In her talk, Shannon challenges the desire for virality over consistency when it comes to digital PR campaigns, whilst exploring the impact this is having on the industry and team morale, client expectations and distorting reality.
By honestly sharing her own shortcomings, she pushes us to learn from our own campaign failures using tried and tested frameworks that’ll mean you can face any digital PR challenge head-on as we continue to navigate uncertain times during Covid.
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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another session at Turing Fast twenty twenty. It is in fact, week eight of our of our eight weeks. So we're into the final, really the final stretch, our last day of keynotes. So it's been it's been something of a marathon to get here.
And it feels a little bit odd, frankly, for for for all of us at TuringFest to to think about that we're in we're in the final week. But for from my perspective, it's been great. Actually, it's been really pretty enjoyable. It was a little bit shaky at the start to figure out how to do all of this.
But once we got in the groove, it's been it's been fun at this end. I hope you've all been enjoying it. But we're not finished yet. And let's just a quick recap on last week's content in case you missed it with Nick Francis, who's the CEO and co founder of HelpScout, gave a really good talk on architecting a company for profit profit and purpose, and great chat afterwards.
Someone I mean, Nick's Nick's a person I wanna go have a beer with when this is all over and and hear more about what he came to his particularly interesting viewpoint on building businesses. We had marketing consultant Katie Martell, with a really tremendous talk about the dangers and opportunities in the era of wokewashed marketing.
Lots of lots of practical stuff in there, but also some pretty strong viewpoints as well, which is always makes for for good stuff for the speaker, I think. And then, Elon Montgomery, head of UX at Kazoo, they gave a really deeply thoughtful presentation on why and how we should try and move beyond the era of human centered design.
That's really well worth checking out. And then on last Thursday, I had, a lovely conversation with Nandini Jami. Nandini, some of you may have seen her speak at Turing Fest last year. Great give great talk about her experience with sleeping giants and how they took down Breitbart, amongst other sort of bad actors on the web.
And she dug into that a little bit more and give an update on what she's been up to and talked about the the brand safety requirements that we all need to start thinking about a lot more And the way the advertising system of the Internet is pretty broken.
So loads of loads of good stuff in there. This week on Thursday, it's gonna be our final day of the twenty twenty event, and we're gonna wrap it up with someone I've I've had a lot of respect for for a long time. Paldi Gulcioni from Balsamiq, founder and CEO of Balsamiq, the web's favorite prototyping tool.
Many of you are probably Balsamiq users. Great, great company. Great tool. And he's bootstrapped that company for it's twelve years old now, taking it up to about seven million dollars in ARR with a pretty small team, but tens of thousands of customers all over the world.
So he's gonna be sharing some lessons learned along the way, including how you keep learning as a as a founder or leader, and the paradox paradox of getting growth when they intentionally designed for not getting growth. So that's on Thursday. And for today, unfortunately, we have one of our speakers has not been able to make it in the end today.
Spectra Dora Sala from Wistia had a family emergency. So she's not gonna be joining us today. Hopefully, we'll try and get her talk recorded at some point over the next week or two. And if we can if we can manage that, we'll we'll get the link to everybody so you'd be able to see the talk at some point.
And, of course, just to reiterate, all of the talks from the entire conference are gonna be in in a hub on our on our website available for delegates from next week. So there'll be more in your inbox about that soon. But who we do have today, we have Natalie Nagele is gonna wrap up today.
She's CEO and co founder of WildBit, really interesting software house in the US, and talking about why business exists. It's kind of almost like a part two to Nick Francis talk from last week, and they they happen to be pals as well. So that's a that's a great one to keep an eye out for that at three pm today, UK time.
But next up, we have Shannon McGurk from Era talking about the truth in digital PR and digital PR campaigns. So lots to lots to get into here. So we'll hand over to Shannon. Hi, everyone. Great to be joining you today as part of Turing Fest.
I'm gonna be speaking to you about Great Expectations, the truth around digital PR campaigns. So we have a huge problem. Here's what Twitter has to say about our digital PR campaigns. Digital PR is getting ridiculous. We're attention seeking as an industry. And finally, and probably the most prominent one for me is that the digital PR community shouldn't feel pressured to post their best work and highlights all the time.
But I have a confession to make, and you know what, I'm really guilty of this too. So here I am almost three, four years ago now on Twitter, shouting about how amazing the team are, we're coming to the end of the year, we've generated like two thousand five hundred pieces of coverage for our clients and it's amazing.
We're finishing the year on a high and I'm so, so proud of the team. Fast forward into twenty eighteen and you can see I keep going on this trend, I'm sharing coverage from the campaign launches that we've generated, talking about our clients on Twitter and this comes down to me being so proud of all of the work that we've been able to do as a team over the last couple of years.
And then I kept going, I mean, this is just a snapshot of some of the tweets that I was talking about, but you can see, you know, how proud I am and I really want to celebrate every single success that we've had as a team.
So here is one of those successful campaigns in silo, and you can see that this month was a great month. We got more than forty pieces, oh, sorry, we got nearly seventy pieces of coverage, more than forty links and a huge proportion of those were followed as well.
But when you put that successful month into context, you can see that the months following this, the successes really kind of dropped off a little bit. And there were some really, really hard months following that around kind of August time where we didn't get any links at all.
And it didn't stop there. This is me on Mosscon stage last year looking like a tiny little pin drop in the ocean. I was on stage trying to share my insights, tips and successes around how other people in our industry can go off and hit dizzy link numbers.
This was one of the campaigns that I spoke about, we released this two years ago now for a logo brand, and we essentially rebranded Santa. It actually had kind of reached a peak when there were film crews in Times Square in New York, asking people if Santa should be male, female and what he would look like in the present day.
It generated four sixty eight pieces of coverage and three twenty four linking domains. This one here and one that, like I love this campaign, it's one that stayed really close to my heart, the most popular beaches according to Instagram, nominated for a UK search award for this as well, got one hundred and fifty pieces of coverage and sixty six linking domains.
And then finally, and probably one of the, the ones that I will hold onto forever at Era. So this is what we called Era Viral. It's the first campaign that really took off on its own, revealed the world's booziest countries. It got sixty eight pieces of coverage and forty five linking domains.
But again, a second confession today, I wasn't showing you the full picture when I stood on that stage. And today for me, really it is about showing you the full picture when it comes to digital PR and creative content for link building. So for me, the full picture covers these three pillars with creative campaigns.
We have huge wins, those campaigns that go off and get two, three, four hundred links. We then have what we call the steady performers, and that's the every day of what we do. We might get five, ten, twenty links even, and then huge fails.
Now not to be too negative but this is something that we should be open about. A fail doesn't necessarily mean that nothing's worked at all but it potentially hasn't gone out and got the link numbers that we wanted it to. Now this is how we talk about those three pillars.
You'll see us on social media talking about these huge wins, entering award categories and stuff like that, really kind of going for it to share these successes. We don't talk about steady performers and huge fails as much, even though they are part of what we do.
Actually the everyday of what we do at Era and what probably most agencies do, our campaigns fall into this steady performer category. Know, the huge wins may be one in every four, one in every five campaigns takes off and goes viral. Steady performers sitting at five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty links, that's our bread and butter category, that's what we're doing every single day.
And then the huge fails, again, happening few and far between. So what's the problem with that then, and how we talk about it and the disparity between the different pillars? Well, if we're talking about the wins and only the wins, we're giving the impression that we don't have campaign fails.
We're gonna be putting far too much pressure on ourselves and newbies in the industry to come in and join the community and think that straight away, the campaigns that they're working on outreaching has to go off and reach viral link numbers. We're also normalizing the idea that each campaign launch must go out and deliver more than one hundred links.
That in turn means that we're starting to set unrealistic KPIs and expectations with key stakeholders and potentially clients as well. It also then feeds into the mindset that, you know, we're starting to make others believe that five, ten, or even just twenty links can't be effective when you want to see an increase with traffic and rankings.
And actually, we know it can. We know that steady performers can be effective. We need to be celebrating them. We need to be sharing the impact and the successes, and also learning from them more. So I believe as an industry, we can do better.
So rinse and repeat then, why do we focus on the wins? Well, let's go back to our first AeroViral campaign. This is the world's booziest countries. We launched this campaign on behalf of an online voucher brand in January, a time when arguably we're all supposed to be cutting back after a boozy festive period.
I for one, on the other hand are more likely to go and grab a glass of wine after work more than ever as it's doomy and gloomy. So this interactive map meant that we have multiple different angles to be able to outreach to various different countries, sites, top tier press all around the UK and the world.
It generated sixty eight pieces of coverage and for, including forty five linking domains. Now I know what you're thinking, there's nothing viral about that, but we call it AeroViral because we were coming in in the morning and we were seeing this campaign starting to do its own thing.
Journalists were covering it because they'd seen it elsewhere. They were coming to us asking for the embed code and the asset itself. Now, the core reason that I'm telling you this isn't necessarily the campaign itself, it's actually the mindset that we were in.
And at this point, we focused on the wins and only the wins. So guess how many maps we launched in that year for one client alone. Out of eighteen campaigns, twelve of them were maps, which is a huge proportion of a campaign activity that we did for them.
And that's us tying into this, right? We're talking and sharing and kind of pushing forward those successes and that huge win category, almost disregarding the steady performers and huge fails. And we're doing that because actually, if we focus on the wins and only the wins and that larger category itself, it gets us coverage on sites like this all around the world from Nat Geo right through to CNBC, IBM, you name it, there's some huge tier one sites there that we would love to be seeing our clients'
brands and generating links from them. So this is quite a familiar mindset in the digital PR and SEO industry. So what do we do to get links and help our businesses grow from an SEO perspective then? Well, back in two thousand and nine, the way to do that quickly, efficiently, cost effectively was to publish guest posts.
In twenty twelve, we saw the rise of the static infographics with agencies like Distilled really championing and leading the way. Push forward into twenty fourteen, you can see that interactive infographics again, really kind of pushed forward by Distilled and other large agencies like Branded Three, really driving forward the success of kind of what we were doing with these interactives.
Then in twenty seventeen, and we did a fair few of these ourselves, we saw Instagram maps and using data sets from social media to drive brand awareness, drive coverage and links back to our client sites. In twenty eighteen, we saw indexes come through multiple different data points that we could take out to different sections of the press.
Twenty nineteen best job ever, we've seen everything from Yorkshire pudding tasters to spa retreats and stuff like that. In twenty twenty, the rise of the product's done and we even did this ourselves, one of the brands that we work with and launched a bespoke gym as a result.
So what about next year and beyond? What are we gonna be doing in order to drive forward our clients' SEO and help them grow their businesses? What assets are we gonna be depending on? Well, actually in twenty twenty one, I think video is gonna continue to make a huge impact.
We see this format itself be covered in writers' articles more and more. In twenty twenty two, the rise of virtual reality and starting to tap into emotions using and skewing reality to be able to do that and cut apart from our competitors campaigns.
And then twenty twenty three, a few years from now, but I think there's gonna be more experiential work fully immersing our brand's audience so that they can feel, think, hear, do things around products, services, and client offerings. So that's ten winning formats in fourteen years that we've used in the digital PR and SEO industry to generate links, which then increase traffic and rankings for brands.
But I have to say, we must have been doing just more than this. In fact, I know we were. What about the formats we didn't celebrate? And what about the wins that we didn't shout about on social media? So the challenge that we have then is that we love to rinse and repeat these formats again, but that doesn't show the full picture of really what we're doing to help our clients' businesses grow from an SEO perspective.
So the truth about digital PR, let's talk about failure. So for me, the first step in really sharing the full picture with you guys today is talking about failure. Hand up, who's ever had a marketing campaign fail? I absolutely have. This is the one that really kind of sticks close with me.
It was one of my first campaigns at Era. I was working under Paddy, who's quite literally written the book on all things link building and creative content consultant who headed up the creative team at Distilled, Mark Johnson. You hit that watch it disappear button and you can see that oil drum deplete in terms of the volume of oil that it's got in there and just see how quickly the USA was gonna use its oil reserves across the next couple of years.
I love this campaign. It was short, simple, snappy and to the point. But when I launched it, I was asked by a leading contact who writes on the environment and science at the Daily Mirror, where I'd been for the past four years. And if that wasn't my only worry, the first launch, it generated zero links and zero pieces of coverage.
I was not helping my clients' brand grow here. But why? There was something else at play, something much bigger that I should have caught. And as a marketeer and PR, it's pretty shocking that I didn't at the time. We launched our campaign here just before this spike.
And this is something that we've just seen with kind of across the pond, something that dominated the news four years ago and that has that cycle of every four years comes to light. I could have planned for it, I could have seen it and yet it was completely off the radar for me when I launched this campaign with the team.
Can anybody guess what happened? This guy, he won the US presidential election. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and it was probably one of the biggest things that will go down in US politics and presidential history in the sense that the media landscape was dominated by this wind, sorry.
It's not just the US press that were covering it, global media outlets around the world and in the UK were focusing solely on this. So it's no surprise that nobody cared about my oil campaign. It really wasn't wise for me to launch that campaign to press during the presidential election.
I should have caught it. I should have seen it, and I didn't. And you know what, guys? I kept that one quiet on Twitter. But the other thing when it comes to marketing and digital PR and as business owners watching this, marketeers watching this, you guys will know that failures across the business landscape come in all shapes and sizes.
Again, another very trusted link building format here, we can see that a campaign we launched two or three years ago now that reveals the world's top selling car model in every single country, great format in terms of, know, we're able to take this out to multiple sectors of the press from automotive right through to country specific, but you can see how busy it is and you can imagine just how difficult this was to QA at certain points with our designer and team back at Era HQ.
Scrolling in on one of the busiest places down here then in kind of Asia, you can just see how many different kind of names, brand names and automotive cars we had to check. Now there is something wrong with this screenshot and you can see another failing of ours.
Let me make that a bit easier. So rather than Hong Kong, we had Hong Kong, and again, I was absolutely mortified when this was brought to my attention. What was worse is that we'd already launched the campaign on behalf of the client. The coverage here that you see, it has that typo in that image there.
Now, luckily enough, I had a client that was very understanding, helped us turn around this really, really quickly and we're able to go back with a corrected dataset with typo free. Luckily the campaign went out and got more than a hundred links, so it kind of offset the risk a little bit there as well and every, all of the headaches that we went through, but it's fair to say, Hong Kong will always haunt me, and again it's a story that I'll probably never forget or live down.
Failures, they don't stop there when you're heading up a team and a business either, and I've had to report on a number of campaign struggles, fails, trials, tribulations. Hands up if you have had to as well. This is a client of ours. Now I got this pre nine am on a wintery gloomy morning, Monday, fourth of February.
He says to me, hi Shannon, how are you? Has it been a good weekend? I just wanted to get your view on how January unfolded. It was below normal in terms of standards when it comes to link building. What do you put this down to?
Now, not only has he got to me before I've managed to get to him and explain what's happened, it's not even nine o'clock. And finally, this guy, he's a lovely client. We've worked with him for a number of years. He's one of those clients that you really wanna do your best work on.
So it hurts to get this email. And again, who's had to pull their team through a campaign failure? And that's another one that I can put my hand up to. As marketers, you know, this is the reality of running and being part of full stack digital marketing agency.
I've had to say well done for pushing the team on this guys today, keep going, we've got it, we've got it in the bag, everyone needs to focus on that output and that goal. Aoife who heads up my outreach team says, I've got your back on this Livy, now Livy's the AM, and before you know it, by the end of the week we're in a much, much better position.
You have to have each other's backs through thick and thin if you guys are going to be helping your business grow, especially when it comes to marketing, because there is no fixed science for this. There is no success formula for digital PR and link building that can be applied to every single brand and go off and hit viral dizzy heights.
Sometimes the reality is it really hurts when things don't go to plan, but that is the nature of what we do. That is marketing, that is digital PR, that is link building. So what is normal then? And when you're looking to invest in this kind of service as a business owner or potentially, you're a head of marketing there thinking about plans for twenty twenty one, well, what does good look like and what is normal for an award winning agency like us?
Well, we launched the State of Link Building Report nearly a year ago now, in back in February twenty twenty. We asked more than three hundred people, the survey itself was led by Paddy, one of AERA's co founders, they thought the future of link building and digital PR was, where they spend and invest their money in the services, and kind of what good looks like when it comes to campaign outputs.
Now, of the most important pieces of data from this report was when we asked the question, have you ever had a campaign that received the following number of links? One to nine, sixty one percent said yes. Ten to nineteen, fifty five percent said yes.
Twenty to thirty nine, forty six percent said yes. Again, there's nothing viral about these numbers. These are consistent link building outputs. And on the other side of that, when asked how many people had got zero links or essentially had had a campaign flop or fail, twenty eight percent said they had as well.
Now I have to admit, I'm a little bit suspicious that only a third experienced zero links when it's come to their digital PR and link building efforts, but hey ho, that's what the data tells us. Now the thing to really hit home here is that despite what Twitter shows, not every single campaign is going viral.
Instead, you know, more are sitting in that steady performer category. The research shows that the majority of campaigns are getting between one and twenty links, and that is good. If those one and twenty links are having a positive impact on traffic and rankings, you can then follow through to revenue and noticing that your marketing, digital PR and link building efforts are helping businesses grow and the business that you work for grow, that's brilliant.
That is all you can ask for. And you don't necessarily need viral link numbers, coverage outputs or campaigns to be able to pursue that. So what's normal for error then? Well, in a twelve month period, we launched one hundred and thirty eight campaigns.
It generated two thousand three hundred and eighty one followed links and about five thousand pieces of coverage for traditional PR purposes as well. Now you divide that down and that's only an average of seventeen links per campaign. Of course some went off and got one, two hundred.
Others, they probably didn't get any links at all, but in terms of averages, again, nothing viral there. Instead it's consistent. Consistent numbers are going to be getting you those kind of the positive impact on traffic and rankings, which ultimately is going to add into revenue and help your business grow.
They fall directly into the steady performer category, and this is what we are doing, living and breathing here at Murrow. Now the link numbers, they're almost irrelevant if they're not having an impact on bigger KPIs, such as traffic rankings and revenue. Now you don't always need loads of links to get real business results.
So here's what forty seven links across five campaigns with technical SEO and keyword research can do. It doubled sessions, and that, again, is helping this SME grow. It's putting money, revenue on the bottom line. So this is a testimonial as well to back that up.
Era have consistently provided guidance on setting targets, communicating their progress, and helping us grow as a company. This proves that steady performers can make a big difference to the bottom line. So how do we learn from these steady performers then? Well, remember that email that I took you through that I received pre nine am on a Monday morning?
Well, ten, twelve months later, we got this. Great job guys, you're finishing the year on a real high, keep it going. So the reason that we're able to do that and turn doom and gloom right through to that positive email was that we've got a number of processes in place that help us learn and develop and grow as a team.
The first one that I wanna share with you today that you can take back to your teams, and again, I'm coming at this from a marketing and digital PR perspective, you could do this with a number of projects in order to evaluate successes.
Where this content evaluation at Matrix all started then with Mark Johnson, he headed up the creative team at Distilled, has recently launched Content Hubble, which is a platform to help marketeers, business owners come up with better ideas for their business. And you can see that the scroll here was what was quite literally on our whiteboard.
Taking that and digesting it down, this matrix actually looks like this. You can see successful versus not successful in terms of results generated, and then we've got complex versus not complex in terms of how difficult the idea was to bring to life, how challenging the concept was to come up with in the first place.
So when you repeat this every quarter, you tend to focus on the wins and that's exactly what we did. So in focusing on the wins, as I said earlier, we were able to spot trends. And the first trend that came out was that maps are great for link building.
Here you can see three of our most successful maps got more than three hundred links between them. That's fantastic. Then on the flip side of that, you can start to learn from fails. So this is one of those campaigns that struggled and it reveals the most lucrative movie quotes of all time.
We thought that this story was gonna be a surefire success. It essentially broke down some of the world's most, or some of the movie industry's most famous one liners, like this one here from Tom Hanks and Forrest Gump. Mama said life is always like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.
Well, we were able to break down just how much Tom Hanks was paid for saying that phrase and what the cost outputs were from that. We thought that would be great to launch at awards time, when the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and stuff like that happening.
This is what that looked like when you scroll down the page a little bit more, you can see here, different movie quotes from the likes of Fight Club and stuff like that. But it's safe to say this might not have been the best visual for telling this story.
So what should we have learned from that campaign then? Well, actually we can complicate things too much, trying to be innovative and trying to push ourselves too much means that we sometimes don't get the visual synced up. And that actually, it means that, you know, it hinders our campaign success.
Now, not learning from these, it can produce inconsistent digital PR results, which is not what we want. We want consistency, even though that might just be seventeen links per campaign. And it produces results like this, as I showed you at the start of this presentation, huge spikes, drops down to challenges, and actually these make for really difficult conversations with key stakeholders within the business as well.
Whereas steady performers on the other hand, they can produce consistent results. So let's look at the middle of this matrix. And you can see here a campaign that we're able to extract out. This is the world's best cities to stay connected. It's an index, it's got six different data points in there from cities all around the world.
So we went out to not just tech in UK press, but we could go out to the Parisian press, Spanish press in New York as well with all of these different stories, which actually offsets the risk of launching this campaign as well. So the trend that we're able to spot was that campaigns with multiple data points that are evergreen work well for consistent SEO and digital PR results.
Now looking at steady performers and that campaign itself, we combine that again with technical SEO keyword research, and together the joint projects help us get a ninety five percent increase in organic traffic and a sixty three percent increase in organic revenue. Again, nothing viral, but consistency paid off.
And again, we know that we're helping businesses grow. So you should be reviewing your work every quarter to find these trends and implement them. I've been able to create a template for you, the decks will be shared no doubt after the session. So in summary, let's circle back around.
The full picture, I really hope that I've been able to walk you through it today when it comes to digital VR and link building. Ultimately, it can be really hard, it can be risky, it's not without risk and reward, but it's worth doing to help businesses grow from an SEO perspective.
You are gonna experience a campaign fail or two, that's gonna happen, whether you're just a marketer, PR, whoever it is, there are gonna be struggles along this road. But it's important to keep consistency and quality in mind over virality. I would take twenty relevant links with twenty to thirty pieces of coverage that I can track back to making sure that it increases rankings and traffic, and therefore has a positive impact on revenue any day over a hundred links from spammy sites that have nothing to do
with the brand itself. So the first step in being able to really push consistency then is take that viral pressure off yourself when it comes to marketing campaigns, and start talking more about steady performers and fails. Realize that steady performers, they can consistently impact weighty SEO KPIs like traffic and rankings, and they will have a positive impact on revenue, which will help the brand and business grow.
And finally, use that success matrix to review campaigns and catch trends early, so that you can learn, pivot, and adapt your strategies in real time. Today, I really hope I've showed you the full full picture. Thank you so much for joining me. Okay. Lots to dig into with from Shannon there.
So we're gonna bring her in straight away and get stuck into it. Shannon, are you there? Hi. Hi, Brian. Hi. Thanks for joining us, and thanks for that great talk. So tons tons to get into. One of my favorite things in your talk is that maps are such a winner.
I'm a huge fan of maps. So I was delighted to hear that. I've actually one of the first things I did for my for my kids was buy a giant map of the world and stick it up in their bedroom wall. So they're always looking at maps.
So they'll be very susceptible to your marketing in, you know, ten, fifteen years. I I wanted to ask you about one of the there's loads to get into around the steady performers being perhaps the key to success over the longer term, one of the big takeaways of your talk.
But I have to ask you about the gin, the bespoke gin that you said you did as a product stunt. I'm pretty sure I saw that on Twitter. Can you did it work? Did the campaign work? Yeah. So we launched a bespoke gin back in the summer, I think it was August time on behalf of a leading fast fashion brand, Pretty Little Thing.
It was a good few months in the making. There were lots of hurdles along the way that we potentially could have foreseen. We're learning kind of on the job, but yeah, it was great to be part of that with such, I guess, such a passionate, hungry brand as well, PLT.
They're really pushing the boundaries with their marketing campaigns. We probably guys may or may not have seen but just a couple of weeks ago we were going to launch a huge pink runway across a pink lake in Australia to kind of get them tap into the market there.
So the gin itself was called Pretty Little Gin as well, keeping in mind the Pretty Little Thing kind of brand name and relating there. So it did well across social. We saw some huge engagements there. Amazing pieces of coverage came through. You can see it in most top tier nationals as well.
So quite experiential, was awesome to put something in the hands of journalists as well. Kind of went back to my traditional PR days, really, really, really great brand to work with, amazingly talented team. And, yeah, looking forward to seeing what else kind of comes comes next year in twenty twenty one for those guys.
So something that you you focused on quite a bit in your talk was around the steady performers and that how they're maybe a little bit underappreciated. And, you know, huge wins get all the airtime, but steady performers and consistent consistently delivering the steady performer campaigns is is ultimately what kinda drives the longer tail success.
Just wanted to ask you about how there's a question that came in actually, which is for to in house for in house marketers to they might find that easier than agency side marketers to embrace and celebrate that idea of steady performers. And how do you how do you convince your external clients to see it that way?
Yeah, definitely. That's definitely a really key point there around, I think agencies have this pressure to perform. And as soon as you engage and bring them on board a new agency as a in house team, you want them to do well. You're trying to set up the environment for them to be successful and strive forward with not just their link building efforts, but any kind of marketing effort, any digital effort.
The first three to six months to any partnership is where you're not just getting on board in terms of working relationships and stuff like that, but you really need to start to see the foundations of success being built. So I think in terms of getting external clients and stuff like that on board, really it comes down to making sure that you're measuring the right KPIs.
So for us, we try not to focus too heavily or we're trying to pivot as a business so we're not focusing too heavily just on links. We're actually looking at a combination of links, technical SEO, keyword research, making sure that we've got access to things like GA, GSC so that we're able to look into the back end of a website and say, actually, okay, the perfect digital marketing SEO storm there between all of those components that I just mentioned is actually having a positive impact on traffic and rankings.
We can see it here through kind of sessions and stuff like that. I think if you're looking to try and get a buy in and to try and change mindsets, that comes down to just communication. It is looking again across a twelve month period, would you rather have two campaigns out of six that you launch do really, really, really well and get hundreds and hundreds of links, but they might not be relevant links and you can't see in GSE and you can't see in GA the positive impact they're having
or would you rather have out of those six campaigns four but all of them get twenty, thirty links in that stead of performer category but they're relevant to the brand. The campaigns that you've created are topically on point. They're themes that Google would be looking at you and going, right, yeah, that brand should be an authority on that source.
I'm to give them credit for that. And they're doing all of the stuff when it comes to technical SEO and stuff like that as well. So really it comes down to open, transparent comms, managing those expectations and saying, look, actually our longer term goal here is to push that consistent level of results so that you don't have to go to internal stakeholders, CMOs, heads of marketing, and even above up into the board and say, hey, two of the agencies campaigns have performed amazingly, but the other four,
they're not quite doing so well because that also makes for a bit of a difficult conversation. And I think the other thing to tie into here as well, in the current environment around COVID and the impact that that's having on strategies and spend, every piece of money, every penny that's being spent is likely to be scrutinized.
It needs to be spent in the right way. And if you're kind of fluctuating all over the place with link building results, it's not consistent. And that story is quite hard to then share up into senior stakeholders that you're having a positive impact because you could skyrocket results and then drop back down.
And then that has a bit more of a negative impact on visibility and stuff. So I would be open with your comms, manage expectations, take them on the journey with you, share case studies, maybe start small and say, rather than put Q1 and Q2's budget together into one huge campaign, We actually wanna do two or three across the first six months of twenty twenty.
Let's play safe and play smaller digital marketing and digital PR bets because longer term, we think that's the way to go in terms of strategy and stuff like that. So from all of that, it sounds like maybe there needs to be a bit of a change in mindset from, I guess, the two people on either side of that marketing budget relationship, whether it's client or CMO, or the company management on the one hand, and then the marketing team or the agency on the other hand, does there need to be?
Is it just about being more transparent being more? It's a it sometimes feels, I think, for people who are on one side of marketing budgets that they don't really understand what the marketers are going to do. You they understand the outcomes they're trying to get to, but maybe they don't understand the process.
Is there do you think it it it's time to have deeper conversations about that and make people just kinda educate the stakeholders a bit better? Yeah, definitely. I mean, for us, what is the main reason that you engage with an agency? It's usually because internally, you don't have the resource to execute some of these campaigns and to drive forward with those strategies.
And another reason is the transfer of knowledge and the skill share that you have. Agency side, yes, it's crazy and we love it and it's fast paced and a hectic environment. But we're able to see how different strategies work in different industries. We're able to take good learning, put them on different accounts.
And we're able to experiment in the right way to generate whether it's AB tests and stuff like that, or even coming right back down to PR campaigns, looking at how we can elevate and not just use the same formats and stuff like that.
So I think really it comes down to saying, asking yourself, why am I engaging with this agency? What am I trying to get out of them as an in house marketer? Well, it's those two things and let's trust them as a strategic partner.
They're here to challenge me. I'm gonna challenge them. I need results out of this. I need to manage my stakeholders' expectations. I need to see my online share of voice grow, my rankings increase, my traffic increase and stuff like that. Let's actually listen to the agency and what they've got to say.
Let's listen to their skills and expertise. Let's allow them to be that strategic partner that, you know, we bought, we onboarded them for. Yep, makes a lot of sense when you put it like that. So something that you mentioned in your talk, and it's something that comes up a lot in just over the last few years, it's maybe something that we've all been talking a bit more about, which is about failure.
And getting comfortable with failure. And you know, it's, it's, it's a fact of life in anything you do, it's going to be some failure. But it's not always as it's not always as easy to deal with, I guess. How do you have conversations with your clients about failure?
How do you have conversations with your team or your boss about failure? How does that work out for you? Sure. So I'll probably chunk that question down a little bit, Brian, if that's Okay. Talking to clients failures. For us, as I said, we take a really consistent approach.
So if we have a campaign that's struggling, we likely have one lined up, ready to go in the coming weeks, two, three, four weeks later. And then again, after that, there's likely another one to go. Now we can kind of off set those challenging conversations around results not coming in with other levels of activity as well.
We've got this big campaign piece that potentially could be going out that's not performed. A lot of us have traditional PR backgrounds. We're on the steady drumbeat of the press and the media looking for stories to break. We then might be able to take a spokesperson and profile them in order to get the brand's name out there and drive links that way.
So usually when it comes to clients, we have a lot of activity going on on their accounts. And we aren't just focusing on this one campaign going out and getting one hundred links to be able to hit our KPIs. We can also usually tell, and I've got a couple of my team I'm pretty sure have logged onto this as well, they'll be nodding their head at this.
We can usually tell within the first twenty four or forty eight hours of a campaign launch if it's generating the traction and the interest that we wanted it to. So it may be the open rates are strong or they're not strong if the campaign is struggling.
That's something that we communicate back to the client at the earliest opportunity. And we say, look, guys, launched this morning, open rates are X, Y, Z. We're pivoting and changing subject lines. We're AB testing across different data sets at the moment to see what gets traction.
Then usually it's a very open and transparent dialogue with the client all the way through that. So kind of regular updates in order for us to be able to say, this is what we're trying. This is the plan of attack at the moment.
This is what we're pivoting. This is what we're trying versus we've got this under control. We're doing what we can. Link building in its nature is generally, you know, there's risks attached to it and stuff like that. Not every campaign idea that you come up with is going be a surefire success and skyrocket to the moon.
And that's again why we also take that kind of consistent approach and make sure that we've got other activity going on. And you know what, we're not afraid of having those conversations. And we say, well, actually we're going to add in that new data.
We're going to try this. And usually that really helps. It really helps being agency side, just proving and showing through clear comms to your client that you are doing all you can. And on that note as well, in that note of doing all you can and trying your best, that's something that I use internally with the team and say, look, if you can say to me, we're doing all we can, we've tried multiple different pitch lines to get this campaign, to get traction with the press.
We've asked for journalist feedback. We've pivoted different data points. We've gone back to our data journalists and seen if there's any more stories we can pull out. If we're actively hunting out for these angles and trying to pivot things and look at new ways that we can get traction and you can confidently say to me, Shannon, that's what I'm doing.
We're doing all we can. Then that's all I can ask from you as a team, know, that's what that comes down to. And likewise, when I'm managing up to stakeholders at Aero, if there have been some performance challenges, again, really, really transparent around this is what we're doing, this is a plan of attack, the strategy isn't working, let's pull it apart, push it all back together again.
And ultimately Paddy, Matt, co founders of Era, me and my team, we're doing our best to tackle these challenges head on. Stick with us, trust us, let us ride this storm and we'll come out the other side of it. So speaking of coming out the other side of a storm, just for the final final question for today because we're running a bit tight on time.
Yeah. Twenty twenty one is almost upon us, thankfully. And it's been, you know, it's been the year. It's been challenges all over the place in every, every sector, every sphere of life. How do you see marketing and particularly the PR and digital comms side? What for twenty twenty one?
What's going to get harder? What's going to get easier? How do you think it's starting to look? Yeah, sure. So I think the first thing to say is that we know that budget is likely in some of these harder hit industries, travel, hospitality, leisure, stuff like that, we know that budget isn't going to be where it was this time last year.
And that internal stakeholders are going to be looking at every pot that they've got that they're spending. And they're going to want to see something back from it. So I think it's down to us as agencies, that strategic partner and advisor to say, look, this is what good looks like in the next six to twelve months.
Manage those expectations around marketing campaigns, looking specifically at digital PR. Again, be open about what realistic and what good looks like. So digital PR isn't like paid or PPC where you can put a chunk of money in and you can see ROI and you can get it out within three to four weeks.
Digital PR is a much longer game and it's something that can evolve and the successes are built on three to six months down the line. So you have to be patient with what we're doing. But again, it's that cumulative effort of all of the different disciplines.
I think my biggest advice if you're in house or agency is start with what is the real business problem? What is the challenge that our business is facing in twenty twenty? It could be reducing customer CPAs. It could be increasing, I don't know, renewals of insurance policy quotes.
Whatever that business challenge is, you need to have that as your starting point and then work back. Because if you start with tactics and then try and charge forward, those tactics might not be right. They're not gonna help your business grow and get back to the levels that potentially were pre COVID or help your business to get out the other side of it.
So start with that real business problem and then work back. And that is an awesome challenge to throw at an agency partner and say, guys, this is my brief for twenty twenty one. I need your help in increasing X, Y, Z, reducing my CPA by fifty percent, increasing my customer database by whatever amount.
And then throw it at them as a challenge and say, what we did in twenty twenty, is that gonna get us there? Are we gonna be able to do that? Come on, let's get through this kind of stuff together. So yeah, I guess my biggest piece of advice is start with that real business challenge and then work back.
Manage your own expectations. Realize that Rome wasn't built in a day. We've lost a lot of ground in twenty twenty. And you know, spend means more to a lot of stakeholders than it ever has before. So make sure that you're confident in the strategies that you're putting forward and that you know, you feel confident in executing them as well.
Good advice. And, yeah, I mean, that's that's that's how I I've been talking to a lot of people about how they'll see the next twelve months. Yeah, I think everyone's under no everyone's no one's under any illusions that it's all just gonna be back to where we were in, say, twenty nineteen.
But there's gonna be a slow rebuild, and and it's gonna affect a lot of things. It's gonna change the way a lot of us do business. So much to, much to think about there. But Shannon, we're out of time for today, but thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks for a great presentation. Really enjoyed the chat. Lots of good stuff for q and a there. Not at all. Not at all. And, you know, future future trip to Edinburgh to be on the on the pink stage at Turing Fest. Let's see if we can make that happen.
Oh, yeah. I'd love to come up and meet you guys in person and see the stage as well. Missed out this year. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we we you know, the way things are going, we're hoping to be back on on in person next year.
So, yeah, that's it for now. But thanks so much. Fabulous. Thanks for having me guys. To Shannon. Okay, so we're going to take a quick break now. And we're back in just thirteen minutes or so. We're back at three PM UK to speak to Natalie Nigueli from WildBit about how how she thinks about business.
The incredible story, WildBit, actually, I'm really looking forward to hearing more from Natalie. And, there's a lot a lot to dig into. So we're back in just over ten minutes. See you then.
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