Table of Contents
If you’re a BuzzStream Newsletter subscriber, you’ve probably seen the name Victoria Schmid before. She’s been quoted in several of our articles and created a fantastic case study of her digital PR success with KURU Footwear.
In my chats with Victoria, she discussed the interesting challenge of creating content in-house for an e-commerce company. She told me that, early in her career, she received feedback from a journalist who said a campaign felt like an ad for KURU shoes.
I realized that this is probably something that a lot of in-house digital PRs may face—especially with an ecomm site.
With that in mind, we took to the podcast to discuss the challenges of ideating, designing, and pitching digital PR campaigns from an in-house.
Actionable Takeaways
Here are some key takeaways that I got from chatting with Victoria.
1. Align campaigns with brand identity, mission, and goals
Ensure digital PR campaigns are rooted in your brand’s core values and mission. Work with brand, SEO, and marketing teams to ensure campaigns align with broader business goals, such as brand awareness and product sales.
2. Strike a balance between creativity and sales
Create campaigns that capture attention without coming across as overtly advertorial. Focus on storytelling and consumer engagement over hard selling.
3. Use feedback to refine strategies
This applies to any kind of digital PR, not just in-house. Proactively seek feedback from journalists and audiences about your campaigns. Clearlink used to pay a panel of journalists for feedback on pitches and ideas.
4. Create an easy way to capture inspiring campaigns
Victoria recommended using the Pinterest Chrome extension to create a “swipe file” of successful or inspiring PR campaigns, headlines, and pitch ideas.
5. Build community
In-house work can become repetitive and sometimes isolating from the digital PR community (as compared to an agency). Actively seek creative opportunities or collaborate cross-departmentally to keep things dynamic and stimulating. Create communities with other digital PRs outside of your company for feedback and inspiration.
Resources Mentioned
Here are a few of the resources mentioned by Victoria in the pod.
Kuru Footwear Website – Kuru Footwear
State of Foot Pain – https://www.kurufootwear.com/pages/reports-foot-pain-2024
Best States for Hiking Campaign: https://www.kurufootwear.com/blogs/articles/best-states-for-hiking-2024
Safest and Most Dangerous Cities for Pedestrians Campaign: https://www.kurufootwear.com/blogs/articles/safest-and-most-dangerous-cities-for-pedestrians
Longest and Shortest Airport Walking Distances Campaign: https://www.kurufootwear.com/blogs/articles/airport-walking-distances
Detailed in a BuzzStream case study.
Transcript
Vince: Victoria, we talked prior to this. You actually did a case study for us on BuzzStream, and that’s where I met you. Then we started talking a little bit about your background and working in-house. There was one specific thing you said to me that really stood out because it is a problem that I’ve seen other people have, and it’s very unique to working in-house.
Today, I’d like to discuss in-house versus agency life. I also like the idea of avoiding overly salsey, overly marketing-oriented content and how it can be tough to build content in-house for a product without making it sound too heavily advertorial.
What is it like moving from agency to in-house?
Victoria: Yeah. So thank you so much for having me. So just to give a bit of background and introduce myself, I’m Victoria. And as Vin said, I’m currently a digital PR specialist and also an influencer marketing specialist at Kuru. I started digital PR back in 2018. It’s crazy. It’s been about six and a half years now, and I’ve mostly done in house roles with a really short stint at an agency.
One thing we were talking about was. When I first started in digital PR, and I was in-house, I was working for a client or a website that was an internet comparison website.
So we weren’t, we were selling a product and that we compared internet, but we weren’t selling like a physical product. So moving over to Kuru footwear, where we do have this physical product and we are an e commerce brand, like there’s no stores you can go on, go into and try the shoes on.
It’s been really unique and had some really unique challenges. Okay, digital PR challenges.
I just offhand mentioned to you that I had been accidentally cc’d in some emails from journalists. I think it was around Black Friday Christmas last year, when I was running this campaign about every state’s favorite shoe.
Or, I think it may have even been a survey called the American Footwear Survey, where we just wanted to know what Americans’ favorite shoes are.
We could break it down by state: sneakers, boots, and sandals. And then, I even went as granular as just to give myself as many pitching angles as possible, favorite color shoes in every state, and average shoe size in every state.
How many pairs of shoes are Americans in? Yeah, I accidentally got this email. I guess the journalist hit reply all, which we’ve all done.
And I got this email where they were saying, “Oh, this looks interesting. Should we cover it?” And then another journalist said, “Oh no, this just reads like a total ad.”
And, I think, at first, we all have a bit of an ego, and I know I put my heart and soul into every campaign I do. And I have a lot of pride in it. So at first, like that really did hurt my feelings. I was like, Oh, that kind of sucks. I’m bummed that they thought that.
But I then took it as a kind of learning that getting unfiltered, brutally honest feedback from a journalist is really like a digital PR’s dream because I’ve worked at places where we paid journalists to give us feedback on our pictures and our ideas. I just think, yeah, getting that it, I had to take a moment.
I took a big step back, reassessed all my strategy, and said, from a journalist’s perspective, why do these read like ads?
I forgot to mention this, but I actually started out in broadcast journalism. That’s what I went to university for. I worked in a newsroom for a bit, and I was literally the person filtering the pictures coming in, reading over them, and passing them along to journalists, saying, “Is this something we want to cover?”
So I have to make some changes and think. Oh gosh, this reads like ads. That’s so not the goal of link building. We want earned media and earned coverage. So yeah, that’s how that all came about.
Vince: Yeah. Having that unfiltered advice or feedback, I guess from a journalist, I’ve definitely gotten that before, not from a journalist.
I remember pitching somebody something freelance. This was a long time ago before I even got into digital PR. I was trying to do social media and somebody. cc’d their partner after the pitch and was like Hey, this guy wasn’t that good. Or so he sounds too young or something.
And I was like, ah, okay. All right. It’s a hard learning experience, which you can take them one way, and it sounds like you took it the right way, which is great. And yeah, let’s dig into this a little bit because.
Honestly, to me, that pitch that you’re talking about doesn’t sound too advertorial.
It doesn’t sound like in a marketing play. You’re just getting shoe general. If it was like, what do you like about Kuru or something? Like which Kuru style do you like, but for people that are working in house and have let’s. A product. I guess it could be a SaaS.
It could really be anything. How do you ideate so that you don’t get too far into it, but then not, you don’t want to get too far away as well. So there’s like that special kind of middle ground there that you have to hit. It seems pretty challenging.
How do you ideate campaign ideas that don’t come off as too salesy?
Victoria: Yeah. I went to Brighton SEO Last year, and I keep on top of a lot of SEO and digital PR industry news. I think we all know that we’re moving to this place where relevancy and campaigns are really important. If I did a digital PR campaign, I’d be trying to think of something off the top of my head, even like every SAID’s favorite Thanksgiving dinner.
That really, to me, is way too far from Kuru footwear, walking, foot pain, or anything like that.
So I am in this really tricky spot where I have to find something relevant enough so that the link equity and SEO values there, but clearly my really close stuff was like too advertising.
So, I think in digital PR, we should always be trying to improve and make the best campaigns and find the campaigns that fit our brand. So what I found has really helped is looking at different things that relate to walking, or maybe we have an annual report we put out that’s very in-depth. It’s called the state of foot pain and covers almost all the foot pain stuff, right?
We have podiatrists and doctors review it. That’s our big report of the year, which we’re really trying to use to build up credibility and backlinks. That almost eliminates foot pain as a topic.
Otherwise, it’s going to be too repetitive. So, I’m trying to find these campaigns that make sense and have something to do with our brand.
For instance, last year, I did a campaign about the best states for hiking, and that one really did well. And I think this year, what I did differently was launch it at the same time that we launched a new hiking shoe, a new one that matches our marketing and editorial calendar really well.
And then when I’m pitching people like an outside magazine or people who, do like gear review, those kinds of places, if they reply saying, Hey, this isn’t really something I’d cover about the best states to hike in, but do you have a shoe we can try? I can then say, Hey, yeah, we’ve actually got this new shoe and send it to them.
Not in the sense of sending them something like in exchange for a link, but just for those journalists that it is their job to review new gear and post their reviews. It’s really about some campaigns I’ve had a lot of success with are the longest and shortest airports or airport walking distances that we mentioned best states for hiking, safest and most dangerous states for, or cities for pedestrians.
Things that really relate to walking and being on your feet, but aren’t about shoes and foot pain. I almost think shoes and foot pain are like off limits because they are so close to what our brand is selling.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds so I’d say like the foot pain one, like I really liked that.
It almost sounds like activities that you do with shoes, and it could be extrapolated to other activities that you could do with a product and then also solutions that your product offers. So that’s where the foot pain, I think, makes sense.
I’m curious have you gotten feedback on things being too far away as well?
Have you ever received feedback that your digital PR campaign wasn’t relevant enough?
Victoria: Ooh, that’s a really good question. Actually, yes. When I first started, I wanted to do something really different that I’d seen, honestly, being used mostly by Rise at Seven about TikTok search data and how I could pick something different instead of, the Google trends thing I’ve been doing since 2018 of this state, Google’s this the most or this state’s favorite X is this.
I think that’s like a fantastic digital PR recipe. I was thinking I’m going to try something with TikTok search data. I don’t see that so much out there.
And I did this campaign about the most searched TikTok workouts, because, we do a lot about exercise being on your feet.
And I did actually have a few journalists saying “Why does a footwear company care about this?”
I think that’s definitely one of those instances where it was too far from the brand.
And I think that’s what digital PR is, especially at in house. I basically do one campaign per month, sometimes two, like a new campaign.
And I look at it as every opportunity, like every month is a new opportunity to say, how can I get either closer or learn something about how to get this brand, like how to get links and like brand mentions and brand awareness, but without being too far from it.
So I definitely have had that.
No one’s going to get it perfect the first time. And you should always be looking to improve that.
So yeah, I will definitely say I make mistakes and I just take it and take it to the next thing and think, all right, TikTok workouts way too far.
Vince: Yeah, we used to have these post mortem meetings with when I worked at Siege Media.
I was like, we go over every client just, what did we do wrong? Like, why did this work? Why did this not work? And see what we could apply to other clients. You mentioned something interesting there too. It’s got me thinking about your job in general, right – in house.
Like BuzzStream, I feel like maybe has a pretty good mix of in house customers and agency customers using BuzzStream to do digital PR and link building.
But I feel like in my experience selling digital PR to an in house is maybe easier from an agency and you don’t see a lot of in house Digital PRs, I guess it depends on the size of the company, right?
But what made Kuru decide to go with a digital PR, bring you in house and run these campaigns?
Why did KURU decide to bring digital PR in house?
Victoria: Yeah. So as you mentioned in the beginning, Kuru is not a hugely known company, right? Like maybe Hoka, you’ll definitely like Hoka and other household names. So a lot of our strategy on the market, and I said, as I said before, is that we’re an e-commerce company.
You can’t walk into REI or any of those stores and see us and try us on.
So we are like heavily on marketing online, whether it’s like influencers, social, paid search, and we do have a lot of emphasis on organic search and organic traffic.
So we really are invested in and want to rank for terms, like best shoes for foot pain or best shoes for plantar fasciitis, things like that.
Best shoes for sore feet.
We’re looking to rank for terms like that to attract customers who have foot pain. I work closely with the whole marketing team and the SEO side here because we are trying to, and a lot of our strategy is built around helpful content updates.
A lot of that about, we’re not just here to sell you shoes.
We have a really robust blog. As I said, podiatrists and doctors review our pages. So, we have this robust blog. That’s also really helpful.
You can go on there and find out ways to help your plantar fasciitis, help your foot pain.
Even things like the best songs for running for the summer or places you want to go hiking. That’s how we tie in digital PR and SEO: We’re trying to earn links to help us be a helpful resource, not just a sales site.
Yeah. And I also think a lot of it is brand awareness.
I know that’s one of those spots where traditional PR and digital PR kind of overlap in a funny way that I think we haven’t quite figured out while the two industries are merging, but I also don’t want to, but it’s not a household name.
So, part of my job is getting our name out there and getting journalists to see credibility in us.
Vince: Yeah. It sounds that makes sense now, like why they would invest in digital PR because you are all digital.
So it’s just like, why not get as many kinds of strategies out there as you can? And you mentioned working closely with SEO. Do you have a brand team as well?
Does KURU have a brand team and do you work closely with them?
Victoria: So we have a marketing team. Being a pretty small company and a pretty small marketing team, I work with one person on SEO. Then I obviously own all of digital PR, and, I guess, the link-building side, but I try to be super tapped into what we are ranking for.
What position are we for this? Monitoring all the different Google algorithm updates. I know one, it’s so funny. I know one went out recently. It’s August right now. I’m not sure when this will come out, but just with it being August, one went out recently and we also did a site migration on the same day.
So we are eagerly awaiting what happens. And that was just a bad coincidence because we don’t know what’s going to impact our site. But I really try to stay on top of that. I think that’s one of those blessings with being in-house: You get a lot of insight into how the whole site is doing from an SEO standpoint, rankings, staying on top of algorithm updates.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. And that brings up a good point too, of working in tandem, right?
With a lot of these other avenues and you got SEO there’s like advertising or influencer marketing. I did want to ask you more about your, there’s this senior digital PR slash influencer marketing specialist.
Do you do a influencer marketing much? How about, and curious how that kind of crosses over with digital PR.
Do you do much influencer marketing and how does it overlap with digital PR?
Victoria: Yeah. So when I’d started this role almost two years ago, I had never really done anything with influencer marketing. And it really came down to, like I said, we have a pretty small team. So a lot of us wear a few hats.
I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to learn another skill set. So I’ve really enjoyed it. I would say if I’m talking about how I split my time and my role, I am mostly like maybe 80 percent focused on digital PR with 20 percent being over gifted influencer. And then we have someone else who works with paying influencers.
It’s a pretty separate thing. I will say it’s helped me be a better market marketer because I have to understand so much more about our customer base when I’m looking at influences like age, a lot of influences are really young, for example, where our customer base skews older because they have foot pain.
So things like understanding, yeah, I know it’s pretty separate, but just things like understanding our audience has helped in that way.
I do just want to, I guess, say that as digital PRs, our audience is not customers, and our goal is not to sell right? Our audience are journalists and the media and our goal is to earn coverage.
So it’s a bit of a switch in my brain to try to be on those different sides, but it’s been really fun. I really enjoy it. It’s a completely new thing for me.
Vince: Yeah, I’ve never done really much in the influencer realm of things. I can see how they play well with each other.
You did say something interesting there at the end where, you know, the goal of digital PR, at least for you here is the end result is getting coverage from journalists, not necessarily selling shoes. Let’s expand on that a little bit because I know that some people might disagree that all marketing you want to sell.
Obviously, the goal is to get journalists covered, which will get you backlinks and help you rank and help the pages rank. But I think there’s probably a happy medium there, right? Where you’re all the content you’re creating has to do with, it’s going to get your product in front of people and readers and stuff too.
They do meet up at some point, but yeah, let’s expand on that a little bit. I’m just curious where you’ve encountered those issues.
Do you think the role of digital PR is to sell?
Victoria: Yeah, that’s so true. I didn’t even think about that in that way until you said it because I think of digital PR sometimes—this is definitely more of an in-house thing than an agency-side thing— but sometimes, the rest of the team’s goal is ultimately to sell and appeal to our audience.
Whereas mine, like I just said, is very much journalists are my audience. And I actually think you’re right.
And that if you actually do zoom out a bit, it’s true.
At the end of the day, I am trying to make sales, build the brand, and get brand awareness so that we can make more sales. So that’s really interesting. I honestly hadn’t really clicked for me. I’m like, “Oh yeah, it’s so obvious, but I never thought about it.”
Vince: Yeah. To your point, that is not the danger, it’s but that happens in the house, it’s easy. And I’ve felt that on the agency side too. If you’re, you can be so focused on specific goals that you have as an agency that like, Sometimes the communication just isn’t there. And so like when you’re in house, sometimes it’s easy to get hyper focused on the goals and it sounds like you do a great job of.
I think making sure that you’re relevant is the way to make all those lines connect, at least in my experience, but yeah, that is a really good point. It’s your reaction, like proves that, that happens.
Victoria: Yeah. I think, as you said, keeping things relevant to your brand is so important.
Knowing that when you’re in-house as the digital PR person, you’re often the one giving quotes to media or connecting media with, say, experts, and so you also do become that traditional PR representative in a way as well.
And so I guess that’s why I think so heavily on journalists being my audience.
What are some tips for ensuring your campaigns aren’t reading like ads or too irrelevant?
Here are some tips for if you are in that same spot and how to make sure your campaigns aren’t reading like ads or aren’t reading like ads that are not connected to your brand and are too irrelevant:
So, one of the ways I did that when I took a step back after getting the email from those reporters, it was like taking a step back. I went and looked at all my campaigns. And one thing I think we all, as digital PRs, really need to do is make sure that our methodology is solid.
I think that’s another way to be credible because one example I’ll give is WalletHub. Have you ever tried to go and reverse engineer a WalletHub campaign? They have probably sometimes upwards of 20 or 30 different data points and each way is like a 1. 2 percent or a 7.5 percent or something.
And I think when you’re WalletHub and you have that brand that brand recognition and credibility, they can do that.
I think with a brand like Kuru, that’s so small, and maybe it’s even the first time these journalists have heard about it. I try not to overcomplicate my methodologies too much at all.
I try and keep them simple. I think the most I have is five data points in one campaign each worth 20 points, you add it up to a hundred. Super simple because I don’t want anyone to look at my methodologies and think that is so complicated. They may as well have just made it up. You know what I mean?
Vince: You’re like tailoring the data to your story versus vice versa.
Victoria: Yeah. I think Wallethub can do that and I fully believe that they have a full team who can do that kind of really detailed methodologies. But I think it’s important to always keep your methodology super clear and super straightforward.
Otherwise, a journalist might just distrust you.
I also think if you’re in house and you’d look at your campaign page, make sure that there’s no, shop women’s shoes now, shop men’s shoes now.
None of those ads or what we call them in-house are CTAs.
The only one I will absolutely allow on a campaign is to sign up for our newsletter.
If anyone like way at the bottom, like I want this, I do not want anything that’s going to give a journalist an inkling that this is any kind of ad.
So let’s remove any kind of banner, any kind of ad.
We want it to just look like it’s just a report page.
Vince: Do you keep the like the navigation links in there as well?
Victoria: Yeah. Yeah.
Vince: Yeah. I feel like, that’s going just to do the heavy lifting internal linking.
Victoria: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m keeping the layout. So it still looks good, it still looks like our website, but I’m pretty much always trying to be open to other people’s ideas and everything, but I really do think that putting those kinds of ads or call to actions on the page does make it look too much like an ad.
The other thing I’ve done to really help with this and make it clear that I’m not just this person sending out ads is to put a line like, “Thank you for considering covering this report,” or “I think your audience would really resonate with this report.”
So I think sometimes putting that in even just shows this is a report that you, or that the goal is earned media coverage without saying it right. Instead of just saying, And if you want to buy Kuru’s, go here.
Vince: Yeah, it’s like a gentle nudge, right? To, yeah, remind them. Yeah, that makes total sense.
I often wonder about digital PR sometimes, and this is maybe a little dated at this point, but the microsite approach is—I used to not like that approach, and still I’m a little wary on it, because Yeah. They typically don’t match the website, like the main website, right?
And that’s why I asked about like the navigation, because I think that’s such an important thing so that the user doesn’t all of a sudden feel like, Hey, this is this is a different site, Getting back to that tying it all together back to selling shoes ultimately, right?
So you talked about getting feedback from journalists you said that you used to or you still do you pay journalists for feedback on pitches or story ideas?
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Do you pay journalists for feedback on pitches or stories?
Victoria: Yeah, for sure. That was actually a couple roles ago. So it’s not in my current role, but we built an advisory board where we had, I think, three current working journalists and we would send them, I think it was once a quarter, a bunch of pictures and then any campaigns that didn’t really do well and say, Why do you think this didn’t do well?
I think it’s easy enough for us, like you said, to have done post mortems and even look at things that did do well and say, cool, this is clearly what worked from that. Let’s take that to the next thing. But having a group of journalists as like an advisory board that we could get feedback and say, this is what we specifically want feedback on was like a pretty cool initiative.
I think. Yeah, a really interesting way to get advice, like straight from the horse’s mouth.
Vince: Yeah, this was at Kuru or a different?
Victoria: That was at Clearlink where I was two jobs ago.
Vince: Got it. Yeah, I feel like that’s something like every agency should try to do. I feel like it’s probably like budgetary concerns when you get in house.
Yeah, it’s a smaller team, right?
I’m surprised there might even be somebody who has that service or something already, but yeah, I really liked that idea.
Another thing that kind of comes to mind when you’re talking about working in-house is that it sounds like you do keep busy in as much as your ideation because you are constantly forced.
I think you said you force the kind of thinking about how to push the envelope and stay creative. That was the one thing I was going to ask about in-house versus agency.
For me, the benefit of agency was always getting to work on different clients. You weren’t, like you could dip your feet in different industries, and it didn’t get too boring.
And like working in house, I could imagine after a few years you’d be like, all right, I’ve had enough of shoes. So like, how do you recommend, how do you personally keep things interesting working in house versus when you were an agency?
How do you recommend keeping things interesting while working in-house?
Victoria: Yeah, for sure. I’ve got a few different ways. To be honest, one of my favorite aspects of working at an agency was being across all different industries, I would, for half a day spend half a day on a campaign about pets and then spend the other half of the day on a client about coffee and then the next day do every state’s favorite restaurant.
That was really fun and cool to jump around. And I do think when you work in house on one agency. website for a long time, you get so stuck in this cycle of thinking the same way and thinking it has to be the same formula, the same topics. So I think that one thing you can do is you can, or one thing I’ve been trying to do a little bit is using chat GPT.
I might say, what are some topics around this? I haven’t done a ton of that. And I do want to get really a bit more. nitty gritty with like maybe even foot pain and see if there is, cause I’m sure there’s some topic or campaign idea I haven’t thought of that I could try. Another thing I think is really important is I love the grapevine newsletter.
Just seeing hundreds of different campaigns every month, I always sit down and I build out probably, you can even put time on your calendar. I used to do that. Put it, put an hour every Friday where you are just looking at digital PR inspiration. You are just looking at what that other, what other agencies are doing and.
Take their campaigns and think, how can I adapt that to my clients? I can talk about the, I did this campaign where we use AI to visualize like every state as a shoe, a interesting out there thing. I loved it. And I got that idea from another agency, which. I cannot remember who they are, so I’m so sorry, but they did every state, like they use AI to make a Barbie house for every state.
And I thought that was really cool. Gosh, that’s out there, but it’s creative and it’s so different and it’s really cool. And so I was like, cool, how can I take that and adapt that for my client? The other thing, which I think is really great, I learned from Mark Johnstone back in 2020. If you know him, he suggested this activity that you do with your whole team.
And it’s a mind map, which sounds really simple, but get your whole team, like marketing, if you are like me, where you’re the only digital PR person, get the whole team in, set up a brainstorm and do a mind map. And you will be absolutely shocked how many different topics fit into if I start with shoes that could go to sports.
That could go to foot pain, that could go to walking, that could go to, I don’t know summer, festival, travel, and then just keep going and go as nitty gritty as you can on each of these and you will be absolutely shocked. There’s probably like a hundred different topics you could make a campaign around and you just, You get just so stuck in like cool states for hiking and stuff like that. So I highly recommend doing that.
Vince: Yeah. I, as you’re talking, I’m trying to pull up just did a post on AI tools for PRs. And there was one called idea map.ai. And it does exactly that. It’s like a brainstorming tool where you can you put in shoes and then all of a sudden it’ll, pull out like whatever.
And it’s all chat GPT run or or open AI run, I guess I should say, but that, yeah, I love the mind map that, that was always super surprising to me too.
Like working in agency, all of a sudden you’re like, wow, I didn’t even think of this topic from that angle. Everybody brings their own history and stuff to it.
And yeah, that, that is definitely where I’ve seen ChatGPT as like a very good resource for PRs and like content creation is just brainstorming.
It’s basically just like having that friend that you’re like, you can just constantly sit there and be like, give me more ideas!
Victoria: Especially as weird as it sounds, especially being in house and being the only digital PR specialist, sometimes that is like having coworkers that you’re bouncing off of.
And like that, just having that other voice, that’s just not you really helps.
So I’d always say, take a step back, look at what other people in the industry are doing, create a swipe file like a Pinterest board, or even just a folder on your phone where you screenshot everything that inspires you.
And that could even be ads—it doesn’t even have to be digital PR content. It could just be ads that you see and think, wow, that’s great. That really caught my attention. That particular topic evokes a lot of emotion in me, and that would make me stop scrolling if I was on my phone. So think about that kind of stuff and let yourself just have a creative time.
I think we hear a lot of jokes that, like, I always get my best ideas when I’m falling asleep, or when I’m in the shower, or when I’m cleaning. It’s because that’s when your brain is switched off and allowing. It’s allowing your brain to process all the creative and amazing stuff that you’ve seen, and so you’re coming up with these ideas.
So just have a swipe file, have somewhere you keep what you like and what you’ve seen as inspiring that you can revisit. Also, write down every idea that comes to you because maybe it’s not the perfect idea, but maybe once you take it to a brainstorm or sit on it for a few weeks, it will become a really good idea.
Vince: Yeah, that’s such great advice. I need to ask what a swipe file is. Is that a map? Swipe?
What is a swipe file?
Victoria: No. So it’s actually just the name of like maybe a folder that you keep your inspiration in. Yeah, I got the idea again from Mark Johnstone. He’s great. And he basically showed us you can set up a Pinterest board, just call it a swipe file, install the Chrome extension for Pinterest, and you can just save any image on the internet straight to it.
And then you’ve just got. All this digital PR inspiration in one spot. It’s amazing.
Vince: Yeah. Again, I’m like looking back, I used to have a really cool plugin. I don’t think I have it anymore, but it was just for that. And totally blanking on the name. It was like pin something, pin board. I looked it up.
That’s not what it is. Oh, is it flip board? There was something where you could just pin. Whatever page you were looking at and come back and read it later And I used to have one of those just for that reason where you’re just like, okay, this is interesting I’m gonna come back and During my five or 10 minute or hour that you have set aside to find inspiration.
Then I just go through those. I love that idea, too—setting aside time to actually enjoy and get inspired. I used to, when we did training and stuff at Siege, I always told new people to do that. Yeah, especially when you’re in-house at a small team, like you said, it can be tough.
Yeah. If you don’t have people to bounce your ideas off of, I find that. Working remotely we have slack, but. It can be tough sometimes to to stay, not to stay motivated, but to have that creative, those creative juices flowing all the time.
How do you stay motivated?
Victoria: Yeah. I was going to say, I also think if you have friends in the digital PR industry, or you can even reach out to like me or just anyone even at other agencies or brands or clients, you can set up like a one hour Zoom or even just send a Google doc if you’re in different time zones and just say, I’ve jotted down some ideas.
I feel like they’re 90 percent there, but maybe something’s missing. Or, this one might, I just need a bit of a gut check on this one idea, I’m not really sure how that might come across. Is it too far? Is it not relevant enough?
And just call in one of those favors, maybe once a quarter from someone else or every few months from someone else, in the industry and then be there and be willing to help them, it’s, I’ve even just in group, group chats just sent: hey, I’ve got this idea. It’s a little bit out there. Are these too out there? And then send it to them.
Most of the time, people I know are like, no, that’s awesome. I’m I don’t know. But I think having just set up a network can be a bit tricky, obviously, but if you can return the favor for them at some other point, I think that can be really helpful just to leverage.
One thing about our industry is even though we’re all weirdly competing, we all also are so just, I don’t know, we’re like all on the same team, I think.
When I go to Brighton SEO, there is no Oh, they work for that agency. So I’m not going to talk to them. Like we all help each other.
We all hit each other up on Twitter and LinkedIn. So I love to see that we have a really good community.
And I really doubt if you went to someone and said, can you just help me that they’d say no even just one thing we also used to do is literally make a doc of like 20 to 30 campaign ideas and then send it to a few people and say, can you just anonymously vote on your favorites?
And they put a little asterisks or an emoji next to it. And then you can go the next day and say, one idea has five votes. So cool. That’s one that people really like, like things like that. You can always just lean on the community. There’s always someone who will help you.
Vince: Yeah. That’s a further push.
I want to set something like that up. I’ve been meaning to do it for BuzzStream users just because I’m always interested in what people are working on too. And it’s a good way to get. there. I feel like sharing content that you create is something that some agencies do a lot of. And obviously there’s, NDAs and stuff.
They like the clients who don’t like to have their stuff shown and shared.
But I think that it’s a great way to get feedback, like you said, but then also it can lead to link sometimes too, like getting I see a lot of people just sharing, you get on the grapevine newsletter, you get on PR insider and like those types of kind of roundup posts that can then, you, next thing you know, you’re on some digital PR examples, blog posts that somebody writes, so there are definitely like some added benefits.
We are hesitant to share things if you, if it’s not because of an NDA, and you just don’t feel like you’re going to get value out of it. I think there is a lot of value, like you said, in building that network up.
Victoria: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
Vince: Victoria, I want to ask one kind of final question that I used to think about a lot.
Obviously, like when I worked at Siege Media, one of the big things that we struggled with or struggled with, was part of the growing process. I think when I joined Siege, it was like 12 people. By the time I left, it was like 100 people. So we had to constantly think about ways to train new hires, bring in new hires, where to bring them from.
Do we want to hire senior people, junior people? And it got me thinking about your situation. Working in house versus at an agency. If you were just starting out, if you had recommendations for people just starting out, so they wanted to get into digital PR, would you recommend the in house route or recommend the agency?
If you are just starting out in digital PR, do you recommend starting in-house or agency?
Victoria: Yeah. So this is a really tough question and I’ve thought a lot about it. The too long, didn’t read is I’m going to say it depends, but I’ll tell you why, not to be annoying, but so for context. I started in house, I was in house for four years, I went to an agency for nine months and I said, this is just not for me and I moved back to an in house role.
So I definitely have a bias in the advice to give. I would say when you work in house, the pros are that you have a lot more visibility and a lot more ownership. Like with the marketing team and the website as a whole. I am looking at keyword rankings. I’m looking at traffic, I’m looking at brand awareness, I’m looking at backlinks.
And so I can see the real impact of my work over a long time. When I was at Clearlink, I was on one website for two or three years and I got to see. The domain rank go up. I got to see the linking or referring domains go up over years. And I think that’s really rewarding and really cool to be able to say, Hey, this is how digital PR can really benefit a website or a brand at the same time.
At an agency, if you go in brand new, you’re going to learn from like really great people. There are so many incredible digital PRs I know who are at agencies. And I think that. Going into a role like mine right now where you are the only digital PR specialist, if you were brand new and you really didn’t really have anyone else to bounce ideas off of or learn from, or even learn how to do digital PR, I think that would be really difficult.
So I think I would say go to an agency and do one to two years where you are really going to learn. A lot from like really great people. And I think that then maybe looking in house or looking for an in house role would be a great next step. So you can just feel like you’re more part of the brand rather than like dropping in building links and then leaving.
That was like my experience at an agency. It was very much these short term contracts, very much. No or very little collaboration with the SEO team and literally just building links and saying, here’s how many links we built. I think that you can learn a lot about SEO and marketing from being in house.
So I will say the other, the only other pros and cons I want to mention is I know at agencies, some things like something that really was hard for me was like time tracking and having to bill time to clients. We tracked our time in 15 minute increments. I’m not sure if that’s. The industry standard again, I just want to give that caveat.
I was only at one agency for nine months, so I’m not entirely sure what’s completely normal. But tracking time dealing with kind of things like we were told a certain percent of your time has to be on client work, but then there weren’t enough clients, so sometimes that can be, it can be like a bit dicey with like how much work they have versus how much they don’t.
And then I also think just one last thing to consider. Again, this is only my experience. And, at the end of the day, I think when it comes to looking for a job, you have to consider the entire thing the entire package benefits, everything when looking for a job. And I found when I was at an agency, it was a really small business.
And this might sound a bit silly, but like the health insurance was like 500 a month, whereas when I’ve worked in house, my insurance wing with a bigger company, Has been like 50 to a hundred dollars a month. And I know that sounds a bit like obscure to bring up on a digital PR podcast, but I do want to say job is not just, it’s not just, is it agency or in house there’s so many different factors to consider what’s best for you and the size of a company really matters.
And at the end of the day, it’s a job we’re all doing to get paid. And I think. You can hear some agency horror stories, you can hear some in house horror stories. You can meet some of the smartest people in an agency. You can meet some of the smartest people in house. So whatever’s best for you, but I definitely could say spending the first few years of an agency learning being really helpful.
Vince: Yeah, I felt the same exact way you touch on a lot of stuff there with working at an agency. I never liked the time allocation and I feel just it’s a lot more free. When you’re working in house, you can dig deeper into certain areas that you want. And, that’s, I also worked in an agency for six years and I liked most of it.
It might’ve just been time for me to move. But the one last thing that I thought was really interesting that you said was this idea of the digital PR and traditional kind of the lines melding a bit and blurring these days. And for whatever that’s worth I think it would just might be interesting to hear from you.
Like, where do you think the industry is heading, especially working in house and, being able to see this from the ground level? What does that look like? The future of PR in general look like to you from that context of the traditional versus digital.
Where do you think digital PR is heading?
Victoria: I think they’re both heading to being one.
I think that when you are the digital PR person, you also are the PR person. You are representing the brand. You’ve got your name and face associated with the brand you are earning awareness and earning placements. So I do think if you’re new to digital PR, or even if you’ve been in the industry, it’s good to prepare for knowing that it’s not just link building.
It is very much an all round being a PR representative of a brand and other website. I think I have done, I’ve done TV interviews. I’ve done, radio. I’ve done all kinds of things on behalf of a brand. And when I do provide a quote, I am quoted as the spokesperson of the brand. So I really think that’s where it’s headed is it’s all headed toward one.
And I think it’s hard. I’ve never had any training or really experience in like traditional PR, but I do see that there’s just so much focus on these, especially top tier publications around their own SEO and affiliate links that it’s definitely headed that digital way. And that as they’re learning more about.
SEO and links and no follows and do follows. You know, they’re learning that too. And so that has to just become a part of the PRS job. I think back when I started in 2018, I could, you could tell a lot of top tier publications really didn’t have an SEO strategy or they, and they just put links in now.
There’s a lot of top tier places who. Say we have a no link policy or a no follow only, and they only do follows our internal links. So they’ve counted on and they’re counting onto affiliate links and everything like that. So I think the more is any kind of PR role, traditional digital, the more you can learn and understand about SEO.
Understand journalists and what they’re going through and dealing with they need traffic. They need clicks. Yeah, I think that was just merging into one with even a slight more emphasis on SEO and digital. Yeah.
Vince: Yeah. Great answer. I, it’ll be really interesting to see how things play out.
You bring up the, like the no follow links and like the public communications catching on.
Victoria: There’s still like the Google of it all where it’s is Google also, giving preferential treatment to publishers? And yeah, it’ll be interesting to see, but I love that idea of any PR position needs to be aware of the whole landscape.
It’s not just digital may touch TV or vice versa. I feel like that’s probably the closest line there, radio, billboard, like print ads and stuff. Like I’ve had people where you pitch something and they’re like, can I put a, this article in my print magazine?
You’re like, yes, sure. It’s really me like from a link perspective, but like a brand perspective. Yeah. Thinking of a big picture.
So yeah, Victoria, this has been great. Thank you so much for giving up some of your time.
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