Alastair Campbell, founder of Company Check, shares his experience of working with digital PR agency Impression and outlines what he expected and continues to expect as a digital PR client.
How we came to choose digital PR
Company Check is an online business with a website viewed by over 3 million visitors each month who between them conduct more than 300 million searches each year as part of their due diligence processes.
Having founded the company in 2011 with a very modest personal investment, I am always keen to understand the return on investment of anything I invest in and for me, marketing is no different.
Because we operate solely online, it makes sense for us to market ourselves online. But at the same time, I am not blind to the benefits of traditional PR, where the profile of my business and of myself as the founder could be grown through thought leadership and strategic placement.
When I was introduced to the idea of digital PR by Impression, it felt like it made perfect sense for my business. An online company, marketed online through digital PR.
Measurable return on investment
Client expectation 1: Provide a measurable return on investment
Of course, the fact it was online wasn’t the only draw for me to digital PR. I’ve already mentioned that for me, understanding the return on investment (ROI) of any channel is important and this was my first expectation of digital PR - that it would provide a measurable ROI.
This is true to an extent of traditional PR too. You’re paying your PR agency to get you featured in relevant publications and they can show you these features in the form of press cuttings. They can even provide you an estimated value to that feature through AEV (advertising equivalent value).
But while getting featured is great and can result in more people knowing about your business and visiting your website, it’s only through digital PR that can you really track links back to your site and subsequent traffic to your website too.
We receive a monthly report from our digital PR agency and within that we see how many places we’ve been featured with the links to where we’re featured, and we also see traffic to our website which comes from these places as well as other mentions of our brand from around the web that resulted from each feature or news story too.
Differentiation from the competition
Client expectation 2: Position them as experts across the web, use their existing expertise and data
Another draw of digital PR for Company Check was the fact that very few of our competitors seemed to be doing it.
It’s important for us to differentiate our brand from others. The service we provide isn’t unique in itself but the way we display the data that people access and the positioning of our brand is what helps us stand apart.
Digital PR is a channel which we’ve found to be much faster paced than my previous experience of traditional PR and we’re able to have our brand featured multiple times each week, across a wide range of industry and sector relevant websites.
To date, Company Check itself has been featured widely across the web as a hub of business data, and I have personally become a featured expert across a number of business sites too which has developed my own profile.
These features have come from two primary areas of focus. Firstly, Impression, as a creative content agency as well as a PR company, has been able to help us turn our data, which can be quite dry on first look, into visually interesting representations which have helped us to get it featured in more places across the web.
For example, they helped us to cross-reference data from Rightmove’s Happy at Home survey with our own business incorporation data to produce this table which showed the relationship between happiness and entrepreneurship, which earned us feature in multiple places across the web including this feature on Virgin Entrepreneur.
Secondly, we have been featured for our own expertise. Impression identifies places for us to pitch thought-leadership pieces and also contribute to existing content, as well as responding to journalist requests. All of this helps to differentiate the Company Check brand from its competitors.
Fast growth, regular feature
Client expectation 3: Diversify their online footprint through regular features across a wide range of high quality, relevant websites
I’ve touched on this briefly already but another component of digital PR that really attracted me was the fact that there are so many more websites and publications available online than there are offline - and many offline publications now have online versions anyway.
For me, this meant that digital PR could provide faster brand growth and more regular features, because there are more places to us to appear.
Had we invested solely in traditional PR, my expectation was that we’d only really be able to approach certain media outlets or even trade press for the various sectors that use our services. To me, that felt limited and correctly or not, my perception was that feature in such publications would take a lot of time to achieve and therefore not really provide me the best ROI.
Digital PR, on the other hand, opened us up to thousands of business publications and thousands more sector specific websites too. This means our digital PR agency pitches us frequently to a wide range of online publications and the features of our brand and links to our website come in thick and fast.
Lessons from a digital PR case study
Alastair Campbell’s experiences as he’s shared here are common across digital PR clients. They have certain expectations and, whatever our personal opinions toward digital PR, they show how much emphasis is placed by businesses on online techniques and how important it is in times of business austerity to be able to prove a tangible return on investment.
Essentially, clients want to get as much as possible for their money and by investing in our own digital skills, PRs can achieve broader coverage and a provide a more comprehensive set of services in today’s online focused business world.
Alastair Campbell is the founder of Company Check. Follow him on Twitter @companycheck