How To Create a Cutting Edge Digital PR Strategy for 2026

Heat. Heat. [music] [music] [music] Hello and welcome to the dojo research marketing podcast by Exposure Ninja. My name is Dale Davies. I'm the head of marketing at Exposure Ninja and I'm joined by Charlie Martin, our CEO. Charlie, what is digital PR and why is it so important? So, digital PR is commonly thought of as its own thing, but really in marketing, I consider it part of a really strong SEO and content marketing campaign. And digital PR covers quite a lot of different areas when we think about it in this context. So some people think of PR more in the traditional sense of public relations, but actually digital PR encompasses things like link building and guest posting, which are traditionally thought more of as SEO tactics, but actually in a very well orchestrated content campaign, they should all be working together as part of digital PR. But there's also a sort of side of it that is journalists working with journalists, outreach to journalists, what might be called news hacking or newsjacking depending if you're doing it proactively or reactively to what's already happening in the news. And there's also a sort of um softer side to it as well which is around building relationships with certain publications. So that you might be publishing there long-term doing some thought leadership pieces and those thought leadership pieces might be on some of your own channels as well. So things like LinkedIn or third party websites where you regularly have publications as an author. So it's sort of encompassing the link building, the brand mentions, the PR and the thought leadership that someone in a business might be doing. Why is it important? It's actually incredibly important to a successful organic campaign, but it's also incredibly important in a slightly less measurable way to how the number of people that actually buy from your business make that decision to purchase with you. And that's going to be very different depending on what the business does and where that thought leadership actually comes in. So for example, in a lot of B2B businesses, there's going to be a large segment of thought leadership going on on the LinkedIn side as part of digital PR to influence leads to come over the line, for example. However, BTOC might be totally different. We might be seeing thought leadership that goes more into YouTube video type of content that goes more into social side that goes more into getting mainstream publications and really saturating that area with certain messages with certain branding with the brand lines about certain products or whatever it is, however they position and describe themselves in the market to actually then get consumers to make sure that that is the top of mind brand and digital PR is soant important because when someone is making a purchasing decision, they're not making that decision 100% of what they see on your own website. They're also making that decision off of what they see on third party websites, on review sites elsewhere across the internet when we're talking about digital PR, but also, if we're honest, offline as well. what they hear from friends, what they hear from neighbors, what they see on billboards or more traditional types of marketing often comes into this too. Is digital PR an apparatus to use to get broader kind of brand awareness at the earliest stage of the buyer journey or can it also be a useful tool for lead generation too because you mentioned in there about digital PR usage through LinkedIn in different formats can can lead to lead generation is it as equally uh strong as a lead generation tool alone can you just use it for that or would you use it for both I honestly think it's possible to use it for both and I Brands that are earlier into working on their digital PR often find it more of a struggle to get the ball rolling to actually get the fires burning and get publications. Whereas actually once you're already more established and you've been doing some PR, it can become easier to then get more references, more links, more mentions, more features, whatever it is that you're aiming for because you've already built up that sort of thought leadership. Particularly if you have a couple of figureheads in the business who are being quoted or commenting or writing articles, making videos, whatever it is that they're comfortable with, then it becomes easier because that person starts to become known. And then other publications, other journalists, editors are like, "Ah, that would be a fantastic person to have quote for the content that I'm writing." And you can you can find that you can build from there. But I think there are also clever and creative ways to do PR campaigns that don't feel like that initial trudging through the mud of doing singular articles, singular posts, singular pieces of thought leadership all the time. Actually, once you really get the fires burning, the best kinds of PR are the ones that build momentum for themselves and they actually start creating more links, more articles, more people requesting quotes for you, requesting people to come and speak on certain topics because they're like, "Ah, amazing. This person, this business has something interesting to say about this specific topic or subject area." And then once you've got that kind of traction or it might just be that you've got a really interesting topic that your business has got some interesting data for example that lots of journalists want to publish that they think wow this would actually be an interesting article for my readers. And once you've already got that then some of the work starts to be done for you. It feels less like you're the one who's constantly like searching and trying to find publications and you feel a bit more like you've got some publications coming to you asking you for quotes which is a much nicer place to be but it takes a while to build towards something like that. So let's say the two choices are between doing a couple of different digital PR campaigns across the year. Maybe you've got enough capacity you can do a new campaign every month or a new one every quarter versus you can do one across an entire year and that's your thing. You just you talk about the main topic uh for a year and you keep putting stuff out between those two choices. If you're a smaller and mediumsiz business, do you have to pick one or the other? And if you're a larger kind of enterprise, do you only go in on the full year this is the only story we want to be known for or can you do a bit of both? I think you have to do a bit of both. And the reason I say that is because most businesses when it comes to digital PR will be more likely to have success with something that already strikes the news and it may not be a topic or a trend that they are leading on. And there will be times where you run a digital PR campaign, particularly if you're enterprise level, and you've got something very interesting to put out there because you've got a bit more resource to do that research, that data, look at those consumer trends, whatever it is. Most of the time when you run, if you run a singular campaign and that's where you're putting all of your eggs into that one basket, you run a very high risk that it doesn't stick. And when it comes to PR, it's very difficult to predict something definitely sticking. So you can have a couple of ideas that you think could do well, but actually whether they catch on, you don't have that much control over. So when I'm saying you want to do both, it's because you do actually want someone in your business being on top of trends that are coming out in the news where actually you might just be able to comment on something. You might be able to get someone in your team in a certain department to comment on something that's in the news and get features. And you don't want to cut your nose off despite your face by deciding that you're only doing one campaign and it's the campaign that your team have decided. Something else brilliant that is super relevant to what you do comes up in the news and then you're ignoring it. But your competitors won't be ignoring it because many businesses will be thinking about how to do both that reactive side responding to what's already coming out, what's trending, what editors and journalists want to talk about as well as the proactive side like what does the business have to say? What are the positioning statements you want to put out there? What's the new product that you're launching? What do you want to be known as? Do you want to be seen as very innovative in the sector that you're in? So you're putting out certain news items about innovations that you're doing internally, that kind of campaign as well. And then there's also some kinds of businesses are probably thinking, well, we don't really have that many product launches or new innovation research pieces to put out. So actually, you might be thinking about how you want to be known in the sector. So, the kinds of words, descriptors that you would use about your business. And you might be putting content out that's more around those types of things. If you're uh e-commerce, for example, you might be sending products in certain seasons to journalists in order to get featured in articles. You might be doing the same with influencers and bloggers. That doesn't mean you need new product releases, but it does mean you need a PR strategy that is specifically around what you want to promote and when you want to promote it. I can't help but wonder whether digital PR is a tool and a bit of a playground only for BTOC companies because it seems like most of the stories that were talked about from our own client campaigns and from you know the general wider world are about these exciting things where there's some kind of brand activation off the back of some digital PR. Can B2B companies also dabble in and get great results from digital PR too? Yeah, I 100% that B2B think that B2B companies can get great results from digital PR. It's just about what you do and how you do it. And I've seen some fantastic campaigns run from B2B companies where they've done things like surveys from their industry. And often those surveys, they they pay people to get research from a certain job role. For example, they might do a survey of lots of CEOs, and all of the CEOs that reply get a 50 pound Amazon voucher for giving 15 minutes of their time to fill out a survey that becomes a bench press report of some kind, a white paper of some kind, so that they can then get headline data. You know, 50% of CEOs think X, Y, and Zed type of headline. Then they pitch that to publications. But they also use that kind of thought leadership on their own LinkedIn posts, whether from the company page or whether there's a more figurehead type of person, a couple of different people who might be active on those thought leadership areas. Another area of PR that I think B2B often performs quite strongly in is things like industry awards as well. Um, industry awards, sponsorships, and local press. So things like getting involved in sponsoring your local football team or donating a percentage of your profits every year to charity or for example we're a BC Corp here at Exposure Ninja. It might be that we work on certain publications relating to the BC Corp, what the experience was like becoming a BCorp. So thinking about the business's values as well as the stories that you have to share is a great way to do it. And being able to get awards if there are particularly famous awards within your industry allows you also to position your business in a certain way. So if you've won, you know, best CRM for small businesses, for example, perfect. If that's the exact positioning you want, that's your target market, that's the kind of award you've gone in for, you can do quite a lot of PR spinning off of that about how you've outpaced certain competitors, why you've done that with whatever's in your tool stack. For example, if you're that kind of CRM SAS company, you can publish press releases and then you can do a couple of thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn about the same thing as well. It gives you quite a lot of steam to get going with. I'm quite fond of businesses that in B2B where they do you know the state of our industry kind of report. So if you're in HR, you talk about you know the nature of uh HR problems and what we predict for next year and this is the state of things or um you know there's so many different areas where you can dive into and be the leader when it comes to you know the data that's available and this is what we've seen across and this is what we predict for next year. I think they're really exciting. But we talked a little bit earlier about like why digital PR is important. Anyone who's listening to the rest of this series, the marketing strategies 2026 series will know that we believe the digital car is increasingly important for next year for a couple of different reasons. And would you mind recapping for people who haven't caught those episodes why we believe it is so super important? Yeah, absolutely. Digital PR is becoming even more important than it was. And I don't want to undervalue how important it has been because it's underpinned many a successful organic search campaign for years, decades. If we're honest, link building in the traditional sense of SEO has always been incredibly important to strong rankings in Google. It's becoming even more important now and moving into 2026 because AIS and LLM, so Chat GBT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, all of those LLM platforms reference offsite content. And they do that often much more than they reference your own website. So, what's being said about you on the internet and third party publications, on news sites, on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on Quora, on social, all of those different publications influence whether you're visible in chat GPT and other LLMs. It influence the sentiment. So, if someone is if an LLM is describing you positively or negatively because it's pulling that information from other sites. And it influences your positioning in LLMs as well because AI is considering the context of what's actually been published within other articles online when it's describing your business. And this is true both of if there's searches on LLM such as best CRM software which doesn't specifically mention a brand, you'll see a large amount of references that are not from your website that are offsite, even if you're an industry leader in that sector. But even sometimes on branded searches, so for example, if you're um searching something like how great is HubSpot? Is HubSpot a really good CRM? Would HubSpot work for my sales team? those kinds of searches where a brand is actually being mentioned. So, a a branded search in an LLM, you will often see a percentage being referenced from the HubSpot website, but you'll also see citations, sources coming from third party websites as well. So that could be coming from how that business has been described on Trustpilot by its reviewers, but it could also be from third party articles, you know, HubSpot versus Salesforce versus Zoho that might have been published by third parties. And it'll be saying that those kind of articles that we I just want to double check where whether the articles that we try and kind of organize to have published on other websites where we get our clients mentioned in are we counting those as digital PR or as traditional content creation or you know guest posting and things like that. How does they overlap with what we may see as digital PR in terms of like the big um you know here's the brand new thing that we have the kind of the press release kind of stuff is is it content creation guest posting or is it digital PR or how do they work? I personally put all of this under the umbrella of digital PR and that might be a controversial statement because it makes a PR's job very busy and you'll actually often see people within the business who do content creation for the business's own website taking on some of the PR responsibilities and the reality is that PR in the digital sense has become much broader and actually very talented PRs are able to think across all of these channels. They're able to think, I need a certain number of links from certain authority websites to do well on Google. They're also able to understand the softer side, how the business wants to be positioned and seen and think about things like the sponsorships or the awards that they're going in for that is a broader sort of more holistic brand awareness look at PR. they're able to think about the fun creative campaigns like how am I going to pick up lots of mentions about something that's interesting or how am I going to promote this specific product at this season where I want it to come up and then they're also able to think more about this AI side which is going to feel very new and it is very new for many PRs of actually what research do I need to do within LLMs how do I break down the sources the publications that are being cited and how do I make sure that the business I'm working for is being referenced in AI by going through those sources. And so it does make it a broader role because there's so many different things to think about which is one of the very important things about tracking the PR work that's been done where the references, links, brand mentions, article publications are coming from and then all of those organic markers that we would usually look at, where website traffic is coming from, what website traffic is converting. If you published something at a specific time and you suddenly see a a a speak a spike in traffic, what was it you published and why did it hit at that time? That's the type of monitoring that PRs need to be doing. And I think businesses need to understand that not every single piece of content that a PR puts out is going to be a hit, but sometimes it will be. I do want to take us towards how this works or how we do it and how we do it today versus how we would have done it a couple of years ago. But before we do, I want to just touch on what you um reference there with a question and that is what are the measurements and metrics of success for digital PR today versus what they may have been a couple of years ago predominantly maybe link quantity. Yeah. So some are the same and some are different. The metrics or the KPIs that actually make the biggest impact on the business from PR is going to be organic traffic and revenue. What's actually being driven through certain content pieces and understanding if that referral traffic has come from certain PR pieces. And then the very difficult to measure bit which PRs have always had issues with in the SEO and content side is how organic rankings are affected by the types of backlinks that are built the types of publications that are achieved through PR and that part is very very difficult to know where actually a lot of the links or publications that are earned during PR won't necessarily drive specific referral traffic but they will support improving rankings. for specific keywords and that can be very difficult to tie back. But keeping a track of particularly the types of topic clusters that you've been publishing PR on can often help with that. So if you put out um say 20 pieces that get featured in different third party websites on a specific topic on topic A and then you see that selection of topic A keywords improving rankings, you can therefore be quite sure that that has started to influence it. But at that part is very difficult to measure. In terms of new measurements, AI is the big area where digital PR actually has new measurements that are coming in. And that's going to be visibility in LLM with certain prompts that you're tracking. So, for example, a business might decide to track, let's say, 25 prompts for a specific kind of topic. Then the PR is researching. Okay, what citations do I actually want to secure about these topics by running those prompts through LLMs and you can do that manually. You can use tools like PKI, Tri Profounds, Scrunch AI to decide what citations you're going after as well if you don't have time to do it manually. And that can pull a great great list for you. So you've got pretty much the target publications ready to go and the specific topics that you want to work on ready to go. And then the measurements are going to be are you improving the visibility score in those types of prompts. Again, something that you can do manually if you're happy to run multiple prompts uh through chat GBT for example and then roughly put where your business is appearing in the prompts or again those tools that I just mentioned. They do it automatically, which saves a huge amount of time because then you've got a percentage score where they're consistently running those prompts for you and then calculating the score to show what position or what ranking you actually have in LLMs? And are brand mentions like a newer metric or not being necessarily a newer metric, but maybe a metric with core importance now versus how important it would have been beforehand? Yes, 100%. Traditionally, those working digital PR used to just count the links that they built and you would see something like a spreadsheet of links and what pages those links were pointing at. So, what text was hyperl to what page on the website and that's because traditionally when we were looking at Google rankings, having the specific hyperlink was so important. Now with LLMs, they don't need to see specific hyperlinks in content to understand that it's your business being referenced. And more and more we're going to see this across Google and LLMs that they're able to understand the context of a brand mention. So it doesn't have to be hyperlinks to be valuable. And PR should absolutely be tracking both now. links that they build, which is still important for the Google algorithm at the moment, and brand mentions that they've achieved even if they're not hyperl. I want to take us into how this works, and I wonder if you have an example of maybe some of the work that we've been doing, not necessarily just for uh brand building, but for link acquisition as well, for you know, getting our clients out there for for SEO purposes, but maybe for AI as well. Yeah, absolutely. I've got tons of examples. One of my favorite ones that I often reference is Age Care Bathrooms. So, they're a disability bathrooms installer and they also install bathrooms for elderly people as well. And we've been very proud to win multiple awards for our work on Hare bathrooms. We ran a really creative PR campaign which started with commissioning a Yuggov survey so that we could get some interesting data to lead our PR and news stories with and that Yuggov survey came back showing that 206 26% of UK adults who were over the age of 50 had a household member who was struggling with bathing. Perhaps not a surprise to anyone who has someone uh in their life who is over that age. And 65% were aware were unaware that there is a grant called the disabled facilities grant which allows them to claim the grant money from the government and therefore improve the situation with how their bathroom is set up to enable more independence. So we went after news publications with this headline of the 26% and the 65% being unaware about the grant. We put out loads of press releases to initially get the ball rolling. We outreached to a selection of journalists who were working for publications and in target areas where we thought this was going to be of interest to them and to the audience that they have which was fantastic. Then we put out a change.org or petition and this was particularly fun and a bit different because this is obviously a huge issue in that sector. A very emotional issue for anyone who is uh supporting a family member who has a disability or an elderly family member who is struggling to be independent and hugely emotional for the person themselves losing their independence over time. And we were very fortunate that the people who work at age care bathrooms, they're an absolutely incredible team and they care so much about the situations of their customers that they wanted to lead with putting out a petition to raise awareness, encourage more people to understand and be able to access the grant. And so we did that. And then we were also able to back that up through email newsletters. So making sure everyone that was on the mailing list, not all of those people are going to be customers, some of them are just going to be aware of the brand, some of them will be past customers, were aware of what we were doing and built loads of momentum across channels around that campaign. And it earned us links in lots of lots of different publications and across the news as well as the press release side. And we had journalists contacting us to find out more about the story as well. And that was not a directly on then nose promotional which is the important point of PR is actually the PR needs to be telling a story and if it can do something to support the community well even better that's amazing different example debt relief company that we work with at the moment just built a tool stack to help entrepreneurs uh reduce daily payments that they have to make very specific very very niche audience and then building that tool stack that's on-site work. So, we've got the development team actually deciding what do those tools look like, the content team putting out uh content on site about how the tools work, very targeted to the niche customers that they actually have. Then, National Entrepreneurship Month is coming up or we're in it. And we've then done loads of PR articles around it knowing that there's going to be publications particularly in the business sector who are wanting to put out stories about entrepreneurs during that month. and then being able to advertise our tool advertise as part of a PR campaign because of this new tool stack that's been released specifically for entrepreneurs. We're able to tell entrepreneurs stories as part of that. So a great example totally different from the bathrooms one of how you can do something that is very niche and specific but also make it a bit fun. seems to me that you can take what may be regarded as otherwise like quite dry topic and turn [laughter] it and one thing I kind of found quite useful over the years I've seen from our team are our ability to spot those you know national X month or something day or whatever and tie that into some camp some part of the campaign. Yeah. And I think the same about government policies as well. So the debt relief example that was around national entrepreneurship month the age care bathrooms one was actually around the disabled facilities grants the the DFGs and then we've got another one that we're working on at the moment for a retrofitting company which is all around the great British installation scheme a government scheme uh to support homeowners to improve their energy efficienciness and essentially save costs. So running a PR campaign that's actually around something that's going on, whether that's government policy, whether that's a national month or a national day or something, um whether it's a seasonal thing as well. Those are great things to spin off because you can bank that publications, that journalists, that editors are thinking about stories and trends and what's going on in the news and what they can put out related to those topics. There's always one great example that I come back to, and you'll probably know this far better than than I do, about one of our US-based uh clients in the legal space where they compiled, our team compiled a whole bunch of information that would otherwise be quite, you know, not fun or maybe ugly to look at, you know, like a bunch of data tables and stuff. and they compiled that together to create like a very visual and engaging and actually newsworthy and useful piece of content um about like mo was it motor vehicle uh incidents. It was um the traffic accidents reports and this was for a law firm that we work with based over in the US called Patino Law Firm and every year uh their their equivalent of the Office of National Statistics put out an incident report essentially of the number of traffic accidents there have been and what kind of traffic accidents they were. It is dense. If you've ever had a look at that data, it is extremely dense. Um and what we were able to do, our team very very cleverly put in a request for that data before they had even published the data. So we were able to get a first look before that had even gone out in the national statistics for the US and then we were actually able to pull all of the data, look at the interesting trends within it and repurpose it into content that was uh much more easy to understand and accessible. And some people might be thinking like, goodness gracious, that's dry, the number of traffic accident reports. But because this is a legal firm that actually supports people with making claims if they're involved in a car or a traffic accident of some type, actually being able to lead with some of those statistics around the number of accidents so that their customers know, okay, I'm not the only one. This is actually a problem that's happening in our state and this is the kind of scale of which this is happening in Texas. Plus then our client is able to talk about the number of cases that have been successful. So they're able to both go to relate the data to someone's need and then actually sell off the back of it as well. And the PR with that that's totally newsworthy PR because it's amazing data put in a very digestible format. we're able to pitch it at a state level in Texas to news publications who would want to be publishing information on that type of thing annually, the annual annual statistics, but we were also able to use it for our own content on that client's website. We're able to put out um Google My Business content updates with it as well, showing some of the key headline stats. So that's another great example of how you can take something that's quite dry and make it very useful and interesting to the customers and the types of journalists and publications who had picked that up for PR. I do recall that we have for that particular campaign picked up uh several uh award wins which we're really proud of. But um there's one campaign that we've uh won an award for recently which I think was best US SEO campaign which for our client DSLD mortgage uh the global search awards. Um super chuff for the team but I imagine that digital car has had a large part to play in their SEO success as well. Yeah. And that that campaign which was an absolutely fantastic campaign and I'm so proud of the team that worked on it was very multi- channelannel. And I think this is one of the interesting components we sometimes forget is that digital PR doesn't just work in silo. We also need to be looking at our organic, our paid, our other marketing channels when we're doing it. So that campaign, we're actually extremely proud, generated over 11,000 leads in 12 months. After a first year before they came to us, they were generating zero leads through their website. And a lot of the early work that we did um with this campaign, which was a mortgage company based in the US, and they were they were state level, but they started competing nationally. So they were competing with big big lenders, the big banks as well. and they wanted to grow their revenue through the website. They knew it wasn't performing for them and that was a huge amount of SEO and organic work. We also looked at their brand and positioning which was extremely important because without the brand and positioning you would have no plan for what you're doing on your link building side. You need to be able to do a great amount of positioning work in order to understand that. And then we were also running uh paid ads off off the back of it as well. And we did what we did was break that down into the customer segments that they were serving. So they had four key customer segments. Their sort of premium home buyers, the ones that had high value mortgage needs, veterans and military who have specific types of loans in the US, refinancers, and then firsttime buyers. And we are able to use those personas to build campaigns specifically around each of those four. And when I'm saying campaigns, I don't just mean PR campaigns. I mean we were building campaigns on the website. We were creating content specifically for each kind of persona. Then we were building ad campaigns and landing pages specifically to that kind of persona. And then we were able to also build PR campaigns for each kind of persona that actually supported their needs and what they needed to see. And we were focusing on driving them through to relevant areas on the website. So both persona based areas and we also did it for uh specific target regions as well. And then from what I recall looking through that campaign is that digital PR is like the amplification uh system where it kind of takes the story that's been created there with the improved positioning and just kind of broadcast it to the world and just takes you know again firstand uh uh first party data third party data finding a story that can be can be created and then you know help you to reach that that cohort or that audience of people. Um yeah and this oh this kind of campaign had so much data as well. So we created loads of assets on their website that we used to spin off the PR. So we did loan calculators. Uh we did a custom USDA eligibility map. Kind of looks like a a map of all the states of the US and there's like a heat map red patches on a map essentially showing if they're eligible for certain loans. And then downloadable mortgage ebooks as well with lots of different information. Um, and our map, that USDA map, I'm really proud of it because it actually ranked in Google's top 10 and was competing with government domains. And we just built that as a custom WordPress plug-in. I say we, our very talented dev team built that as a custom WordPress plug-in that was just running spatial queries and then it was able to dynamically display CTAs with it, so calls to actions on the website. But this was great. It was an amazing content asset that actually ranked and drove traffic into the website, but oh my goodness, it was newsworthy as well because it was so visual for people to look at and be able to see those different patches on on the US map. So, a great piece for us to build a PR campaign around too. Yeah, I love that. Just the idea of the digital campaign is how uh how are you impacted or how Texas readers how where do you rank in the league table of you know highest num number of whatever it is you can apply to literally any sector. Um but I want to take us on to like how do we actually go about doing this? How do we create a digital PR strategy? How do we go through the tactical side of it and especially add in these new bits like the the brand mention increasing the brand visibility increasing for AI the citation building as well. Yeah. And this very simply starts with a blank spreadsheet which maybe everyone doesn't want to hear but what you need to start with is deciding a whole list of publications where you want your business to be featured because you think it would be useful. And there's multiple ways to get this list. One of the the best ways is to also pull apart your competitor's backlinks. So anyone who is industryleading or very successful in your sector, there will be someone pull apart their backlink profile and see where they've built links and what they've built. You can do that with a tool like Majestic SEO for example. You're just able to pop in a competitor URL, pull out all of the information. You can also do it in uh tools like Semrush as well. So we get that. Then you want to do the AI side as well. So AI LLM like chatbt they unfortunately for everyone reference different sources to Google. So digital PR for one though it may be useful is not a direct uh comparison piece. It doesn't mean it's going to be successful on on both uh platforms. You want to run prompts to then pick out citations, pick out specific websites that have been referenced in answers to prompts you care about for your business. You can do that manually by deciding what prompts you want to put in and then you can manually go through and copy and paste out the links or you can use a tool uh like try profound.com, peakai, scrunchai. you're able to preload the prompts and they will generate you a whole list which you can download uh as as a CSV file and then pop into your spreadsheet. So then you've got a whole list of publications you know you definitely want to be in. Then I would say you can also think a bit more creatively about the things that the business cares about where they might also want to be featured. So that might be uh interviews with a founder or CEO or some seauite level executives in the business who you know would be happy to be featured in certain areas. It might be looking at um the charities you sponsor every year and getting on their website. It might be looking at um partners you have, suppliers that you have if you want to be on their website. You might give them testimonials even in order to achieve that. And you might also uh look more broadly at the business if it has certifications like a BC Corp certification and go after those types of publications. So then you've got a long list and your list should be long. I mean it should be really really long um pages. You want a lot. Then you're going to need to do the topic side. So first you want to know how do you position the business? Ideally you would only have a maximum of three positioning statements I would say. And my favorite example of this is uh The Ordinary who are a global skincare brand and they've got two very strong positioning statements. The first is that they do sciencebacked skincare and the second is that they do great value skincare. You will see them on almost any Google or LLM search, any search on any platform to be honest for those two positioning statements. And if you search them directly, you will see those positioning statements are pulled up about them. You want to make sure you have something similar for your business. You have a clear way of describing what the business does, who it does it for, and those couple of USP positioning statements. And then you want to build your PR around that. You also want to look at what's going on in the news, trends that might be upcoming, national months, national days, your high seasons and your low seasons to understand what you might be selling at those times. And you probably want to think about what data might be interesting, especially if you are B2B or you feel like you're in an area that's a little more dry. And it's totally okay. We want to make boring business fun if you are in a sector that's a bit boring. You just need to think about how you can make it fun. How you can make it relevant to your customers because it may be boring, but it's actually not boring to the people who need it and care about it quite often. So then you want to decide those topic angles. And I would say just pick three or four very clear topic angles. Then you've got your list of publications. You need to decide what to pitch to which publications. And you need to send out a lot of emails and you need to make a lot of calls and you must you must be resilient. You must not be deterred by getting rejections. If you get a reply to one in 10 of those email pitches you send out, that's a really good result. But you must also have follow-up pictures. So if you've sent a bunch out on week one, in week two you need to be following up. In week three, you need to be following up. In week four, you need to be following up because you want to be at the top of the inbox. The other thing to look out specific journalists, editors, contacts who write in your topical expertise sector and building relationships with them. And then the third component, which I like to think of uh as a bit of a a continuing flywheel. It's happening all the time, is keeping track of what journalist requests are going out. And there's lots of great platforms for this. Sometimes you can also do it on Twitter as well, but we use a platform called quoted. That's qu because they make it really difficult to know quoted. And journalists put out requests for comments on there. So, if you see something relevant to the business, you can reply and say, "I've got this amazing person within our business who is experienced to comment on this specific topic that you're looking for. Here's why. Here's what they have to say." Make it really, really easy for them. Actually, just embed the quote directly in the pitch and then offer them to be able to speak to that person on the phone if they want to. And I would say it's pretty 50/50. Sometimes journalists just want to be able to extract a quote from like a paragraph that you've sent through, especially if they've got an impending deadline that they have to get to. They don't have time to ring everyone up. Then actually 50% of the time they might be working on a longer article or they might even be doing five 10 different spin-offs of the same article and they might want to speak to someone in the business on the phone. But that's a great way to react to what's happening in the news and then put out content pieces where you're quite likely to then get a feature from time to time. So I hope that helps. It's it's a long process. It's a manual process at times as well, but it will have a fantastic result if you've got the right person driving it, planning it, thinking strategically about it, and relentlessly going after getting those PR articles as I want to pick up on something you mentioned there um about uh getting mentioned and looking across you know putting together your list of where you want to be uh referenced and double checking what the current citations are within AI answers and there was a new piece um a new report out that I saw um Ryan Law ahs I can never how do you say h all right um a new like report that come out and they they reshared like an image from it. It was basically like 30% of the citations within chat GBT's top 1,000 URLs that are referenced are not visible in Google at all. They don't like rank for any keyword whatsoever. So, it seems to me you can't continue to do what you used to do or always done when it comes to digital PR or and you know how it interlinks with SEO. Can't continue to proceed with the same old same old. you need to take this new approach because yeah there's these different articles are being referenced that you probably never even thought of or even look you know because they just don't appear in the top 10 the top 100. Yeah, and this is why I gave the example of building that list both um what might be considered the more traditional way by looking at backlink competitor profiles on Majestic, which will really help you understand what backlinks they've built in order to rank well on Google, but then also spending time thinking about citations in AI, which is very much a new area as well. And one of the reasons that I would hesitate against using any general data to decide those AI publications, there's lots of amazing data out there, but there's also lots of general data studies that will show you, you know, the top reference domains are going to be Wikipedia, Reddit, New York Times, for example. They almost all say some variation of that. You will find that in AI answers for your business, the specific publications are very different. And you must go and check the citations you need to build and the domains and publications of those citations specifically for your business and prompts because if you work to just a generic list that you've pulled off of generic data, remember this is not specific to your business, the data that's being published out there, this is just general. And even if it is say B2B specific, that is such a wide range of prompts that they might be using to get that general data. If you build to a generic data list, you'll either get nothing or you'll get a very generic result. And so what you want to be doing is thinking specifically about where your business needs to be seen. In exactly the same way that you would think about the keyword searches that you want your business to show up for in Google, you need to think about the same in AI. So, I would just warn against doing anything that feels very generic or using generic lists about what sources AI uses because it won't get you the result that you want. And I'm tracking several sectors, especially the ones that we do our best work in, you know, with healthcare and finance, uh, legal and several others. And the citation list changes so often. You just really have to stay on your toes and make sure that if there is a piece that is emerging is getting cited a lot across a bunch of different prompts that you are Johnny on the spot really quickly seeing what you can do to work with that publisher to potentially include you in a in a positive light without you know strong arming or or anything like that. And this is absolutely a cyclical process. This isn't like a oneandone. You don't create the spreadsheet in January and finish pitching by December and feel like you're done. You need to be refreshing that original spreadsheet of target publications and your target topics every quarter at least. And if you're enterprise midmarket, every month you should be running that. And that's because exactly as you say Dale, the publications cited in AI are going to change, especially as these LLMs are evolving. But we'll also see competitors gaining new links as well. And this technique is very much reverse engineering what's in existence at the moment. I would also encourage everyone to be thinking about where they want their business to be seen just in general like where you think would be awesome to be featured because that's the kind of proactive industryleading side of it is if you're the first person the first business in your market to get featured in a certain kind of publication. You've got a link and mention that no one else has. And that can be really valuable because you're the only one cited there. And it's not an exact science. No one knows 100% what sources are going to be cited in AI or which exact domains are supporting Google rankings even though we know it's going to be higher quality, more trustworthy, more authoritative domains in general. So actually managing to get something a bit different from everyone else is an exciting thing because then you are very much also leading the trends with digital PRT. I think we should close up for this episode of uh episode 8 of the marketing strategies for 2026 series. We will be back next week for a episode about paid media strategy as well. But do you have any closing thoughts you want anyone to take away with when they are considering their digital PR strategy or potentially digital PR within their marketing strategy for 2026? Yeah. Closing thoughts on this is digital PR links very strongly with your brand positioning. You need to know that first. It links very strongly with your SEO and organic and PRs absolutely must be working with SEOs now that AI search is growing and becoming more of a leader in terms of driving referral traffic and revenue ultimately conversions to businesses. So thinking about those things if this has all sounded like quite a lot particularly this new area of citation building I would also say get in touch with us. We're more than happy to have a chat and see how we can help. There's many great tools on the market at the moment. And if you need a hand with what the strate strategy, what the tactics need to be for your citation building, we have an incredible team who have been working on this as well. We've got a fantastic client called Zugu Case who sell iPad Air cases who have been featured amongst all of the top results in Gemini Chat GBT AI mode and on Google for their best iPad Air cases was the big topic that we went after when they had their new product release earlier in the year. If you're launching something like that and you need a hand with making sure you're number one, we are absolutely the agency who can help. Superb. So, head over on over to exposioninja.com. You'll be able to find everything that we've just talked about there, as well as a lot of our blog posts, videos, podcasts, all about the various areas of marketing and search marketing you're going to need to know how to do effectively for 226 to get the kind of results you're looking for. So, thank you so much for joining us this week for this episode. Join us again next week where we'll be talking more about strategies for 2026. Take care and see you then. Bye. Hey, hey, hey.