DIY reactive digital PR: How to earn media coverage on a budget
Unlike big proactive PR campaigns, where working with professionals can prevent you from wasting a huge amount of time and money, reactive digital PR is usually something that you can bootstrap with a bit of time and effort.
As long as you follow a few basic rules, you can earn yourself a handful of foundational links early on in your brand’s life without having to pay for an agency or consultant to do digital PR for you.
Get to know the key writers in your niche
If PR isn’t your full-time role, you likely don’t want to monitor every single journalist in the land, their likes and dislikes and who they work for.
It’s a long process, and there is a reason PR professionals pay good money for expensive journalist databases to keep track of them all.
Instead, with some initial research, you can find the top journalists in your niche and the publications you wish to appear in. Stick with a handful, maybe 4-5 at most.
Follow them on X and connect with them on LinkedIn. Read what they write about your industry, and then send an email to introduce yourself.
Clearly mark in your subject line what type of expert you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re an architect or a dermatologist.
At some point, a journalist may need your expertise and search their inbox. You want to be findable when that happens.
Keep a spreadsheet with their email addresses in case there is a breaking news story in your niche that you want to comment on. You don’t want to be scrambling around looking for their emails when time is of the essence.
Timing is everything
Once the article is published, it’s too late
This is not link building; you cannot email a journalist two months after an article in your niche has been published and ask to insert your expert opinion (and link) into the article.
This is just not how journalism works.
At best, you’ll get a confused response; at worst, you’ll get called out for it on X.
If the news happened yesterday, it’s too late
Earlier this month, I woke up to a dozen news alerts. There had been a massive IT outage affecting everything: doctors, planes, Gail’s Bakery.
I knew then that my software client could comment on this, but I also knew that everyone else’s software clients could. I opened my laptop and contacted my client right away to get a comment put together.
We moved quickly. I then emailed it to the key writers in our niche before lunchtime. This meant we secured coverage across both tech blogs and the national and international press.
Was ours the best comment? Maybe, maybe not, but what we were is quick. And that, when it comes to newsjacking, is the secret sauce.
If I had to go through an arduous sign-off process with multiple people making edits and wanting to check the comments, we would have missed out on those links.
When DIY-ing your reactive PR, your superpower is speed. You can write a comment and email it to your key writers straight away, while bigger competitors have to work through layers of corporate red tape to get a comment out the door.
If the holiday/awareness day/event is happening tomorrow, it’s too late
If you run a floristry website and want to talk about the top flower trends for Valentine’s Day, you don’t want to send that out on Feb. 13.
Google Search data, according to its own AI overview, suggests that searches for Valentine’s Day may start as soon as Christmas is over and build through January.
Therefore, journalists will be looking to write about Valentine’s Day, populate gift guides and get expert views on the year’s Valentine’s Day trends at this time.
Share your expertise and experience
It’s all good to be told to share your expertise with the press, but what does that mean?
Let’s break it down into three approaches:
Newsjacking
A big news story breaks in your industry and journalists need expert comment and analysis.
This one can be a little tricky. It’ll take you a few tries to get it right and that’s OK.
Essentially, a big news story has broken in your niche, and journalists want experts to give their opinions. In many cases, they will be looking to:
- Understand why something has happened.
- Gather some wider background or context.
- Establish what this might mean for those affected by the story.
- Predict what is likely to happen next.
If you’re a cybersecurity brand and a data breach has happened, you might be able to tell the journalist what caused it (e.g., people sharing passwords or a vulnerability in the system).
The wider background might be that this has happened before. What this might mean for those affected could be that they need to change their passwords or contact their banks.
What is likely to happen next is that the company will release a statement, tighten up its processes, or even potentially be fined.
Journo requests
This is when a journalist puts out a request on a journo request platform (we’ll cover the best ways to find these below).
This is perhaps the easiest for beginners, as you simply need to answer the questions the journalist has provided.
When you do this, remember to add color to what you are saying. Let’s be honest: they’re likely going to receive a bunch of bland, ChatGPT-written responses.
If you want to stand out, then provide answers that showcase your opinions and expertise.
Use examples if possible and don’t try to hide your personality. Journalists want answers from humans, not large language models, so lean into being human.
Seasonal trends and evergreen expertise
Some examples include summer or winter skincare for beauty brands, advice on moving house, removing red wine stains from carpets, drying laundry inside or using compost in the garden.
We Google these things when we want to know the best way to do something. Lifestyle content is constantly seeking tips and hacks from experts to answer its readers’ questions.
Unsure of the questions in your niche?
Use tools such as AlsoAsked (other tools are available, but this is the one I find most user-friendly) to find out what people are asking in your niche.
If you have a site with plenty of informative content, where you’ve already done the hard work, you might be able to work smarter, not harder, with some clever repurposing.
Dig deeper: How SEO and digital PR can drive maximum brand visibility
Repackage your on-site content (and your social content)
You have likely spent a lot of time and money creating on-site content to help your page rank.
This content will be designed to showcase your authority in your niche, detailing your expertise and trustworthiness.
Hopefully, Google will recognize this hard work, but here is how you can make it work harder for you.
If you’re a florist, you might have informational content on your site that explains how consumers can increase the longevity of their flowers once in a vase. This could easily be repackaged and outreached to journalists ahead of Valentine’s Day.
As a skincare brand, you probably have a page that details how to choose the best SPF and sunscreen for your skin type.
If the weather office is predicting a heatwave next week, it might be worth taking this and repackaging it for the press. Send it out to lifestyle writers who cover skincare ahead of the hot weather.
This definitely makes things quicker and easier, but you can’t just copy and paste the content.
Rewrite it to be fresh, topical and designed for the publication’s audience. It’s definitely quicker than writing content from scratch.
You might then want to include the link back to that page in your outreach, explaining that they can get further information there.
A similar approach works with social content. If your brand has a product that goes viral on TikTok, compile the video link, key stats (views, shares, etc.), product info, purchase link and standout comments into an email.
You can then send it to journalists who cover these products. “TikTok users are going WILD for this new mascara” is a headline we see more and more.
If your product causes a stir on socials, make sure to alert the press to compound that success.
Ease into reactive PR with journalist requests
If cold outreach and newsjacking seem a bit too brave an option, the journalist requests are the perfect place to try your hand at reactive PR.
Journalists nearly always need experts and case studies to bring their reporting to life and give it the gravitas it needs.
Whether they are writing lifestyle content on interior trends or hard news about a cybersecurity breach, they will undoubtedly need to hear from experts.
One way they connect with experts is via journalist requests. If you know where to find these – particularly in your niche – then it can be an easy way to get your foot in the door and begin building your first digital PR links.
Some of these are free, like the #JournoRequest hashtag on X, and some offer a freemium model. The ones below are the ones I have used successfully.
- #JournoRequests on X: The original and still the best despite Elon Musk’s best attempts at making the platform less user-friendly to everyone and the influx of spam. To make this more manageable, you can use your search bar to type in the hashtag and keywords related to your industry, e.g., ‘#JournoRequest Plumber.’
- Qwoted: Qwoted operates a freemium model, but the basic account is worth paying for if you find initial success with a free account. Qwoted is particularly good for U.S. brands and publications, but it’s also starting to get better for the UK and Europe. Its UX lets you search and submit quotes and comments easily.
- SOS: The new HARO. It’s early days, and while it may take time to build up to the success of its predecessor HARO, now is a great time for brands to use it to build relationships with journalists before it becomes overrun.
- ResponseSource: This is great for the UK market, but it’s not cheap and provides plenty of excellent press opportunities. ResponseSource is a great thing to build up to, and if you’re doing digital PR yourself and only need journalist requests in your niche, you may find an account more cost-effective than outsourcing your digital PR.
Effective reactive PR strategies for building brand visibility
Everything I’ve explained above will help you build relationships with journalists in your niche, increase awareness of your brand and hopefully build some links. It is crucial to remember that this is a long game.
These tools will help you build foundational links and initial awareness of your brand in the press and build relationships with key journalists in your industry. However, they won’t equate to overnight success in the SERPs.
When it comes to digital PR links, no matter what some impressive-sounding agencies might tell you, it really is quality over quantity.
A little and often approach to digital PR to help you build sustainable growth is fine at the beginning. As your brand and business develop, you may want to bring in a digital PR freelancer or agency to scale up these efforts.
But you’ll already be ahead of the game and you’ll know how it works and be less easily impressed by promises of hundreds of low-quality links.
Lastly, remember journalists don’t owe you links or coverage. All you can do is be willing to put yourself out there and share your knowledge and expertise.
If you do this consistently enough, it will nearly always lead to coverage and links over time, but they are not guaranteed in digital PR.
Dig deeper: 5 underrated skills you need to be a good digital PR – and how to master them