Main Takeaways
- Building relationships over time is essential for effective digital PR.
- Leveraging unique data or publicly available data can enhance your digital PR efforts.
- Traditional methods like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) may still work for some, but a proactive approach often yields better results.
- Creating authoritative content around your value proposition and leveraging digital PR can give you a competitive advantage.
- Creating linkable assets and utilizing internal linking can boost the authority of your bottom-of-the-funnel content.
- Personalization and testing unconventional email approaches can lead to successful outreach.
- The size of the prospect list depends on the market and industry, ranging from 10 to 200 prospects.
- Testing conventional advice and personalizing pitches based on the target audience is important.
- The main tip is to create and promote content intelligently, without being afraid of being too salesy.
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Video
Transcript
Alan: Hello. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the show. We have Tom today. Hi Tom. How are you? Doing
Tom: Doing very well, Alan. Good to be here.
Alan: We’ve been in touch for the last couple months trying to work together and do something together, but for some reason it’s been super difficult. So I’m really looking forward to eventually do something with you.
Tom: Life gets in the way, but we’ll make it happen. I’m
confident of it.
Alan: definitely. Definitely. yeah, let’s get started. do you wanna give us a quick overview of your background and how, like you came to be doing what you do with Grizzle?
Tom: Yeah. So how far back do you want me to go? How I got into marketing or just the company itself?
Alan: Yeah. I guess how you got into marketing and specifically focusing on SaaS maybe and digital PR content distribution.
Tom: Cool. That sounds good. So I fell, asked backwards into marketing like a lot of people tend to do. I was a bit of a programmer IT nerd back in the day, and then I discovered this thing called SEO while I was working for a nonprofit here in the uk. And I thought, oh, okay, so now I can actually do something with these technical jobs and slowly but surely just fell into the rabbit hole that is marketing.
Worked with a lot of different companies over the years. E-commerce. I even started like a quote unquote local marketing consultancy. I feel like that’s a R of passage for a lot of SEOs. and then I got my first job with a SaaS company and that’s where I really came into my stride. I felt like it was a little bit more me selling and reaching like B2B buyers and.
Over the years worked with a few B2B companies. Ended up working for a marketing agency, growing the agency where it was basically a C-suite marketing offering. The goal was to ca get a round table, a dinner of C-suite executives for our clients. their core ICP essentially. And because no one’s really searching for CSU marketing and it wasn’t really abm, I had to create content where our audience was.
And that was places like marketing profs, Econsultancy here in the UK as well. Smart Insights even started writing for people like. Content Marketing Institute, and I wondered if people, other people would want this, other marketers reaching other marketers. And so I whipped up a one page website in a weekend.
I still had grizzled IO as a failed experiment, tinkering with mobile games back in the day. reached out to a hundred people and got our first, my first four or five clients in a couple of months. So the rest is history. It started off with, guest bogging, digital pr, and now it’s, yeah, end to end content.
Alan: Awesome. Cool. And so you specialize in doing more of, like digital pr, content distribution, So why do you think content distribution is important and what does content promotion in general mean to you?
Tom: Distribution is important because without it, you’ve only got content. If we look at the content marketing spectrum, and yet there’s obviously ways that you can embed promotion and distribution into the process of content creation, but it’s still, I. Not enough. And I never found it to be enough.
And so when content distribution became a thing back in, I dunno, 20 14, 20 15 or something like that, it was like, ah, okay, cool. Now we have a practice we can put our hat on. And obviously a big part of that is getting it in front of other people’s audiences. And I think that’s essentially what digital PR is at its essence.
Obviously there’s a lot of technical elements like link building when it comes to search, but yeah, I think that’s one of the greatest. The greatest benefits of digital pr. And so when you ask what does content promotion mean to me, I think it means the difference between writing content and getting paid right
Alan: Okay.
Tom: the end of the day.
Alan: Yeah. That’s very good. Yeah. So there’s a lot of people that have like a negative connotation about the word promotion. Like it’s salesy, but I like, your view, like you really, it’s something that you need to do to be able to stand out specifically in competitive landscapes, which SaaS is really becoming one now.
yeah. What’s what’s your view on, like companies trying to be proactive, whether like just hoping that traffic will come.
Tom: So it depends on the companies, doesn’t it? Because someone with a huge DA could probably publish something and have a high chance of ranking, but if you’re in startup lands, you’ve gotta get that engine going. And when you say people find that a bit salesy, I think you either have to get over it or start a journal or a diary, right?
If you just wanna write into the point. Promotion doesn’t have to be a salesy thing. It is. If you’re creating something that is truly of value, getting it in front of many as peop as many people as possible, I. You’re doing them a disservice. I think especially if you’ve got like all these experiences, all of this knowledge locked up, all this subject matter expertise, you should be promoting it out there cuz you’re not adding your value to the world.
That’s one way of looking at, but also we have our targets. We want to build our businesses, right? And I think if you’re just starting out, or if you are a startup that’s just found product market fit, for example, you’ve gotta think of that promotion engine. You’ve gotta think about that distribution engine, right?
So yeah, I think that’s it in a nutshell.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. Makes total sense. And so what do you think is the right balance between content creation and content, distribution or content promotion? Does it difference, like between different stages of company needs?
Tom: that’s a really good question. I feel like that’s, a complex answer. So it reminds me of one thing that we are talking about a lot internally at Grizzle at the moment, right? The difference between publishing content and promoting it. Cuz oftentimes those two things come hand in hand. And so if you look at content repurposing, right?
You are taking a long form article. As one example, it could be a podcast and repackaging it into other formats, LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, short form video, and distributing it many times. The problem with that, I think, is that sometimes it uses these social platforms as an afterthought. So when you say, What’s the right balance?
Sometimes those two things are the same thing, right? Instead of using social as an afterthought, you need to think about what kind of content should you be creating for social versus what you should be creating for the blog. And sometimes those two things feed into each other, so I think it’s hard to strike a balance, right?
I think you have to constantly do both and experiment with new approaches to distribution. I don’t think there’s such a thing as, you should spend 20% of your time creating and 80% promoting.
I just don’t think it’s as simple as that.
I dunno if I put a spanner in the works on your question there.
Alan: no. That’s perfectly good. There’s a lot of people that try to come up with these formulas. but as we know, it depends with everything in marketing, it depends on the stage of the companies at, it depends on the competition. The stronger the competition, the more noise you have in the market, chances are you’ll probably have to do more, promotion, right?
but yeah, creation is also very important because if you’re mo. if you promote something that’s not good, it’s basically not gonna go anywhere, right?
Tom: Exactly. Exactly. And to be honest, you don’t know if it’s any good and till you’ve got it out there and you’ve got feedback, this is why I think Dave Gerhardt from Exit five, he may have popularized the idea of using social content as a smoke test. I think we call it like a litmus test. Put an idea out there.
If it gets engagement, then you’re probably onto something to expand on into a long form article. Obviously, again, doesn’t always count for, for search, because you can see what the demand is and as long as you have authority or if you’re building authority in that space, then you’re off to the races.
But yeah, I think the two things can feed into each other, if that makes sense. What do you think?
Alan: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. It’s something that I’m seeing a lot of the creators,the, like the creator economy. There’s a lot of people that. Now publish like Twitter threads, and then if they see that they get engagement with us, they turn them into either blog articles or even like short online courses.
so it’s definitely a good way, I think to test, test the content, test the market. so what would you say are your, favorite content distribution strategies that you’ve done for yourself or for your clients?
Tom: That’s a really good one. So back in the day, we used to have a very convoluted promotion strategy, so to speak, or a methodology. And there was a lot of like little bitty things, right? Ticking boxes here and there. Repurpose into this, repurpose into that, post it here. And we found that a lot of it was just busy work and you can get way more impact by pulling the right levers.
I think when it comes to search, I think you and I both agree digital PR is the way to go, right? Especially these days. If you can create something that people actually want to link to that is relevant to your offering or the authority that you have in a particular niche, short industry or topic, then I.
You can then use the power of internal linking to spread that far and wide internally, and so many people. I still get so many emails from outreach specialists. I’m doing the bunny ears with my fingers here, where it’s like we just created an article about topic ideation. We see that you link to this one as is better.
And I dunno if it still works. I don’t think it does because. We saw dwindling results a long time ago. I think it, I guess it depends on, the niche in the market, right? I think if you are upbringing, very competitive spaces, then it’s gonna be harder. But if you create something that’s a little bit different or actually adds to the narrative that.
Other journalists, editors, content marketers are writing. So data-driven content, for example. Using that as a way to not just generate buzz, but also natural backlinks is a great way to go for search. We’ve just talked about content repurposing. I think you can do that forever, as long as it’s relevant for that amount of time.
find new ways to repackage the same message into other formats. Maybe put a unique angle into it. There’s often, like an article that you wrote a year ago, there’s often gonna be overlap with something that happens in the zeitgeist now, right? AI content could be, one example and the importance of quality.
That’s a rabbit hole we can go down later. but then the third and most important one I think is we used to do a lot of community posting. We’re not community posting, community promotion, right? Try and get. ourselves embedded in a community to then eventually share our content, which does sound incredibly salesy and we realize that.
And so what we realized is we can take a similar approach to digital PR in that it’s all about relationship building. So now, and I think this works differently for an agency than an in-house marketer. So as an agency working with lots of clients, obviously we’re looking for ways to work smarter. Instead of embedding ourselves in these communities, we find who are the movers and shakers within these communities who actually have something interesting to say, and then we collaborate with them on the content creation process. And this does a couple of things, right? It makes the content more authoritative and more unique because you are getting another subject matter expert’s voice.
They have other. Perspectives and experiences to add to the article, but also they’re involved in the process and invested in it. So when it comes time to share then or published, they’re more likely to share it to that community or that their social offering. It takes a little bit of a deeper approach, but if you search your channels well then I think you’re off to the races and of course, Some channels perform better than others.
And so it’s an iterative approach. And over time you figure out, okay, these guys, they have great insights and they always help to amplify our content. Let’s get them involved in the process. So if you were to bucket the two, the three approaches I had mentioned, it’s digital PR content, day driven content, thought leadership content.
Technically not a thing depending on who you ask. Content repurposing and influencer engagement is what I would call that.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love the influencer engagement thing. so what, so how would you say that differs from the usual, like expert roundups kind of thing that’s been around for the last 10 years?
Tom: So I think, again, depending on the industry that you are in, I feel like a lot of influences may be immune to banner blindness. Now, I could be wrong. We haven’t done the, the influence round up in a while. They still might be quite effective, but I feel like if I was asked to contribute to an article that was around my. Expertise, something that I had a lot of experience in and they wanted either to jump on a call with me for 15 minutes and get my insights and then turn that into, snippets to use throughout the article. I would feel more invested in that than just, hey, we featured you in this article. And again, I think it depends on who you’re reaching out to at the end of the day.
I’m sure that, people like, Rand Fishkin and Peple, they might be, immune to that. They probably get a lot of emails like that, but I feel like, yeah. More in-depth approach is a little bit more authentic and a little bit more valuable to the person getting involved.
Alan: Yeah. So let’s dive deeper into this because it’s something that I’ve, like not heard a lot of people doing, so it’s very interesting. so what’s your process for finding these people? Cause like you said, people that are too famous, like they’re gonna be super, like overwhelmed and bombarded by like these kinds of requests.
People that are not. Very big in the space that not gonna do much for you, so I’m assuming like you need to find the middle ground. So how do you go about that?
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. I think it starts, if we are looking at the community element to it, it starts with finding what those communities are in the first place. Obviously, making sure that they’re engaged and obviously investigating them to an extent. So whenever we are doing our research on a new topic, industry or client, we will find various different publications and channels and of course communities and then actually dig into those communities.
Part of it is obviously finding what are the most popular topics of conversation within them. what’s resonating, what patterns are coming up. But there’s always gonna be names that continuously pop up, right? And they might not be, quote unquote influencers in their own right, but they are embedded and engaged in a particular community.
So if we feel that community is worth embedding ourselves into, then. We will prioritize that community and a handful of individuals, the movers and shakers within those communities, and then actually finding quote unquote influencers.
One of my favorite tools to do this beyond Googling is Spark Toro. So speaking of Ran Fishkin, again, audience intelligence tool, it’s, it can be as simple as punching in a keyword, whether that’s a topic, the industry that you’re operating in or something else, and then finding, The movers and shakers within that.
And then you can fill, filter that down by hidden gems, for example. And I think that’s just one way of finding people who get a lot of engagement but don’t have a huge following. So we try and diversify who we reach out to based on that. Because yeah, I feel like you should still go for the people who might get a load of emails in their inbox.
You just have to reach out to ’em a little bit differently and play at the long game versus people who might have a smaller following, but a very engaged one. I think they are probably more prime to investing a little bit more into the content you’re creating. It also, unfortunately, depends on the brand that you are representing or working for, right?
If you reach out from a Sam Rush or a pipe drive, for example, people. Within those industries, know those names and so you’re riding on the wave of their popularity. Whereas as a startup you’ve gotta do a little bit more heavy lifting, I think, in terms of what the incentive is, which again, where digital PR can come in.
Because if you are repurposing an article for a guest post that you know, lands in, I dunno, Shopify a Shopify HubSpot, and you mentioned that, then they’re gonna see that as an opportunity for them as well. So there’s a few
things that play there. Win down a couple of rabbit holes.
Alan: That’s okay. It’s great. So yeah, basically try to get them a win-win kind of engagement,
Tom: exactly. Make sure win, win as well. If you’re working with
other publishers,
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. And so do you reach out on behalf of your clients? do you work and pitch like these people as if you’re someone that works in the client’s company?
Tom: you know what we did. Do that once upon a time, but now we find it’s way more efficient to just do it as ourselves because. We are building relationships, first of all. So that kind of gives us a level of access that we can then, leverage later on. As long as we are respecting what an editor or a journalist or another content creator or marketer is looking for, we’re not taking advantage.
That’s the important thing. But yeah, usually just doing it as ourselves works just as well. And again, it’s because you can, leverage the brand name that you’re working with. if you have that behind you or present. Access. I think access comes down to it a lot, right? if you’re reaching out to an influencing and you say, okay, I’m writing an article for the startup, we’re also gonna be, repurposing it, for lack of a better word, into, the HubSpot Blog or Content Marketing Institute.
Would you like to get involved? It doesn’t matter if it’s from grizzled io, I think as long as you
are communicating the
value.
Alan: behind your back, essentially. Yeah.
Tom: yes. Yeah. Riding on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.
Alan: Okay. So let’s talk now more about digital pr. so how would you leverage, digital PR for a company to reach, maybe a new audience that they like didn’t have before? And what are some best practices to create, digital PR content for this?
Tom: Okay. Two really good questions. reaching a market or an industry they haven’t reached to before, right? Or an audience? Is that what you meant by the first one? Okay, cool. You’ve gotta target the right publications. First of all, I think you probably already know what those are to an extent.
There’s probably others that you’ve not thought of. And it comes down to good old fashioned research, right? You can use tools like I just mentioned, like Spar, tar Buzz, sumos, and other really good one. SIM Rush and hfs, content explorer tools, things like that, just to like. Pull and collect the data, but you gotta go in and figure out what are these people publishing as well.
for example, if you are reaching the e-commerce audience, yes, Shopify might seem like an obvious way to go, but if you dig deeper into the weeds, then you might want to go for a smaller publication with a more concentrated amount of your specific icp. can be tricky to find what those are beyond.
Just reading the articles and seeing what they’re writing about, and also reverse engineering by using tools like I just mentioned, BuzzSumo, to figure out what are their most popular topics. Those are usually really good indicators of which publications to prioritize. And then, sorry Alan, what was your second question on that thread?
Alan: Second question was, yeah, what are some best practices to create the digital PR content for this?
Tom: Gotcha. So again, I think it’s gonna come down to what your biggest priorities are. So when I think about, researching publications, I’m actually talking about the, through the lens of guest blocking. I always feel like I would much rather go for a handful of publications with a high quote, unquote high DA, or, a lot of relevant, a relevant readership.
So to speak, then yeah, try the spray and pray approach saying that volume still matters. And so then it comes down to a good old fashioned digital PR approach, creating something that people are actually gonna want to link to. And even going, back to the old school PR roots of building a media list, reaching out to those individuals in a personalized manner with the content that you have and shopping it to them. So when it comes to actually creating the content yourself, I think it comes down to what the audience is hungry for. And also riding on trends. So you can play the kind of tried and tested in the BTB world and the SaaS world, especially industry reports work really well, right? So like these long in-depth reports where you are serving people, serving your ICP preferably, and.
Collecting trends from those similarly benchmark reports. So a lot of SaaS companies have a lot of owned data, that they can then transform into, benchmarks or trends within certain segments of their audience to create, these kind of smaller. Articles and reports as well that kind of collects that data, puts it into infographic form, and then maybe even overlap that with publicly available data to come with some hypothesis.
Is hypothesis a new word out and, other angles that can then be taken to the press, so to speak. And I think that also works with, studies and reports and things like that. Surveying a specific group of people with five to 10 questions and writing a real in-depth article about that.
Producing a bunch of great assets, both visual written, adding some commentary, and then in a campaign format, almost reaching out to the right people, journalists and editors, et cetera, to get that content featured on other publications, getting them placed, getting those placements essentially. Then there’s a reactive approach.
Responding to industry champions quickly with a high quality piece of content that acts both as commentary but also actionable takeaways into what other people, other professionals, buyers, both, I, individual contributors as strategic senior decision makers can do to act upon that. so there’s a few things that we do on quite a regular basis there as well.
Alan: Awesome. And so let’s say that I’m a, like an early stage company, so my budget is limited, my time is limited. like I don’t have a huge team to do all of these different things. What would you say is the 80 20 that I should be focusing on to get started with digital pr?
Tom: Oh, that’s a good question. Okay. Can I throw the microphone back on you and ask you, in this role play, what are your biggest goals right now? What are you trying to achieve by doing this?
Alan: so biggest goal is, let’s say I just found like product market fit. And so I’m looking to expand and reach out to,what I know is my target audience, target customer,
Tom: Okay, so let’s say budgets are limited. I would look for a unique angle that you have expertise in or data that you own and can ride a trend with, if that makes sense. Let me think of an example. So you might be in the HR tech space. Right talent acquisition platform, and there’s a lot of layoffs going on right now.
Is there anything within your own data that can offer, for lack of a better word, a glimmer of hope in, when things are moving in the right direction? more people are starting to post jobs now despite the amount of layoffs that were happening a month ago, that kind of thing. And then take a tailored outreach approach.
I think building relationships over time, if you’ve not done that already, then starting now is the best way to go. But creating that, get it in front of your own audience, first and foremost, repurpose it into other assets. And then yeah, maybe, hand build. A list of 20, 30, maybe even 50 people, if you have the resources to get that in front of, create a pitch, say, Hey, this is happening in the space right now, but this is what we found from our own data.
Because you have that data no one else has. And if you don’t have anything like that, then you probably have expertise or maybe even access to publicly owned data that you can leverage. And that could be as simple as something like, In the marketing space using data from Sam Rush or HFS to, build trends around a certain topic or market.
or if you are in the small business entrepreneurship space, is there consensus data around what kind of business being started? What are the most popular. Business categories, for lack of a better word, by state, that kind of thing, really getting into the weeds here. But like those things are publicly available and only requires a little bit of data wrangling if you know how to do it right.
Alan: Yeah, makes sense. and so things like harrow,like you said before, to journalists, like queries, do those still work?
Tom: they might, for some people we’ve found it was quite, Ineffective a while, quite a while back. I do know some people make it work, but we’ve again just found that the opportunities that are a few and far between, sometimes you have to shoehorn something in if you know you really want to get featured in something.
So we find taking a more proactive approach has always worked a little bit better in our experience. Have you found it works?
Alan: for me a couple years ago. Yeah, not lately. And also I noticed that like I started getting a paid request on Harrow as well, which sucks.
Tom: What do you mean
by that? So like
people
were asking for money to have placements,
Alan: yeah. Basically I would reply to a journalist query and the guy would,email me back saying,your reply looks great. if you wanna publish it, it’s $50.
that goes against many, many a guideline.
Yeah. Yeah. So I’m assuming those are like, like some kind of rogue journalists that are trying to make a couple of extra bucks here and there, which is not great. so,
Tom: happen though. It, I
think it’s, I think it still does.
Alan: so in terms of, Content that can actually bring in some signups or some revenue for the client. Is this something that digital PR can help with as well?
Tom: Yeah, I think increasing. Increasing the domain and page authority around topics that are closely related to your value proposition, right? And so again, if we’re going down into startup land, let’s start there. You’ve got product market fit. You know exactly what problems that your products and their features solve, and the jobs to be done that they fulfill.
Build content out around those at every stage of the funnel. At least prioritize bottom and middle of funnel, right? And a lot of people talk about. Alternative pages, comparison pages, stuff like that. but also, talking to the jobs to be done around it as well. How to do X and use a kind of like a product led content methodology to build out a topic cluster around your value proposition and the problems that you know, that your ICP is looking to solve.
I think that’s a great way to start. But the problem with that is they are often very competitive. Those topics are hugely competitive depending on how nascent or how mature your marketing industry is. And this is where I think digital PR can really give you a competitive advantage because we, I think despite what the arguments on social say, links definitely still matter.
If they don’t, they definitely make a correlated impact. And if you could create something. That fits into that topic cluster naturally, that also attracts links. You can then use the power of internal linking to, help elevate everything at the same time signal to Google that, okay, these guys know their shit when it comes to this topic because these very reputable sources are linking to them.
So
I think it just like it, you create this ecosystem around your value proposition and the topics that are most relevant to that, if that makes sense.
Alan: yeah. Total sense. So you essentially create this, linkable asset, digital PR content. And then, you use internal linking to link out to your money pages. Essentially, the pages that are potential to bring in customer signups that they can rank for the target keywords, right?
Tom: exactly that. Call ’em money pages, bottom of funnel content, whatever you wanna call it. Yeah. the things that indicate. Some kind of commercial intent, or at the very least, people looking for, okay, I’m trying to solve this thing. Ah, this product does this. Let me sign up for a free trial and play around with it, at the very least, right?
Alan: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely love this approach, especially because, so you mentioned the bottom of the funnel pages are more competitive, and another problem that I see with these pages is that they’re very difficult to build back links to by using the traditional guest posting or link placements, kind of technique because people don’t wanna link to like commercially driven pages.
So yeah, I definitely think we’re moving more and more into a holistic,link building landscape where you should. Creating, valuable content to acquire links to that content and then use internal link into, naturally create this network of, yeah. Interlinked content on your, like topic essentially.
Tom: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And then of course, if you follow some of the approaches we’ve just talked about, that makes your quote unquote money or bottom of funnel content, way more authoritative, cuz you’re using data to back up certain points as well,
which makes those internal links even more natural.
Alan: And so we talked a, we talked about a couple, different tools. what would you say is like your essential toolkit that you use for digital pr content distribution, content repurposing what you do?
Tom: Okay. So when it comes to the digital PR side of things to actually produce the content, again, it comes down to ideation. I feel like there’s a lot of Google through that goes into it, figuring out. What content is gonna resonate, how to ride certain trends, and to be honest, I think just operating in any space is gonna help that.
So oftentimes, at least for me in the B2B space, LinkedIn is probably my biggest tool when it comes to figuring out, okay, what is going on in the market right now? We’ve talked about Spark to, we’ve talked about Buzz BuzzSumo, of course some Russian ATFs are classics as well. I think that looking for other. Other pieces of content that are generating a disproportionate number of links over a short amount of time can give you an indicator as to into what else you could possibly be creating as long as you are not directly competing with it. Someone like Buffer, creating a state of social report.
We’ve done, we did a study on this recently and found that in, I think in their first 100 days they got 200 and something links buffer. But you can emulate what they’ve done through that content format, for example. So borrowing ideas from other places. And then in terms of reaching out, it’s a mixture of good old fashioned prospecting or having those relationships in the first place, which requires some prospecting of course, but assuming that you have those, those relationships built, managing outreach through.
Buzz Stream is pretty handy to, for managing campaigns, outreach and responses as well from people who haven’t necessarily, responded. So managing contacts, sometimes you can use that to test a different angle within the same piece of content too. So being able to easily, segment people who haven’t even opened it, maybe cuz the subject line’s just not relevant to them.
That’s a really good way of, segmenting it out and have another at bat. Those are the things that kind of initially come to mind sometimes. Yeah. it’s good old fashioned, dig into the weeds. Of course, there’s, various tools when it comes to creating content. Canva, Figma for visual content and stuff like that.
But those are the ones that are top of mind.
Alan: so in terms of quantity, like how big would you say is your average, prospect list?
Tom: Okay. So that, again, it depends on the size of the market or the industry that you’re operating in. So it can range anywhere from,
if we’re talking guest blogging, sometimes 10 to 20 because the response rates can be pretty high from those, But if it’s a digital PR campaign, it can range anywhere from 50 to one to 200.
Again, we try to go for a more targeted, personalized approach and then try new angles and approaches within that. But yeah, we stick with that. We don’t wanna burn relationships before they’ve started as well, And I think it helps to take a more personalized approach. But I think if you’re listening to this and you’re gonna start testing outreach and reaching the same, reaching out to 200 people with the same message. You risk burning those relationships before they’ve begun. So yeah, we try and start small test things out and then scale up once we’ve got a good read on the market.
Alan: Okay. Any other tips for, email copywriting or like templates?
Tom: Yeah. So I’m gonna go back to a story here. I started drizzle on the back of, A list of a hundred people that I scraped together myself. Went through Angel List back in the day, looked for all the MarTech companies, looked at the, for the marketing directors on LinkedIn, and then I sent out, I broke every rule in the book and I sent the longest email I’ve ever sent in my life, and it’s still one of my best performing quote unquote campaigns to this day.
So I would, one thing I come back to when I ask this question over and over again is to test conventional advice. If people say shorter emails, work best, try really long emails. Again, it depends on the audience, and I think especially when reaching out to journalists, you need to give them everything they need to be able to pick out a story.
But I would test new approaches against conventional advice when it comes to digital pr again, personalization. I think it’s quite important, and sometimes that personalization is just a matter of here’s an angle within this particular story, and I’ve chosen this angle because you cover these things and that’s it.
and that’s a very journalistic approach. If you’re reaching out to other content marketers, you’ve gotta take a really personalized approach, right? Because they’re probably, they’re not as, I find they’re not as open to certain types of pitches, right? Their goal is to Create value for the audience and obviously hit KPIs and if you come in and say, Hey, you got a broken link, then they might not be that interested.
So yeah, it depends on the type of people you’re reaching out to as well.
Alan: so we’re heading towards the end here. so one of the questions I’d like to end the, the interview with is particular, so I really hope you prepared for this a little bit. So if you could have, like any, yeah. Any movie character from the eighties or the nineties, to promote your content, who would they be and why?
Tom: I did come up with one, one of these. Alan, I’m gonna go with Crocodile Dundee
because
Alan: Oh yes. I love it.
Tom: in, in the face of all adversity, he keeps a level head and I dunno, I feel like. If the whole marketing thing never works out for some reason, that’s the type of person I probably want to be like
He’s the first one that comes to mind.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. I remember watching the movie a ton of times when I was little, so yeah. Definitely a favorite.
Tom: Yeah, it might also have something to do with the fact I’ve just come from, come back from Australia actually.
So
also quite
Alan: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Okay, cool. So any last, final, like tips for the audience that you wanna leave them with and where can we find you and get in touch with you?
Tom: Yeah, create content and make sure you promote it intelligently. I think don’t be afraid if, if people think it’s too salesy. You’ve got a lot of value and expertise to share with the world. So share it and you can find me on LinkedIn. Search for Tom Watley. I’m the founder of grizzle.
grizzle.io is my, our website. And you can yeah, learn a bit more about us there.
Alan: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you a lot, Tom. It’s been great to have you and yeah, we’ll talk soon.
Tom: Cheers, Allen. It’s been a pleasure.