Table of Contents
This podcast started from a LinkedIn post.
Bekki Ramsay, Digital PR Manager at UK agency RVU, posted about how she re-angled a piece of existing content.
It’s a very detailed post with really great tips for digital PRs. After meeting her and speaking with her on our podcast, I quickly found this to be a trend. She was full of unique insights and tips for re-pitching your content and digital PR in general.
You’re going to want to keep a notepad handy for this one!
Actionable Tips & Takeaways
Based on our chat, Bekki made some tips and points that really stood out to me. Most apply to general outreach for digital PR, not just re-pitching content.
Monitor Open Rates Closely
Use BuzzStream’s open rate feature to spot journalists’ interest in your emails over time. Sort by last opened, ascending or descending, to identify any recent engagements. This could indicate renewed interest due to a relevant news event.
1. Always Include a Boilerplate
Add a brief description of your site in every outreach. This ensures journalists can locate past emails if they need expert commentary from a mortgage advisor later, increasing your visibility in their inbox.
2. Analyze Coverage Beyond Links
Don’t just celebrate when a campaign gets a link; examine why it was picked up. Often, a news event can renew a campaign’s relevance, offering valuable insights to leverage in future PR.
3. Leverage Successful Social Campaigns for PR
Transform popular social media posts into PR pitches, especially if they resonate well with the audience. This crossover can breathe new life into existing content and expand its reach.
4. Align Ideas with Client Buy-In
If you’re not convinced of a pitch’s value to the client, it’s unlikely to resonate with journalists. Ensure clients see the pitch’s potential by linking it to their brand goals and audience relevance.
5. Avoid Duplicate Pitches to Journalists When Re-Pitching
Avoid pitching the same campaign to journalists who’ve covered it before. Instead, create a system for tracking “successful placements” at the publication level to prevent redundant outreach and maintain goodwill.
6. To Find New Contacts, Identify Competitors’ Backlinks
Analyze competitors’ links to uncover potential new contacts. Track competitor placements monthly to stay ahead of industry trends and keep Mojo Mortgages in front of the right people.
7. Personalize Each Expert Commentary Pitch
Customize every expert comment you send, tailoring it to each journalist’s specific interest and recent work. This method is labor-intensive but significantly increases coverage potential.
8. Always Educate New Clients/Stakeholders on Digital PR
Onboard new clients and stakeholders with a foundational understanding of digital PR. Set expectations on the types of data required, deadlines, and why signing off promptly is crucial for campaign success. This way, you’ll never miss an expert quote or commentary deadline.
9. Extend PR Reach to Social Channels
Reach out to publication-specific social media accounts (e.g., TikTok, Instagram) and video journalists for added exposure. Repurposing data as video content or a social post can help diversify outreach and drive engagement.
Resources Mentioned
Here are some of the resources that Bekki mentioned in the pod!
Mojo Mortgages post – https://mojomortgages.com/mortgages/first-time-buyer-mortgages/average-age-of-a-first-time-buyer-uk
Transcription
Below is a slightly edited transcription of our chat!
Is there a piece of content that stands out to you?
Bekki: I’m going to be really basic here, but my name is Becky, so I’m living up to it.
But just the whole Bratsummer, like it is taking over every single aspect of everything. I am a 29-year-old woman who writes about mortgages all day. I still feel like I’m having a brat summer listening to it at the same time. Yeah, I think the fact that I feel like Charlie XCX was very like sort of niche, not niche, she was quite broad.
popular, but for her to break into the fact that even like my Nana knows who she is now I think it’s really interesting. You’ve got coffee shops making brat summer green matcha lattes. You’ve got people wearing like little, like t shirts of say that brat on like their babies and stuff. I just think it’s really inspirational that she’s rebranded and literally she’s taken over summer.
So yeah. Charli XCX, I didn’t expect her to get a shout out, but yeah, she’s the one for me.
Vince: Yeah, there we go. Love it. We’re recording this August 15th. So summer’s coming to a close. It’s time to rebrand
Bekki: again.
Vince: Brat winter, Brat fall, yeah, Brat autumn. So let’s talk about Mojo Mortgages to explain what the brand is and maybe how your role fits into that.
Because I did mention you work on a couple other mortgage related brands.
Can you explain what Mojo Mortgages is?
Bekki: Yeah, of course. I joined Mojo Mortgages. Next week, it will be exactly six months, which has flown over. And so yeah, before that, I worked at an agency, and I’ve been in so many different industries from working on an array of clients.
But obviously, like I said, I just moved into mortgages half a year ago. And so Mojo Mortgages is like the leading mortgage broker that offers an array of products, whether it’s first-time buyers, home movers, or that kind of thing. And the thing that’s great is that they are fee-free, so literally, you can go to them and not get charged, but you have access to an array of different mortgage lenders over 70, so highly competitive.
I think it’s great that we use a lot of data internally, which is actually great for PR as well. It really enables us to offer customers a completely personalized experience. That allows them to get the best mortgage deal for them, the best mortgage product. That’s why I’m really proud that we have lots of internal tools, like data tools that we’ve created.
It should help customers buy their first home. And as a recent person who’s just bought their first property with their boyfriend, and it’s really impressive, and I’m very proud to work for Mojo, so yeah.
Is Mojo just UK-based?
Bekki: Yes, they are just UK-based.
Vince: Do you know, off the top of your head, again, this is me just being interested in mortgage space.
Is the mortgage process much different in the UK than in the US?
Bekki: Yes and no. From what I’m still obviously getting used to, the industry has different terms and stuff. Things seem to be called completely different things. So it might be more similar than what it seems. But From when I do research, I’ve tried to get links essentially in the American publications and it’s very, there seems to be a different process and how you do things compared to the UK.
Vince: Yeah. Okay. That’s interesting. Yeah. We can touch on that a little later too, because I’m always interested in taking a brand, like with Homebuyer, it was specifically. In the U. S.
Bekki: Yeah.
Vince: Are there options, or are there, is there potential to pitch internationally? Yeah, when you get into those, like, when the process is a little different, I feel like it can maybe take away a bit from the message of the piece.
Bekki: Yeah.
Vince: Let’s talk about this initial campaign that you did. You talked a lot about, using internal data.
Was this a post that you were able to leverage some internal data?
Bekki: Yeah. Yeah, that. So we’ve got a great data team internally that help people get mortgages, but there’s also a fantastic woman called Mel who can also help with digital PR campaigns.
So we’ve got access to every mortgage we’ve ever given out, and obviously we can transform that into PR campaigns. Being like GDPR being aware of what we’re using and being careful of how we use it and all those kinds of things, working closely with compliance. But the great thing is we have access to it.
That’s literally the data that we use for this campaign that I discussed on LinkedIn. So the campaign itself is the average age of a first-time buyer around the UK. It’s a topic that gets discussed quite a lot, and it’s always around the same age, around 32 or around 33, but we wanted to do something completely different at Mojo and delve into it a little bit more.
So we wanted to find out the exact month, so we looked at our internal. But then we also wanted to see how it differed around the UK. It might be the same. It will be the same in different States in America, but I live in the Northeast of England, which is much cheaper than in London. So you tend to get on the property ladder a lot earlier, or if at all compared to London.
So we wanted to clarify the average so that people feel like they’re not behind or maybe gone a little bit earlier if they do if it is like their goal. We used our internal data to find the averages and then looked at deposit size and house price.
That’s why I think we have almost the upper hand and added something new. To the news by digging a little bit deeper. So yeah,
Vince: Yeah, it’s such a great advantage to lean on some of that data. Shout out to Mel. I think you said thanks for the help on this one. Do you have much friction in terms of Accessing data?
I know that can often be a blocker, especially if you’re an agency worker. I’m curious what that looks like at Mojo and how it has looked in the past for you, having worked at an agency.
Is it easier to access data to use for campaigns when you work in-house?
Bekki: Yeah, of course. I know it is like the privilege of working in house.
You normally have access to data, and you have access to it quicker. As I said, we’re very data-driven at Mojo. Specifically, we have access to lots of tools that we’ve created. So I can actually go in and access data myself, use it for reactive commentary, and get it proofed by compliance.
Make sure everything’s happy, all of that. But when I was on the agency side, it was naturally a lot more difficult to access that sort of data. And it’s very time-consuming for the in-house person to collate it as someone who’s now on the other side and has their own to-do lists, goals, KPIs, and that kind of thing.
I totally sympathize with both sides. But I think the interesting thing is that you don’t just need to use internal data. So I listened to a webinar recently, and it’s something I’ve been doing for years, but it’s great to see that journalists at the Financial Times financial advisor—we’re discussing it as well—said they’re happy to accept data.
That’s external data, which you then almost make your own by combining it. So you might get demographic data and then finance data from another place, combine them and you’re creating your own statistics. So that’s one way of creating new data that no one else has seen. And I think as well, just being mindful of what is out there, what sort of data, there’s lots of blog posts.
There’s even BuzzStream of different places to access data. And I think it’s just a case of. Continuously look at these sources such as DataGov, YouGov, Statista, and all these different things and get them into the back of your mind. So when creating a campaign or sending a chaser, which this podcast episode is about, have that at the forefront of your mind and add something new.
Yeah.
Does the data dictate the story or the other way around?
Bekki: It can work both ways. So this is the thing that I think that’s so exciting about PR is you can almost be a problem, you can find a problem and you can help solve the problem, or you can uncover the problem yourself and then you’re solving it.
And if that makes sense. So one thing I’d say when you’re coming out with a campaign is don’t just pull data and say this is a problem we need actually to be given a solution at the end, let’s not scare monger people.
But yeah, I think that’s the great thing is I feel like when you’re really invested in PR and you’re becoming an expert and you’re reading the news quite a lot, you’ll start to see timely hooks journalists are talking about and you’ll start to think of different ways that you can contribute to that with data.
Or they might have published something, and you know you can add to it. So, one of the reasons that the average age of a first-time buyer campaign was such a success is that we added a last-minute secondary angle based on something that we’d seen in the news. So the Bank of England did an article saying that many under-30-year-olds are getting long mortgage terms.
So like 30, 35 years. And I realize I’m speaking in mortgage lingo here, so I’ll drop back out since people might not understand. But , it means that a 28-year-old might be getting a mortgage that lasts 35 years. So by the time they pay their mortgage off, they’ll be very close to retiring.
In that, seeing the reason to do it is. a lot lower each month. And that sounds great. But really, the bad thing is that you’re obviously paying your mortgage off too close to your retirement, making it harder for later life planning. So this was all over the news. I didn’t create this story.
The Bank of England did. An additional angle we essentially used in the campaign was predicting when these first-time buyers are likely to pay off their mortgage based on what we know. We were going with an internal mortgage term. So the Northeast might be joining the property ladder at 29 but only have a mortgage term of 30.
So they’ll be mortgage-free at 59, whereas London might not be mortgage-free until 68. Differentiating between the different regions allowed me to, first of all, connect with the journalist when I was sending these chaser emails because I’m giving them something entirely different. But it also meant that I was able to contact a lot more journalists by digging into the data deeper and linking it to something that’s happening in the news.
Yeah.
Vince: So, do you actually put that link in the pitch? Hey, this study came out, and we also did a follow-up.
When referring to an existing piece of news, do you include the link in your pitch?
Bekki: Yeah, literally that there’s absolutely no shame, even if obviously you wouldn’t do it for a direct competitor, but say someone else uncovered a study and it relates to yours there’s absolutely no shame in including that in the introduction of the email, because you’re telling the journalist that you know that they covered that campaign, they might be interested in this one too, and you’re almost giving them a reason to like, internally link between the two articles as well, so you’re like, putting your SEO savvy hat on as well, so
Vince: Yeah, I like that.
I’ve never linked to the campaign, although I’ve referenced it. That’s a great idea.
Bekki: I just think it makes the journalist’s life a little bit easier as well. They have so much, they need to do day to day that literally giving them the link means they don’t have to go searching for it as well.
The evidence is there for them.
Vince: Yeah, whatever we can do to make their life easier and make it like a turnkey process. I feel like that’s where people have had the most success and probably where the most people have failed when they forget to do that. So Becky, let’s get into the kind of re-outreaching or re-angling. However, you want to say it.
I don’t think re-outreach is a word. This campaign sounded like it did well—the first round, right? And you could ride that wave of this retiring age or mortgage payoff age.
So what made you decide to re-angle and re-pitch this?
Bekki: Yeah so there’s a number of different reasons.
First of all, I had nothing in outreach. I’d created the next digital PR campaign, filled with compliance. When you’re a PR, you have to be proactive and outreach. So I thought I’d reassess an old campaign.
And I was actually looking that morning at which one I could add a timely hook to when, just so conveniently, it picked up an organic citation from the daily mail, and this is money.
So this is actually, I’d say, pretty much a top tip of mind— is be mindful when I wouldn’t say I like calling them old campaigns because I’ve never thought of campaigns done with; I always think you can get more like juice out of it in the future.
But be mindful of when a campaign generates a link. Don’t just add it to your link tracker and be really happy with the coverage; look at the article, read it, and understand why it’s being picked up again. Often, it’s because something’s happened in the news, and your statistic might have been used and referenced within that.
The journalist is almost telling you that there’s a timely hook, a reason for you to jump on this, and that’s exactly what happened.
The journalist spotted something, went out with it, and then I thought, okay, I’m going to jump on this, too. So yeah, that’s the main reason I ended up re-outreaching it.
But then, also, I had a little gut feeling that I wasn’t completely done with the campaign.
It had been successful and done well, but there were still some dream publications that I wanted to tick off, and I knew that after a few weeks of not emailing the journalist, I’d give it another go.
Thankfully, it worked. I can get into more tips later because that could be a whole other thing. But I’m re-outreaching it to open it a few times at work. As I posted on LinkedIn, we ended up getting further coverage from the Financial Times Advisor, but we also generated coverage from the Telegraph.
Vince: Yeah, that’s awesome to hear that the success there. I, so you mentioned looking for citations. Maybe a signal, anything else you say, you keep looking at your campaigns, keep them top of mind, but what else can I would stand out for you?
Besides citations, what are other signals that a post interests journalists?
Bekki: Definitely. I’d also say that BuzzStream’s open rate is a godsend.
You can click on the date the email was last opened, put it in ascending or descending order, and see if a journalist has opened an email recently.
So, every few weeks, I tend to go through all my past campaigns from the past couple of months and see if a journalist has opened a campaign that I sent them four, five, or six weeks ago.
You’ll often be surprised that they opened it recently. That’s when I get my little inspector gadget hot on. I try to work out why they’re opening it weeks later. Perhaps something’s happened in the news again, the timely hook, or perhaps they were on annual leave, or maybe they wanted to cover it at the time.
But. There was other more presidential stuff going on in the news, like a general election and everything that we’ve had happening in England and, sorry, the UK and yeah, so try and find out that reason why they’ve potentially opened it and investigate a little bit more, see what articles they’ve been writing about that they might have looked at and they might have looked at your campaign and so yeah,
Vince: yeah, and I will say just as a disclaimer for people listening or watching:
Open rates can be somewhat deceiving, but specifically what you’re saying, I think Bekki, when they open it a few weeks later, I think that’s probably a safe signal.
Just for some background, like there are like Apple, for instance, anybody. Anytime that your campaign gets sent to an Apple phone and they view it like that, it counts as an open like they don’t even have to open it; they just need to view it in their inbox. So there are some mitigating circumstances there with open rates.
That’s just something to be aware of, but yeah, that makes total sense. And I even see sometimes open rates can be like, if you see somebody opened it a thousand times, they probably didn’t.
Obviously, that’s some kind of bug or whatever it’s on a redirect chain or something. But, you can get a pretty good sense when you look at the open rates. If most of them are open three times, and then this one’s open, like seven times. So, there is probably a good chance that this was opened a bit more, so you can take the open rates with a grain of salt, but you can use them directionally.
Bekki: Yeah, no, for sure. I think it’s also like the content of what you’re putting into your pitch. So, also include a boilerplate. We always explain what Mojo Mortgages are so that in the future, if the journalist is looking for an expert comment from a mortgage advisor, hopefully, they’ll go to their inbox, search for previous campaigns and previous pitches, and Mojo will appear.
You should do the same for your clients and ensure that even if they’re not directly looking for that campaign, they’ll find your client and what you can provide weeks later.
Vince: Yeah. I love that so much. And I think it was Mark Roof. Put it to me where he was like, I try to do it with like kind of keywords, almost like keyword optimize your pitches so that a journalist can refer back to it.
And like, how would a journalist want to search for this in their email inbox? Yeah.
Bekki: That. So the boilerplate, obviously, you don’t want it to sell, or you don’t want it to be like buy our product right now, but you need the keywords, potentially the keywords that you’re trying to rank for as well.
So you say, for example, you. Again, you’re building lots of links for a sleep expert. Highlight them as a sleep expert and explain what they can comment on. Is it insomnia? Is it? I’m trying to think of all these other things, and ironically, mine went blank from a lack of sleep last night.
But yeah, put in different keywords that hopefully the journalist will then find them that way.
It’s a great tip by Mark Rofe. He’s a great guy.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we touch on Kind of some of these signals for repitching, re-angling when you do come up with your new hook.
Let’s talk a little bit about the kind of the process because I remember working in an agency, the most challenging part was like, okay, I have this post that I worked on, and it’s a little easier in-house, mind you, but I had this post I worked on, this was my deliverable or whatever for this month, it can be sometimes challenging to pitch to a client that you’re going to repitch something.
Talk me through that process either in-house or through an agency.
What’s your process for getting a client or stakeholder buy-in for repitching old content?
Bekki: Yeah, no, for sure. Honestly, I’ve always been quite lucky to work for clients. I’ve been doing PR for nearly seven years, but I’ve always had clients who are quite open to me trying different things.
I think the reason is that you must be honest and transparent throughout the entire process. Campaigns aren’t always going to land, and that’s also important and why you can bring them back out. But I would speak to a client when I worked at an agency and say, “Oh, we’re going to finish this campaign temporarily.”
I’d always say it’s on pause, never say it’s done, like we’re never going to get links from it. Then, when it comes to bringing it back into outreach, whether via email or call or how you speak to your client, I would just explain the reasoning behind it. You shouldn’t be outreaching something if there’s not a genuine reason behind it.
At the end of the day, us PRs are helping create news, so there has to be that hook. There has to be a reason for the journalist to care. So to bring the client on board, whether in-house or in an agency, give them the reason for. Why are you doing this right now? Almost sell it to the client before you selling it to the journalist.
And if you can’t sell it to the client, then you said, you’re not going to be able to sell it to the journalist.
Vince: That’s a great point. Yeah.
Bekki: You can get the sign-off that way. And then it is a case of, I think collaboration is honestly the key with the success of most campaigns.
And I think we’re quite, I hate this phrase, but PR is seen as sexy like it is. And when you’ve got work on. But more I don’t know, like not as creative perhaps, like creative in their way, but Just different jobs. Essentially. Many people get excited about the potential of helping with NPR campaigns.
So, collaborate together, put an article into a Slack channel, and say, Oh, does anyone know what hook I could go with this? What’s the most enticing part of this? People might give you different spins or angles that you can go with. When I was an agency, the sales team and the account managers were amazing at doing this because they were constantly.
So yeah, and then just collaborate with people in terms of data I’m very fortunate that I’ve really enjoyed data. I love working with it, but I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Strong point, but there will be someone within your agency or in house who will be able to help you. Even if it is just using Google searches and making it more timely and giving the journalist a reason to care.
So yeah.
Vince: Yeah, that’s all great advice. I’d say my experience with the data pool, at least with BuzzStream, even echoed by Stephen Panico, who is our CMO and who has done this in the past.
Make sure that you have a clear set of data, like you know what data you need to pull to tell the story. Sometimes, going back to pull data can become a little bit of a log jam and extra stress on the dev team.
And you can sour some relationships if you’re not careful. Yeah,
Bekki: Make sure the data actually exists before telling the client you’re going to do something as well. Definitely.
Vince: OK, so we can get onto the fun part. We’ve got this, new data, a new angle that’s maybe in the news, or you’ve had your sales team perhaps give you some insights. Your customer service team will walk us through. Okay, now we’ve got to find new journalists.
We got a. You mentioned a little bit of repitching to old journals who might have been interested, but let’s talk about not treading over the same targets. I think it’s the way that you mentioned it in your LinkedIn post.
Bekki: Yeah, rule number one is to not send the pitch to journalists who have already covered it.
You have to be meticulous about how you send your emails. You have to ensure that you, like cross-through or mark, are successful in placement on BuzzStream.
So, when it comes to sending in a potential repitching, whether it’s six weeks, two months, or six months, you’re not going to send it back to them.
I’d advise against writing “successful placement” just for the journalist—do it for the whole publication.
So, if a personal finance journalist at the Express covers a campaign, do not send it to another personal finance journalist.
Because it’s already been done. It’s okay to send it to a different industry. If you’re sending. A different angle almost and but make sure you’re just not stepping on a journalist toes if someone else has already covered it
Vince: what do you think like the timeline is between say they have someone somebody else has covered it in the finance sector They’ve covered something about mortgage prices dropping or something and now you have a new story.
What is the timeframe between pitching stories in the same industry?
Bekki: I think it can differ like on the industry, but also on what you’re actually outreaching as well. Are you adding something to what someone else has already done? If so, get that in outreach straight away because you’re adding to the story.
And like I said before, you’re given a journalist, like a reason to internally link. Whereas if this has happened, it’s happened to every PR, it’s happened to me multiple times where I’ve thought of this amazing idea, okay. created the campaign and just as I’m about to outreach it I realised someone got in there the week before.
With that one you need to try and differentiate between how yours is different and how theirs is and what your upper hand is and where you can get coverage that they haven’t. But if they’ve, unfortunately for you who’ve got coverage everywhere, I would wait like a couple of months, maybe two months, and in that meantime be trying to find a different hook or thinking of a different angle. This different spin can make yours different, essentially.
This has even happened to me recently and I’m gutted because it was a goldmine of an idea and someone got in there, but my time will come to outreach it and I know that it’ll work. But yeah, the one thing I will say is though, there’s many ways to find new contacts as well.
So, to return to your original question about how you know, like how to find new journalists, my number one tip would be to look at competitors’ links.
You should be tracking your competitors’ links, citations, and coverage. By looking at what they’re doing month on month, putting it in a Google Sheet, and seeing what coverage they’re getting, you should know just as much about your competitors as you know about your own clients.
But I’ll say that when I say competitors, people often assume you mean your direct competitors. So if you’ve got a kitchen brand looking at another kitchen brand, but I think we need to take it one step further and actually look at the industry as a whole. So you’ve got a kitchen brand also look at a bed brand or a garden shed brand and see what links they’re getting because They’re most likely to be getting links from home publications that you’re also looking to seek.
So find journalists that way.
Also, don’t forget about international competitors. When I worked at an agency, I was a bit different with mortgages, as it was UK-based, but I knew all the U.S. competitors of my clients.
We’d always be looking at what they were doing, what campaigns they were creating, and what links they were generating because I knew that I could also target the end publications with my campaigns. So that would be my number one tip.
A few other tips are using a Google Chrome extension called Similar Sites, which is fantastic.
It’s a little bit addictive. It’s the easiest to use: You just type in stylists.co.uk, click the button, and it’ll give you 10 more publications.
You can see why it’s time-consuming because you can just keep going through them. But one thing I will say is that over time, you’ll start to understand your industry a bit and know these publications off the top of your head.
Another privilege of working in an agency, which I’ve had to get used to with going in-house, is that you’ve got access to all of these links from a range of different clients.
You can actually look at other clients’ links and see what links they’re generating and target those publications, obviously, if they’re speaking about a relevant topic.
So keeping track of everyone might spark interest.
And then there’s just the standard site search. Like I mentioned earlier, the average age of a first-time buyer campaign did really well, but it didn’t completely hit the nail on the head because there were a couple of publications that were dream publications, and I knew they’d be. And the campaign, but I just had to find the right journalist.
So I literally site-searched Telegraph. I looked at other journalists that I didn’t contact the first time and sent them the article the second time. Luckily, that’s how we got the coverage. Yeah.
Vince: Yeah, there are a lot of great tips to unpack there. I love that. For example, having your dream publications or maybe doing a site search on similar sites.
Yeah I definitely use that. I love that Chrome extension. I’ve also noticed chat GPT can actually be pretty helpful. It depends on the model you have, as long as you have the most recent one that’s pulling from recent data, that can be helpful for that.
Yeah, so many great tips, Bekki. I think you also mentioned expert commentary in the LinkedIn posts.
So say you’re. You have your post, you have your new kind of hook.
Do you tailor commentary to the new journalists that you’re looking for?
Bekki: Yeah, of course. So I actually do something completely different. And I, when I send my first pitch out, I don’t include an expert comment, and I know a lot of PRs will be against that. Still, in my eyes, I know that if a journalist wants to cover it and they want it, they’ll, it means they’re going to email me back and say, have you got an expert comment on this and I’ll send one then.
But one thing that I do is it enables me to send that chaser email and say hiya. I know that you’ve opened this email a couple of times, and what I’ll then do is suggest an exclusive comment specifically for them.
I don’t really believe in these mass expert comments that just get sent out.
One thing you need to be mindful of when you’re reaching out is the publication’s demographic.
Refinery29 has a different demographic than the Times, but they might both be interested in single-homeownership.
So what I will do is when I send my chaser email, I always send my emails through BuzzStream through individually sent. I’ll have my email on the right, and I’ll be looking at the author bios and what we’ve recently discussed. I’ll have it on the left, and I’ll try to find something that they’re interested in and tie that in to my expert comments.
What I mean by that is I’ll say, “Hi, I know that you’ve opened this a couple of times, the average age of a first-time buyer. Would you be interested in exclusive expert commentary on how this impacts women?” I know that you covered this. You wrote an opinion piece on how hard it is to be a home buyer as a woman, and that’s what I’ll go with.
You would then hope that the journalist would come back and say, “Yes, absolutely.” Thank you. Can you get that?
And then I know that I’ve got the journalist that way. So I never send a mass expert comment. It’s always personalized specifically for them. It might be seen as more time-consuming, but in my eyes, it’s worth the time because you know that you’re going to get the coverage.
That’s why they’ve asked for it.
Vince: Yeah, I love that. I’m a big proponent of the personalized follow-up email or chaser email where you’re referencing something, either a post they’ve just written or a story they’ve just written or something they’ve posted about on social when you’re emailing these.
I think that’s coming up with that unique angle there.
You mentioned this earlier pieces get stuck in compliance. I know in, in the finance space that kind of stuff can get, become a nightmare.
Can you talk about avoiding compliance issues when coming up with quotes?
Bekki: Yeah, no it’s totally understandable. In terms of actually sending it to the journalist, I only ever send it a journalist I know will be interested in it.
That’s based on me finding an article on a similar topic. A lot of research goes into the creation of the actual seeding list, the contact list, as opposed to the follow-up. The follow-up should be easier because I did all the planning for it.
In terms of compliance, yes, you’re right. And it’s going to differ depending on the industry. Finance: Everything has to go through compliance, make sure it’s factual, make sure you’re not trying to be too salty, and this kind of thing.
But I think I have again been quite fortunate that my compliance team knows that if it’s a comment and it’s reactive, they’ll sign it off quicker.
Coming from agency experience. I think it’s, again, it’s building a relationship and, really, in the beginning, setting the foundation of explaining what digital PR is, why signing off quickly is essential, and pushing that.
Pushing it in a mindful way— I should be clear.
When a new client starts, getting them on board with what digital PR is, how they can help you be successful, and then when it comes to actually sending over an expert comment to be signed off for them to write it explaining, what the deadline is— putting it in the subject line, explaining why it matters, is it the, is it your client’s dream publication that they’d mentioned on onboarding, does the journalist have a deadline of 2 PM that they need?
As you would with the email, express urgency, making the journalist care, and making the client care as well.
Vince: Yeah, that’s such great advice. Just building those relationships, I found, is the easiest way to break down some of that red tape or whatever you want to call it. So another aspect of your pitching is I think pitching to social, right?
So in your LinkedIn posts, you mentioned about getting coverage on Instagram.
Can you talk about getting coverage on Instagram?
Bekki: Yeah, so I will actually be completely transparent. I mentioned in the LinkedIn post that it got coverage on GoFundYourself, but that was actually a total surprise in the best of ways.
GoFundYourself is, yeah, organic coverage. But GoFundYourself, for those who don’t know, is like a financial Instagram account that helps people build their financial knowledge.
And it’s an Instagram account I’ve followed for many years. So imagine my surprise when I open my phone, and the research we’ve collected is there.
I literally gasped, put it straight into Slack and was really happy.
But I just want to set the precedent that was through organic coverage, which I’m going to say is a bad thing that I didn’t send it to them, but it’s actually a good thing that it caught their attention.
I have tried to send them stuff before, but I couldn’t get their email.
That being said, yes, social media is so important with digital PR right now.
When you’re outreaching a campaign, you should be mindful of relevant social media accounts that you’d like to be published on, regardless of your industry.
Even if you’re in the home sector, Ideal Home has Instagram, TikTok, that kind of thing, like there are publications you can target.
Find their social media-specific email address, whether it’s on their website or a little hack: They often have it in their About section on Facebook for some reason.
Find it that way and make sure you’re outreaching it to them as well as publications. Then, also radio publications. It’s no longer just about generating citations and link builds.
It’s about overall brand awareness. You go on your phone, find out who Mojo Mortgages is through Instagram, and then, obviously, get a sponsored ad on Google. It’s all part of the marketing funnel and should be implemented as part of digital PR.
Vince: Yeah, I love that. I just had a conversation yesterday on, for future podcast with my former boss when I was with the grit group and speaking about how.
SEOs and digital marketers shouldn’t feel as disconnected from the rest of the marketing mix these days as they do now.
Brand is such a powerful thing, and AI overviews, helpful content, all this stuff. Google is just being deemed a monopoly, like Google might not even exist.
Or might not even be the most prominent search tool. So getting your brand out in as many different ways as you can. That was going to be my follow up question is what about the clients that just care about links, but it sounds like you have that mindset where, it shouldn’t matter.
Links are good if you want to play that game. But ultimately, the name of the game is to increase brand awareness and public relations, right? It’s in the name.
Bekki: No, for sure. It’s also again, like what I said before comes down to collaboration. Since moving in-house, I’ve had the privilege of working, and we’ve got a social media manager called Tusi, who’s fantastic.
It’s been really great collaborating with her on ideas.
When I worked in an agency, we didn’t have social media, so it wasn’t segregated because it didn’t exist.
In-house, I’ve realized that power is the force that can really come from collaborating with digital PR and social media.
So one thing you can do, which I’ve obviously started doing in the last six months, is reaching TikToks, it such a 29 not even 29-year-old thing to say; it makes me sound like I’m younger.
But one thing I’ve noticed is that there’s obviously a lot of video journalists out there and they’re obviously, they’re the engagement that they need to build is trying to keep you on the page for as long as possible so that the bounce rate isn’t as low.
So, work with your social media manager to share tips from your actual in-house experts or your data, creating it into a video and outreach and that to video journalists.
I guess other ways as well that you can work with social media managers is experimenting like AB testing.
One thing we did recently was have a campaign that did really well.
A couple of weeks later, we posted it on social media, and we realized that people would comment on it and give us their opinions, and that is just a goldmine—it’s pretty amazing.
PR goldmine, finding out how people feel. Journalists often don’t have the time to reply and be honest about how they feel about your campaign, but on Instagram, everyone wants to give you their opinion on everything and just in social media.
Reading what people say and whether they find it positive, negative, interesting, boring, or want more, use it for social engagement.
So one thing we noticed is that people were saying, this is really cool, but can we also get it on blah, blah, blah.
And now we’re going to create a tool that allows that to happen. And ideation as a whole.
And then finally, I think another thing you can use for social media is giving a second push and finding out what angle works for this reangle of PR.
So when you see how people interact with the posts, what is it that they’re finding engaging that could even inspire your hook when you go out with your second pitch or third pitch and based on what people are saying. So literally Just experiment, be interested in all aspects of the business and try and collaborate with as many people as possible.
Vince: Yeah. Great advice. Invaluable, I think for people who are, struggling to find coverage maybe, or just only focused on a few spots, I feel like the social can sometimes be a backdoor into some of these, dream publications.
Just as to get specific, like you mentioned, reaching out or finding video journalists, finding social accounts for these different pubs.
Are you then reaching out twice? Like you’d reach out to let’s use daily mail.
When you reach out on social media, do you also contact journalists at the same publication?
Bekki: Yes. Because they’ll be completely different. So it’d be like the social media account of the Daily Star, for example.
So it could end up on their TikTok.
Whereas the video journalist is literally, their job is to cover the news and include a video.
Like, they’re specific journalists for videos, which obviously didn’t exist a couple of years ago. But like I said It’s to keep people on the page for longer. So you’re almost making that job easier, but also actually a lot of brands don’t do social media or make videos.
So it means you might have the upper hand against your competitors as well.
Did you say you sometimes create videos to pitch to the social team?
Bekki: Yes, that’s right.
Vince: So you’ll have a campaign like your, this mortgage campaign that you did, like you’ll create like a tik tok video and send them then that to repost?
Bekki: Exactly that. Yes. And vice versa as well.
We’ve had campaigns go really well on social media, and I’ve transformed them into PR pitches as well.
And that’s what I mean about the whole importance of collaboration.
Or sometimes I might think of an idea and not have time for it. But I know it’ll perform really well on social media, so it’s almost like actually doing something with the ideas and that you know will do well, but There’s not enough hours in the day, is there, to be doing everything, so
Vince: Yeah.
Yeah, keeping that little notebook of ideas. It sounds like you’re like me. I have one of those off to the side. I just dump all those ideas on all the time. Yeah. Becky, I think we should leave it there. There’s just a ton of information and ton of great tips that you gave. Everybody, you can find Becky on LinkedIn.
I highly recommend checking it out. She, post this kind of stuff and hopefully we’ll continue to post all this great knowledge that she has. So Becky, yeah, thanks so much for joining us and good luck with the rest of your campaigns at Mojo and everybody keep an eye out for that.
Bekki: No worries at all. It’s been a real privilege. so much. Really appreciate it.
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