From ideation to pitching to analyzing success, BuzzStream is a key tool we utilize at KURU Footwear for all our Digital PR campaigns.

In this case study, we’ll outline how we used BuzzStream at all points of our campaign’s process: The Longest and Shortest US Airport Walks in the USA—A unique study that examined how much Americans have to walk in various major airports across the country.

I will be running through how we used this campaign to earn relevant, top-tier coverage, including 25 links over DA 80 (including Yahoo, MSN, USA Today, AOL, and Travel+Leisure), 60 syndications, and a total of 125 backlinks of coverage in March and April 2024.

Step 1: Starting With A Strong Idea

As a PR professional for over five years across many different brands and verticals, I can tell you that the most important part of any digital PR campaign is starting with a strong idea.

All the clickbait-y subject lines and high open rates in the world will be meaningless if your campaign idea isn’t interesting to journalists.

From late 2023 through early 2024, I noticed that an old KURU campaign continued earning organic links without active outreach. In fact, the report was about three years outdated.

The report was The Longest and Shortest Airport Walking Distances in the U.S., which included a survey from 2021 on Americans’ travel habits. Not only were this report and survey data three years old, but the world has drastically changed in travel over the past five years.

Taking a solid idea was a great starting point for a successful campaign to push ahead of summer and the peak of the summer travel season.

The travel industry finally saw its biggest rebound to pre-pandemic numbers in 2023, and the TSA predicts travel in 2024 will exceed travel in 2023. With a travel-related campaign earning 100+ links from CNN and other top-tier publications in 2023, despite being outdated, I knew it was an ideal time to revamp the campaign for 2024.

We refreshed this campaign in March 2024, just ahead of Spring Break, the first week that most Americans start to travel ahead of summer.

Step 2: Planning and Strategy Within BuzzStream

While the team worked on bringing the new campaign to life with updated data and graphics, and while I ran a new survey—it was time to plan a pitching strategy for the updated campaign.

I started by building media lists by first creating all of my projects under a folder for the campaign. For this campaign, you can see the following lists:

• Travel
• Lifestyle
• National Lifestyle
• Specific state and city media lists

Tip: Look in BuzzStream to see what media lists you already have built. You can search keywords (e.g., “Travel,” “Lifestyle,” “National,” etc.) and easily copy the list over. Before copying a list over, check your sequence to ensure the list has good open rates.

• “Good” open rates may differ from agency to agency or brand to brand, but a list with open rates between 20% and 40% indicates a strong interest in your pitches.
• Ensure your list is relatively new and has been made in the past 1-6 months at the earliest.
• Utilize Buzzsteam’s ‘filter’ feature to clean up the list (I’ll discuss this later.)

Tip: if you have done a similar campaign with similar audiences (which would make sense for the client to target similar audiences in the same niche/industry), quickly check those folders to see if you’ve forgotten any obvious media list ideas.

After building out every media list I’d need to make and checking which lists we had built within the past few months, I used a database to create the lists.

I did manual prospecting to find and target relevant journalists I think would be interested in covering the report.

How We Used BuzzSteam To Avoid Spam Filters

It’s a digital PR’s worst nightmare to be flagged as spam, but BuzzStream has many features that can help prevent this.

We utilize BuzzStream to ensure that we are not marked spam by following these best practices:

1. Remove Those That Have Unsubscribed

BuzzStream makes this easy. Contacts who do not want to be emailed by your brand will have a “Do Not Contact” label next to them, preventing them from being emailed. It’s easy to create and save a filter that can be applied to each project to remove these contacts.

I always remove these contacts from my media lists before pitching.

2. Remove Bounces and Send Failures

As mentioned above, you can create a filter that removes email addresses that have bounced or failed from your lists. Emailing too many bounceback addresses can get you marked spam, and you don’t want to waste time emailing people who don’t exist.

The journalism and news industries have experienced significant turnover, layoffs, and restructures in the past few years, so it’s not unexpected that some journalists now have new email addresses.

3. Don’t Double Send

Utilize filters in BuzzStream to ensure that you are not sending a contact who may be in multiple media lists the same pitch, potentially at the same time. Journalists will (rightly) get frustrated and are more likely to mark you as spam if you do this.

Tip: If you’ve been working with the same client or website for a long time and have pitched multiple campaigns on behalf of this client, be sure to utilize filters to filter out any contacts who have not opened an email from you in the past 12 months or longer. This will help reduce the likelihood of being marked spam and ensure you’re not wasting time contacting journalists who aren’t interested in your pitch.

Step 3: It’s Time to Pitch!

Once the report was updated, the media lists were made and cleaned, and my subject lines and pitches were written and edited—it was time to pitch to journalists!

We launched this campaign on March 12th and started actively outreaching on March 18th. The pitch related to Spring Break as shown below:

Tip: ALWAYS personalize your pitches. BuzzStream makes this easy with custom fields, the most common being [First Name]. It can also be utilized for custom fields for state-specific outreach. Always include a greeting and a name when pitching.

Step 4: Analyzing Campaign Performance

The pitching process has various stages. While open rates are one strong metric to monitor, different data points can indicate why and if journalists are or aren’t resonating with your campaign.

BuzzStream makes it easy to track your campaign’s performance during active outreach. Sequences are shown in various stages in each project, and subject line performance can be monitored in real-time.

A high open rate means your subject line is interesting and catching the eye of the journalist. This is already a great start, as journalists are bombarded with many pitches each day. An open rate of about 18%-20% is expected and considered good.

If open rates are high but click rates or coverage is low, this may mean that journalists liked your subject line but didn’t find the report intriguing when clicking through. Finally, if the timing is right, the idea is strong, and the subject line and pitch are accurate, then you’ve got the perfect recipe for a digital PR campaign that would be deemed successful.

Tip: Luckily for me, in an instance where a similar campaign was run three years ago, I went into this campaign with data to guide my outreach strategy. I could evaluate which angles and subject lines resonated most with journalists while also testing unique and new subject lines. If this is the first time pitching this particular campaign, look at other campaigns to see what subject line structures worked and didn’t work.

Key Findings and Takeaways

This campaign is the perfect example of the PR stars aligning. With the combination of a solid idea, a tool like BuzzStream to evaluate outreach in real-time and pitch our report, and the timing of Spring Break, KURU Footwear was able to successfully revamp an old campaign and earn 125 pieces of coverage with an average DA of 48 (28% of the links being over DA 80, and 20% of links being over DA 90).

• The average open rate for emails across this campaign was 46%, which is well above industry average.
• The most successful subject line was “Travel Report: Longest and Shortest Airport Walks in the U.S. Revealed ” with an open rate of 60% sent to travel journalists.
• The least opened subject line was “Spring Break and Summer Travel Insights: 2024 American Travel Habits Survey ” with 30% open rates, also sent to travel journalists.
• In the past I have usually sent a two-step email sequence to all contacts in a campaign. For this campaign, I did a three-step sequence to travel and lifestyle journalists, which I believe boosted coverage by using a new subject line for each email.
• Timing matters: Launching this campaign just ahead of Spring Break contributed to the success of the campaign.

With a platform like BuzzStream, KURU Footwear could not have targeted as many travel journalists across the country with this interesting data.

The post How KURU Footwear Earned 100+ Links Using BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

Over the last 18 months, the business has worked to bring more of its PR functionality in-house and reduce reliance on third parties when looking to secure coverage and links.

With a PR strategy designed to support wider communication and SEO objectives, it was important for Motorpoint to find a way to scale up outreach while ensuring that PR efforts remained as impactful as possible.

Below, Lizzie Parr, PR Manager at Motorpoint, shares how BuzzStream has helped simplify the team’s outreach process and why utilising the post-outreach data available within the platform is essential for driving results.

Maximising Email Opens With BuzzStream

Cutting through the noise and getting your content seen by journalists has always been difficult, but with research suggesting that PRs now outnumber journalists in the UK, it’s more challenging than ever.

In such a competitive environment, understanding how journalists use their inboxes is essential to give your content the greatest chance of being read (and hopefully used).

With the option to track email opens, BuzzStream offers us the chance to understand how and when journalists are engaging with our outreach, from first send and follow-ups through to coverage landing – and sometimes even after that.

Having this level of insight has proven essential for us when it comes to making more informed strategic decisions. Being able to analyse how our outreach is performing at every stage of the process, is essential to avoid wasting our efforts.

There are a few ways we use Buzzstream to help maximise email opens, but the most notable is for A/B testing subject lines.

A/B Testing Subject Lines

By testing different options to see what has the highest open rate, we can tweak our outreach accordingly and use what we have learned to inform subsequent follow-ups.

Below is an example of how we used Buzzstream to compare subject line performance:

Beyond A/B testing and email personalisation, the platform’s email open function allows us to test the best time of day to send out our content.

By closely monitoring open rates across a range of projects, we’re able to build a clearer understanding of how different publications and journalists use their inboxes.

Then, within Buzzstream’s outreach platform, personalising email content is easy.

You can quickly tweak subject lines to best match the format used by the publication or journalist you are targeting.

This level of data is relatively unheard of if outreaching direct from your inbox and has proven essential when it comes to getting our emails read.

Tracking Engagement and Strategic Follow-Ups

Within Buzzstream, we can see if a journalist has opened our content, along with when and how often they revisited the piece.

This information is useful when re-engaging with journalists.

Within the platform, you can filter your outreach list by email opens, meaning it’s easy to prioritise who you follow up with and how to frame your email based on how warm the lead is.

Below, you can see how we are able to track when a journalist has re-engaged with a piece of content:

If contacts in your outreach list are yet to engage with your content, you can forgo a follow-up and instead re-pitch the story to them with a different subject line or focus – giving you another chance to get your content seen.

With this approach, Motorpoint has found that journalists who have not previously engaged with the content are more likely to open a freshly pitched story, as opposed to a follow-up for an email they have not previously opened.

Simplifying the Outreach Process

Beyond giving us access to a wealth of data that we otherwise wouldn’t have, Buzzstream has streamlined our outreach process and halved the amount of time we spend collating media lists and pitching directly from our inbox.

There are a range of features within the platform that make it incredibly efficient to build out media lists and pitch, but some of our favourites are:

• Website and person tags – offers the ability to categorise contacts based on their interests and the types of stories they cover regularly
• Ability to copy contacts between projects – saves huge amounts of time when it comes to building out outreach lists for similar projects
• Full contact list stored within the platform – means we don’t have to manually re-add details as everything is stored centrally and will pull through people already in our contacts as suggestions

The ability to see all earlier interactions with a journalist makes it easy to see what pitching strategies have worked historically.

The platform’s ability to personalise pitch emails even when sending to a list of contacts means you don’t waste time flicking between screens when outreaching.

Having all our templates and outreach list stored in BuzzStream means we can quickly rework a piece of content if it aligns with something in the news agenda – helping us make our evergreen content work harder (without requiring a huge investment of time).

What Impact Has Buzzstream Had on Motorpoint’s PR Activity?

Motorpoint started using BuzzStream in January 2023. Since then, we’ve secured over 400 pieces of coverage, 90% of which include a link back to the Motorpoint website.

The team has been able to grow results without adding additional headcount, and this is due largely to efficiencies achieved with tools such as BuzzStream.

Here are two real examples of campaigns that BuzzStream helped our campaigns.

Example 1: Winter Driving Mailer

As part of our proactive press office strategy, we look to re-issue our winter driving piece whenever snow is predicted.

While weather-related content tends to perform well, time is of the essence when sharing it with the media.

With our pitches and media lists already saved as a project in BuzzStream, it’s quick for us to refresh the piece and share it with the media.

Here’s a quick view of our outreach:

We never spend more than a couple of hours re-outreaching this piece and have pushed it out three times over the last 18 months, securing over 35 pieces of coverage.

Example 2: Fuel-Efficient Driving Campaign

Another example of a campaign where outreach through BuzzStream helped bolster results is our fuel-efficient driving campaign.

With fuel prices well covered in the media, our advice-focused campaign used original data to predict exactly how much motorists could expect to spend on fuel in 2023 and share tips and tricks to help car owners go further between filling up.

In addition to providing clear and realistic advice for drivers, this campaign also highlighted some of the most fuel-efficient vehicles on the market – giving them the Motorpoint stamp of approval.

Here is a snapshot of the pitch:

So far, the campaign has secured 151 pieces of coverage across titles including the Mail Online, This is Money, Express, Daily Record, Wales Online and the Lancashire Telegraph.

As a result of our outreach, we were able to secure over 140 new links on a huge number of highly authoritative websites.

Final Thoughts

Discussing Motorpoint’s experience with BuzzStream, Lizzie said: “When I first joined Motorpoint, I really championed us subscribing to BuzzStream as I’d has nothing but positive experiences with the platform in previous roles.

“Since we began using the tool in early 2023, it’s allowed us to bring all our outreach in-house and expand our knowledge about the media – helping reduce our reliance on third parties and allowing us to continually secure incredible coverage.”

The post How Motorpoint Used BuzzStream to “Drive” Over 400 Links in One Year appeared first on BuzzStream.

In this case study, we explore how BuzzStream has helped the team of 70+ digital PR specialists working at Reboot Online earn more than 30,000 pieces of organic coverage for our clients. We also look at the insights and data generated from our recent BuzzStream-powered analysis of 1,000 subject lines sent to 29,095 journalists.

The Fight for Attention in Digital PR

A journalist’s inbox is a battleground where digital PR professionals must fight for a finite amount of time, attention and engagement.

Helpful tools like BuzzStream have made large-scale outreach easier than ever, and this alone has had a hugely positive impact on the speed and efficiency of digital PR.

However, just sending a well crafted outreach email is no longer enough.

Journalists receive literally thousands of emails per day, and the outreach email means nothing if the person receiving it never opens the message to read your pitch.

Thankfully, tool providers have invested heavily in building out a robust suite of tools to help the most effective digital PRs refine their approach and maximise the success of their outreach campaigns.

Innovative features and functionality contact information discovery and imports, intuitive prospect list management systems, outreach personalisation and data-driven reporting dashboards have continued to move the industry forward and help all of us working in the space send the right email, to the right person, at the right time.

How Reboot Online is Using BuzzStream to Earn More Coverage & Links

Before we dive into the findings from our 1,000 subject line study, we first want to speak about just a few of the ways that BuzzStream is helping the Reboot Online team deliver more effective digital PR campaigns at a serious scale.

List Building & Digital PR Prospecting

Reboot has been offering digital PR services to clients for over 5 years now, and in that time we have tried virtually every media database and list building/prospecting tool that you can think of.

When running our campaigns we have come across good list building tools, and we’ve come across bad ones. What sets the BuzzStream listing building and prospecting functionality apart is the level of detail and relevancy that it helps us bring into our media lists.

Mass outreach campaigns to any and every journalist that might have ever mentioned an industry related keyword in one of their articles yielded decent results for a time, but every PR under the sun now knows how to use this approach so the link and coverage conversion rate using such a strategy will be frustratingly small.

With BuzzStream, the details that we can store about each contact in our media list by default helps us ensure that we’re not outreaching to irrelevant people (and risking our emails being marked as spam), and the option to add custom fields to tailor BuzzStream to our unique outreach approach and methodology has really streamlined our processes internally.

We are already using custom fields to keep tabs on the outreach campaigns across different types of clients, team members, and more detailed journalist profiling.

Streamlined Outreach & Email Personalisation

BuzzStream’s outreach functionality is second to none. The tool helps save countless hours which would otherwise be spent manually writing and sending emails to our contacts.

By building effective outreach sequences, we can ensure that follow ups are taken care of and that our outreach emails reach the journalists that we’re sending them at a time when they’re most likely to be noticed and opened.

Having the mailboxes right there in the tool also means we’re not constantly switching between tools and apps when trying to respond to journalists that do want to use our data and content and/or feature our clients in their article(s).

Digital PR Reporting & Testing

Bounce backs, open rates, link clicks and coverage earned. There is so much data available to the modern day digital PR professional.

To put it shortly, gaining useful insights from all of our outreach and digital PR data will help us earn more and better pieces of coverage for our clients. In fact, this is why we’ve invested so heavily into our data analysis team (which now consists of 10 data scientists).

We find BuzzStream not only useful for planning and outreaching our campaigns, but for reporting on how effective they are and/or testing various outreach approaches too.

Having insightful and intuitive charts and graphs at our fingertips makes understanding how our campaigns are performing a breeze, and being able to dig into the data and see exactly which contacts have opened our emails, responded to them, clicked the links in our message etc. makes it that much more usable and useful.

Findings From Our BuzzStream-Powered Study of 1,000 Subject Lines

Now that we have spoken about some of the ways that we’re using BuzzStream in our day-to-day digital PR work, we also wanted to quickly touch on how the tool is helping us experiment and test our digital PR theories and ideas (this is important for all agencies but especially Reboot since we’re always experimenting to improve our knowledge and understanding across SEO and digital PR).

As mentioned, we used the BuzzStream tool to study more than 1,000 subject lines which were targeting a variety of topics such as finance, property, lifestyle, travel and entertainment.

Our goal in this experiment was to identify the ideal subject line length, and the styles that journalists are most likely to engage with. BuzzStream’s email activity tracker was then used to gain insights on open rates for each type of subject line, allowing us to draw conclusions on which kinds of subject lines are likely to perform best in future campaigns.

Key Subject Line Findings & Takeaways

• Subject lines phrased as questions have shown 13% lower open rates compared to headlines without questions. This suggests that journalists may be more inclined to open emails with clear and straightforward subject lines.
• Surprisingly, starting subject lines with keywords such as ‘data’, ‘study’ or ‘survey’ at the beginning doesn’t have a significant impact on open rates, as it was just 1% higher compared to subject lines without these keywords.
• Like the research-based subject lines, listicle subject lines have only 1% open rates above those that aren’t written in listicle formats. This can be attributed to the fact that ranks or lists usually lack a stronger hook that will intrigue journalists enough to engage.
• Subject lines containing buzzwords such as celebrity names, events, and special dates had a 12% higher open rate compared to those that did not. This indicates that journalists are more likely to open emails with subject lines containing trendy words.
• Subject lines of 4 to 8 words tend to have higher open rates on average, with percentages starting to decline when they exceed 8 words. This suggests that emails with subject lines from 4 to 11 words are the best choice, likely because they are entirely visible in email previews.

Our Methodology

For this study, we split our subject lines into 4 different groups. The open rates of each group were then analyzed and compared to all the other headlines. The groups consisted of:

Interrogative Subject Lines

Interrogative subject lines are those which ask a question, always including “?” at the end. For example:

Research-Based Subject Lines

Research-based subject lines are those that start with keywords like ‘data’, ‘survey’ and ‘study’. For example:

Listicle Subject Lines

Listicle subject lines are those that organize results in the form of rankings or lists. For example:

Buzzword Subject Lines

Buzzword subject lines are those that include current events, trends or celebrity names. For example:

5 Tips From Our Study to Write More Effective Digital PR Subject Lines

1. Prioritize relevance

A relevant headline will be directly aligned with the target audience’s interests, suggesting that the story will provide valuable information. Journalists open their email inbox searching for what’s newsworthy to their readers, so prioritize relevance above all else.

2. Be clear in your headline

Use simple words, be direct and ensure you’re communicating what your study is about. Find the right balance for a headline that will interest journalists enough to catch journalists’ attention, without risking being so vague they won’t understand it.

3. Keep it concise but avoid extremes

When analyzing BuzzStream open rates, Reboot saw that both short (2-3 words) and extremely long headlines (15+ words) resulted in lower open rates.

Very short headlines limit your ability to communicate what your story is about. Too many words may get cut off in email previews, making it difficult to grab journalists’ attention.

4. Make it reactive

When possible, make sure your campaign is relevant to current trends, as journalists are always looking for reactive content. Always consider including trendy keywords and elements such as popular celebrity names, events, and special dates.

5. Refine headlines before follow-ups

Use the BuzzStream open rates tracker to analyze the open rates of the first attempt. If they’re low, avoid following up with the same headline. Dedicate time to revising it. Ask yourself whether it clearly conveys the value of your story, and if it’s tailored and relevant to the target audience.

Conclusion

To cut a long story short, we would recommend BuzzStream to any digital PR looking to work more efficiently and effectively. Make sure that you explore all of the features and functionality offered by the tool, and once you have a decent amount of data in your dashboard why not try running your own studies like our one above!

The post How Reboot Online Has Earned 30K+ Pieces of Coverage Using BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

Truliant brought on Inseev Interactive as their link building provider in October, 2020. They came to Inseev with a goal of building links to their auto loans, mortgage loans, and checking pages. They also wanted to focus on two of their Learn hub pages. The target hub pages are home to all of the content for the home ownership and car buying tips related posts. Inseev’s goal was building ten highly authoritative and relevant links to these target pages each month. When the campaign kicked off, Truliant had a strong organic presence. With roughly 1,000 backlinks from unique domains their overall backlink profile was strong. For this reason, the campaign focused on a page authority growth approach.

You may be asking yourself, “what’s a page authority growth approach?”.

Certain pages on your site could be in a position where they are just a few backlinks away from ranking competitively for their target keywords. In this case, it can help to build links to those specific pages. This is where building links to specific pages versus an entire site, can help significantly increase ROI on linking efforts. These same pages could be your revenue-driving pages where you’ll benefit most from organic growth. This happened to be the case for Truliant.

As you read through this case study, you’ll see the unique circumstances and outcomes that make a page authority growth approach the right fit for a given website.

The Strategy

In an effort to start the campaign with as much momentum as possible, the initial focus was on branded opportunity. Branded strategies require a certain degree of brand presence prior to link building. Thanks to Truliant’s community involvement, there was a relatively strong digital footprint to start.

Branded Strategies

Strategy #1 Unlinked Mentions

The first branded strategy identified unlinked mentions of Truliant. These unlinked mentions included all variations of Truliant’s brand name as well. For example, Truliant FCU, Truliant Federal Credit Union, Truliant Credit Union, etc. Once you’ve identified these unlinked mentions, you can reach out to the appropriate contact and request to update the mention with a clickable hyperlink back to your site.

Consider ways that you can incentivize or add value to your request. Is there outdated information or a typo on the page that you could bring to attention with your request? Is there a broken link on the page? What can you do to add value in exchange for requesting a quick update on the page?

Expert Advice: If you are attempting to utilize this strategy for a brand name that is synonymous with a common term, i.e. Apple, implement Google search operators to help narrow down your results.

• “Apple” + “Steve Jobs”: this will return results that mention Apple and Steve Jobs

• “Apple” or “Steve Jobs”: this will return results that mention Apple or Steve Jobs

• “Apple” around(2) “Steve Jobs”: this will return results that mention Steve Jobs within two words of the word Apple

In addition to searching for mentions of the brand name, you can search for C-suite executives, successful ad or PR campaigns or any other initiatives that have garnered recognition for the company. This approach can also be used in tandem with active PR campaigns, as the campaign generates new press recognition, keep tabs on all features and ensure they include a backlink!    

Inseev identified 1500+ opportunities for this strategy, securing 35 links with a 2.5% conversion rate. 

Strategy #2 Broken Links

This strategy is a two-part approach, focusing on broken links or 404 pages. Part one focuses on broken links on your website, part two focuses on broken links on your competitor’s websites.

Part one – your website: this strategy identifies 404 pages on your site with backlinks pointing to them. Conduct your outreach with a request to update the broken link from the pages linking back to the 404.

It’s important to note that setting up 301’s for 404 pages will allow most of the link authority to flow to the new page, given that the replacement page is a good 1:1 match. This means that if you have a good replacement page for the 404, you’re better off setting up a 301 redirect and leaving the backlinks alone. If you don’t have a good replacement page, this is where conducting manual outreach can be helpful. As you are vetting the sites that you want to reach out to, consider whether it makes sense to pitch your new page. If you don’t have a good replacement page for a 301, you may not have a good replacement page for manual outreach either.

You may also find that the posts linking back to your 404 pages are significantly outdated. If this is the case, you may benefit more from collaborating on a new post with the site versus having a 5 year old link updated.

In addition to 404 pages, assess whether or not your website has outdated pages or pages with minimal SEO value that you can “sculpt” links away from. For example, About Us, FAQ or search pages with backlinks can likely be updated to more valuable targets.

Part two – competitor websites: this strategy identifies 404 pages on your competitor’s websites with backlinks pointing to them. This strategy is tough. It’s tough for a few reasons. The first is that your competitors are likely already working the broken backlinks in their profile, the second is that you may not have a good replacement page for your competitor’s broken links, the third is that the process can be tedious at times. Despite these challenges, don’t be discouraged, when you can secure these links, they add a ton of value, so stay on the lookout for these types of opportunities.

Inseev identified 250+ opportunities for this strategy, securing 18 links with a 2.6% conversion rate. 

Strategy #3 Link Addition

This approach can be a goldmine depending on what site your industry is in. Your industry can also influence the ways this tactic can be utilized. This strategy aims to identify pages with existing backlinks where it makes sense to offer your page in tandem with the existing link. For Truliant’s campaign, this worked best on existing backlinks to their social profiles. Start by identifying pages that are linking to your social pages but not your actual website and reach out with a request to add a link back to your site. Utilize language like, “this way your users can easily find out more about us!”.

This strategy can be utilized for 3rd party reseller pages (i.e. Amazon, Nordstrom, Target, any other retailers who sell your products), other domains (if you own any), social profiles of your C-suite executives, podcasts, e-books or any other asset that you own that lives on a platform other than your website.

Inseev identified 350+ opportunities for this strategy, securing 6 links with a 1% conversion rate.

Hybrid – Brand & Non-Brand Strategy

Strategy #4 Ego-Bait

This is one of our personal favorites and one we haven’t heard of other link builders utilizing. We also love this strategy because you can generate new opportunities, basically, at your own discretion. This strategy identifies existing external links on your site and aims to secure a placement on a Press, About Us, or Featured On page on a third party website. (This works best with external editorial links on your own site).

It’s important to note that this strategy blurs a bit of a “grey” area in terms of reciprocal linking. For a backlink to be flagged as reciprocal generally requires a 1:1 match. This means that the page being linked to and the page linking back need to be the same URL structure.

In addition to not being a 1:1 match, this is a relatively safe linking practice and is a type of website behavior that happens organically. It’s also a fairly easy ask as a result. If the website you are requesting a link from, already maintains a Press page, your feature may have ended up there naturally!

As we mentioned, the other reason we love this strategy is because you can easily generate new opportunities. Simply write more editorial content for your site, feature the 3rd party websites you want links back from in the content, and conduct your outreach letting them know about their feature on your site! It’s best to try and pick sites that have a News or Press page so that the ask already makes sense.

Inseev identified 70+ opportunities for this strategy, securing 2 links with a 1% conversion rate. 

Non-Brand Strategies

This next round up of strategies can be utilized for websites that have zero brand recognition. These are the strategies that are helpful to sites who are starting from the ground up.

Strategy #5 Thought Leadership

For this tactic, we leveraged the expertise and authority of the leadership team at Truliant. The Truliant team has a full suite of C-level executives with a broad range of expertise. They also have a senior management team, allowing for a robust database of experts across a number of different industries. In an effort to execute on a highly relevant link building campaign, we started our thought leadership initiatives around team members who had the closest experience to finance. This thought leadership approach can take many forms and is somewhat of a bucket term for a variety of tactics. This approach can include providing quotes, participating in interviews and podcasts, or becoming a regular contributor to relevant publications. This strategy relies heavily on relationship building and becoming a go-to source for publishers. These link building initiatives tend to pick up momentum as you execute on them for longer periods of time as the greater someone’s reputation is, the easier it is to create new relationships.

Inseev identified 250+ opportunities for this strategy, secured 14 links with a 2.5% conversion rate. 

Strategy #6 Pitching as a Resource

This is a tough but extremely rewarding tactic available to link builders. It has a notoriously low conversion rate but can yield some of the highest value-driving links out there. This approach requires you to create high-quality and competitive content. Without investing serious time and energy into the assets on your site, this strategy won’t work. The content medium you can utilize for this strategy are uncapped, you just need to make sure that there is a sincere value add for third party websites providing a link back to the resource. You could create your resource as a webinar, blog post, or workshop series. This strategy also has the potential to yield significant organic link placements, assuming that your target audience responds well to the content. If you can leverage this strategy with the existing content on your site then you can get started right away. If you need to develop content prior to starting the strategy, make sure to conduct thorough research ahead of time. While this may initially seem like a setback, it can actually be a great way to develop an asset with the goal of making it linkable.

In our experience, we find the most linkable assets have a call-to-action or appeal to logic, emotions or ethics. In addition to considering this aspect, think about the topical volume and appealing to your target audience. You want to identify a focus for the piece that has a significant reach. The greater the interest around the topic, the better chance there is to identify more linking opportunities for your asset.

Once you’ve identified which asset you are going to leverage for link building, start prospecting for opportunities. Here are some helpful examples of search queries we like to use:

“asset topic” inurl:resource

“asset topic” inurl:helpful-links

“asset topic” + “resources” or “helpful links”

Inseev identified X opportunities for this strategy, secured 3 links with a 0.5% conversion rate. 

Results

Over a 7 month span of link building, this campaign secured a total of 77 backlinks for Truliant FCU’s website, consistently exceeding the quota by 10%. Of the 77 links acquired, over 70% were to our target pages.

Strategy #1

The organic profile of the target pages saw improvements that correlated with the linking initiatives. While linking is not the sole influence of ranking improvements, the growth and link building correlation make a strong case that the linking efforts helped to support organic growth strategies.

Checking Page:

Mortgage Page:

In addition to ranking keyword and traffic growth, we also saw improvements on the Page Authority (PA) score from Moz on the same pages.

Checking Page: +3 increase

Mortgage Page: +5 increase

The post Case Study: Linking Strategies for Page Authority Growth Featuring Inseev x Truliant FCU appeared first on BuzzStream.

After a quick audit to determine what could be going wrong, we realized our new backlink and domain acquisition strategy was the problem. Specifically, we didn’t have one – and our competitors did.

Identifying Our Backlink Gap

Taking a look at who was beating us in SERP, we saw that two main brands were hammering us on overall domains linking to them.

One of these brands (let’s refer to it as Competitor 1) was a relatively new website that had acquired a ton of new domains quite quickly. We were shocked that this new website had stolen a big chuck of our SERP out of nowhere, but we quickly realized that its edge on us was the sheer number of domains linking to its site. In a brief period of time, it had actually surpassed G2 Crowd in total number of dofollow domains linking to its site.

The other brand (let’s refer to it as Competitor 2) was a site that has been around much longer than we have, and at the time had nearly three times the overall amount of dofollow domains linking to it.

As of October 2017:

• G2 Crowd had a total of 3,835 dofollow domains
• Competitor 1 had 4,030 (105% of G2 Crowd)
• Competitor 2 had 10,011 (261% of G2 Crowd)

As of September 2018, G2 Crowd had 6,223 (62% year-over-year growth) do-follow domains; we surpassed (and gapped) Competitor 1, which stood at 5,179 (83% of G2 Crowd), and significantly closed the gap on Competitor 2, which sat at 12,800 (205% of G2 Crowd).  

Our growth in dofollow domains didn’t happen overnight. But how did it begin? With a dedicated strategy and a focus on developing new campaigns with backlinks in mind.

Here is what we did.

Identifying an Opportunity Through Ahrefs Research

In October 2017, with our traffic waning, our competitors beating us in backlinks, and lofty year-end goals in our sights, we needed to find strategies that we were fairly certain would work. Late on a Sunday night sitting around an apartment, three of us dug into our site data on Ahrefs. Our goal: to look for content we could replicate that would get backlinks.

We saw a pattern with our “Vanity Grids.”

The Grid is our recognizable visual quadrant that places similar software products head-to-head in their respective categories. The Vanity Grids we’d done in the past grouped products by location or event, rather than by software category (best software in Boston or at Dreamforce, for instance, rather than best CRM platform).

A few of the most backlinked pieces of content on our site were these Vanity Grids based upon a geographic location. In a way, it was a surprise to the group:  If we’re being transparent, these Vanity Grid articles were downright embarrassing. They would cram dozens of product logos, from different SaaS spaces, on a Grid with no context to why they were being compared, with almost no content under the Grid.

Yet they still drove backlinks. We all know that “best of” lists drive links because they draw on the pride of the companies mentioned. Well, these were our “best of” lists.

We theorized that if we took the Vanity Grid concept and fleshed it out into large, pillar page-type reports on 25 American tech hubs and 10 countries, created quality content and an appealing design template, and used our customer review data, we could create a successful campaign that would crush new backlinks.

And it worked.

Building the Project

We’re in a special situation at G2 Crowd. Our platform has an enormous number of user-driven insights; this empowers our research team to create reports and best-of lists that are backed with high data integrity.

A main goal of our website traffic project was to acquire new domains and backlinks. But as a data-driven, users-come-first company, we needed to ensure the project continued with a high-quality and reputable series of reports that we felt comfortable releasing.

(In general, this should be a rule for all types of content production.)

Ranking products from vendors that are also customers can become a tricky (and sticky) situation. We needed to ensure the project was communicated to everyone involved, both internally and externally.

Releasing this much content also required sitting down and scheduling out releases over the course of a month. (I’m very thankful for project managers.)

All in all, this took a lot of (fun) cross-team collaboration. Here is a breakdown of responsibilities:

• The data team pulled the rankings from our database
• Our design team provided feedback on the layout, and created a theme for cover images and graphs that fit our project and style guide
• Marketing sent out vendor communications to products that made the reports
• PR worked with media outlets to acquire media coverage
• The community development team worked to reach out to companies included in the lists to acquire quotes and put together press kits for those companies to share the news (people love when you create content for them!)
• Research team members connected with industry leaders in each city for quotes and insights, and wrote the content
• Editing and publishing front-end designed each individual report in the series (believe me, this took a LOT of time)

While the entire planning and content-creation process was a huge time suck, the efforts paid off. The pieces were some of the best work our content and research teams had ever produced.

Pieces in the American tech scene series included quotes from major players in the SaaS world, timelines that were custom designed and branded by our design team, and company profiles on all the brands listed in our reports.

Promoting and Distribution: Getting Eyes on Our Campaign

As the cliche goes, “build it and they will come.” Many content marketers stress that the most important part of content marketing is creating great content, and benefits will come.

I don’t buy either of those things.

Yes, building great content is extremely important. Probably the most important aspect of content. But if no one sees that great content, who cares? Especially if you’re publishing that content on a site that doesn’t have a high domain rating. A promotional plan is the Ying to great content’s Yang.

Before our content was published, we made sure brands and influencers knew this series was happening. Our PR team pitched to business publications in each city, leading to placements such as Boston’s American Inno and Indianapolis’ TechPoint.

Our marketing team sent out vendor communications to all the companies highlighted in our reports. Included in the vendor comms was a PR kit personalized for those included in the report, including a custom badge highlighting the award, and a prewritten press release and blog announcement.

Our content team connected with influencers and tech leaders in the cities they were responsible for to gather quotes to include in their reports. Through different social media networks and our large network of software connections at G2 Crowd, we were able to gather many well-known thought leaders in different cities.

Once individual city posts went live, we had a huge social push behind them. We crafted tweets from the author of each piece of content that tagged local tech leaders, VCs, top companies and more. This led to social ecosystems grabbing hold of our content, helping us reach our geo-specific targets.

The Campaign’s Impact

The series released over the entire month of January. And once we had visibility into our campaign, the backlinks poured in. The majority came from our vendor communications campaign that included the media and PR kit.

The prewritten press releases were a hit: a win-win for everyone involved.

This strategy enabled the brands receiving recognition to promote their award, while not having to spend the time crafting the announcement. It also allowed us to select the exact anchor text and links we wanted from these domains.

In total, the campaign resulted in over 350 new domains linking to G2 Crowd. A majority of these domains included links not just to our reports, but also to what Google considers our most-valued content: category pages.

The Residual Impact

The campaign was a major success in terms of sessions, backlinks/new domains, brand engagement (specifically with brands that were previously unresponsive), and overall brand recognition.

The campaign also has had a major impact on overall organic traffic here at G2 Crowd. It’s hard to say this specific campaign can cause major bumps in organic traffic as SEO has so many varying factors, but it’s foolish to deny how this wouldn’t be a major influence (that January was by far our biggest traffic month to date).

It also allowed our content team to begin to wrap our minds around what types of content people wanted and would link to.

Our strategy has adapted and evolved over the past year. But examining our past successes, and learning how to replicate those and do them at scale, helped jumpstart our backlink strategy and rejuvenate our organic traffic growth.

The post How G2 Crowd Uses Award Campaigns to Get Backlinks in a Competitive Environment appeared first on BuzzStream.

In the past year, we have decided to dedicate a team to audience development. This team focuses on creating longform content, building reader relationships, and (of course) link building. Over the past year, our 35 websites have earned 707 links total from bloggers. 405 of those links were to our top websites. These are the links I examined for this article.

Links We Earned This Year

From January 1, 2017 until April 26, 2018, our editorial team has earned over 700 links to our websites and content that our bloggers told us about. My company manages 35 websites, meaning each site received around 10 to 20 links. For the purposes of this blog post I examined the incoming links to the 6 top sites. I looked at the first 300 of these links to see what our network was linking to and found the following:

• Branded links, or links directly to the homepage, made up a bulk of these links at 29.14%
• This was closely followed by project and recipe roundups or lists (23.71%). Working with a strong blogger base means this time-honored linking tradition is still going strong for us.
• The other big chunk of these links were to the blogger’s own content on our site or their profiles (18.36%).
  

While a wide variety of content earned us links this year, we discovered three strategies that consistently brought in high-quality, long-standing links.

1. Appreciation and Best Of Posts – Earning Links from Your Network

Nearly 9% of all of the links we earned in 2017 and 2018 thus were to a handful of “best blogger” pages to our sites. These lists are not simply round ups of bloggers we like in the industry, but instead are round ups of bloggers we work with on a regular basis. These collections prominently feature our favorite video channels, collaborators, and more. Instead of reaching out for the first time, these pages leveraged our existing relationships. They promoted our friends and told their stories.

Examples

https://www.allfreesewing.com/Basics-and-Tutorials/Top-25-Sewing-Blogs

https://www.allfreecrochet.com/Miscellaneous-Crochet/Top-25-Crochet-Blogs

Why it Worked

This content worked because it utilized pre-existing relationships with our contributors instead of just wishing for a link-for-a-link relationship with a stranger or new connection. We work closely with our blogger network and these posts were initially designed as a thank you and a shot out. Since this content was about them instead of simply mentioning them flippantly, people were excited to announce that they made they list. Creating content about your users, contributors, and connections shows you appreciate them and that genuine content and connection encourages linking. You’re telling their story. Not just baiting them with a PR mention.

How it Could Work for Other Brands

While we run a pretty specific type of website with a heavy amount of user-generated content, this process and general concept could easily be applied to plenty of other brands. Consider creating content about your users and customers. SaaS companies, for example, could utilize case studies to highlight the work their favorite customers are doing. Blog posts like 5 Ways Our Customers Are Transforming Their Industry with XYZ gives them a genuine, interesting brand mention that will likely lead to links and shares. Retailers could easily create content around particular branches and stores, earning local links and media mentions. What do you really love about your customers? What story do they have to tell? These stories are engaging, interesting, and linkable!

2. Hyper Specific How To and Q&A Articles- High Quality Linking Practices

While this type of content did not earn us a high volume of links (about 3%), it did earn us the highest quality of link. Rather than linking to our homepage or a simple brand mention, our reference and how to content outperformed all other links when it came to the link itself. These pages are consistently linked to with their title or exact keyword matching for our intended keyword cluster. If you’re hoping to boost your authority in your niche or a particular topic, this is the way to go.

Our top content for this particular content type was NOT a general or all encompassing topic like how to cook steak or how to crochet. Instead, the content that did the best here was for hyper specific skills and techniques or specific questions that are not often answered in those other general, higher level content. It helped solve one particular problem.

Examples
https://www.allfreeknitting.com/Knitting-Tutorials/Condo-Knitting
https://www.recipelion.com/Cookies-and-Bars/No-Bake-Cookies-Too-Dry-Gooey
https://www.recipelion.com/Casserole-Recipes/Thaw-Frozen-Hash-Browns  

Why it Worked
This content works on several levels. First and foremost, it is addressing an obscure question that by and large has yet to be covered on its own. While many articles on no bake cookies, for example, may mention issues with consistency and texture, a thorough explanation of them is a unique and engaging piece of content. These always do well on social. It answers a question that might have have been answered already.

Secondly, this content is much easier to link to than the dreaded listicle. This article provides a unique value that makes it very linkable. When reaching out, we are able to mention that we have a thorough explanation for a technique or recipe that might be worth mentioning.

We have also had success with the gentle nudge that the blogger failed to mention something in their recipe and providing the research for them. “I noticed you didn’t mention whether or not to thaw the frozen potatoes for your casserole. Is this something you would recommend? We actually just wrote an article about this since some of our readers were asking.” This allows you to create content that is adding to their own and participate in a conversation.

This type of content also does an awesome job of earning links naturally over time.

How it Could Work for Other Brands

What is often called pillar or reference content is not a brand new concept for any content marketer. We have all worked on creating this higher level, long-form content at one point or another. What is important to note about this strategy is the specificity. It solves a short-term and very specific problem a user might have, something that might be mentioned in these longer form pieces of content (and linked to)! Finding these topics can be tricky, but there are resources out there. Try perusing the “people also ask” sections of the search engine result page or the tool AnswerthePublic.com.

The trick here is to find a great topic that aligns with your goals. Our readers for our knitting site, for example, are generally retired women with limited income. Condo knitting is a vintage style of knitting that was popular in the 70s, so it offered a nice #throwbackthursday vibe. Our readers don’t tend to love higher end materials, so writing an article about how to care for expensive alpaca or cashmere yarn would not have done as well for our intended audience.

SaaS companies could do this by writing a shorter, snackable article about a specific solution their platform offers (like Buzzstream locating email addresses). Retailers can easily create articles on how to care for their product. Remember to find a specific topic. We’re not looking for “how to care for a mattress” and instead looking for something like “how soon after buying a new mattress should you flip it” or “can sleeping on a short mattress cause back problems”. As an added bonus these low stake, content snacks tend to do fairly well organically when you find the right topic. This article about thawing frozen hash browns we created last week is already receiving about 10 or more organic clicks a day and it took the team about an hour to put together. Staffing wise, it will likely pay for itself pretty quickly in leads and ad dollars.

3. Collaborative Content and Promotions – Working with your linkers!

Two of our biggest projects every year are National Craft Month and National Sewing Month. These month-long promotions and content calendars provide 30 days of new content to our readers as well as a myriad of giveaways, freebies, and more. Our entire editorial team gets on board to create the content, finding bloggers to help with projects, and promote the content. These large scale projects are link-earning machines. This year alone National Sewing Month earned us about 25 links while National Craft Month (on our biggest site) far exceeded that by earning around 3-5 links per project, earning us just under 90 links in total! These promotions consist of brand new high quality content created by our editorial staff as well as collaborators. With such a big group working together, the link building is natural and expected.

Examples

https://www.allfreesewing.com/Miscellaneous-Projects/National-Sewing-Month-2017

https://www.favecrafts.com/Most-Popular-Crafts/National-Craft-Month-2018

Why it Worked

Rather than focusing solely on bringing links inward, these month-long promotions focus on creating content with creators we love. They share projects on our sites in full as well as promote them on their blogs. Readers have the option to win a ton of prizes. We send out social media blasts, tag everyone, and create a community around one promotion. Rather than just linking to us, collaborators on these projects feel as if they are part of something. They submit project ideas and applications to be apart of the promotion, giving it just a little exclusivity. It is something they are proud to be apart of and want to share. This means promoting their projects on our domain is also promoting their very own brand.

How it Could Work for Other Brands

While brands might not have as strong as a collaborator or blogger network to pull from, the overall idea of creating a community and an event instead of single pieces of content is easily transferable. Depending on your goals and resources, it would be just as easy for companies to create week-long promotions showcasing new content from talented collaborators and freelancers. Digital promotions like this one give collaborators a feeling of community. If they are part of something, they’re likely to promote and link to their own content as well as those within their network. SaaS companies could easily create a week of webinars and retailers or brands could easily borrow from influencer campaigns to create a week of DIY ideas or recipes using their products.

Creating week-long or month-long content calendars also has the added bonus of inspiring internal promotion. If your company does something new and exciting, your staff is more likely to share the engaging content on their personal channels and blogs. Organic social promotion is just as useful for brand promotions as link building even if it is a little more ephemeral.

Build Relationships and Links Will Follow

My team creates a wide variety of content with several goals in mind. We’ve created a lot of longform and reference articles for our site to add value for our readers and promote our Youtube content and videos. We’ve created shorter listicles for users who are just looking to browse. We’ve even created content focused solely on building links that involved a lot of ego-baiting within listicles. Many bloggers are willing to link back and share the love, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this is because of our existing relationships and not the content itself.

After a year of link building and hundreds of reach outs, our main takeaway is that curating excellent content and working closely with the collaborators we love is the best way to earn links. Working with other content creators to create content either through shared promotions or offering them something extra (like a niche reference article) is going to earn you more links than a 1,000 cold emails ever will.

The post 3 Types of Content That Earned Prime Publishing Their Best Links in 2017 (and 2018) appeared first on BuzzStream.

From my experience, when you first start a company, focusing on the core competencies and building systems and features are usually the top priorities, to the point where everything else gets added to a to-do later list. As you grow, there’s a tendency to wish time was dedicated to other pursuits. Like investing, marketing may start small, but it needs to be consistent in order to see growth and results.

“Shiny new startup syndrome”

If I had to give a piece of advice to teams just getting started in their company’s journey, it’d be this: Beware the “Shiny new startup syndrome” that often accompanies the excitement of beginning something new.

Just because your company is breaking into a new territory or working with cutting edge tech, does not mean you should overextend your budget. Start small and grow until you can afford new technology. For example, when we were first starting out at Exercise.com and CarInsuranceComparison.com, we managed our outreach in spreadsheets and Gmail.

If you’ve succumbed to the shiny new startup syndrome before, it’s not too late. There are many bootstrap marketing options to use, but the key is to actually start.

Once you start rolling with your marketing efforts, it’s time to find companies that align with your growth strategy. For us, we knew it was time to start looking when we had outgrown our spreadsheets and Gmail approach. Though it was cost-effective, in order to keep growing we needed a much more efficient way to send and track our outreach that could involve the whole team.

That’s where BuzzStream came in.

Here are three reasons we chose BuzzStream to launch our growth strategy:

1. Ask (for support, features, and solutions to problems), and you will receive

Back in 2016, our slow and steady marketing approach was making good strides. CarInsuranceComparison.com had a few viral articles, and we needed to find a better way to organize outreach with our 500+ other websites.

Our CMO had used BuzzStream when it first came out in 2008, and after doing some Googling, we decided to give it a try. Slowly, we started to implement BuzzStream into our existing workflow.

Initially, we choose BuzzStream because of their features like the BuzzMarker and the link change status reporting, making prospecting faster and making it easier to keep track of our link building efforts. But what has kept us with BuzzStream is their problem solving. We’re able to submit build requests for features. We’ve reached out to BuzzStream’s support team a few times (e.g., feature request, product question, account upgrade question) since our join date, and every single time we’ve been met with respect and cooperation.

Kristen from BuzzStream is a boss at making sure we get all of our questions answered.

It’s no wonder this company, who helps us build relationships through their tech, is so good at building their own relationships through their tech.

Not to mention, the development team is incredibly thorough and thoughtful when building features we requested.

We had asked for a way to manage all link-building outreach. This feature was critical for our company because we send a lot of outreach for different marketing campaigns, and it was challenging to track where we were with each campaign. Not only did the the BuzzStream development team build this feature, they even walked me through it prior to its launch!

Since this new feature was delivered, we’ve been able to track our different campaigns with ease and the results have been astounding. The automation has made our lives easier, ultimately saving us time that we can use to work on other valuable tasks.

2. All-in-one solution = More $$$ saved

Before some recent updates to BuzzStream, my team was using a mixture of products to create a solution to our goals. It worked, but it was time consuming to switch from product to product, and of course the cost was not as low as it could be.

BuzzStream was previously just one part of this multi-faceted mixture, until they released their Sequencing and Bulk Send features. These niche features, as well as others released subsequently, have allowed my team to reduce our reliance on competing products.

Because of BuzzStream’s continued innovation as an all-in-one solution, we’ve saved money in subscription fees for other products, freeing up budget to invest in other areas. Furthermore, the improved outreach management has allowed us to focus our time on other marketing projects while never needing to put a hold on our link building.

We can now continue confidently innovating and growing, all while knowing that BuzzStream is doing the same.

3. Gain insight into my team’s achievements and connections

Our team loves this old proverb: “What gets measured gets done,” and with BuzzStream, we’re better able to do both.

As you can imagine, tracking outreach performance when you’re using spreadsheets and your Gmail is less than pleasant. BuzzStream, on the other hand, boosts accountability on my team as we’re able to easily track goals and tasks together. The built-in reporting options not only allow me to see who is accomplishing their tasks, but also who is hitting their goals by using reports like the Team Leaderboard report.

With these new insights, I can easily manage my teams and redirect their focus when needed. BuzzStream has laid the foundation for my team to execute in an organized fashion, as team members know what to do and when they are achieving results, allowing every member of the team to be captain of their own ship as it were. We’ve seen increases across the board in what’s being accomplished with this new transparency and buy-in.

We’ve also appreciated BuzzStream’s a la carte account options. Most companies do not have enough capital to bring on a full-time marketing team — we were no different. With several pricing options and the ability to add more users when needed, BuzzStream has saved us money on subscription fees and gave us confidence to know they’ll be ready for our future growth.

Organizing my outreach and team has never been easier. The team at BuzzStream has injected excitement into building relationships. Check out what they’ve been up to recently and, if you are a startup like us, don’t overlook how they’re growing, too. BuzzStream isn’t just another subscription-based product, it’s also a company to model and grow with.

The post How Two Startups Streamlined Their Organizations and Outreach to Drive More Links appeared first on BuzzStream.

Google has written and tweeted about the importance of generating inbound links to your website. It helps drive referral traffic to your site and more importantly, it helps tell Google that your site is valued, raising your Domain Authority.

At Siege, we’ve found link building through personalized outreach campaigns has helped build 38 links with an average 50+ Domain Authority for one B2B site.

Our view on content is essentially this take on a common old saying: If a great piece of content is created on your site, but no one sees it, does it really exist?

In Google’s eyes, it basically does not. If no one is linking to your site, it’s as if your content is created in a vacuum.

So, the way we get Google (and the rest of world) to see our client’s content and link to it is by pulling up our sleeves and doing some old fashioned outreach. We email hundreds of prospective bloggers, journalists and website owners that might enjoy the content and ask them to link to it.

That is where content promotion with BuzzStream comes in.

Personalized Mailing at Scale

In the early days, we relied on countless Google Sheets, each manually updated, to keep track of our outreach. BuzzStream allows us to take this headache out of the equation and powers our team members to manage these outreach emails as if they were clients in a sales funnel.

Sending about 100+ emails for every project can be a handful for anyone to track in one project, let alone five or ten per month going at the same time. Having the ability to track opens, clicks, and even responses right in BuzzStream automatically saves the headache of manual data input as well as the potential for error.

But, where you really begin to find the value is through building relationships with journalists and bloggers.

Personalizing to Build Relationships with Bloggers and Journalists

Since we focus so heavily on outreach, personalizing emails is key to building relationships with journalists and bloggers. If we were to send a mass email out to all of our prospect lists, our link rate would sit at just about zero percent. So, we look to BuzzStream to help us do this in a cost effective manner.

The Dynamic Fields option helps bring in information like Website Name and First Name, or even create our own custom fields.

Having the ability to email in real time while prospecting with BuzzMarker gives our team the ability to refer to information on a page, without having to open a new window or tab. (If you’ve ever tried to do this type of work without a dual-monitor setup, the BuzzMarker is a true game changer.)

The time that we save going back and forth between spreadsheets and web pages allows us to dig deeper when personalizing an email for a prospect. This helps establish a real connection with the person we are emailing, which helps us continue to foster these relationships.

We’ve sent tens of thousands of outreach emails and greatly attribute our high link success rate to this ease of use.

For an agency with 50+ employees, each sending out 100+ emails in each campaign, the more relationships we have, the bigger and better our overall agency prospect pool becomes.

Teaming Up At the Agency Level to Foster Relationships

When prospecting, we can see who has already linked to similar projects. These are people that we know are more apt to share a link to our project. This eliminates precious hours spent trying to find relevant blogs for specific verticals.

It also greatly improves our success rate. Instead of a cold email, we can send something like this:

This allows us to continue to build relationships with journalists or bloggers who are consistently looking for interesting/unique content.

The ‘History’ feature in BuzzStream lets us easily see who else has reached out to a particular prospect and, more importantly, what was already said in an email. If we see that an email has been sent, but hasn’t gotten a response, we can tweak the email copy moving forward. We can also check to see which journalist or blogger was emailed.

Sometimes a second team member will dig into the site closer and find an even more relevant contact, increasing our trust with that contact. If there is one thing journalists hate is if they are getting pitched something that isn’t in their “beat”.

For instance, one of our newer team members wasn’t getting any traction or response from Inc.com for one project. Another team member quickly realized that the email being used previously was just a general pitch email.

From here, the other team member was able to troubleshoot without even consulting the other members. She then dove back in and found a personal email for the journalist.

Another thing they hate is being pitched to too much. Sometimes enough is enough. By seeing how many times a prospect has been pitched without any response, we can easily gauge if it’s time to move on.

Using Relationships to Draw Insights at an Agency Level

Taking a look at a more macro level, BuzzStream helps us work together to draw insights.

For example, when analyzing the performance of our outreach we uncovered insights like optimal subject line length or even best performing topics in a given industry. We can also look what type of content is doing well, and where we have the stronger relationships with bloggers or journalists.

For example, if we find that we are producing content for an business technology site that gets a lot of links from HR blogs, we may continue to brainstorm ideas in that HR vertical.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that when building an agency, you need to think about how you can be as efficient as possible in all avenues. BuzzStream has made it easy for us to bake software right into our workflow and has become an essential tool in our value as an agency. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to onboard new hires, saving us valuable time and money.

Every link we earn is a new relationship, data insight, and proof of concept for future ideas. After almost four years with BuzzStream, it has become a tool that we can’t live without.

The post How Siege Media Uses BuzzStream to Leverage Cross-Client Relationships appeared first on BuzzStream.

Coming from a country where endless phone calls to journalists and influencers, befriending them on Facebook, and ‘bribing’ them with small gifts are accepted outreach tactics, I was only familiar with these aggressive approaches, which were very different from my personal idea of leveraging soft skills and building real relationships.

Very soon, however, it became clear to me that the digital outreach assistance a tool like BuzzStream only facilitates my job and humanizes my efforts, putting it at the top of my list of PR resources I trust.

How we pitch different audiences with BuzzStream

Working for a tech start-up specialising in custom designed engagement rings, I have many varied outreach techniques at my disposal. Our BuzzStream database has become an endless source for organisation, exploration and planning for all of our outreach activity and influencer relationships.

We organise our outreach into three main categories, each one requiring a specific approach. The categories we normally target are:

• Business and digital marketing journalists
• Niche media outlets
• Lifestyle/fashion/celebrity media

Let’s dive into each audience, and our best tips on how to reach each one.

How we reach out to business and digital marketing journalists

Things are relatively easy when we reach out to business and/or tech media outlets, as we have a lot to share about our experience as a tech startup company and the key tech functionalities that enable our business.

Our experience has been that business and digital marketing journalists are usually the most approachable and the most responsive. Because of the ever-changing nature of their field, these guys are always looking for the latest news and are really great to work with.

We make sure we know who we’re talking to

As with other media sectors, the best thing to do first is try to identify the right person to contact and figure out what they write about. We all know that journalists receive tons of information daily and your email needs to be special to them in some way.

Thus, do your research, don’t just send a press release. BuzzStream allows me to be personal, yet efficient in how I plan and send my emails to these journalists and bloggers.

We pay attention to our subject lines

As seen here, we have selected only 9 people for this outreach piece but we got 100% opens. The subject contained the three most SEO-friendly words for our type of business ( tech, jewellery, startup) and we quickly managed to engage with a short but prominent business media list of journalists.

We use Twitter to supplement our outreach

Twitter is a great way to say hi to someone who’s work you’ve been following and been interested in. This is how we got ourselves a short publication in Virgin.com and this one had to happen really fast. Literally, 5-minutes-fast. We mentioned the content manager in a tweet, saying ‘’Thanks for the follow X, also enjoy the Virgin posts.’’ Then we immediately replied to a journorequest they had posted.

In a few minutes we had exchanged direct messages, emails and got ourselves a follow link where we talked about tech tools we used in our job.

What helped us complete this outreach piece was the perfect timing to match a specific journalist’s field of competence with our own ability to deliver a brief and concrete response.

We find more influencers using BuzzStream Discovery

If we are going for a news item that has to reach as many people as possible, BuzzStream Discovery helps you organise a fairly massive stock of potential contacts, from which you’ll have to select the most relevant ones and familiarise yourself with their previous work.

We keep track of conversations and follow-up

After reaching out to that group of journalists, the rest is just to keep track of responses – hopefully a number of those guys will get back at you and if you’re persistent and show a genuine understanding of their audience and style, eventually some will. In my experience, building a relationship with a business or tech media representative is easy once you’ve kindled their interest.

Usually, due to the short deadlines those media stick to, you can start a relationship relatively soon. They are very responsive on Twitter and LinkedIn and unlike bloggers who only ‘’heart ‘’ tweets, business and marketing-orientated journalists tweet back are much more to the point. Do not waste their time with long overtures and creative writing – they will appreciate your contribution only if it is direct and straightforward.

Concrete example: Seedrs campaign garners increases in social engagement and links

We recently launched a major crowdfunding campaign at Seedrs and I relied heavily on BuzzStream to plan, structure and follow up on the people from my media list.

The round is still half-way through but we can already observe several favourable stats.

• We have raised brand awareness among jewellery writers, and more importantly – potential investors.
• Social media engagement increased by up to 20%
• Do-follow links to our Seedrs campaign increased by 30%

By following the tips we covered above, we see that whoever you’re reaching out to, make sure you get to know them first. That will give you the best shot at building a relationship, and seeing victories across different success metrics.

How we reach out to niche media outlets

Another audience that we pitch to a lot is niche media outlets, and when pitching a new product or when you have very specific news to share, we’ve learned that imagery is key. At Taylor & Hart, we specialise in bespoke engagement rings, so high-resolution and well-styled photography is a major factor when we promote our products.

Although we do have collection rings, we usually deliver on specific unique customer requests and craft our jewelry according to our customers’ specific ideas. This is where CAD designs and 3D printing come in handy and play a crucial part in outreach as one of our topical areas of interest.

It is then important to find niche media outlets that would be interested in our products – in our case it’s anything wedding and jewelry related. Those are the guys that stand between the business and the fashion side of companies. They appreciate both our beautiful designs and business model and strategy, so we need to impress them.

Internally, we secretly call them Big Easy’s, but believe you me, easy is a massive understatement. It is a matter of professionalism to be following the niche media in your field and initiate interaction at any possible chance so you don’t get out of sight.

We keep emails to the point, and let images do the talking

When pitching a product to these niche outlets, keep your emails nice and short and make sure you send your imagery both as an attached file and as a visible inserted low-res copy in the body of the email.

This piece illustrated above was about the endless possibilities of custom design. We pitched it with a giphy and lots of attached images, and earned a mention on the Huffington Post Blog. This campaign a long-term project which will certainly continue to be a source of education and inspiration for jewellery addicts.

We’re not afraid to start building a relationship from the ground up

Last thing when pitching these niche outlets: As a PR specialist, I know sending that first email can be hard.

But don’t sweat it! Do your best and hit send. The more you get out there, the more you’ll start establishing good relations with niche media, and that means you’ll have the prestige and authority you need when selling high-value products.

How we reach out to lifestyle, fashion, and celebrity media

The hardest part in my job is to reach out to lifestyle, fashion, and celebrity media. This is where it hits you that you can’t rely solely on your BuzzMarker when pitching a story to someone who probably receives dozens of hot-topic emails every day.

We don’t fear rejection. We follow-up (nicely)

Yes, my BuzzStream secret stash is full of bloggers and influencers, and I have access to key names in every possible lifestyle and fashion magazine, but so do hundreds of PR specialists. A hard lesson I had to learn was to be rejected and be rejected ten of times before a small success actually occurs. Initially I’d take it personally and would grow discouraged immediately.

This is how discouraged you can get when it comes to pitching lifestyle and celebrity news.

But then I learned to follow up in the most friendly tone possible but remain relaxed and prepared for never hearing back from the other side.

We give relationships time to grow

Persistence is key in this type of communication, and no digital tool can help you in get more replies than time. PR is about building professional relationships and solid trust and those take a lot of time, maybe a career of time.

This is how I established my own outreach credo. I researched those journalists and scrolled down through a great deal of their tweets. I took notes and read their articles. I hardly ever resort to email templates.

We know when to use templates, and when to send unique, heavily personalized emails

Paradoxically, the template feature that BuzzStream boasts is fantastic, but my experience shows that the individual approach is much more efficient when it comes to this type of audience. Templates are good reference points, they allow you to keep track of your relations from their very beginning, but I think one should be very careful using them, especially when reaching out to this type of media, as you may overdo it with impersonal, lifeless sentences that will reveal the automation.

There might be nothing of ‘Eureka’ status in what I’ve said above but the point is that you can make the most of your BuzzStream only if you actively engage in its use and pick carefully from its immensely resourceful database. I’ll be the last to deny the power of technology, furthermore, I love finding out about tools that make our life easier. I take advantage of them but also don’t let them take control over my job, it can’t do without me just as I can’t without it.

The post How Taylor & Hart Segmented Their Outreach to Increase Social Engagement, Replies, and Links appeared first on BuzzStream.

A few months ago I became the Head of Partner Marketing for Material, a software startup that focuses on letting people create affordable ecommerce websites. We had lofty outreach goals, and we were launching from square one. We wanted to make sure we were starting out strong from the get-go, which is why we decided to use BuzzStream to help us build our brand from the ground up.

Here are five ways BuzzStream has helped us expand our reach:

1. It helps us find the “ins” in our industry

I’m a networking pro, but there’s always someone you haven’t talked to, or even encountered. This is especially true in the world of entrepreneurship, where there are new, valuable influencers popping up on a daily basis. This is why BuzzStream’s Discovery tool is so magical for us. All I need to do is enter in the term we want to network for, and voila: I have an entire list of influencers in front of me.

I’ve only been using BuzzStream for a few weeks, and have already locked down several amazing bloggers to collaborate with. With the Discovery product, it was easy to enter a specific topic I was seeking guest writers for, and quickly have a list of candidates right in front of me. In the past, finding a credible guest blogger took hours of Google searching and LinkedIn digging. With BuzzStream, I’ve been able to contact credible writers within minutes, and often receive responses within a day or two.

Additionally, many of these writers are people we wouldn’t have found without Discovery.

For example, I wanted to find someone to compose a guest post about how entrepreneurs can use Kickstarter to raise money. Discovery helped me find a board game company that used Kickstarter to fund their projects, and I was able to reach out to them about composing a piece for us about their experience. Pre-Discovery, I would have never thought to tap the board game community for guest content! It’s definitely a tool that’s opened doors and expanded our contributor base.

2. It shows us which leads are worth pursuing

SEO has been an important part of our strategy since Day 1, but it’s a challenge to manage the organic presence of a new brand. Not only is your site’s authority important, but you also want to be reaching out to other sites with high levels of trustworthiness.

Initially, this was hard to gauge; I’d find sites that looked professional and established, only to find out later that Google was not a fan of them, and that they shouldn’t have been our partners in the first place. (Another thing about SEO: Once you get bad links, they’re really, really hard to remove.)

With BuzzStream I can see which connections are worth pursuing at a glance, which makes Google (and us) very happy campers. All I have to do is import a list of websites, and boom: there’s a tidy lineup of each one’s domain authority. Not only does this make it simple to know which leads to first contact, but it’s also helpful in culling sites that have low DAs. Nowadays I can easily see where my efforts are best spent! (And — perhaps more importantly — where not to waste time.)

3. It helps us keep a dialogue going

One of the most difficult parts of networking is juggling a ton of contacts at once. At any given moment, I’m usually batting emails back and forth with at least 30 people, not to mention reaching out to dozens of leads outside the digital space. Even the most savvy PR person can let contacts slip through the cracks, and it’s easy to lose track of the folks who still haven’t responded, or who want to talk at a later date.

In the past, I used to track my contacts with a spreadsheet. But that soon turned into a many-headed monster with an unruly amount of tabs and columns, not to mention atrocious navigability. I would have to go in and meticulously log each interaction with people I’d reached out to, and squeeze in conversation notes next to their names. It became tedious and time consuming to track down people I’d spoken with, and all too often I would lose crucial information in a sea of cells.

BuzzStream helps me keep an eye on contacts that may not always be at the front of my radar, and I can keep easy track of progress with a quick glance at the (delightfully color-coded) Relationship Stage column. Additionally, I can add nifty little notes within a contact’s page, and easily search for anyone I previously emailed. Now I even have a weekly ritual where I just sort my list by people I’m attempting to reach, and drop them a line again. It’s been a great way to stay on people’s radars and be persistent about outreach!

4. It lets us (quickly) know if our efforts are working

I like to find tools that are going to do the more detailed legwork of networking for me. Know what I really hate to do? Manually check partner websites to make sure that they’re actually linking back to us. It’s a time consuming task, and building an ecommerce company doesn’t leave room for slow networking. Which is why BuzzStream gets to be my loyal grunt work minion who will track linkbacks (and email them to me!) with just the click of a button.

We’ve also gathered great insights from our BuzzStream reports, which have incredible built-in features that make reporting ultra-customizable. We’re able to build reports with any number of widgets that provide detailed insights, which range from seeing how our contacts are progressing to tracking the overall authority of the links we’re building. There’s even a widget for determining which email subject lines are working (and which ones aren’t), which makes high-volume outreach projects more effective. What’s the point in emailing 1,500 people if no one is going to open your message? BuzzStream helps us not only avoid this problem, but also improve the overall quality of our contact methods.

5. It makes life easier

The Buzzmarker tool is the fastest and easiest method I’ve found for collecting outreach data. Not only does it uncover contact information that can otherwise be tough to find, but it also helps me easily add a site’s/person’s info to our account without having to manually retype everything.

If I find a website I’m interested in, the Buzzmarker wrangles important contact information, social handles and other data with the click of a button. This has made gathering contact details for massive numbers of sites much more easy, fast and efficient. (And gives me more time to actually be doing outreach.) It’s only been a short amount of time, but BuzzStream and the Buzzmarker have already helped us make some great connections in our industry.

The post 5 Ways One Startup Is Using BuzzStream to Maximize Their Potential appeared first on BuzzStream.