can smell a spray and pray pitch a mile off and like many won’t even open it let alone do anything with it and you’re right it is fueling that tension between journalists and PRs on a larger scale and I feel like you’ll get some bad actors in our industry who think so what it’s getting me some results now.
And, you do you, if you absolutely must, but personally, I wouldn’t be proud of that. And I feel I don’t think it’s very good. I feel if you’re teaching, say, industry newbies or juniors, that spray and pray technique, I feel like it doesn’t set them up for a professional career that’s sustainable.
And I feel like it’s doing them a disservice. So why? And that’s because good digital PR is evolving and becoming like more influenced by worse. And more traditional PR circles and for the better, I think, and what I mean by that is, it’s work that’s brand led. It’s like considerate and mindful of reputation and the message, but done in the way that kind of understands and compliments the wider SEO strategy and those two together with gold dust.
But I think focusing on spray and pray tactics is not developing the skills that juniors need to carve out a successful digital PR career that has longevity and can take them through to more agencies and even maybe self-employment.
Vince: Yeah. And there’s so much strategy to it, right? Yeah, if you’re trying to learn the business and learn the craft, just finding a general list of here’s a thousand people that work in travel, like that’s not going to get you get anything.
You have to be able to learn how to target and get specific, so let’s actually drill into that. We got the kind of theoretical stuff out of the way that people may roll their eyes at if they, do the spray and pray. But let’s talk about.
So I think the biggest problem that people have with this is the time spent. We mentioned this a little bit, right?
Especially in an agency, or if you’re a freelancer, you’re working hourly basis or, maybe you have a contract for a certain amount of things, but you have a lot of clients you’re struggling. It can be tempting, let’s say, to cut corners and do the more broad approach, because it does take a lot of time to personalize and target email.
Let’s dig into that a little bit. When we talk about personalization, let’s start there. What do we mean by personalization? Is this, Hey, I saw you write this article and it was really great and dah. Or is it more in the targeting of finding the specific journalists? I’m curious what your thoughts are there.
How do you define personalization?
Olivia: Yeah, I feel like when you say personalization, people can take so many different meanings from that. So some people think it literally just means including their first name in the pitch. Great. That’s a good start. Better than having the accidental first name.
Olivia: But yeah. When I think of personalization, I’m not just talking about the name and, the whole thing of, I saw you said this article and I like this, that and the other.
I wheel that out occasionally when it feels right to do but I feel like a lot of the time it feels a little bit disingenuous and it’s are you really like my biggest fan right now, PR? Do you know what I mean? That’s if I had that sort of pitch come to me when I worked in journalism, I think, oh, come on.
Get to the point. I think, for me, personalization is tailoring your pitch to the format that journalist likes their stories to be in how they structure their stories and what’s newsworthy in their beat and why. And that’s like the crucial thing, like why does this matter to that person’s beat and their audience.
Yeah, that’s, when I talk about personalization, it’s a lot more nuanced than a checkbox exercise of, make sure you’ve got their name right, make sure you mention this. It’s a lot more nuanced than that. And how I like, how I manage that for a campaign more at scale which I often have to do for a hero campaign, which has lots of different kind of angles available to me.
And, so I want my list to be representative of. The scope of the campaign, if what I’ll do is I will pair, say, several different pitches, not just like one or two pitch emails with, say, different subject lines. I’m talking like a pitch per angle. And just Put a number on this and I’d say for a data campaign that has like regional or city specific data I’m talking 20 or so pitches like 20 or so emails really like sequences in my first dream That are specific to say that location.
There are shortcuts to get there with things like data campaigns. For example, I will basically just do some crazy stuff in Google Sheets to try and pull in the information I need for this city and that city, but the rest of the email is basically the same, right? So that’s how I kind of speed that process up.
But when I’ve got my list, I basically tidy it so that I have an angle and, sometimes, even a subject line assigned to each person, and that decision is based on my research into each specific journalist when I’m doing the list. I’m asking myself, what beats do they cover and how do they structure their stories?
Do they like listicles? Do they prefer case studies? Do they like puns and headlines? Lots of UK tabloids do. It takes time to get that nailed, but once I’ve got that down, the outreach part in BuzzStream is an absolute breeze. I use filters, bulk send, with dynamic fields, and get through my media list fast.
There will be times where there are some publications in my media list that are a little bit slower. really like super important that I want to nail that. And that might be for a few different reasons. It might be from a kind of SEO strategy point of view, like they’ve never linked to me, but they’ve linked to my competitors.
Like how can I try and unlink them? Or it might be audience space. So this publication’s audience is so aligned with my brand’s audience. I really want to make this land. For those ones, I’ll put a lot more effort into the individual pitch itself. That’s maybe even like 20 minutes to half an hour, like I’m getting that one pitch nailed.
Cause if I get it. Brilliant. So yeah, that’s how I kind of balance sending a scale while also being mindful of personalization and what my strategy and my end goal is for that client.
Vince: Yeah, so a lot to unpack there. It sounds if I’m listening to this as an agency, we need to find ways to speed up where we can.
And there are definitely ways you mentioned using Google Sheets. Personally, before I worked at, I didn’t even know we could do these custom fields within the outreach workflow. Yeah, you can set up several custom fields and then import them via Google Sheets.
So if you’re building your list, you have these little notes or whatever you want to add to each of these, personalization bits, city, this city was found to be X percent, whatever you can add this data points in and yeah, like mail merge that all into your campaign.
So it sounds like strategic kind of outreach construction almost. There it’s not just, here’s a list and shoot the same email or make one or two templates and that’s it. Like the people that I found and you, including those that use Buzzstream, at least that are really successful, do get pretty nuanced with the templates they send and it’s not just one or two per campaign.
It’s like 10, 20 different templates. So yeah, that sounds to me like a major takeaway for some agencies is to focus in on that, the education almost of. Of structuring an outreach campaign and it’s not just as straightforward as here’s a list and send this couple, these couple emails.
Is the main takeaway just to educate structuring an outreach campaign in a way to personalize at scale?
Olivia: Yeah. I think a lot of it, obviously you have to be mindful of what budget you’re working with. And I think you can tailor your while a lot of the tactics that I do for my clients depend on a kind of strategy that I set out for them and what maybe I find works for their competitors.
Sometimes the thing that dictates the tactic is the budget. So I think, you have to be honest with yourself about like how long would it take me to do this 10, 20 pitches? How can I speed that up? If I, if I need to without kind of sacrificing the quality and it is a balancing act, it’s not like a kind of you’ve got this unlimited budget and you can do the perfect campaign every time.
And, as much as we’d all like to, I feel like, there’s probably loads of campaigns out there that that digital PRs have done that have done great, but could probably do better if they had the budget for it. This is the world we live in, there’s not an unlimited pot where we can just do everything in a perfect campaign to the nth degree.
But I have a campaign for one of my clients, which I absolutely love working on, and it has been really successful. But I haven’t even gone after half of the prospects I could have done. But you just have to stop at some point, you have to respect that budget. Yeah, I’m always learning.
Yeah.
Vince: Yeah, I guess a lot of that comes from experience, right? And the wins and losses that you have. And you touched on this idea that we talked about last time, which is that it’s tough to run an agency. It’s tough to be a freelancer. It’s tough to be in the service business where in digital PR specifically, I believe, because it’s really hard to come up with a scalable strategy like service that you can provide to different clients, is what I’m getting at, because there’s so much nuance to every client, not every strategy fits every client.
Being able to scale that approach is difficult because, it would be, I think you said this last, when we spoke offline it would be lovely to be able to say, Hey, I’m going to create four blog posts for you. And, you’re going to get X amount of links, but it’s just not that easy.
Is it hard to sell digital PR?
Olivia: Or even possible, there’s so much that goes into outreach which is in your control and a lot that isn’t, and also a sprinkle of luck, and as much as we maybe don’t want to admit that, but it is true, it comes down to timing, it comes down to like your message, like what you got approved, what you didn’t, do you know what I mean?
There’s so many different factors that mean you can’t accurately predict like Input output is just not possible in PR.
Vince: Yeah. So let’s dig into that a little bit. So as an agency, let’s say, or freelance PR, how do you approach a new client? and build a strategy that works for them.
How do you build a strategy for a new client?
Olivia: That’s a solid question. And again, a lot of it depends on budget. So like some clients will come to me and I work with both agencies and like brands directly. Sometimes they’ll come to me and they know exactly what they want. They say we have this client and we, if it’s an agency, we have this client and we need a campaign for them and we need it to launch in October.
And it’s be helping to this keyword set or this product. Great. That’s a nice, clear brief. I’ve got something to work with there. Some agencies and brands don’t know what they actually need to do to get the links they need. And so for those ones I like to start with a digital PR strategy.
And what goes into that is like masses of kind of competitor analysis, but also having a look at, the kind of The kind of things that resonate with say their dream publications or some of the ones that they’re not getting but their competitors are. I think about so maybe even not like from a competitor brand, but from like campaigns that touch on similar topics for them.
Just for an example here, I had a bathroom client years ago and I did a travel type campaign for them, but I didn’t just look at other bathroom brands. Companies doing travel campaigns. I looked at travel campaigns in general, to try and get an idea of what’s been working, what’s been done, how they did it, that sort of thing.
But I think, with a strategy, you can you can figure out what sort of tactics are the most effective within that industry. Let me just think of an example. I think, I do every sort of digital PR tactic that’s under the sun, right? As long as it’s in line with Google’s guidelines and every, every tactic essentially aims to achieve the same thing, which is coverage and links, but, and each tactic as well has its own kind of pros and cons.
But yeah, the point, like you were saying, is not every single approach works for brands. And so with that digital PR strategy, you can figure out what tactics work. For example if in your strategy, you uncover that a brand’s link velocity, and by that the kind of rate at which they’re earning quality links, say it’s massively lagging behind competitors, right?
If I was doing that strategy, I might suggest doing lots of kind of mini campaigns and things like editorial outreach, which is where you use your client’s existing content as leverage to build links. Now, those tactics are less demanding in terms of the sort of research and production required to make a campaign.
Like when you talk about hero campaigns, there’s a lot of research, design, dev, loads of different things involved. And they’re fantastic, and they have the scope to get lots of links, but they can take a long time to execute. smaller scale campaigns and using what you’ve already got. It’s faster.
It allows you to pitch more regularly to press because it’s faster. And you can bank as much of the budget as possible into outreach which should improve link velocity. So that’s how I connect like data to action and think about, okay, what tactics should I do next? Each, it doesn’t mean that say if your strategy thinks, oh, okay, there’s two, there’s two tactics here that will work for you.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t consider flexing later down the line if the opportunity presents itself. And this is where all that nuance comes in and it’s just yeah, a minefield for someone who’s not in PR but when you are, you just, I don’t know, the experience helps you know how to pivot and what to try and what’s working there and then.
Vince: Yeah, it sounds like you have an extensive toolkit which comes from experience. Are there places that you recommend people learn and build their toolkit, like the resources online? Like, where did you learn all of your kind of tools and strategies?
Olivia: When you say toolkit, do you mean actual tools and software, or do you mean like tactics?
Vince: no, sorry. Yeah, like tactics.
How do you recommend people build their “toolkit” of digital PR tactics?
Olivia: Okay, yeah. It’s almost, it’s like a mixture of places where I’ve picked it up from. When I joined the team at iProspect it was great because there was, more than one person in the digital PR department and I could learn from what they’ve done, what has worked, what hasn’t worked, that sort of thing.
We brought on a head of digital PR while we were there, Louise Parker, who’s now at Propellernet. She was brilliant. Shout out, Louise.
And yeah, taught us lots of different things that we could do. And then another I didn’t even really pay too much attention to say recipient, like journalists as a recipient, their sort of behaviors with the pitch I’m sending them until we hired Anila, who was fantastic.
And she’s the one who taught me all about BuzzStream open rates, landscaping, that kind of thing. And I would start paying a lot more attention to that because she mentioned it, so you learn and then learn from testing you like doing it yourself as well. I feel like there’s a balance to strike between learning and doing.
And I feel like often doing is the most important thing, you won’t, like I’ve made mistakes. Everyone who’s been digital PR has made mistakes, but you don’t learn from that and hone your process until you actually do it. Yeah, just do it. Just do it.
Vince: Yeah, no, I talk like people who asked me about getting into digital PR and where they should start.
I usually say, try to like intern in an agency or get a junior position at an agency because you have so much exposure to different brands and tactics and industries. You mentioned another thing when you’re talking about building the strategies and figuring out what tactics you’re going to wield for different clients.
You mentioned It sounds like taking more of an SEO first approach. And by SEO, you’ve mentioned like looking at doing like a link analysis and like seeing where they’re getting links and link velocity. Some of those are things that, a client. Might not know, right? So is that kind of your approach is the SEO first approach?
Do you approach clients with an SEO-first approach?
Olivia: Ideally? Yeah, because it helps to inform what I’m doing and can connect it to the sort of wider SEO strategy. For me the ideal kind of setup is I’m working with. And possibly even a content or a copywriter at that brand. And I have a kind of good workflow with those specialists because Digital PR, I feel like one mistake that some people can make is thinking PR is, separate to SEO.
Digital PR is SEO. It’s like one of the three pillars. So like having a strategy which is mindful of that is really important and the thing that will help you get results. There’s so many times where you might see a campaign. It’s Oh, we got 80 links. Isn’t that great?
What did it do for you? What did it help your rankings? Did it help your sales? What was the outcome of that? And I think if you don’t connect it to your SEO goals, it can be really hard to measure that and to, yeah, to quantify that basically. And I’m not just going when I do my PR work, I, yes, I’m obviously trying to get them the kind of brand awareness and get their name out there and all the positive things from traditional PR, but with the kind of with SEO mindset there to help them do even better.
Vince: Yeah, there’s like a kind of top down approach to branding. And then there’s like the bottom up SEO approach, I feel like, that you can come at it from both ways. And. Yeah, I think it’s so important to link that starting with the SEO, I think it was James Brockbank. I spoke to from Digitaloft.
He put this really well, which I thought was, we talked about kind of the differences and benefits of digital PR and PR in general.
We asked this question of if Google wasn’t around, would your PR still support you? Would all the PR efforts still support you? And having that mindset, you can see, you can start to connect the dots between the traditional PR and branding and, The business in general and like where are you getting links from?
And, but yeah, to your point, like when there’s that disconnect, it just becomes a numbers game for one team and a numbers game for another team. And so what would you say is the easiest for you? You’re starting with a new client. What do some of those talks look like to make sure that kind of everything is in alignment?
How do you ensure PR and SEO align with a client?
Olivia: Yeah, for some clients, I go as many as I can. I go through this quite detailed onboarding process and I’m asking them questions that are to do with their site, like their technical SEO their onsite content. Also, they’re like broader business goals. So not even considering PR or SEO, what are they, what do they do?
What are they trying to achieve? Who are their audience just as a business? I think you can’t just look at. PR or SEO sort of in isolation, it is all part of this kind of marketing mix, right? So yeah, I’m asking questions like that to get like a full context of what is this all about and having that knowledge of being armed for that knowledge really helps me to figure out what kind of sort of press ideas like whether it’s a mini campaign or a hero campaign or whether I’m using their existing content no matter what tactic I’m doing.
Having that initial context is so valuable to me because yeah, I can match it up and then when I’m having, say, if I put some ideas together and I’m going through them with my client and seeing what one they want to run with, I try and make sure that all of my ideas connect to their sort of broader strategy in one way or another and show how that connects.
Because if it doesn’t, what’s the point? And what you were saying about James point about, if Google didn’t exist would it make sense for your brand to say this? Or would it, that is so important. to what I think about when I’m coming up with ideas. There’s been, there was the time of kind of completely irrelevant campaigns and we’ve all done them.
Those of us who’ve been in the industry long enough. But the more I do it, like the more I learn and the more experienced I’ve become. I don’t do those now. It’s all about being super relevant to the brand with SEO in mind and trying to balance the needs of that.
Vince: Yeah.
Yeah. I, that’s great to hear. I, I think it serves for me right now, I feel like, we’re recording this August 23rd. There’s been so much so many changes in the Google landscape, SEO landscape that have. Kind of repercussions to how digital PRs and how link builders and how SEOs view each other’s craft and how brands view, link building disappear.
And I’ve been formulating this hypothesis that it’s. Everything is moving more and more towards digital PR. And it’s for all those same reasons that you’re saying. I think the brand itself is becoming so important. The strength of your brand, being able to show up in these large language models.
AI overviews and Google is even like the Google leak that came out a few months ago showed that and whether or not they still use these signals, I’m sure they do, show that they really prioritize links and coverage from specifically areas on a site that got a lot of clicks and areas on a site that had a lot of fresh content that was updated frequently.
And lo and behold, that’s what digital PR really aims to solve for. It’s been an interesting kind of time to educate people and try to push them away from these older tactics that I don’t know, it’s like snake oil kind of Hey, I can, you can pay me 20 bucks and I’ll get you a hundred links or here’s this link exchange network and all this kind of stuff.
It’s been interesting. It just seems like the digital PR is the way to go with this.
So with that in mind, there are a couple of tactics too, that you had mentioned.
I made some notes here and then I want to dig into a little bit. So you mentioned this idea, and I’m not sure if you said this on this podcast or in our offline talk, but what you called editorial outreach which was using clients, existing content for outreach.
And you did say that earlier, that’s how one of the first things that you do when you’re evaluating a client is Hey, can I just use this existing content? It’s cheaper. Let’s talk a little bit about that and like what you evaluate in the content itself, because I think that’s an easy win for some people and can help shift the mindset a little bit.
How do you repurpose existing client content for digital PR (aka “editorial outreach”)
Olivia: Sure. So I think to get started with editorial outreach and again, like of reiterate to your listeners, like what I mean by that is. going through the kind of stuff that’s maybe on your client’s blog or even like kind of other areas of their site, like maybe even the about section, or maybe even like the kind of product description of a certain category, there might be something in there that you could repurpose into a comment, basically anything and everything that’s on Your your client’s site, what pages are there that you could use as as leverage to do some outreach with?
And the beauty of this tactic is that you don’t have to start from scratch and try and get loads of budget signed off to create something new, go through all the kind of sign off process with is this message right for us? Do we want to do this? Actually, no, we can’t say this. We need to say that.
And then just becomes diluted, I think Editorial Outreach is a brilliant place to start and I mean you can start by doing it by like just trawling through the site and just see if anything leaks out at you, but personally, like going back to what we were talking about earlier, I’d say the best place to start is with that strategy and competitive analysis and doing that does allow you to better understand what kind of topics are earning links in your niche.
And, way back when, just to give you an example, when I worked on that bathroom brand after looking at competitor links, I saw a couple getting links around world war today, right? And it’s seems obvious in hindsight, but I probably wouldn’t have even thought of that. without seeing it work from competitors and rather than let’s say starting from scratch with creating a campaign landing page or trying to think of these kind of big creative ideas to connect to world war today i just run a check through the site and a good way to do this is just research parameters so i do site colon Brand URL and then a keyword.
So in this case, it was a safe water or water. And from doing that, I found a mixture of things. I found products. They had some water saving showerheads that I didn’t know about. I found some editorial stuff, tips to use less water in the bathroom. And this was from a blog post two years prior just on their site.
Things about like stats around water usage, that sort of thing. And I earned a handful of links just by leveraging stuff that already exists. And their products front and center. It’s a tactic that’s worked throughout my career, like fast forward to more recent times, I did a strategy for a flooring company, and I know some stuff that worked for competitors, there was content on my client’s site about how to fix squeaky floors, and I just repurposed that, turned it into a kind of expert led strategy.
sort of mini pitch, like a kind of mini press release just with like commentary about how to fix them and yeah, got some pieces of that, like that sort of tactic isn’t necessarily it’s gonna end up in PR week or go viral, and it doesn’t typically drive as much coverage as you might get with a larger scale campaign, but it can be a lot more budget friendly and make the content that you already have work even harder.
And like having done that throughout my career, that kind of process, I think there’s ways that it can be improved in terms of like workflow. And for me, like the best ways to do it are work very closely with your brand’s content marketing or like copywriting team. Find out their content schedule, if you can, and scan through some pieces before they’re live, sometimes like when I’m doing that with my current clients, I might suggest kind of small additions that could make that page more linkable once it does go live or more newsworthy.
And then what I’ll do is I will maybe take out snippets from. The content and basically repurpose it into a spokesperson comment, and then that’s there ready to go. Whether I’m doing proactive or reactive outreach, it’s just in a kind of bank of commentary and yeah, it just basically makes what you already have work a lot harder.
Vince: Yeah 1 thing that is sticking out to me here is a realization I had. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me or maybe this isn’t as prominent in the States, but there is like this tactic around pitching informational articles to journalists and whether or not they use all the information you give them.
I’ve seen that happen, right? Where you mentioned like a mini press release, right? You find the article on your client site. It’s got great information. Maybe you supplement it with a couple of expert quotes, then you’re actually just pitching that whole thing. And it’s usually like seasonal content, right?
Like in the summer. If you have an air conditioning client, you know how to stay cool, and you’re pitching it to these journalists that, cover this kind of stuff every year because it gets hot or it gets cold in winter or whatnot. And reading it, being able to shoehorn your client in there, but in a way that you’re presenting them as an expert, but really you’re writing a majority of the article for it.
For journalists, right? Do you a is that right? Is that kind of how you look at it? And then be you find that is as common in the U. S. as the U. K.
Do you rewrite and pitch existing client articles?
Olivia: So I don’t when I don’t necessarily. But rewrite the whole thing and then use that as the pitch, if or expect the journalists to use it almost like word for word.
Obviously some will, because maybe they don’t have like, all the resources on their news desk. But no, not I just use it like, in, in a few ways. One, like sometimes the piece of content on the site is good to go and can be like fantastic leverage for outreach.
I don’t know what it might be. Maybe like you said, tips about how to stay cool.
What I would do with something like that is I would turn it into a pitch, not necessarily a press release but yeah, I’ll turn it into a pitch and it’s “Hi, journalist. Temperatures are going to reach 35 degrees here today, or like in the next couple of days.
Here’s loads of ways that you can keep cool or sleep in a heat wave.”
And this comes from expert so and and then give a bio, and then take a snippets from the content on my client’s site and turn it into quotes, not necessarily word for word. Like some of it will just be like a little bit too salesy because that’s what that blog post is trying to do.
It’s got the kind of like days and stuff, but that’s not what my pitch is trying to do. My pitch is trying to get coverage.
And so I will pick out the most newsworthy piece, like newsworthy things and turn it into sort of tips. And then I’ll ask for the link at the end. I’ll be like, if you’d like to use this please attribute it to expert name at company link.
And yeah that’s what I mean when I talk about it, which I’ll repurpose what I’ve already got and turn it into something that will work for a journalist.
Vince: Yeah. Does the date published like the published date of the existing content, does that ever get in the way? If you, you mentioned here’s a blog post from two years ago, you have to refresh that data.
Is that pitchable still?
How important is the publish date of existing content when pitching it? Can you pitch old content?
Olivia: I think again, it depends on what, like where I’m trying to get them to link to. So Ideally, they would link to the blog post that is literally about the thing that I’m sending to them. Sometimes it will just be the homepage link, sometimes it would be a product link, so I have to think, where am I trying to get them to link to?
If I’m trying to get them to link to the blog post and it makes sense for them to do then I might chat to The SEO team or a content person be like, can we update this and update the date just to make it a bit fresher, but not always I don’t think there’s always a need to do that. Like with the bathroom client, I didn’t have to do that.
I just turned it into, but I just use some of the tips to help me write. A bit of a press release. And then mostly the thing I was pushing was their water saving showerheads. So the product isn’t dated. It’s in stock. Let’s go, so that’s how I evaluate it as I’m working through.
Vince: Yeah, that’s great advice. The one other thing I wanted to catch before you leave is, so we mentioned how obviously there’s no one size fits all strategy or tactic for any client. But in your years of doing this, do you have any specific tips or tricks for like different tactics that seem to work better in different industries?
Does a specific tactic work better in fashion versus entertainment? I feel like this is a good way to end, give a couple little tips and tricks for people.
Do different tactics work better in different industries?
Olivia: Yeah okay, let me think of a industry. Okay, I’m working on a couple of brands at the moment in the homes and interiors space, for example.
And yet they’re both in homes and interiors, but they have totally different digital PR budgets. They have different product offerings, audiences, and even totally different price points. One’s more the kind of budget end, the other’s more luxury. And when I think about what’s working in that niche in digital PR today, Rarely do I see like a kind of creative hero campaign perform exceptionally well in that sector.
Now, the stuff that I see doing consistently well is thought leadership, expert commentary, whether it’s proactive or reactive. That isn’t to say that hero campaigns don’t work, period. A lot of it is about the story. Working with an agency, I ran a hero campaign for a flooring company and it took a while to get some coverage at first, but fast forward a few months later.
60 pieces of coverage across online and print and 40 links.
So I’m really happy with that. So I think like I was saying even though we see these trends that kind of expert commentary works really well in this sector. And yeah, for one of my clients, that’s the only thing I do because it consistently gets some coverage.
It works really well. If there’s, if an opportunity presents itself, if the SEO strategy is like, oh, we really need to drive our rankings for this particular set product category or keyword set, then you have to think, okay, let’s work from there. What will work for PR and supplement that SEO strategy and kind of, Yeah, sometimes that is a hero campaign.
But yeah, taking a totally different sector and brand side. I work with an amazing non profit called Earth FM. They’re essentially like Spotify, but for nature sounds, you should check them out. They’re brilliant. And the digital PR for them suggested some sort of kind of hybrid type of resource link building weirdly enough would work but also a gap in the market for the kind of bigger hero campaign piece.
Like lots of the competitors weren’t doing that. I say competitors as a charity, lots of them weren’t doing it. And so I started off with leveraging the earth FM website almost like a tool in itself But they have an interactive map where you can basically virtually travel the world and listen to these incredible nature sounds and i’ve also been doing the odd piece of like reactive Pr for them in tandem, but the thing that really worked for them was a big hero campaign and the concept we did was the quietest places in the world’s outer cities or some of the world’s outer cities to be completely accurate And it’s done impeccably.
Like we’re talking like 80 referring domains. It’s got placements and Forbes, BBC, Boston.com, lots of us regionals and what is delivered for them is, they hit an all time high traffic and that isn’t necessarily just down to the digital PR, I’m also working with their SEOs and their content team.
But yeah, it’s it’s done really well for them. You have to look at what is working in the niche you’re working within and what sort of things the journalist you want to target tend to write about and shape your tactics based on that insight
Vince:. Yeah. And it sounds don’t be afraid to pivot based off of their needs.
Yeah. I guess that’s the theme and major takeaway for me and talking with you is as much as we, as content creators want to extract these “here’s exactly what you should do for this” it’s never going to be that cut and dry.
So it’s more a matter of, yeah, gaining experience through trial and error doing your due diligence upfront and gathering as much information as you can.
And then trusting your gut. It sounds like in a lot of these instances, trusting the process that you’re putting in place. Yeah. Olivia, this has been awesome. So much to take away from this. I will put links to as much as I can in the show notes here, especially some of these great clients that you just mentioned as well.
But for those of you listening, Olivia, you could find her on LinkedIn. That’s where she’s most active. Yeah. Olivia. Thanks so much. This has been great. I really appreciate the time for anybody listening. Please subscribe, give a thumbs up. Let us know what you think in the comments. I’m sure Olivia would be happy to answer any questions you have about any of these tactics, strategies.
Share this podcast with people. The more that we can get listeners and watchers and subscribers and all that good stuff, the more it can bring on great guests like Olivia. So again, big thank you to Olivia and thanks for watching.
Olivia: Thanks so much. Cheers
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