Ep 144 - Digital PR in the Age of AI: How Mentions Drive Visibility with Natalie Severt

It is a frequency game. From an SEO perspective, creating your own content, you want to be publishing, like every platform is different, but like on your own website, you want to be publishing a good piece of content at least once a week, at least, if not every day, if you don't have the resources to do it every day, at least once a week. And that's where your traffic will stabilize or go up and your visibility will stabilize and go up. When it comes to social media, it needs to be more frequently, like every day probably, but different kinds of content.

When it comes to PR, you want to be kind of pursuing it all the time because you're not going to get every win. So you kind of constantly need to be pitching journalists all the time so that you get these wins periodically. So, and I'm not telling people to spray and pray. You need to kind of do very targeted campaigns.

Welcome to the SEO Leverage Podcast, where we talk about search, marketing and conversions. Welcome back to SEO Leverage. My name is Gerd Mellack. I'm the host here.

And today we are going to talk a lot about digital PR. We are going to touch upon what earned media is and why you probably should have it. And we are also going to look a little bit at the practical side. How can we incentivize the media to talk about our brand?

How can we get the word out? How can we get more mentions? And for this, I'm happy to welcome Natalie Sievert here, Marketing Manager at IntelligentRelations.com.

Welcome, Natalie. Thank you. It's good to have you on the show because we definitely, digital PR is definitely obviously a topic that comes up a lot with clients here in the team. We've done a little bit on it ourselves, so definitely not specializing on digital PR.

But it's definitely something where we see, especially with AI mentions right now, we just see that a lot of it can be impacted by the amount of times a brand is mentioned, the context is mentioned in. What's your experience with that? Okay, so working as a search engine optimization person and a marketing person inside of a PR company, basically what I've learned is that, you know, when you're earning media and earned media is anything that is like not on your website, outside of your website's ecosystem of owned content.

And generally you want to earn this media from relevant news sources, either it be industry, niche industry publications or like high tier publications like Forbes or The New York Times or whatever. And most small companies or like unknown startups or whatever, it's going to be difficult for them to earn that kind of media, but you can build up to it. And essentially the idea is that you want to appear in these outside sources and be mentioned as many times as possible across the Internet, because with the AI in place, they're eating the whole Internet is what they're doing.

And the more that you show up in these types of sources that they're eating, the more likely you are to actually show up and answer to a question someone might ask in AI. So that's kind of the idea. And it's a little bit different than old school SEO backlink building because it's not so much anymore about getting the link. It's just about being there.

So that's the main difference. So it's more about I need to say something valuable to these outlets and give them valuable content so that they'll put me in a publication. And that will position me as an expert, make me visible and get me in different pieces of content that could potentially show up in an AI result. So definitely something, like you said, not easy for somebody to do right off the bat when they're starting their business.

Getting into digital PR is probably not the first thing on their mind. Of course not. No. When you're thinking about a small Shopify brand or a small brand starting out, is there anything they could already do in order to kind of push this brand media theme a little bit along?

Yeah. So one of the first things, if you're doing this in backlink building or if you're just wanting to earn some media, you can start with smaller niche publications. like reach out to a small blog or a small newspaper or small something inside of your industry and say, hey, I've got this idea about this or I can talk about that. And then you build up, you slowly build up to the bigger ones.

So you go for go for smaller publications that don't have as much traffic, don't have as many viewers, you know, just niche things. And then you can build up to like bigger publications later. and then you practice. One thing that we have found that makes it a lot easier is when people go local or regional because there might be local news outlets they're happy to report on a business from their area or you might get into a list of different businesses on a local outlet where I just mentioned just one of them so you slowly get a little bit of a connection to other peers in your industry and then can use this, like you say, as a leverage point in order to work your way up to larger public colleagues.

Yeah, especially if you are an e-commerce brand that has like a local footprint. Local SEO is still very relevant. Getting listed as a local business on different sort of like indexes or whatever, but also, yeah, talking to your local newspaper, talking to your local radio station, this is all still very relevant. And then you can go regional and then you can go bigger.

And it's like being a writer. You need to have a portfolio. look, I was published over here talking about this and I'd like to do something similar for you. So that is a very good way to start.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Also, I think one thing we also saw was relationship buildings and knowing a few other people that already write for this outlet or have featured in this outlet, somebody might be making an introduction. So very often we see clients, even at the contacts, that just didn't think of actually leveraging them or asking them for an introduction or so.

To get into this outlet, it very often seems to be helping as well. So when you look at it from a perspective, from how does actually a publication in a news outlet work? So I'm a big fan of reverse engineering. So my business mentor always said, like, set the destination and then lay down the train tracks back to where you are right now.

If you think about the news article somebody has in mind, they want to be featured with their product, with their brand in this news outlet. What happens? Because a lot of people, I think, don't know the process. What happens actually before that, before this published article actually gets out there?

How's the process worked out? Mechanic work. So at Intelligent Relations, what we do is you have an idea. You start with an idea.

And then what you want to do is you want to go and look for either somebody who's already written something similar, somebody who covers that beat like a specific journalist a specific publication so you we use our own tool to do that we're able to identify okay this we want to have this particular topic we put it in our tool and we get a list of journalists who are recent are talking about that right now and so that makes it easy for us to like find find these people um but but that is kind of the way that you would do it or you might do it a different way where you like I want to be on this publication And then you kind of go and look at what they currently writing about And you come up with an idea and you say I can write about that but I can put this twist on it.

Or I can add this information. And then when you're pitching that journalist that wrote the thing that you kind of want to riff off of, you would say, hey, I read your article and I have an idea about how to, you know, kind of like, for example, I want to be on your podcast, right? So I might look at previous episodes and see what you've talked about and then go and say, hey, I can talk about this with you. So there's different ways to reverse engineer it.

You know, you can start with the idea and then go look for journalists who are already doing it. You can start with a publication and think, OK, what are they doing? What can I add? maybe you have a journalist in mind already, that you have a relationship and you've built something with them, which is usually a little bit later in the game, but we very much encourage that at Intelligent Relations, then you can do it that way and think, okay, what are they talking about right now?

How can I, you know, be a part of the conversation? I think I've also found interesting what I've heard, I haven't tried it myself, was to kind of find the cadence. People might be talking about similar things at a similar time of the year. Let's say I know Christmas is around the corner, right?

So in October, November, they are going to talk about where to find the best discounts on your Christmas presents or whatever. Definitely. Find somebody who talked about it. Last year, they probably are open to a similar article or statistic or something you can send them over about a similar thing.

Absolutely. Yeah, especially for e-commerce brands. Like if you're selling a product online, you definitely have the seasonal cadence, you know, Christmas, Valentine's Day, you know, all of these types of things. That's definitely, definitely there.

And then there are cadences inside of industries, too, you know, depending on what you're selling. Like if you're a fashion brand, there's fashion weeks. There's all kinds of stuff going on around that. And you can leverage those things, you know, too.

That's a great opportunity to leverage like statistics or facts that you pulled from inside your own company. You know, if you're able to do that, you've got data sets that you can work with. Yeah. Right.

Yeah, there's definitely, I think, especially we see this with like small, medium sized businesses that have tons of, Of past projects or past clients that had similar issues solved in a similar way. They know exactly what it's going to cost to solve it or what the average cost is, how long the project takes, etc. What we find is a lot of times people are not aware of the quality of data they actually have with a little bit of number crunching or these days uploading some anonymized file into a limit and getting some patterns out of it.

Exactly. That's one way of using AI right now. I mean, to me, that's the best way to use AI. You've got a data set that you can't go through easily as a human person.

That's what the AIs are for. Then this data set and you say, give me insights, you know, and then you can work with those data sets in a way that you maybe couldn't have easily before. So I think it's one of the better uses for it. I want to talk a little bit about the frequency of digital PR campaigns.

How imagine now we have an established business. It's not a startup anymore. They are going to have a marketing budget. They have an SEO budget.

They might have a PR budget specifically. What could be a wise way to structure this budget or use this budget? How often should digital media outlets be pitched? Is it something we do every month?

Is it something we send something every week, ideally? Because it's a frequency game. What do you think about us? It is a frequency game.

From an SEO perspective, creating your own content, you want to be publishing. like every platform is different, but like on your own website, you want to be publishing a good piece of content at least once a week, at least, if not every day, if you don't have the resources to do it every day, at least once a week. And that's where your traffic will stabilize or go up and your visibility will stabilize and go up. When it comes to social media, it needs to be more frequently, like every day probably, but different kinds of content.

When it comes to PR, you want to be kind of pursuing it all the time because you're not going to get every win. So you kind of constantly need to be pitching journalists all the time so that you get these wins periodically. So and I'm not telling people to spray and pray. You need to kind of do very targeted campaigns.

But I think what we do at Intelligent Relations for us is that we we have a couple of different campaign ideas every quarter. And then we pitch those to a selected media list of journalists that would want to hear something on that topic. And, you know, out of hundreds of pitches through the quarter, which is like several per day, we're probably only going to get a handful of pre-media results. So it's something that you, with PR, it's a little bit different, you're relying on another platform to publish you.

So you kind of need to, but also the cadence of your email outreach needs to be polite. So you send out an email pitch and then the next day you're like, hey, did you read my email? You know, you're not going to build a good relationship. Yeah.

And obviously you also want to kind of keep in mind what does an inbox of a journalist that's pretty regular looks like, right? So they might be getting 100,000 emails a day. So it's probably really hard to catch their attention with anything. They might be just filtering their email address.

If anybody pitched them for a particular topic and then maybe go through them. I don't know how they are going to handle this amount of pitches. Probably different journalists are going to handle it different ways. You really want to make sure you're reaching out to the right person.

Because if you reach out to the person whose beat has nothing to do with what you're doing, they're going to ignore you. And also you have to keep in mind things like national holidays. People aren't going to respond to your emails at Christmas time. They're just they're not.

They're out of office. If there's like an emergency, if you're doing local PR and, you know, I don't know, there was, you know, a hurricane or shooting, something like this, something very sensitive. They're covering that and they're thinking about that and they might even be impacted by that. So you don't want to you don't want to market to them at that point.

So you have to be like really conscious to what's going on potentially with that journalist. They're human beings too. So yeah, you got to be a little bit careful. But you also do want to be persistent about like sending out persistent, consistent.

You know, I'm going to send out pitches. I'm going to contact people. I'm going to do this because if you're not sort of keeping, you know, you're not kind of keeping up with it, you're going to. Sorry, my video glitched there for a second.

Yeah. Okay, so definitely. We pick journalists that obviously are interested in reporting about our topic. We take into account if they're busy with something urgent right now, probably not have an open eye in the inbox for our pitch.

How do you manage to, I mean, it's obviously not predictable, right? So with typical link building, you have an idea after a while that if you send X amount of emails, you get a certain reply rate and get certain links placed. how do you manage the budget in a digital pr campaign where you pretty much need to then set some alerts because they might not even answer that they actually used your your information or your data how do you manage budget or what kind of expectations do you have when you when you have a digital pr campaign well yeah so it kind of interesting If you the type of company that like I can budget a PR agency and they going to do it for me Like sometimes you're looking at $10,000 a month retainer for that type of service.

Most startups or small businesses, they don't have that. They don't have that kind of money. That's one of the reasons we built Intelligent Relations as a company was to bring that price way down. And there are a lot of tools out there, too, that can help you do this and cadence and get into your workflows.

That's what our tool does, essentially. It helps you with your workflow. It helps you kind of get in there. It tells you, OK, pitch this topic now because this is what these people are talking about.

Pitch these journalists because they're talking about what you want right now. So it can help you cadence and it can help you build workflows. That's like we put a $250 price tag on that per month. So it's one of those things where, you know, you can use tools to do that.

And so then your budget is just to pay for that tool. You can hire an agency and then your budget is to let the agency, whatever they cost, do it for you. And then let's say you've got just somebody who is sort of inside your company. Well, you're paying that person to do that job.

And so if you're seeing those results, their salary is going to reflect what your budget is. You shouldn't really be paying for results. I don't believe in paying for links. We don't really believe in, you know, you might want to pay for press releases, but we don't necessarily encourage that anymore.

And it's kind of an outpaced, like outmoded way of doing PR. But that being said, the LLM seemed to draw from press release distribution sites. I was going to say things are coming back. Yeah, so it is coming back.

A lot of things come back from 10 years ago. Yeah, they're coming back from the dead. We've been doing some experiments with that to see if like, do you just need to put the press release? Will that be enough?

Or does the press release need to get picked up by like an outlet and you have to have like both things to show up in an LLM? So we've been doing some experiments. Maybe a little bit of budget for paying for press releases. Or if you are budgeting for an agency, you don't have to worry about that because they're probably going to do that for you.

But in general, I wouldn't budget for like buying links or paying for media or you want to try to keep it as organic and real as possible and pay for press releases when it seems necessary. Like try to get that press release to media outlets where they're going to report about you. But it has to be newsworthy and it has to be, you know, a good story for them to write about. That makes sense.

In terms of expectations, I was rather looking at from your experience, how much feedback or, I mean, it's obviously going to vary. But is there like a range you can give how much and how many mentions or picks up here could you expect if you ran like, I don't know, three months of these kinds of campaigns? Obviously, even if it's 253 months without any mention, it's still getting into the budget and it's not going to be kept up as long as we want. So there must be some sort of expectation.

We say, look, if I don't see X after six months, we're obviously stopping this. It doesn't make sense to spam more journalists if they don't like what we send them. So this is something that's really nascent. I think Semrush just got the ability to track mentions and citations like a few months ago.

So it's very difficult to say like, oh, I need to have X amount of citations because it's the tools to count. These are just coming out now. And then there's the difference. Do you have to decide, do I want to have mentions or do I want to have citations?

So do I want to put my money in earning media or do I want to put it into owned content? citations, you know, having the link show up and an AI result is a different game than having your brand show up. Like, and then you have to think about the queries that you want to chase. Do you want to be like, okay, what's the best public relations software?

Like for us, for example, and we have intelligent relations to be number one. How much do we want to invest in that? How do we invest in that? So it could just be eventually we show up.

So we're done with that campaign and we're ready to move on to a new query and put our money in that one. So it's not, I don't know that it's the numbers game that it was with SEO as much as like we're there, you know, because with SEO, you write a piece of content and you're like, all right, it's ranking 20. Now it's ranking 10. Now it's ranking this and you're building backlinks.

And so it's until it gets to number one, you're going to invest in it. Right. But in this game, it's like, all right, I want to show up for what's the best software, what's the best, whatever my product is, insert product here, you know, or top 10 or whatever. And it's like, how many owned resources do I need to build and how many journalists do I need to have mentioned me in that context to actually to actually show up?

And, you know, and maybe I'm so I don't think it's like I need to have 300 mentions as I have to show up for the right queries. You have to first of all pitch something that's going to be picked up at all, right? Well, that's the first thing. It was not picked up at all, right?

We had a lot of work to pull into it. We had no idea what we were doing. And you just wait and wait and wait. And you obviously have your alert set.

And the alert software for dimensions is definitely there and has been. And you then just say, okay, there was nothing, crickets, like to say. And then you might try again. And maybe there's one or so.

So you kind of need to have at least a quality or a thing. I'm not sure how much the software supports this as well. But whereas I have the confidence that if I send those three press, three pitches, for example, there are going to be a few mentions afterwards, right? Yeah.

Otherwise, whether more than 50 or 300 or 10 is then a different game, right? Yeah. Like you really need to be publishing content that is directly related to what you do. Like Google and these tools, they don't pick it up.

They won't pick it up if it's not related. If you are, like, for example, we are a media and PR website. We write about PR. We write about news, maybe some marketing.

But we also have podcasts as a part of our product. So you can, like, research podcasts and pitch podcasts from our product. So I try to make podcast-based content, but we're not a podcast website. So none of that content got picked up.

We wanted to talk to us because we're not experts on that, even though we offer it with our tool. And, you know, a lot of SEO experts will tell you, you have to stay in your wheelhouse. You have to stay close to your product. So that's one thing to keep in mind.

You need to be relevant. You're not going to show up for content that's not related to you. So it's important to kind of like know like what to talk about and what to pitch and like what you can possibly rank for. Because if you're talking about, I don't know, snow gloves when you sell dog food, it's just it's not, you're never going to show up for that.

So that's not so much about. And the other thing I would warn people against is AI generated content. Like I know that it's fast, especially through e-commerce. So tempting because you can do all these programmatic pages with like original content written on it If you doing like this kind of selling where you pulling through an API your product descriptions and then you reselling it over here and you using the generative AI to change the text, like it is very tempting, but this won't rank very well.

It just won't. So whatever you're doing, if you want it, you do have to have like some original content, like static content that's written by a human person. It can't be thin content. You have to follow all those good content rules.

or none of this is going to work. It has to be good. It has to be relevant. It has to be kind of got some expertise or some extra value in it that nothing, nobody else has that, just you.

And that's when you're going to start showing up. If you don't have those three things, like no matter what you do, you're not going to show up. So whether it's in the LLMs on Google or with journalists. Makes sense.

Before we wrap this up, I have one more question. So what we, and you obviously have seen this as well, We have a lot of social media sites now show up in the SERPs. We just ran an analysis yesterday on Facebook groups. We ran out where they are really ranking on top spots for high search volume terms.

Suddenly, a Facebook group poll, I'm not sure if it's going to be sustainable. For now, it seems to be working. We have had Reddit for a while. We have LinkedIn posts outranking for our LinkedIn articles with penalized website content suddenly ranking number one.

So it's a lot of fun right now to be in search marketing. How do you see the work on those other platforms that are not necessarily news outlets be part of a digital PR strategy? Yes, this is very interesting. It's very hard to do this right.

Because, yeah, Reddit is definitely one that the ChatGPT, for example, really likes. And like, as you said, LinkedIn, YouTube has always been a part of SEO. So that's like beside the point. But these new ones, you know, it used to be that those were closed systems and that what you did there sort of stayed there.

Now it is. It is showing up. And I think very much the same rules apply from, you know, in terms of marketing. You need to follow the rule to the platform.

You need to follow the content guidelines of the platform. You can't fake that. So, for example, with Reddit, you can't just kind of go in as a brand and be like, you know, not have like an established persona or an expertise and go in and be like, buy my product. Like, you can't you can't do that.

You're going to get kicked off. You're going to get in trouble. That has to be organic. We were doing a little bit of Reddit at our company, but we have a tech expert who had a Reddit profile for a very long time, you know, and she would write if she did and said anything about our software, she would write a disclaimer saying, yeah, I work for this company, but this actually works like this.

You know, it did. It did some good for us. And with your LinkedIn, it's still it's long term content, thought leadership, expertise building. You know, you just follow the rules, follow the rules.

Don't try it. Don't go in there like a bull in a china shop and just brands and branding all over the place. You know, you need to be transparent. You need to be like professional, but authentic, too.

It seems like the shorter or quicker way to visibility these days, right? It might be different in six months. But right now you have like a Facebook post. You can just answer this question from your end in this post and it's going to rank tomorrow.

It's already there, right? It's already pretty much go where the visibility already is. Right now, definitely also a more manual approach like we find, right? You actually need this brand from our clients, for example.

where we ask them, look, there's a really good Facebook post. Don't you want to answer? Yesterday I sent a Slack message to a client and said, look, I want you to answer this particular post and this particular question because I know you're going to be the best answer and probably upload it and I don't know what. But it's like a very, very manual approach and we'll see how sustainable it is.

Yeah. Or we've been making this part of it and we see it with courses or like coaching offers and things like those. If they really like work this earned media, It kind of seems to be turned into earned media. So they kind of own this content.

They own their comments, obviously. But then they start getting mentioned on Reddit, for example, because they just have built up this persona or this profile on the platform where people would just refer to them in different contexts, etc. And now that they rank, they're inserted into AI overviews and AI modes, etc. It seems to be making a lot.

That really makes a lot of sense. It's the very beginning of the industry. and I've been around for over 10 years watching this. You have to make good content.

You have to put it, you know, have to follow the rules of the platform that you're playing on. You know, you need to be honest and transparent. You need to share your expertise. You need to create original stuff.

And as long as you're doing that, this is what's going to happen. People are going to pick you up and be like, this is good content. I trust these people. So I'm going to share this over here and I'm going to come back and use this as a resource.

And then the AI will pick up on that and be like, okay, there's all these signals all over the whole internet that this is a good source of information. So we're going to show that too. And it's, yeah, it's not really a new game. It's just a, it takes hard work.

It actually takes hard work in there, you know, and of course everybody wants a shortcut. But no, it's the same as it's always been good content. Good content where it should be. I definitely agree.

At least a lot of things are still the same. I've been in this for 20 years. I started out when we did white text on white background that it worked. And you just sneaked in some keywords.

We had fun times. I do not rule out that it might work with LLMs today. Probably could do an experiment whether they pick up the CSAs or they don't. One thing we do see, I think, where we, at least in our ongoing consulting, try to find a little bit of a different approach on top of, obviously, good content, well structured, et cetera.

I think taking like an extra step and really reverse engineering those AI results and see where do the citations dimensions come from. Yes. Which will be targeted. So it's one thing that there are outlets like tools like yours definitely can create.

The other one is, is this actually something that's relevant in my industry? That's actually taken into account in my industry. And then just looking a little bit at the fan out queries as well. What other queries is the LLM asking in the background if I type something in?

and making sure that we just cover this either with digital PR efforts, link building efforts, on-page articles or on other social media platforms just to slowly get the dots for the LLMs to make sure that this all ties together. For me, it has always been a joint dots game and we connect the dots from our brand to this outlet, this topic, this challenge, this ICP, this I don't know what. And we're definitely in a very similar fashion as we've always done. But yeah, with a few new tactics here and there, I guess.

Thank you very much, Natalie. This has been great sharing this insight from your company there, from intelligentrelations.com. We are going to link to your website over at seoleverage.

com forward slash podcast. Natalie Sievert, thank you so much for sharing your experience here. Thank you, Kurt. It's been very pleasant.

Thank you.