Check out some of the placements we’ve gotten for our clients.
Digital PR Services – How it works
Step 1: Story ideation
During an interview with you, we dissect information about you and your business that we can use to choose tangential story ideas that will appeal to journalists during our engagement.
After learning about you and your business, we look at what kinds of stories are being told on the outlets we’re after that tangentially relate to your business.
Once we know about you and about what journalists in the niche we’re after want to write about, we research and build a story idea that our content team will assemble into something we can pitch.
Some examples of the types of stories we run include:
When we build stories, we’re not just spitballing, we’re using proven story frameworks that have gotten results for previous clients.
Step 2: Build supporting content
Once we’ve decided on a story angle, we build out the supporting content. For off-site stories, this includes a story write-up, press release, and other materials that may be necessary for the story such as images or screenshots.
For content-driven stories, this is usually a data-driven piece that’s built to attract the attention of mainstream media readers or a blog post that supports the narrative of the story we’ve built.
With the supporting content, we build sharable visual assets (such as an infographic or other graphics) that make it very easy for journalists to republish the content for their audience with a unique angle.
If we built an interactive content asset, sometimes that itself can be the story, which gives their readers a reason to click through to your website from the published story.
When we finish the content, we should have something that provides real value to journalists and has data-driven potential to generate attention and shares that result in social media traffic, improved SEO, and referral traffic from published stories.
Step 3: Pitch the content
During the pitch stage of the process, we build an outreach campaign and start pitching the content to them.
This is done by leveraging personalized email outreach where emails are customized to the journalist, blogger, or influencer based on some previously published content, like news articles, blog posts, videos, or podcasts.
From there, we continue to manage responses that come in. Even weeks later.
When responses come in, we do whatever it takes to land a placement. Sometimes, journalists ask for supporting content. This is also included as part of the package.
Most of the time, however, journalists won’t tell us they published the content. They’ll just do it, and we find out later via referral traffic analytics or tracking tools like Mention, Ahrefs, and Google Alerts.
Digital PR Pricing
Legendary
$25,000
PER MONTH
Heroic
$10,000
PER MONTH
Normal
$5,000
PER MONTH
FAQ
Our typical success rate with PR outreach is around 1-3% for a first run with a client. More high-performing campaigns land around the 5% mark, which is especially common for content-focused stories. This is also usually the case on our second or third run with a client since we have data from the first campaign to help us improve future success rates.
In general, if we run 3 stories, 1 pops, 1 flops, and 1 does alright.
However, keep in mind that while PR is an iterative process, creativity and building a compelling story are the most important parts. We have to come up with a story that journalists believe their audience will love (which is sometimes very different from what they actually love).
It’s also possible that external factors contribute to our stories losing placement opportunities due to competition. This isn’t just the 1,000’s of other people pitching the journalists, but it’s also just because events can change, which shifts their focus. For example, when COVID hit, everyone in every industry was trying to find COVID angles for stories. In fact, leveraging that fact is how we were able to pivot from a failure to a success with the PC Mag placement we won!
The key to investing in PR is not to invest in the placements, but to invest in the iterative process of creating great stories so that, as a byproduct, placements happen because journalists like what you’re pitching them.
Google’s algorithm uses backlinks as a ranking factor to help determine how high certain pages rank for certain keywords.
For search engine optimization (SEO), you usually want to get high-quality backlinks directly to the pages you’re trying to rank (which is accomplished via standard link building outreach services).
By contrast, digital PR gives you a way to get domain-wide authority by securing link placements from massive news sites with the help of effective content creation.
These links, while mostly to your homepage or the page hosting the story assets, work to improve your site-wide domain authority.
This helps all of your pages move up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for their respective keywords.
When we take in clients, we look through existing assets to see if there’s something we can work with. If there is, great! We’ll run with it.
However, clients often build content for their customers (rightfully so!) which is very different than what journalists are interested in.
For this to work, we have to build something journalists want to publish. This way, we’re truely earning the placement.
If you’re brand new to digital PR, expect it to take 3-4 months or longer before you see any results in terms of referral traffic from placements, SEO improvements, or a big influx of social media traffic.
It is possible to get placements sooner, but it’s not a good idea to set expectations that way because there are variables about your business that are a factor.
For example, a journalist may look at your website, not like how it looks, and bounce.
Or, while the story would have worked last month, they aren’t into it this month due to changes in current events or other trending story ideas they’re working on.
We work with people here, and it’s important to remember that. While we do what we can on the first story to get it right, it’s often the second and third stories that pick up the majority of client placements because we learn and gather information from the first one.
We can’t guarantee placements because we don’t have publishing access to these websites or work inside these publications. We’re earning placements by building story ideas that have previously shown to work well at getting placements.
At the end of the day, we can’t guarantee publication because this is at the discretion of the journalist, and publication of the story on a publication we don’t own is up to the people in charge of that publication.
If you want guaranteed publication, we can run an advertorial campaign where we work with publications to place sponsored content, but we often find that earned media placements work better for clients than paid media placements.
