Main Takeaways
- Content promotion is about connecting content to the audience and providing helpful information. More effort should be put into content creation as standing out from the crowd is challenging.
- Data-driven content requires a process of gathering client information, developing ideas, and seeking client feedback.
- Hiring a data journalist and a project manager is essential for creating a team for data-driven content. Finding top-notch talent requires evaluating skills beyond resumes, such as personal websites and GitHub profiles.
- Data-driven content tells a story itself and should connect to broader audience interests. Visual mediums, both static and interactive, play a significant role in communicating the story.
- Keeping visualizations simple and focused on the story’s value is often effective. The key to effective storytelling is starting with the simplest approach and building on top of it.
- Avoid replicating existing content and aim to add more value than competitors’ posts or research reports.
- Finding the target audience involves analyzing platforms like YouTube or TikTok, identifying journalists who have reported on relevant topics, and reaching out to them with information and data.
- The quantity of emails sent out and the results obtained depend on the niche, with segmentation between bloggers and journalists and a focus on building relationships with bloggers.
- Content outreach can benefit from sales outreach techniques, particularly in copywriting and subject line optimization. Learning sales skills, can benefit any business.
- AI will have a significant impact on content creation, raising the bar for quality and creating a demand for data-driven content. It will also facilitate faster data analysis and scripting.
- “AI prompter” is a new and emerging role in the content space. Using AI to boost the performance and quality of content, including outreach emails, is becoming common.
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Video
Transcript
Alan: Hello everyone. Hi Daniel. Welcome to the show. How are you
today?
Daniel: Yes. Hey, thank. Thank you for me. Yes, I’m great. What about you?
Alan: Awesome. I’m doing great and I’m looking forward to diving deeper into, data-driven content, with you today. So what does content promotion mean to you?
Daniel: so what it means to us is simply, connect our content to the audience so it can help them, do why, so we have something in our content that we develop, like an interesting fact or a researcher that can help them, conduct their work and yeah, and we simply try to connect them with, what we found in our research.
So create something helpful for a specific audience and then simply send it out to them. Exactly. Yeah. So it’s similar to what you have in sales. Are you not trying to sell people you try to help them with your solution?
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. Makes perfect sense. And so how do you see the balance between content promotion and content creation? Cause there’s a lot of people that spend too much time. Creating content and not enough time promoting it. But on the other hand, you also have other people that spend, not enough time creating content, and so they just end up promoting content that’s very like poor quality essentially.
Daniel: Yeah. So of course, it might sound obvious, but the one cannot live without the other, So if you,if we develop, let’s say in our case that we, produce a research report and it just sits there on the website, yeah, that might get some use from the organic traffic, if we, if you’re not gonna push this to journalists or to interested, bloggers, yeah, it’s not gonna be a good return for our clients.
So it’s a nec necess necessity to have both elements, present at, when creating content.
Alan: So let’s say that you had a limited budget and you’re doing cont creation and content promotion for yourself. would you have a specific division between the two? Like, like, I’m gonna spend 50% of my time and budget on the creation and the rest on promotion, or
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Daniel: Yeah. I would definitely put a bit more efforts into content creation. simply because it’s, nowadays it’s more difficult to stand out from the crowd. So nowadays, everyone can produce infographic or,put together a survey. so I, I would definitely put a bit more effort into, into the content cr content creation because most people are savvy when it comes to content outreach.
you can always, not half, but you can, you, you can get the gist pretty quickly on what to do, how to find journalists and so on.
Alan: Especially nowadays, I think with the rise of artificial intelligence, everybody can simply push a button or write a prompt and create, like written content, but also visual content, videos, whatever. So I definitely agree with this. There’s, scarcity in creativity, more than in being able to get the word out.
And so you’re the founder at Front Page Data. So your specialty is creating data driven content.
Could you tell us a bit more about your process for essentially taking data insights from the client or from wherever you take them and turning them into content marketing that has the ability to spread out into the world?
Daniel: Yeah, sure. so no,it’s not rocket science. So what we do at the beginning is we have the creative process where we, have the client fill out a, an onboarding questionnaire. about what they do, do they have any interesting, data themselves so that we could leverage. ha have they done this before?
What type of results they got from this? So yeah, the first step is,getting the view from, rec client. And then we, yeah, develop some ideas that we think would resonate with a target audience. So in our case, we primarily focus on B2B firms, So firms that are a bit larger.
So we have to, Yeah, we have to provide,ideas that are out of a box, so with the type of, data that they have. and then, yeah, once we, once we create a set of ideas, we get back to the client, for any feedback.
and then we, once we get the grid light, we, kick off the project.
And then, we produce the piece of content, do some data analysis depending on the data format. in the case if it’s, interactive dashboard needs a bit more planning. So we sketch, all dashboard, in Figma,
develop the backend. So possibly like a database that can fit the interactive piece.
and then once, once. the production process is done. We get another feed, round of feedback from the client, and then we start with the, content promotion.
So you also do, the promotion. Yeah, correct. we’d also, the promotion, we have been thinking of removing this, because, we cannot do everything. cuz if you want to excel in, in, creating research studies, which are not simple. You always need to offer, two or more people for that. but at the end it’s, we always came back to also offer this because it’s al always a question that comes up when talking to clients.
They always say, yeah, do you do also outreach? And yeah, it’s also something we do. and yeah, adding to this, typically you can create, processes around, Content outreach, which you can easily head off to, to a person and the person can execute it.
Alan: Yeah. So I’d be curious to know, do you sometimes get clients that don’t have a lot of data and so they tell you, could you please find data somewhere else, like from some database for us?
Daniel: Yes. This assessment also the case of course. and the ideation gets a bit more complicated. Because if you have some, propriety proprietary data, you always have advantage compared to others, So you, you have some nice piece of information that you can promote to, to journalists.
It’s just a question of how you package it, like in a research report or in another forec. So when they do not have,some internal data, we look for, Look for external third party data. So it could be APIs, but it could be,government data that is hidden somewhere, that is relevant to the, to the business. yeah, so we need to do a bit of more research,when it comes to the fact that they don’t have any interesting data in-house.
Alan: , so you run this product ties digital PR content creation agency. what would you say are the challenging aspects of, creating a product ties service like this?
Daniel: Yes. So one, one thing to add, I would say that we are like a service. I wish we would be there. But unfortunately,it’s not the case. simply because,just to give you an example, so on some projects we’re around like three to four people. So we have a project manager, we have a data person, and then we have maybe a data visualization expert, and then we have a content, content outreach person,
So you, you can see that’s very difficult to prioritize, to prioritize a campaign, As compared to, let’s say, SEO services where you have a defined process of how you do the things like, I’m gonna optimize the title tax,I’m gonna publish this piece of content, do my content promotion.
So you have you can see the end state, Compared to other, to, to our,to our business where I would see ourselves more like as a consultancy because. Every project looks different. and it makes it difficult to productize. I’ve tried that where I cut out,where I cut out a lot of services and tried just to offer like data visualization,
But there’s, there was a sort of a market for that. but the main challenge we face is yeah, to operationalize,what we do. cuz it’s very difficult to find one person that can do everything like an a player that, knows how to come up with ideas, knows how to code, knows how to write a nice piece of information, and then also to do like outreach.
so I assume like a lot of digital PR services that came up, lately, or Two years ago, did face the problem, of, creating a, piece of content that, that is not, like an infographic or it’s not a survey, Because it’s a survey, you can figure it out,
You, there’s like data visualization tools that you can just plug in your data and it shows to a nice graph. yeah, but the main challenge is actually, is, funny, it’s not sales,
but more how do I package my service and make it so I can step out, which is which I’m still figuring out and has been definitely a challenge.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely a challenge in most, productized service agencies. Like we, for example as well. There’s always going to be some. Some aspect is going to be more manual than other things. There’s always clients that have different types of content, they have different goals, different types of conversion or KPIs that we need to measure. And so yeah, it’s part of the game,
Daniel: Exactly. Yeah. And I think it’s, it is a sort of like pipe dream to auto automate. Like everything, there always needs to, need to, needs to be like some, some high level touch from you, or from
a project manager.
Alan: Oh yeah,
Definitely both. In the strategy, but also in, for example, email templates.
So why do you think specializing is essential to creating a top notch, digital PR service. How do you go about, being able to deliver specialized knowledge that’s relevant to, a client, for example?
Daniel: Yeah, you definitely, it comes out like to people, and smart people are expensive, So you need to hire like people that, that know what they do in coming up with ideas and also executing on those ideas. when I. Hire someone. I look for experience in that era. So typically it’s like data journalists,
That know how to get around data and also write about data. And when I work with data scientists, they, they should definitely have programing experience and in r which is like a programming language we use mainly, And yeah. And then from there it’s it’s amazing how much problems you can solve with,with top topnotch people on your campaign.
Alan: Let’s say that I’m a client, and I wanna start taking this internally, what are the two, three main roles that I would need to hire to create a team that can perform and do this kind of work?
Daniel: Yes. I would say you would need, as I alluded to, you would need, you, you would need a data journalist, I think would be a good fit. because based on my experience, if you just say a higher, like a data analyst, data scientist, they don’t have the perspective
on content. yeah, I would, yeah, I would hire a data journalist.
you can also hire like a journalist and I can teach themselves the basics of data and then I would potentially contract, a data analyst or a data scientist, So you would have the data journals SMA person and then have them manage the project. He would need to manage freelancers and contractors in order to pull, to pull off like research studies and the sort of, data content.
Alan: Yeah. So do you have any secret places where you find these people or can people find them on app work?
Daniel: yeah. So I’m quite active in, in data communities. so I found most people there, top notch people there. Upwork, of course, is like an obvious place, but you need to know how to evaluate them, because, they can, no, they might have an awesome resume, but,if you look at the code, it might not be that good or the type of analysis they did wasn’t that good.
So I, I like to check always. Like their own personal websites or the GitHub to see, the coding skills. so I had once, like two few years ago, I was hiring for, for data journalist, data analyst position. I was like 180, applying 180 people applying for that and even like professors and stuff like that.
And I compared like the type, type of output we were able to generate in like in half an hour. And yeah, you always get surprised on the type of people that. Now cab deliverer, for example, the,the academic, wasn’t that great. compared like to people that are like, in the trenches and doing like data analysis like every day.
Alan: And so we talked about creating data-driven content, but I’m assuming that to be able to properly communicate your client’s story, to be able to, get brand awareness, sell products, eventually, How do you incorporate storytelling into your content marketing? That’s data driven.
Daniel: Yes. So the beauty of data is that it tells a story itself, So if you already have some interesting insights, Let’s say from an internal database. What we try to do is if our goal is to promote it to journalists, we try to not to be too specific with the data and the story, because then it doesn’t get a lot of interest from journalists.
So we need to connect it to maybe like a social event or something. something,that is also of interest to like a border audience. and then yeah, then we have the. the research question we, we try to answer with the type of data and then we just, create a sort of like structure based, based on the data and also the na narrative develops
also
itself.
Alan: So both the storytelling, but also the visual medium, I’m assuming it’s very important, to
communicate this story.
Daniel: Yeah, for sure. so most of our, let’s say static data visualizations, let’s say like a bar chart or a bit more complex, data visualizations, they are typically topnotch, So we have a specialized person that does the data visualizations. when it comes to interactives, we would like to have a student loan standalone website.
Where we, feature, the dashboard, because then, you probably see those where it’s like,you scroll down, you have some interactives coming up. this is typically very complicated to pull off. When we try to avoid any,adding complexities to a story, because then it’s pr prolong, prolongs the content creation.
So typically we have like research studies that were static, data visualizations, Or an interactive, visualization where. a Java script, developer put his hands on and developed the whole, the whole, dashboard.
Alan: Is there any one visualization style or something like that, that you see is working particularly well recently?
Daniel: I would always try to keep it like simple and stupid. you don’t need always to have like interactive data visualization. Sometimes it’s, if the story’s good and the data’s insightful, you can get away with static visualizations and a simple research report,
and this is also our default, so we try not to do like interactives if it’s really necessary and if we
think it adds value.
Alan: so essentially, you ask yourself like, what’s the simplest thing that we can do for this story to
make it effective? And then you build on top
of that.
Daniel: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So I would say there’s something that stands out.
Alan: yeah.
I’m guessing it also depends a little bit on the client’s niche, the industry and what you see that’s already out there. Cause you don’t wanna replicate stuff that’s assisting already,
Daniel: For sure. Yeah. yeah. There’s also one point we try, we, before we do the,before we pull off the ideas, we try to see if something similar has been done before. and add a bit more value than, than let’s say our competitors, competitors post or research report.
Alan: So I’m curious while we’re talking about this, like this reminds me a little bit of the skyscraper technique, do you do something like this where you try to create something better than what’s already existing
Daniel: so we took inspiration from existing content, yes, but we never. As, as far as I can, as far as I know, we never actually reach out to this, to the, to, to the same people that link to that piece of content.
I don’t, I haven’t actually seen a need for that.
only if we see, our campaign does not get a lot of traction.
We, Check, other competitors and see what sides have linked to them. But it’s not something that, that is, our top priority.
Alan: Yeah, you don’t start from that. it’s basically a low hanging fruit that you can
maybe use.
Daniel: It’s something we could leverage.
Alan: And so we talked about data creation, visualization. So how do you go about finding the target audience that has the potential to eventually buy from the client that’s related to the client’s
niche?
Daniel: Yes. So recently we, moved to, so this allows us to speed up the, prospecting process. So let’s say we do like a piece on YouTube or TikTok, Then it’s simply a matter of finding journalists and that’s space that I’ve previously reported on that and then reach out, to them with our information and with our data.
what we also do is we export, the leads from, from, from, and import them to. a tool called Smart Lead. there’s like others called instantly. it’s mainly, the purpose is mainly, sales, But the beauty of, sales outreach choose is that you can add to a particular campaign, several inboxes,
So it ensures that the emails we’re setting out got actually delivered. And, and there’s also other optimization. you can, you can pull off when doing outreach, like only sending emails without html, Because a lot of emails gets blocked so they, land in,
in the junk folder. So yeah, I, I think that’s a lot to learn for the content, outreach space,when it comes, yeah, when it comes to sales, where you can borrow a lot of approaches from sales people.
Alan: And so you mentioned, reaching out to journalists. How do you connect those? The client’s niche, the client’s space to relevant publications
Daniel: yeah, as I said before, we would like to have the content pieces, not too specific because most of our clients are very industry specific and work and boring niches, So we need to make it our thinking process is, we need to make it a appeal journalist, and then, Yeah.
it’s pretty simple. We look for journalists that have written, previously written about the topic, And also try to personalize that as, as much as possible. So with,it’s more or less straightforward with, AI tools where you can,extract what they’ve written about and then tell.
AI to, to create like a short first, line to create a connection and then make, you’ve done this, but we have something to add, that might be useful to your readers. would you know, is that something. you would be willing to work with us? yeah. it’s not, we don’t apply any complex,techniques.
It’s simply they’ve written about this in the past,they might also like what we have to say.
Alan: And tools like macro, I know they’re quite expensive, so is there any simpler way or other tools that are cheaper that you could recommend for people that are just starting out that can use.
Daniel: Yeah. Yes, you could hack it. I think pretty soon will be more or less easy to do so because I’m not sure if, if you’ve seen, but chat everyt, they released, plugins. so you can basically scrape, you can tell the eye. Can you scrape me? 10 articles that are relevant to whatever topic, and please extract also the journalist’s name,
And then you have maybe a list of whatever, a hundred to a hundred, leads. And then it’s just a matter of, using another plugin to find the emails of,
Alan: uh, of those journalists. I’ve seen a couple of charge BD plugins, but I haven’t saw any of those scraping tools. Do you have a specific name?
Daniel: Yeah. So I haven’t actually, I do not have access to the plugins. so I’m not a beta user. But I’m pretty sure it’s coming soon. but there’s also automation tools where you can scrape, where you can scrape, Google search and then also tell, tell the software to extract like content.
And there you could, once you extract the content, then you can tell,to extract their names, maybe. You can extract journalist names, but this is a bit more hacky and,the set setup process probably takes a bit of time, but I think we’re not far away from, pls to make this much more easier.
Alan: Yeah,that’s really cool to hear for people that maybe don’t have the budget to invest in
those tools or like journalist databases, which are typically thousands
per year, If I’m not wrong.
Do you have a specific example of a campaign that did very well for a particular client that you can share?
Daniel: Yeah, sure. I think one campaign that, performed well was, for invideo.io. So it’s a, it’s a video, a creation platform where you can, simply create digitals for YouTube. And what we did was to, analyze whether. large companies are doing any marketing on TikTok, so it’s a sort of B2B marketing report for TikTok.
And this was quite successful and yeah, got a lot of, got a lot of links for our client. and the outreach process was, once, once you have some interesting data, it’s the content promotion is the easy part, Where.
Alan: care
of itself.
Daniel: Yeah, exactly. It takes care of itself where, whereas you have maybe other campaigns that, you think you have an interesting, report, but then it’s the initial like a hundred, 200 emails,the response rate was really bad.
So you, You need to like, maybe change your angle or reach out like in a, maybe two months time. but yeah, you can check it out. Just type in B2B marketing TikTok report it should show up.
Alan: Awesome. Yeah, we’ll put it in the share notes as well. but what would you say are the typical, quantity of emails that you send out and the typical results? typical returns could be links, mentions, whatever I.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s difficult to give an answer to that because obviously it depends on the niche, so if you write for instance, about TikTok, there’s much more people that have written about this in the past. the pool of journalists is much larger, but if you write about, B2B software,
so it narrows down to tech journalists maybe. but yeah, we try to find as, as much. as much leads as possible. And we also try to segment between bloggers and journalists because the incentives are different of course. blog bloggers when you reach out to bloggers, most of them of your messages will be,paid placements.
So we try to sort of frame the message as it would be also beneficial to them. So we ask ’em for a collaboration, maybe for a future project. So we build a relationship. instead of just, here you’ve got 200 bucks, just place it on our site. whereas so journalists, a sort of different incentive set.
Alan: Yeah. and the other thing that you mentioned that I like is that sales outreach and content outreach are very similar so what’s your view on this?
Daniel: Yes. Generally I think sales outreach should be ahead of computer outreach.
I think a lot of people that do. Promote the content can learn a lot from salespeople, especially when it comes to copywriting. you also need to be like short in your message, So not more than a hundred or, like two 1500 words.
so I try to borrow, when I do content promotion, I try to borrow a lot of from sales outreach, because yeah, as I said, that typically I feel ahead much more, much, much ahead of. Of, of, yeah, content distribution
people. And, yeah, also when it comes to, let’s say, simple thing like subject lights,
don’t try to make it too salesy, which a lot of, people are doing in the content promotional space. of course you need to serve.
Alan: See, I would say, that’s the opposite. Like I would say that salespeople would tend to make the subject lines more salesly,
Daniel: Yeah, it depends. we probably get a lot of, sales arguments from not saving salespeople,
Alan: Yeah,
Daniel: but if,if you like the top 10% of salespeople,don’t make. Don’t make, the email look like it’s a sales email. It’s I gotta help you to achieve your goals.
Alan:
copywriters,
Daniel: they’re good copywriters.
Whereas on content, out content promotion, I have sometimes the feeling that, this is my piece of content, just publish it.
Where’s the benefit for me if I do
Alan: Yeah, so that’s a very good point. Always thinking about what’s in it for them.
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, I mean you probably see that as well in your I email response rates. I would say a bit lower. then when I do like sales typically, but yeah, this is to be expected, especially if you do like guest posting, it depends, the type of emails you’re sending, I don’t know.
yeah.
Alan: Yeah. So when you’re doing content outreach is essentially like you’re selling the value of your content to the people that you’re reaching out to. So you really need to make it, frame it in a way that the content is actually valuable for them. Cause otherwise, yeah, it’s just like you promoting our, yourself.
Yes, exactly. Cool. And so we talked about chat g p T a little bit. Is this something that you guys are using already effectively? Is, what are the other trends that you see that might impact the content and the digital PR industry moving forward?
Daniel: Yeah, of course. I think, AI’s gonna play a big part in it, obviously.
it’s gonna be much more, the bar of creating content will be much higher, so that’s good. That’s a good thing for me. so that’s gonna be more demand for data content. cuz people know, everyone nowadays can create a listical or, infographic or like a simple survey.
so the bar of creating content will be much higher. but I think also AI will give people a chance to do also some scripting. of course you need to have some basic knowledge of, yeah. Of statistical programmer language, but,
it’s good. It’s gonna help people, doing data analysis much more fast, much faster,
think, which is a good thing.
Alan: So do you see a new maybe kind of role be, like an AI prompter?
Daniel: yeah, I think it’s even,
Alan: be really a thing.
Daniel: yeah, it’s a reality. I think,
Alan: just wondering. whether we’re gonna see this more in the content space as well. So this is going to be someone that is a content marketer specialized in using artificial intelligence to boost, the performance or the quality of the content, or maybe even for the outreach emails that they
write.
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. I think for sure. But, when it comes to, I can just speak for myself and the type of work we do. So for data,someone needs to double check the data, someone needs to do the analysis, So you can have like data points already and then just tell, chat with you.
Can you create, a nice re research report out of this? so you could maybe, even if you are like, thinking of scaling or using data content to,to promote your brand, you could think of, I just need one person maybe that can crunch the data and have, AI to completely survey,complete the content.
Alan: So one way that I was thinking about this is you could feed the data to, to charge G P T and essentially ask it to come up with a few different angles for a nice story with that data set. So is this something that you guys are thinking of doing, or are you
already doing?
Daniel: no, it’s not something we, we have done. but it’s an interesting point. I’m sure that. Some of my, people that, that do data analysis are using AI to, to create, code much faster and maybe also to do some data crunching,
to speed, speed up the process. But there needs to be like someone to,to extract the data points and verify her fingers correct.
Alan: Yeah, to double
check.
Cause that’s a
lot of bullshit on judge pity as well.
Okay. All Daniel, we’re got to the end of the show. if you could have any character from an eighties or like nineties, I will allow you.
The nineties as well, movies to promote your content. who would it be and why would that be?
Daniel: SoI’m a huge fan of action movies in the eighties.
Rambo or American Fighter, Chuck Nos, of course.
Uh, Chuck Nos is like an obvi ob Yeah. it’s like the obvious, would be my obvious choice. So yeah,
I would go, with him.
Alan: Awesome. Awesome. I love that. I love that. So is there any final thoughts that you would like to leave our listeners with any last tips?
Daniel: Yeah. So I, I think if you can learn from salespeople, I think you get ahead.
to, I would say 90% of the people, if you learn a bit of copywriting, learn a bit of like how to do like sales outreach,it can always help your business in any way. I would say like sales is some universal skill.
everyone, does sales, like every day you sell yourself to your partner or,try to sell your content. So I would encourage people just to. learn a bit more about sales. and yeah, just try to maybe incorporate some of their stuff into your work.
Alan: Yeah. Cool. Definitely agree. And so where can people find you, Daniel? What’s the best place to like maybe get in touch with you as well?
Daniel: Yeah, so check out my website from page data.com. just, sign up, for,for the leak magnet we have there. And then just let us know, in the message. and then, yeah, happy to reach out and to have a chat. also, I recently launched a new service called Elite Testimonial. So if you want,video testimonials that create more sales, also check out elite testimonial.com. yeah.
Alan: Awesome. That’s really cool. And yeah, it was really great to have you, Daniel. It’s been great to reconnect as well after a
Daniel: Yeah.
Alan: And yeah,
thanks a lot.
Daniel: Yeah. Thank you. Have a great day.