Digital PR
Earn the coverage on the story, not on the size of the fee
Digital PR is the work of producing something a journalist would run without being asked twice: original data, expert comment at the moment it is needed, a genuinely new angle. The links follow the coverage rather than the other way round.
Before anything else
What separates this from buying links
The market for links is full of things that look like PR and are not. It is worth being explicit about where the line sits, because the risk of crossing it lands on your domain rather than on ours.
What we do
- Pitch only stories we would be content to see published with no link at all
- Source, date and show the method behind every figure we put in front of a journalist
- Name the people whose expertise is being quoted, and let them approve the wording
- Tell you a campaign idea is not newsworthy before it costs anything to produce
- Report the coverage actually earned, including the pitches that went nowhere
- Keep the data and methodology available so anyone can check the claim
What we refuse
- Buy links, rent them, exchange them or use private blog networks
- Pay for editorial placement and then describe the result as earned coverage
- Publish on sites that exist only to host guest posts for a fee
- Round, reframe or selectively cut data to make a headline work
- Promise a number of links, a domain rating movement or a named publication
- Pitch a survey we would be embarrassed to explain the methodology of
The standard
What actually makes something newsworthy
A journalist is not deciding whether to help you. They are deciding whether this is a story their readers would want, whether it can be stood up, and whether it can be written today. Almost every failed pitch fails one of those three tests, and usually the first.
New is the hardest of the three. A company announcement is new to the company and old to everyone else. A statistic assembled from other people’s existing reports is not new at all. Genuinely new means information that did not exist in public before you produced it, or an expert view on something happening right now.
That is why the source material matters more than the outreach. Good pitching cannot rescue a weak story, and a strong story survives mediocre pitching. So we spend most of the effort at the start, deciding what is worth making, rather than at the end, sending more emails about something that was never going to run.
Where stories come from
Three sources of genuinely newsworthy material
Almost every campaign worth running draws on one of these three. They have different production costs, different timelines and different risks, and most programmes should run more than one.
Original data
Information that did not exist in public until you produced it: your own operational records anonymised and analysed, a commissioned survey with a documented method, or a public dataset examined in a way nobody has bothered to try. Slow to produce, and the only kind of asset that keeps earning citations for years.
Expert commentary
A named person in your business with a real position on something their industry argues about. This works when the expert is genuinely qualified and willing to say something specific. It fails when they are briefed to be safe, because safe comment is interchangeable and no editor needs it.
Reactive comment
Responding to a breaking story with informed perspective, within the hour. The cheapest coverage available per unit of effort and the one most businesses cannot run, because it requires a prepared spokesperson, agreed positions and permission to speak without a committee. Mostly an operations problem.
How a campaign runs
From internal data to published coverage
Find what you already know
A working session with operations, sales and support to surface the information you hold and consider unremarkable. This is where most viable campaigns are actually found, long before anyone writes a creative brief.
You get: Story audit of available data and expertise
Test the idea against the standard
Write the headline first. If it does not stand up as something a reader would want without knowing you, the idea is rejected here rather than after the production budget is spent.
You get: Shortlisted concepts with draft headlines
Produce the evidence properly
Collect or commission the data, analyse it, document the methodology, and build the page it will live on. If we cannot show our working when a journalist asks, the campaign is not ready to pitch.
You get: Research asset with published methodology
Pitch to people who cover this
Researched contacts who write about your sector, approached individually with the angle that suits their readership. Volume outreach to a bought list gets ignored and damages the next pitch as well as this one.
You get: Targeted outreach with tracked responses
Keep the spokesperson available
Coverage generates follow-up questions, and answering them quickly is how a one-off campaign becomes a relationship. Meanwhile the reactive process runs continuously in the background.
You get: Prepared spokesperson and reactive process
Questions
Fair questions about digital PR
Is digital PR just link buying with better manners?
No, and the difference is not cosmetic. Paid links that pass ranking signals are against Google’s spam policies, and the risk of that sits with your domain rather than with the agency that arranged them.
Digital PR earns coverage by producing something a publication genuinely wants to run. It is slower, it produces fewer links, and some campaigns produce none at all. It also means nobody has to worry later about what was bought on your behalf.
We are in a boring industry. Will anyone write about us?
Usually yes, and often more easily than for a consumer brand, because the information you hold is genuinely unavailable elsewhere. Repair timelines, failure rates, claim patterns, price movements, seasonal demand and regional differences are all routine to you and new to a reporter.
What does not work is a story about the company. What works is a story about the market, told with numbers only you have. The company becomes the credible source rather than the subject.
How many links will we get?
We will not give you a number, and you should be cautious of anyone who does. Coverage depends on the news cycle, on whether an editor has space that week, and on events nobody controls.
What we will commit to is the work: a defined number of campaigns, a defined standard for what gets pitched, and full reporting on what landed and what did not. Guaranteeing placements would mean buying them, which is exactly the thing we do not do.
What makes something newsworthy?
Something has to be new, relevant to a defined readership, and attributable to a credible source. Most pitches fail the first test: the information exists elsewhere, or it is a company announcement that matters only internally.
The practical filter we apply is whether a journalist could write a headline from it that would make sense to someone who has never heard of you. If the headline needs your company name to be interesting, it is marketing rather than news.
How long does a campaign take?
A data campaign typically takes several weeks before anything is pitched: designing the question, collecting or commissioning the data, analysing it, and building whatever needs to exist on your site.
Reactive commentary runs on a completely different clock. Once a spokesperson is prepared and the process is in place, a useful comment can go out within an hour of a story breaking, and that speed is most of what makes it work.
Find the story your business is sitting on without noticing
On a strategy call we go looking for the information inside your business that nobody outside it has. In most companies it is already there, sitting in a spreadsheet somebody finds completely unremarkable.
Related
Where to go next
- our content and authority workDigital PR is one part of a wider authority programme.
- how we approach linksWhere the earned links from coverage do their work.
- planning what to publishCampaign assets need somewhere on the site to live.
- our published researchWhat original data looks like when we run it on ourselves.
- our editorial policy
- brand messaging
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal