Digital Ethos on Digital Press Releases and Link Building!

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey. I guess my career started out actually completely different from marketing. I was in recruitment and then I owned a bar hire company for a little while and tried quite a few things. I guess I’ve always been very entrepreneurial and I then had a website, an online e-commerce website, which I needed to learn how to drive traffic to. So I started consuming lots of books and online courses and Google certificates and all those things to start trying to learn how to drive traffic to that website and actually found real love and passion for marketing. And this is probably 12 to 13 years ago now, I actually came to sell that business and then had the opportunity to go and work in my first agency. Just love the environment, I love the speed, I love the pressure, I love the fact that you have to spin lots of plates every day. The thing I wasn’t too sure about was the fact that there’s often, like, gaps between the service level of how happy the client is and there’s always this no man’s land that sits between the client and the agency of like, mistrust and delivery issues.
And I thought, God has got to be a way of, like, syncing this together and being more of a true partner for that client. So anyway, I had that idea for years, didn’t do anything with it, and then in 2016 decided to form Digital Ethos. It was just me in my bedroom. I’m back in here today in my bedroom with a few freelancers and started to scale up from there, which was great. And in early 2018, I hired my first full-time member of staff and now we’re at 55 people and it’s been an amazing journey. We’ve got multiple UK offices, we’ve also got a Toronto base, and we’re in Germany. And, yeah, it’s been a rapid but exciting journey and obviously sort of touching on other bits that I’ve got involved in. The success of the business has allowed me to really look at other things that I’m passionate about. So, sustainability, Eco-tech, and I’ve started to invest now through my own company, towing capital, in startup ventures and businesses that I think have got a purpose and real meaning.

Yeah, so Digitally South is a team of 52. I think we are actually as of today, we are hiring a few roles as well. Our core focuses on our performance channel, so SEO, PPC or any paid channel, really paid social as well, organic social, PR, and then creative services. So videography, photography, design, and web design. So really full service. And actually that’s been an evolution. We started six years ago as an SEO agency, really, that did a little bit of web design and now we’ve literally bolted on other services and become sort of very specialist providers of each of those as we’ve developed. Nice.

There’s a mix, I would say we’re probably 85% of the work we get in or the clients need us for it. Is WordPress still or PHP based? Anyway, we do have some Laravel and some Magento sites that we also support and host. And we’ve got three in-house developers and three partners that we work with externally for code bases or languages. We can’t do things like net et cetera, or Angular we would outsource, but there’s a lot we can do in-house as well. And really a lot of the web development team, outside of building full projects and builds, they support a lot of the marketing efforts as well, where we need landing pages, extra bits of technical work on-site for SEO, et cetera. So it’s a really diverse offering that fits the core marketing element of the business.

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s changed a lot over the years. So I think when you start off, you’re sort of happy to take any client, and then as it develops, we’ve moved to, I guess our sweet spot really is a mix of probably three. So like a larger SME that’s got a budget to spend maybe two and a half to £5000 a month type equivalent. And they need multi channels rather than just one channel. Tends to be good for us. A lot of e-commerce businesses as well over the last couple of years, especially, since the world’s gone a bit bonkers with online demand, so we’ve really pivoted to more e-commerce websites. We do still have an element of B2B and Legion though as well. And then I think there’s this whole segment of customers that we’ve started to support. We built a strategy team in the business about twelve months ago, so it’s now gone from one to four people within a year, which is great, but we really get into business intelligence with our clients. We understand what they’re trying to achieve over not just a twelve-month, but more of a 24 – 36 five-year plan.
Look at what that looks like from a sales and growth perspective and then almost reverse engineer that battery strategy and look at which channels then help to drive that growth from a growth engine perspective. And the marketing elements almost become secondary to the business solution, providing that we give. So marketing intelligence and business intelligence pieces are really pivotal. So a whole mix of clients in that and we’ve got international, national, regional, local. It’s a real range and we’ve never sort of specialised in one niche. We’ve kept ourselves fairly generalist deliberately, even though a lot of the books you read and a lot of the advice you get is to specialise in one thing. The diversity has given us, I think, more security during COVID and it’s also given us a real breadth of knowledge to be able to help a range of different customers.

Right now it’s 85%. Well, we do an analysis of this at the end of every year. So our financial year ends at the end of August, so we need to do this year. But I assume it’s going to be very close between 80 and 85%. And we always benchmark ourselves to be above 80. In the last four or five years, we’ve never fallen below it. So I think it’s pretty high. The industry averages, we look at around 40-50%. Right. So there’s a lot of movement generally in marketing, unfortunately, I think we all know that. But if you can stay above 80%, I think you can helpfully grow then. And from a secure base, anything apart.

Yeah, I think it all starts from the beginning of the relationship. I always tell my team, if you have a relationship of any form in life, whether it’s making a new friend, or a romantic relationship, those first few months are the most important. Right. So we’ve all been there. You’re hanging off that next text message from somebody, or you’re waiting for them to call you, or you’re waiting for love and there’s a lot of trust elements that need to happen in those first few months for people to settle and calm. So it’s really important that in those first few months we really become an indispensable part of that client’s journey and plan. So to do that, we work now through offering workshops at the front end of every client journey. So we have at least half a day with them. We try to get them to come to one of our offices where we can look after them, we can really bring them in and then we have regular touch points. So we work on what’s called a four, three, two model over the first three months. So in the first month they hear from us every week.
So four weeks of the month, in the second month it’s three times and in the third month, it’s twice a month. So a bi-weekly call is where we end up. Some clients prefer to have something like a monthly and some will ask for a weekly to continue, but we have to try and balance the workload. So ideally it’s that four, three, two and that tends to give us lots of touch points with that customer to really engage them, really settle them and really just build security around the relationship.

Definitely. Yeah, definitely helps.

Yeah, so PR is actually interestingly our newest service. So we introduced PR around twelve months ago, maybe a little bit under twelve months. And the reason that we did it is we saw such a growth in the correlation between SEO and PR and that sort of deep connection of having genuine stories, genuine news hooks, and real things to go out and talk about to the world. I think we all know that historic SEO, you know, you could do guest blogging and even at one point get away with paid links or whatever and it would help with authority and you could get away. But the world has changed and actually, really what works now is having genuine stories and real things to talk about and getting a genuine placement and building content that is shareable, that is engaging, and actually has meaning and purpose. So we built the PR team to do a mix of two things. A bit of traditional PR for us with press releases and media contacts, a bit of media buying as well with paid advertorials, etc. But then also to work closely with the SEO team to help create content that was going to be really beneficial and shareable.

Yeah, I think I guess it depends, right? The most quality content that we see works is, let’s say you create a shareable blueprint on a topic or a white paper or something, and it’s genuinely usable by other companies in that niche or in that industry. So if we create just to put it into dislike concept, we create a marketing-based white paper that has some really usable chart, statistics, facts, and stuff in there and we put that out as the open source. We know that people are going to link to it and use it. Right. Some pieces of content we’ve done like that. I’ve got 6700 links to it and which is fantastic. Incredible result. And why not? Because we’re giving it out that we’ve spent lots of time, resources, and financial incentive into building that as something that’s shareable. And from a Google perspective, that is the most genuine form of content, because Google can see that that’s a quality piece of content that’s behind and liked and linked to and that will drive really good authority, obviously, back to the host site and that gives them benefit for the work that they put into getting it there.

I think in 2022, a business not investing in a form of digital PR, and that’s a mix of a business brand, but also sea level brands and board brands as well. So the owners, the founders, if you don’t create a personal brand, and we all know it, right, when we think about the big brands of this world, you always think about the CEOs as much as you think about the brand, right? Whether that’s Elon or Jeff Bezos or whatever, you can say those names and think of the brand behind them, right? You don’t even need to say the brand because they are just as big, if not bigger in some ways than the brand. So you need to elevate and have a personal brand approach, which again is a form of digital PR. But it is important because that’s interlinked. And then you also need to focus on digital PR for the business if you want to stand out, right? It’s becoming increasingly difficult, especially for smaller SMEs to get a chance to stand out. If they’re not doing the fundamentals of digital PR, they will be lost.

There’s a saying contact equal contracts, right? And it’s about network and your network is your net worth. And I take that. They’re a bit cheesy, but I really agree with them, right? It’s about building out that network, building out the credibility, and using what you start with. So if you’re a startup business or scaling up I do a lot of advisory work with these types of companies. I’m like, look what’ve you got in your own network right now. That will be your initial ambassadors. They’ll be part of your tribe. Like, how do you get that first bit of messaging traction? How do you incentivize them to start banging the drum for you? And that’s the easiest place to start, right? Those people know you, they’re engaged with you. Even if they’re a distant connection on LinkedIn, they’ve got some sort of affinity to you because they’ve at some point looked at your profile or there’s been something, use that to your advantage because it is an advantage.

Yeah, there’s different ways of doing it. The typical traditional way of measuring PR is like advertising value equivalent. So basically, if you got placement in a newspaper, for example, and it was an organic placement for free, how much would that cost? You had to pay for the same spot. So that’s a really good way of doing it. And also then looking at readership numbers. Website traffic. Obviously from a digital PR perspective. Links are another thing. Of course. The quality and the DA of those links. There’s all sorts of ways of doing it and then effectively. Like if the content piece is very much brand driven. Which often it can be with PR. Really looking at what direct traffic impact that has over a period of weeks afterwards whilst that piece of content is live. Can really help as well to correlate back what the impact has been for brand related search terms.

I think link buildings is such an interesting thing, isn’t it? Because for a lot of agencies it’s a dirty word, and for a lot of SEOs as well, they either love it or they hate it. A lot of technical SEOs that link building. A lot of content SEOs don’t understand link building. It’s a real skill, actually, if you can do it. And I think really what it comes down to. And again, let’s go back to some of what I’ve said already. It’s about having like, genuinely useful content, in my opinion, that people will want to link with. It’s also a little bit about newsjacking in this day and age. So if you can jump on a trend at the right time and have a piece of content, it can get lots of links and lots of pickup, right? Journalists and publications are super hot on trend driven comms, so you can get out the door quickly, even with like an image that’s like some sort of meme or something that can then go get huge exposure. It can get picked up by publications, it then links back. There’s all sorts of ways. I mean, obviously there’s the traditional tactics as well, from finding broken links to trying to repair those, to, again, outreaching directly to third-party sites.
There are lots of things that we do in the agency, but the things that I think are the most successful are like genuine content-driven newsjacking-type stories that get initial traction and picked up quickly.

We do. We work at the moment with a couple of tools that allow us to look at the link quality link data and then try and look for opportunities that might have been missed, like those link mentions or tags. But it’s interesting because I know that there’s a lot of SEO agencies out there that don’t really do much link-building at all these days, right? Even though, yes, it’s still quite a heavy rating in the algorithm. So, yeah, I think there’s opportunity. There’s definitely an opportunity. And as more people move away from it and more into digital PR and that way of generating links, I think some of the traditional tactics like you’re talking about are still left there as low- hanging fruit because people are focusing more on the bigger stuff. So yeah, having a mix of both strategies probably makes a lot of sense.

We still do some, yeah, we still do some. Obviously from an authority perspective, it can be a quick pick up and it can definitely help. And again, talking about diversity, the city of a link portfolio, you would expect to have some guest posts in that. So it is still relevant, not as powerful as some of the other stuff we’ve talked about, but still relevant. Yeah.

Absolutely. So for us, it has to be a site with genuine traffic and niche relevance and it has to be something that we believe could drive some sort of ROI, not just the link placement. So we no longer just build links for just the link authority.

Exactly, that’s a big part of it. And also just really making sure that there is some intrinsic value because we’re very transparent with clients, right? So we will share everything and we will back up the reason why. So whereas years ago you could get away with just doing placements on blogs that were never probably seen or read, that’s the thing in the past. So it has to be in areas where we’re proud to be placed and we’re proud for our clients to show that has an inherent value but also offers some link value as well.

Yeah, I mean, look, from SEO, we all know it’s a mid-long term plan, right? But there are things you can do. Especially if you’re a localised or smaller startup business. Using Google My Business. Your GMB to your advantage. Making sure that you get some map placements on there. Drive reviews. Obviously from your customers and really start to get some traction that way that helps to build credibility and trust. I think putting out fresh and relevant content on your blog. But also on GMB as well as quick wins. And they are just time driven, they don’t cost money to do that. I think outside of that, then leveraging social media, of course, to build a community and that tribe, that initial ambassador, the bit that I talked about, you can do that quite successfully through social media. Depending on whether you are a service, B2B or D2C type business, you might have different ways of doing this. But if you are a B2B business, you probably do very well using and leveraging LinkedIn with your personal brand. That’s the way to go and it doesn’t cost you anything to do that and have a voice.
If it’s more sort of D2C or local type business, again, leverage that network and try and do the things that are very inexpensive to start with. And then once there’s some budget or if there’s some money there, probably looking at some paid channels to acquire, there’s that sort of build versus buy approach, right? You can build organically, it just takes longer, or you can buy a bit as well. And the ideal, the sort of perfect marriage or harmony, in my opinion, for online success is having as many channels attributed to each other as possible. So really trying to leverage both would be the right approach.

It’s a really interesting question, right? Because again, there’s a lot of mixed opinions on this we do see and again, this comes down to brand, right? It comes down to the PR stuff we’ve talked about. It comes down to everything. If you are actively building more social presence and interactions and intern, social signals are strong as Google can’t crawl all of those private sites like Meta, et cetera, but it can see that there are brand based mentions and it gets wind of that. We do see a correlation in uplift in rankings. So there’s a lot of agencies that say that that’s BS and you don’t. But we’ve tested it over the last few years and there is a correlation. But I think it’s a correlation not just of the Google rankings, but of the overall brand experience, right? So if direct traffic increases through, then all of that carries everything. And if Google can see that your site is getting more traffic, you’re more relevant over another site, and part of the algorithm will start to play in your favour. So it’s all interconnected.