Digital PR versus link outreach

Lesson 27 of 50Module 6 · Digital PR and earned media5 min read

By Bill Hartzer · Hartzer Consulting · 25+ years in search, domains and expert witness work

The mistake that kills most programs

Here is a pitch I have seen, in various costumes, hundreds of times. It opens by complimenting a recent article. It says the writer's readers would find a particular guide useful. It includes a URL. It closes by asking whether the writer would consider adding a link, and offers to share the piece on social media in return.

That email is a competent resource-page pitch. Sent to a staff reporter at a national title it is worse than useless, because it identifies the sender as someone who does not know what a reporter does. The reporter cannot add a link to a published article without an editor's involvement. The reporter is not looking for useful reading for their audience; they are looking for news. And the offer of a social share in exchange for an edit reads, to a journalist, as an attempt to buy editorial — which is the one thing their profession is organized around refusing.

The failure is not tone. You can rewrite that email in beautiful prose and it still fails, because the underlying model of the recipient is wrong. Outreach asks someone to improve their page. Digital PR gives someone a story. Those are different transactions with different currencies.

Two different transactions

It is worth laying the two side by side, because almost every downstream decision follows from this table.

That last row deserves attention. Bad outreach is forgotten. Bad PR pitching burns a contact who may cover your sector for a decade. Journalists talk to each other, and a reputation for wasting their time travels faster than any campaign.

What a journalist is actually optimizing for

Reporters are judged on stories filed, stories that hold up, and stories that other outlets have to follow. Nothing in that list is affected by whether they linked to you. Understanding the incentive explains behavior that otherwise looks arbitrary.

• They need it to be true and checkable. If your claim cannot be verified independently, it cannot be published, however interesting it is.
• They need it to be new. Not new to you — new to their readers, and preferably not yet run by a competitor.
• They need it to fit their beat. A technology reporter cannot run a health story, no matter how good it is.
• They need it now, or they need it filed. An excellent story that arrives after the news moment has passed is not a story.
• They need someone to talk to. A named human who answers the phone is often worth more than the data itself.

Notice what is missing: your product, your funding round, your rebrand, your anniversary, your new hire below board level, your opinion about your own industry's future. Those things matter to you. They are not stories, and Lesson 6.2 goes into why.

There is a second-order point worth making here. Because the reporter is optimizing for the story rather than for you, the things that improve your chances are things that make their job easier, not things that make you look better. A cleanly stated finding beats a polished brand narrative. A spokesperson who is free this afternoon beats one with a more impressive title who needs three days' notice. A methodology page beats a designed PDF. Every time I have seen a campaign underperform relative to the quality of its idea, the cause has been friction of that kind rather than the idea itself, and Lesson 6.5 exists because of how often it happens.

It also explains why the same story can be published by one outlet and ignored by five others without any of them being wrong. A story has to fit the desk, the day and the space available. Rejection in digital PR is usually about fit and timing rather than merit, which is a genuinely useful thing to internalize before you start reading silence as a verdict on your work.

When digital PR is the wrong choice

A reference that only recommends things is not a reference, so let me be direct about who should not do this.

If your site is small, local and service-based, a national data study is close to the worst use of your budget. The coverage will be geographically irrelevant, the links will point at a domain with no topical foundation to receive them, and you will have spent a quarter's budget on a press hit that converts nobody. Local sponsorships, genuine community involvement and a properly structured site will do more.

If you have nothing to say, digital PR will expose that faster than any other tactic. Agencies that run campaigns for clients with no data, no expert and no story end up inventing surveys about nothing, and those campaigns fail publicly. Being ignored is the good outcome there; the bad one is a methodology-shaped hole that a specialist journalist writes about.

If you cannot commit for at least two or three campaigns, do not start. Earned media has a long tail and a lumpy distribution. Judging the discipline on one campaign is like judging a fund on one week.

Digital PR is the right choice when you have proprietary data, a credible expert, a genuinely novel product category, a strong regional or sector identity, or an audience whose media landscape you understand well enough to name the desks by title.

The honest cost structure

I will not quote figures, because they go stale and vary by market, but the shape of the cost is stable and worth understanding before you commit.

The largest input is skilled human time, concentrated in three places: finding and shaping the angle, building the asset to a standard that survives scrutiny, and the media relations itself — which is mostly patient, unglamorous list-building and follow-up. Data acquisition is a real but smaller cost, and it rises sharply if you need a representative survey panel rather than an analysis of public data you can obtain for nothing.

The cost profile is also front-loaded and lumpy in a way outreach is not. An outreach program produces a slow, fairly predictable trickle. A PR campaign produces nothing for weeks, then either a burst of coverage or silence. Budget for the silence. Programs that are cancelled after one quiet campaign have usually paid the full fixed cost of learning the discipline and then walked away before the variable returns arrived.

One structural point that surprises people: the second campaign for the same client usually costs less and performs better than the first, because the contact list, press page, spokesperson and methodology template already exist. If you are pricing this work, price the program, not the campaign.