Now we are approaching the end of September, Spooky Season is truly upon us. In the digital PR world, Halloween provides the perfect opportunity to get creative and lean into topical features. By nature, some PR topics can border on risky from a brand standpoint, so we’ve put together some do’s and don’ts of Halloween PR.

Do make use of unique and updated data

Finding relevant and up to date data to support your campaigns can give you the edge on your competition. What will set you apart is creativity. There can be fierce competition from PRs to secure coverage and there is nothing worse than discovering someone has launched a similar campaign to yourself. Securing original or recently updated data can give you the edge and make the difference between coverage and failure. From hotel reviews which mention ghosts or spooky occurrences listed on bespoke websites which mention haunted locations, there are loads of potential data sources out there. A good tip if you are worried your data will be used by someone else is to add more data to make this unique. You could take one data point and turn this into an index or cross-reference this with different adjacently themed data to give your campaign a unique narrative.

Don’t use real-life crimes in your campaigns

There is always a moral line in the world of PR that we should me mindful not to cross. In my years working in the industry I have seen campaigns which reference crime data, such as reported murders in relation to Halloween. We should all try to remember these statistics relate to real life victims and it can come across as extremely insensitive to spin real life traumatic events into campaign data. My motto is to go for ‘spooky not scary’ and keep your campaigns light-hearted and mindful of both the impact on the brand’s and your own reputation.

Do find regional angles

Got some great data on Halloween sweets or spooky events to visit? Invest the time in curating bespoke regional angles and your campaign can gain much broader coverage. You should never treat digital PR as a one size fits all approach, as every publication has it’s own ways of working and audience interests. When creating regional campaigns, aim to break down data or highlights linking to cities over entire regions. Journalists prefer to focus on their own areas, for example reporting on Manchester versus the North West as a whole.

Don’t miss the boat on when to outreach

Timing is key with any seasonal campaign and you always run the risk of missing out if you go live too late, which can waste months of planning and execution. This is not only a time cost but a resource cost to agencies, staff and brands. You can start to outreach Halloween early into October, to plant the seeds of ideas before the competition gets too fierce. This should be really dialled up in the two weeks leading up to the date. Launching the week of Halloween or later leaves too much risk of gaining nothing for your release and making it a potentially wasted effort. Whilst it’s less likely to secure coverage on the day before or the day of Halloween, you can always target any reactive opportunities ad hoc to top up the waves of outreach you’ve previously done.

Do monitor the news leading up to Halloween

A lot can change in the news agenda which could render an idea no longer feasible. It’s important for PRs to keep an eye on different news outlet’s news stories to see where ideas may need to be swapped or adapted. News monitoring can also be a great way to find new and innovative ideas to jump on which you hadn’t previously thought of.

Don’t sacrifice relevancy with your campaign ideas

It can be tempting to pick an idea you know works well for Halloween themed stories, but if this has little relevancy to your brand then it won’t garner much traction. The weight of any links you do gain could be lessened by the lack of relevancy in the content on the media outlet site. A good tip is to hold an ideation session for yourself or your team, note down the brand, their products and their core audience groups. Expand two steps beyond each area in a mind map, use useful tools such as SEMrush’s Topic Research or Ahref’s Content Explorer to get more inspiration around what questions consumers are asking. This helps you build a profile of the brand’s core customer and their secondary interests. Secondary interests can be targeted for PR to allow for broader media targeting whilst still remaining close to the brand identity.

Do find suitable experts

Enlisting an expert to give weight to your campaign has remained a successful tactic which has worked throughout 2024 and Halloween is no exception. Lifestyle journalists love campaigns which use bespoke experts, such as mediums or astrologists, as these lean into their audience’s core interests and give some more authority to any advice your campaign may be offering. Putting out media requests on Twitter or using journo request services from Cision or Response Source can be great ways to build up your network of experts to lend commentary to enhance your campaigns.

Don’t forget to add rich assets to your campaigns

Journalists are highlighting more than ever before that having strong imagery, video and rich assets is beneficial to their content. Sharing a unique recipe of Halloween snacks? Be sure to include imagery of the end result if you have this as it can highly increase the chances of pick-up. If you have the resource, consider creating a supporting video telling the story of your PR data campaign on spooky road trips, this can be shared alongside a traditional release and imagery to offer journalists something your competition may not be able to match.

Hopefully these tips have given some food for thought this spooky season. If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Leanne Vause

SEO & DIGITAL PR DIRECTOR

Leanne has over a decade of experience across SEO strategy, content marketing and digital PR. She has worked for a range of clients from SMEs to global brands both for agencies and in-house. She has a 2:1 upper class hons. degree in Media Studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and founded freelance SEO and digital PR business Search etc. in 2023.

LinkedIn profile here.

The post The Do’s and Don’ts of Nailing Halloween Digital PR appeared first on Search etc..

Whilst it’s important to set your own path as a brand developing a marketing strategy there is still a lot you can learn from evaluating your competitors. Reviewing competitor activity and consistently benchmarking yourself in relevant ways is crucial to a well-informed marketing strategy. Today Digital PR Manager James Lavery shares his advice for effective competitor analysis in digital PR.

What are the biggest missed opportunities where brands or PRs may not be using competitor research effectively?

Brands often look at what their competitors are doing from a product and services point of view, but don’t look into what they’re saying and how they’re communicating it.

If a brand’s business goal was to drive more media attention and website traffic to specific products/product pages, then it might be tempting to just pitch the product to the media. But rather than just relying on the obvious tactic, assess what topics and talking points there are around the product/service. How are competitors contributing to relevant publications who cover these types of stories?

Make a note of how competitors are pitching information, too. Are they creating bespoke creative pieces on-site? Are they sharing internal news? Are they launching surveys? What styles of outreach work best for this particular industry?

What makes good competitor research analysis?

I don’t think there’s any uniform, one-size fits all approach as the business goals of our brand will dictate what types of things we include. But a solid foundation would be to split your competitor analysis into what competitors are doing well, and could be doing better.

You might also want to include insights from organic competitors, rather than just market competitors, as market competitors are not necessarily always competing with our brand in Google rankings.

Remember that the brand you’re working with may not have as thorough an understanding of PR or SEO as you, so simplify complex language in a way that allows them to understand how competitors are/aren’t executing the correct PR strategy, and how our brand could use these learnings to achieve goals.

How can you use PR competitor learnings to pivot a strategy?

When a PR strategy hasn’t gone the way I want it to, my first action is to try and repurpose existing information to secure quick wins.

Looking at where competitors have secured placements can allow us to find examples of publications or contacts missing from our media lists that we can easily pitch to. 

You might also want to look at stories your competitors have contributed to before. Is there anything new that your brand already has available (in the form of a blog post, a pre-written comment, data, etc.) that could provide additional value to these stories? If you know a topic already has media interest, then it’s fine to look into it again so long as you’re contributing a fresh take.

If your brand is B2C/ecommerce, then it’s likely that you’ll want to appear in ‘best of’ or ‘top 10 top products’ listicle type articles. If you can spot any articles that get republished every year, it can be a good idea to reach out to the writers and try to get your brand featured ahead of time. This will be particularly effective if you spot that your competitors aren’t doing this proactively.

Remember that not all competitors will be incorporating SEO strategy into their PR, so spot opportunities for where you might be able to outperform them here if traditional PR tactics aren’t working:

• Flag broken backlinks to key commercial pages
• Chase journalists for unlinked brand mentions within coverage
• Approach charities, organisations, accreditation bodies or partnerships that your brand is part of and ask them to link back to your brand if they aren’t already 

What types of things should PRs look for in competitor analysis?

PRs should look for examples of:

• Where competitors have made use of expert insights and commentary to add value to trending topics
• On-site content with newsworthy hooks
• Fresh data that has wide appeal
• Influencer or blogger collaborations
• Product placements
• Promotion of events and internal news

However, don’t just look at things competitors are doing well. We can often get inspiration by looking at missed opportunities from competitors. For instance, some analysis might show a competitor is getting placements on relevant sites but not reaching out to journalists to get a link, meaning they lose out on added SEO impact. Or they could be creating useful, informative content that has potential to get news coverage, but they might be hiding it within downloadable PDFs instead of visualising it on a piece of shareable on-site content. 

Reviewing what doesn’t work can often inspire ideas of how to repurpose something a competitor has done but improve upon it for stronger performance.

How can PR competitor analysis be communicated to clients or brands better?

It’s really important to set client expectations and discuss main KPIs very early on in your working relationship so you can fully understand business goals. This will help to inform what parts of your competitor analysis to share.

For example, if you’ve agreed to do proactive outreach of on-site content alongside off-site opportunities like product outreach or reactive expert comments, then you’ll need to make it clear to clients that your competitor analysis will look at different metrics. This is because results vary depending on the approach of outreach you take. 

Product outreach tends to result in affiliate links, so we might just be looking at the number of placements here. If we can spot a more data-driven campaign launched by competitors, there is likely more granular detail necessary for us to communicate to clients. How many links did it get? What types of websites covered and were they relevant? What datasets did it use and can we repurpose this data for any other campaigns? What is the readership estimates of the publication covering the campaign?

What are your top tips for competitor analysis?

The world of PR is going increasingly more digital, so it’s important that we hone our more technical methods of research:

• Make use of SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to quickly pull lists of top-ranking content and link opportunities for your brand
• Use Google search operators as a cheat sheet to quickly find campaigns and content focused around specific topic areas
• Sign up to competitor newsletters and PR newsletters to get regular industry campaign insights
• Where possible, work with content and SEO teams to collaboratively audit competitors’ websites. Look for opportunities to improve or create new content on your own brand’s website based on findings that you could then pitch to the media.

How often should PRs be looking at their brands’ key competitors?

Competitor analysis is always more effective when it’s taken with a more holistic approach that takes into account activity over a longer period of time. This is because it gives us a more clear idea of what a competitor’s actual strategy might be. If we spend time looking at competitors every month, it might be harder to see the bigger picture.

I would recommend doing competitor analysis every 3-6 months, depending on the brand’s needs. 

In a tougher economic climate, is there anything for brands to consider to keep a competitive edge for PR?

Understandably, many brands are hesitant to invest in high-risk campaigns. The market is becoming saturated with similar ideas and products, and it can be daunting to spend the money on something that might not cut through the noise.

But not every campaign has to break the bank. Staying reactive and being able to quickly provide comment or data with minimal sign-off or turnaround time is by far the best way of being able to keep a competitive edge. Brands should prioritise improving their ways of working to ensure they can quickly respond to media requests.

My personal experience is that comments or data that I can turn around within 24 hours is significantly more likely to secure a relevant placement.

One top tip is to audit journalist requests relevant to your brand’s expertise and compare these with competitor coverage – you might spot that competitors aren’t contributing to a lot of potential opportunities. This allows you to prepare responses far in advance on repeatedly appearing topics that you know competitors likely aren’t responding to. 

What is important to consider when comparing brands to other brands?

Some brands have such a huge market presence that they don’t need to throw themselves into reactive newsjacking and disruptive creative campaigns, as they can still remain visible. However, smaller brands should view this as an opportunity to invest into tactics overlooked by their larger rivals, as it can help them reach audiences and acquire online visibility that their competitors miss out on.

On the flip side of this, some bigger competitors have a very robust PR strategy and launch impressive campaigns that have clear performance goals. While it can be tempting to mimic these, we have to be realistic about budgets. Communicate clearly what is going to be realistic for your brand – how can we use elements of high-investment campaigns to achieve our own goals without needing to exceed resources?

Any other advice you have on competitor analysis in digital PR?

Where possible, provide additional insights into campaigns being launched within your brand’s industry space that are relevant to your client’s expertise. These won’t necessarily be campaigns launched by competitors, but the coverage and media exposure they get will still be worth looking at and sometimes can actually provide more useful than studying competitors with no clear PR strategy in place.

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

James Lavery

Digital PR Manager

James is a Digital PR Manager based in the UK. He has worked across digital PR, content marketing and communications for 6 years in-house and agency side.

The post How to Effectively Learn from Your Digital PR Competitors appeared first on Search etc..

In the world of digital PR relevancy is everything. We asked Freelance Digital PR Manager Jennifer Jordan, of Jennifer Jordan PR, how PRs can achieve maximum relevancy.

Why is relevancy so important for digital PRs?

Relevancy is key when ideating for campaigns as you have to consider the area in which you’d like to build your client’s authority, alongside factoring in where their potential client base is. If your content campaign idea is focused on a completely different industry to your client, with not even a wider industry connection (for example, leisure or technology) then you’re missing a big opportunity to build authority in this area.

From a Google perspective, search engines use relevancy of links and content when it comes to understanding a website – therefore, it plays a big role in ranking factors. If the content and links are aligned with the website offering, then there’s a greater chance of your client being seen by their target audience. If your client wishes to rank for certain topics or keywords, this can be your starting point.

What tips and tricks would you recommend for relevancy in campaigns?

Firstly, I look at our target publications and what content they cover, as this can be a good indicator that we are on the right track with our campaign ideas. If your client’s dream publication is Ideal Home, spend some time researching the type of home related coverage they prefer to take – is it future or current trend pieces? Or lists based on data? 

It’s vital to consider the target demographic of your content campaign as it also needs to be relevant to them. Ask yourself if your target audience will find this piece of content useful or interesting.

I’m a big fan of creating mind maps when ideating for campaigns. This means that you can start with the client industry (or industries if they cover multiple) in the centre of your thought process, and work outwards with your ideas, in order to visually keep yourself on track with relevancy. If you’re straying too far away from the client niche or industry, you can go back to the starting point and take another look. 

Finally, keeping up with the current newscycle is imperative for keeping proactive and reactive campaigns relevant. Pitching a campaign about dealing with hayfever symptoms at the end of August when the health journalists have moved on to more autumnal topics will be a waste of your time. You could focus your time on newsjacking current trending issues if your client has expertise in the area being discussed in order to provide industry opinion and gain further authority.

How can PRs draw a line between a related topic and irrelevant topic?

Simply put, just because the topic is related to your client industry, it may not mean that it is a relevant campaign to their brand and their objectives. For example, a homeware client would be great for home related campaigns, however they probably should not provide advice on checking your boiler or guttering!  

How can PRs better communicate to brands the balance between topical PR campaigns and keeping them on-brand?

Journalists will seek experts in the actual field for their articles in order to preserve accuracy and authority on the subject they are writing about. Pitching a fashion brand spokesperson as an expert on sleep to a journalist will not be considered and you can ultimately risk tarnishing the client’s reputation, and even your relationship with journalists.

How can brands be clearer with PRs on how to identify relevant brand audiences?

Ask if your freelancer or digital PR agency is available for an onboarding call or if they have a discovery document in place already to help them learn more about the brand before tackling any work. This sets out expectations early on and showcases brand objectives, messaging and dream publications. Sharing customer demographics data is also a big help when identifying an audience and will signal where the audience is likely to be online and what content they may be seeking. 

What other advice do you have for PRs?

I’d always recommend doing some thorough competitor research analysis to discover what campaigns are already being done in the similar industry to your client, and where they are gaining coverage. Use this to inform your strategy and target the same publications, and look at titles where key players in the industry are getting links and where your clients currently are not featured. This should also assist with campaign relevancy.

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Jennifer Jordan

DIGITAL PR MANAGER

Jennifer has worked at top agencies for 8+ years in the North East of England. As a freelancer she provides SEO content writing and digital PR services to brands.

The post How to Maximise Relevant Targeting with Your Digital PR Campaigns appeared first on Search etc..

Gabriella Smith, Freelance Digital PR Consultant of Gabriella Lucy PR, shares some expert tips on how reactive PR doesn’t have to be last minute.

Newsjacking and reactive PR are buzzwords you’ll often hear when discussing digital PR strategies. They’re tactics that should absolutely be in your press office toolkit, to ensure you’re constantly jumping on to relevant topics when stories break in the news. 

These tactics are also key to building trust around your brand with your target audience and new customers, whilst building relationships with key journalists so they know who to come to next time they’re looking for an expert to comment on a certain topic. Reactive PR also shows the world that you are super relatable, and have an awareness of the current trends. 

Whilst a lot of newsjacking and reactive PR relies heavily on reacting to trending stories, which, unfortunately cannot be predicted ahead of time, there is a way to get ahead with your reactive PR strategies – by implementing ‘planned reactive’ tactics. 

By looking ahead at key dates such as national days, releases of annual reports and seasonal events, you can draft content ahead of time and (hopefully) be featured in the press before your competitors.  

How to introduce ‘planned reactive’ tactics to your PR strategy 

• First up, identify some key themes that you can offer expertise around as a brand. Consider why these themes are relevant to your brand and the services or products you offer. It’s important not to stray too far away from your offering. As much as we’d like to be, we can’t all be experts on everything – and journalists will only include a comment from a brand that they consider to be much more relevant to that topic. 

• Identify key dates and plot these out into a content calendar. For example, if your client offers training in education or tech, these are often topics that are featured in the government’s spring/autumn budgets. A couple of weeks before the date, ask your client to predict what they think will be announced in the budget. As experts in their field, they’re highly likely to have a viewpoint on this. Work with your client to draft a comment, providing their unique stance on the announcement. If there’s a possibility the announcement may have two outcomes, draft two comments and then on the morning of the announcement – you can push out the most relevant one to press. 

• To flesh out your content calendar, use sites such as Awareness Days to identify national days coming up, ONS for relevant reports being released, and consider regular seasonal events (such as hayfever season, Easter, Christmas, Black Friday, bank holidays etc).  

• Consider what your unique stand point is as an expert. Do you have any customer data that can show a change in behaviour around a certain topic, or have you seen a huge increase in product sales compared to the same period last year? Using data in your content can give you a competitive edge, which other brands may not have access to. 

• Don’t try to cram in too many key brand messages. Whilst it’s absolutely important to comment on topics that are relevant to your brand, this is not a sales pitch. Think of this as an in-direct selling tactic, by raising awareness of your brand to a mass audience. 

• Consider any existing content you can repurpose to save time. If you have any relevant blog posts that can be adapted and pushed out to press ahead of a key date, take advantage of that! 

Once you have all of your key dates plotted out, it’s best to get your content ready to be pushed out to the press a minimum of a week ahead of the key date. That way, you’ll be getting ahead of competitors, and can give yourself plenty of time to follow up with journalists closer to the date itself! 

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Gabriella Smith

DIGITAL PR CONSULTANT

Gabriella has 10 years of experience across digital PR and has worked for leading agencies in Leeds. She has delivered strategies for household name brands across a range of sectors.

The post How to Plan Reactive PR appeared first on Search etc..

For some PR pros, being constantly in a cycle of strategy and outreach can feel like a bit of a hamster wheel. The pressure to be consistently on point with ideas, deliver results and keep your knowledge up to date can lead to a focus on getting links to hit targets but not necessarily have that all-important SEO aspect of delivering links with tangible value. A classic problem of quantity over quality.

A common mistake seen amongst PRs is to box-tick delivery of links at scale and forget about where those links are going to or what impact they can ultimately have.

Here are some common mistakes and how to avoid them:

Only Getting Homepage Links

When turning out press releases or pitches where there is no onsite content to reference, sometimes it might be the only option to include a homepage link. Where possible you should always be looking to link to the most relevant page. Links are primarily used to provide value to readers and acts as sources of information or as a credit to a source, if you have a relevant landing page URL and not linking to it you are doing a disservice to the reader by linking to a less helpful URL such as the homepage.

Sending users to homepages will impact user behaviour, whereas if you send someone to a campaign landing page that may have further information on the story they just read it’s expected they will naturally spend more time onsite and view the source as more trusted in return. How users interact with your site is another important factor to consider when looking at your SEO strategy. Additionally, having more diversity to pages on your website which are getting backlinks will positively impact your rankings and organic traffic as this is more natural and proves the value of your onsite content to search engines.

Ignoring Nofollow Links

There has been a lot of debate about the value of nofollow links over the years I’ve worked in the SEO industry. I can speak from personal experience when I say I have seen on multiple occasions that nofollow links do have positive impact on rankings and traffic. Ever since Google guidelines changed to view nofollow as a hint rather than a directive, this has become all the more evident.

If you only target follow links, you should still track and report nofollow links as standard practice to keep tabs on any factors which could be contributing to page organic performance.

Not Focussing on Internal Linking Structure

If you’ve achieved success and got a load of great, relevant links to a campaign landing page and not included any internal linking on that page then you’ve significantly reduced the SEO impact that campaign could have achieved. It’s important to use internal linking sensibly, link to pages which are relevant and make sense. PR campaign pages should always have a clear tangential link to a product or brand so there should be a natural fit for a page to link to. Internal links should follow best practice SEO for anchor text, placement and how many you use per page.

Linking to URLs which 404

A common issue in ecommerce SEO is having product URLs which could 404 when products go out of stock. For brands which regularly list and remove stock products online this can mean equity being lost from good links which have been gained to specific products. Working with your technical SEO team is important here to set a strategy for how these can be managed. A tech SEO can provide 404 links of high value and you can assess if there is scope to ask the site owners/content editors to update this link to something else that is still relevant. It could be better to ask for category links if it makes sense to when you outreach instead of a product, especially when promoting a range or collection. You can plan for this accordingly by asking the brand/client at the onboarding stage how the site functions for out of stock product.

Additionally, as sites change over time your original campaign page may get removed for whichever reason (although ideally it would be kept as evergreen content). If this happens, keep tabs on past links of high value, similarly to the ecommerce example above, and work with SEOs to see if these can be reclaimed and updated. A good plan would be to audit these regularly (depending on how many links this site receives it can be more or less frequent) and tackle them as needed.

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Leanne Vause

SEO & DIGITAL PR DIRECTOR

Leanne has over a decade of experience across SEO strategy, content marketing and digital PR. She has worked for a range of clients from SMEs to global brands both for agencies and in-house. She has a 2:1 upper class hons. degree in Media Studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and founded freelance SEO and digital PR business Search etc. in 2023.

LinkedIn profile here.

The post Common Mistakes You are Making with Links You Get from Digital PR appeared first on Search etc..

We’ve unfortunately all been in the position where a PR campaign just doesn’t take off as intended. The lack of early results can create panic and stress for some of us, but not all is lost. There are ways to turn around a campaign that hasn’t quite hit the mark by trying a few simple steps.

Questions to Ask Yourself

The best place to start is to go back to the strategy and quickly analyse whether you covered all bases with your targeting. Throughout my career I’ve always looked at the what, where, why, when and who when starting a campaign, but it can be useful post-launch to re-evaluate if a story hasn’t landed to see where you may be missing the mark.

What

• What is the key headline of your campaign in a nutshell and have you articulated this simply to the journalist? – If you can’t explain your key campaign/pitch headline in one sentence, it’s too complicated and needs a revision
• What is the point of your story? Are you promoting a product, sharing data, providing an expert comment or something else? Make this clear in your pitch

Why

• Why are you reaching out? Do you have an exclusive story, interesting data or something else
• Why should they care? This sounds harsh but journalists are inundated with emails, what is it that makes yours timely/relevant/newsworthy/original for this news cycle?
• Why is this relevant to now/this journalist/this publication? Put your story into context or why it works for this timeframe and for this publication

Who

• Who is the brand? Explain how they relate to your pitch and make sense in relation to the story. Never assume a journalist has heard of the brand just because you have
• Who are you? PR is a relationship industry, it’s important to introduce who you are and what your relationship to the brand you are promoting is
• Who is the intended audience for this story? Does this fit the demographic of the journalist’s audience? – Look at how you can frame your story to suit the demographic and make sure it is relevant

When

• When is information gathered between? If you have data then provide the dates it ranges from and to
• When can they use this release? Anything under embargo should be clearly stated
• When does something launch? If you are sharing a story about a product, give the date it is available from

Where

• Where can they find supporting resources, data sources, imagery or information? – Providing this from the outset saves them time and increases the chances of pickup
• Where can they purchase the product? If relevant make sure you have given the necessary information for product launches, is this online/in-store/local to certain areas?

These are just quick questions to go over, if you haven’t included these in your initial strategy.

Gain Some Perspective

It can be common when you’re working to short deadlines to get things out the door without having the chance to get much feedback first. If you have a campaign that isn’t delivering results, go back to your team and get some perspective. Share your pitch email with them, setup a short meeting with a group of different colleagues and ask them if the messaging of your campaign is clear, get some feedback and ideas for this can be re-angled. A good idea is to not just ask PR teammates but involve other colleagues, it can be invaluable to see how people outside the PR bubble perceive your story and would consume it as regular readers.

You should also take on board any feedback journalists have given you on why they won’t cover it. It could be it’s not the right media target, wrong timing, not newsworthy enough or been doing too many times/recently by another brand. All of this feedback can inform where you go with your campaign from there.

Read the News

Do a short daily read of the key publications you are looking to target, look at news stories broader within the topic areas of your stories.

Ask yourself:

Are there new or more relevant people I haven’t targeted yet?

Is there an emerging news story or hook I can relate my pitch to?

Ideally you should be reading the news of the publications you target and following journalists specifically, understand common themes and audience interests featured. You’re flogging a dead horse if your story is nowhere in the scope of what an outlet covers.

Re-angle Your Pitch

Look at how you can give your pitch a new angle. Is there a different angle or story to lead with which could be more relevant?

I always recommend having different targeted pitches for different media types, e.g. for specific regional media you should provide and lead with stories that have data or local interest to those areas. Find new targets to trial this with and see if this improves results.

Assess whether there is additional value you can provide with your story, are there designs or data that could make it more compelling or increase the scope of relevant media to pitch to?

Manage Expectations

Whether this is your own, your teams or your clients it is important to keep an eye on outreach progress and keep the relevant parties updated. If you haven’t had the success you wanted (it happens in PR to everyone) and you are worrying about how it will be perceived, you can manage expectations and show people you have a plan.

Give feedback: provide to the team/client what feedback you have to demonstrate you understand where things have fallen down

Have a plan: any reasonable person can accept things haven’t worked out and trust in you if you have a plan for next steps – look at whether you can re-angle, find new contacts or whether you need to try a new campaign instead. Having thought about this in advance shows competence and gives confidence to other parties that you have a handle on things

Provide learnings: every failure can be a lesson, it gives us more insight to what to change next time and how we can better position something to increase chances of success. Use what you have learnt to provide insights to your team or client and take positives from the negative result

Don’t be afraid to ask for help: whether from a teammate or manager, always ask for help if you don’t know what to do next. No one person can have all the answers and asking for help is always better than suffering in silence

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Leanne Vause

SEO & DIGITAL PR DIRECTOR

Leanne has over a decade of experience across SEO strategy, content marketing and digital PR. She has worked for a range of clients from SMEs to global brands both for agencies and in-house. She has a 2:1 upper class hons. degree in Media Studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and founded freelance SEO and digital PR business Search etc. in 2023.

LinkedIn profile here.

The post What to do When Your PR Campaign is Failing appeared first on Search etc..