Outreach Tips for Successful Digital PR

Impactful outreach is a crucial ingredient of any successful creative digital PR campaign. It’s no good having a newsworthy asset and piece of content if you get your pitch wrong. Digital PRs can spend months working on a campaign, researching data, designing assets, sourcing quotes and writing content – the last thing you want is for this to be let down by poor outreach. 

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ways in which the Embryo digital PR team ensures that we get the most out of our outreach. 

1. Be strategic when building your media list

Before you even send an email, it’s important to build a comprehensive list of contacts that you think would be interested in covering your story. Make it too small and you’re going to limit your success before you even begin outreaching. 

But while there’s a temptation to simply make your media list as long and extensive as possible, you don’t want to be contacting publications and journalists that simply aren’t relevant to your story. Doing this is just going to bloat your outreach and leave you with a bunch of unopened sent emails. 

2. Try to open up a dialogue with your contacts

It’s true that a lot of journalists that cover your story may do so without ever replying to your email. This is to be expected, but where possible you should always try to open up a conversation with the journalists you contact – regardless of whether they have accepted or rejected your story. 

By creating familiarity with journalists from a range of different publications, you’ll open up new opportunities. If your story is rejected, you might be able to find out what kind of stories they are interested in. You might be able to get inside access to other journalists that will be valuable contacts for future campaigns. 

At the very least, getting to know specific journalists will increase your chances of securing future opportunities with those people – you’ll no longer just be a name they don’t know. 

3. Take time to study your open rate, click rate and response rate

Success in digital PR is often defined by how much coverage you can secure – but the truth is that there are a range of valuable metrics that you should be keeping an eye on. 

Open rates, click rates and response rates aren’t just something for you to report to your client on. These are important indicators of how successful your campaign is while it’s still going on. After a day of outreach, take time to study these. Is your open rate lower than expected? A little tweak to your subject line and intro paragraph could be all it takes to push this number up a little bit. If no one is clicking on your link, you might want to change its location in the email. 

By keeping an eye on these numbers while you’re actually performing your outreach, you can be adaptive and reactive and improve your pitch as the campaign rolls on. 

Get in touch with Embryo today

Want to find out more about how the Embryo digital PR team pitch our successful and creative campaigns? Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help boost your brand exposure, raise your authority, and secure your business coverage on leading media publications.