International digital PR is something I don’t have a ton of experience with, so this one was a fun episode to record. The fundamentals stay the same across markets — but the details, like language, working culture, and even what makes a “good” story, change everything.

I sat down with Libby Windle and Eirini Theodoridou of digital marketing agency Connective3 to dig into what it takes to run digital PR across borders: how they grew from a UK-first agency into a team running campaigns across Europe, why native speakers are non-negotiable, and how journalists in different countries work, respond, and decide what to cover.

Here is a slightly edited transcript:

How long have you been doing international PR at Connective3?

Libby (02:16): We were typically a UK agency.

But back in 2020, we started running campaigns within the UK and also on a US scale, and saw huge successes from that.

Then we started working in Europe toward the back end of 2020. We were working with a couple of UK-based clients and brands that wanted to expand across Europe.

One of them was a finance brand where we did a campaign looking into the best places to retire across the European market. From that data we did the UK outreach and some European outreach as well, and we saw massive successes. From there it just grew.

So we’ve been doing it since 2020.

How about you, Eirini?

Erini (03:23): Yeah — I joined in 2021. Yesterday was my five-year anniversary.

Vince: Oh, congrats! Alright!

Erini (03:50): It was organically about to happen. When I joined, I was mostly working with UK accounts. I started as an exec — it’s not one size fits all, but at most agencies you start as an exec and then move up. There was a need for more links and more coverage on topics the UK publications cover, and it was a really fertile environment to create a team because we did have natives.

I was one of the first non-UK people who joined the team, but I was focusing on the UK market, and then I could see the value.

We had so many campaigns where you could get the same data for different markets. I’m Greek native, and I could see the value there. So I saw it happening organically, and then throughout the years I jumped into a more senior role.

What typically comes first? Is it the idea, or is it a client who wants more coverage internationally?

Erini (05:15): I think in the beginning it was the other way around. Now we have brands reaching out for specific links into specific markets, to break into those markets. Germany is a big one, as you mentioned, and the DACH countries in general — not just Germany, but Austria and Czech Republic.

But in the beginning it was more: until we have the data, we have the opportunity.

We’d get publications with a DR over 50 and 60 — really high-value publications — covering our data from different markets. Some of them have English-speaking articles, but even non-English articles drive traffic.

Now it’s more important for brands to break into the market, so they know the value of working with natives, getting someone who understands the market — not just mindlessly pitching a random UK dataset.

We might have Romanian data, for example, and pitch to Romania, but actually creating datasets specific to the market, understanding the regions, understanding the localization.

That’s the main change in the past two years. But in the beginning of 2020, 2021, we mostly had the data that pushed us into outreach to these markets.

Libby (06:35): To elaborate on that — we work with a real mix of clients with different focuses.

Like Erini said, we’ve got clients with campaigns and data who want more eyes on the research, so they’ll have indexes with data relevant to their own market and then wider markets like the US and Europe.

The brief there is to get more eyes on the campaigns, so we outreach far and wide.

And then we’ve got specific clients who just want to dominate the DACH region, the French market, the Spanish markets. They operate within those markets, so we’ll run specific campaigns for that brand within those specific markets. It’s a real mix.

Now they understand the value of actually building links in the market. It might be a UK or US brand that wants to drive revenue from specific markets — launch their product or service in a specific market, say the DACH region.

So you’re acting like consultants to the market and link builders, because they wouldn’t understand, say, if they were a finance service, how Germans understand trading. It’s not something that would just create nice data-led stories journalists like; it’s also about keeping people in that market in the know of what the service is.

How do you build a team for international PR?

Libby (08:58): Yeah, of course. The key to our success is that whichever market we operate in, we’ve got the expertise in-house to grow within that market and understand the consumers and the media, which is vital. We do a lot of work across the DACH region, so we’ve actually got a German PR team within C3 — a German PR lead, strategists, and execs.

They know the market, the journalists, the brands; they know how to speak to consumers and what works. We really lean on them for their expertise, and that’s how we’ve seen success, which we then replicated across other markets like France, Spain, and Italy.

That is really key to building a successful international team — making sure you’ve got those experts internally who are natives within the market you want to grow in.

People buy from people, and it’s the same with brands. So when we’re speaking to brands that want to launch in a new market or run PR campaigns there, if we’ve got natives helping us have those conversations, it builds more trust with the brand and the sector we’re talking to.

Vince (10:25): Are you specifically going out and finding people who live in those regions? Do they work at C3 in the office with you, or—

Libby (10:31): So when we talk about international at C3, one point we always make is that although we’ve got an international presence and team, they all operate from the UK. We’re not dotted all over the world. They’re all working outside of our London, Manchester, and Leeds offices.

But at Connective3, one of the perks is you can work from anywhere abroad, which has been crucial to how we built that team. For example, we’ve got people from France working for C3, so they can go home to France, spend time with family, and work without dipping into their holidays.

That’s been a vital perk. Erini was in Greece last week but was still able to work.

So they’re all within the UK — we’re not all over the world.

Erini: But sometimes we are all over the world — we’re working from other areas.

Before we got this benefit, when I first joined, I was the only non-UK person in the team. Then we built this work-from-abroad scheme, which the non-UK nationals used first, but now most people use it.

It’s a good perk.

And the reason we’re able to build this big team of internationals — we have to thank the brain drain from other European countries. I came here for studies because of the educational system and the economy, and a lot of people followed from different countries as well.

So it’s nice to go home on the weekend to see your family, or work from there for a few weeks. That flexibility has definitely helped. So yes, we’re all in the UK at the moment — but who knows what the future holds.

How do you ideate for different international markets?

Erini (12:48): It depends on the market, but I’d say it’s still the same thing across all markets: relevancy is key.

Whenever we get a specific brand for a specific region, we’d ideally have a native in-house, and then we start ideating by following their guidelines — anything around cultural differences, language differences, even time-zone differences. Then we pick our specific topics and follow the niche of the industry.

Relevance stays the same throughout.

But the key difference is language.

We might have a UK brand that wants to enter the German market, for example, but it needs to be translated in a way that consumers in that country understand. So it starts with a really basic overview: relevance, analyze the media landscape, check the audience of our brand and their competitors, and then we speak to natives and analyze their feedback.

Do you hire native speakers for pitching?

Libby (14:13): Yeah, absolutely. Everything’s done in the native language — the onsite blog if it’s an onsite campaign, the press releases, the actual outreach pitches are all done in the native language within those markets we’re outreaching in.

Vince (14:29): Have you tried, or would you recommend as an alternative, using a translation tool for pitching or ideating for people who don’t have native speakers?

Erini (14:43): Yeah, I think it is possible — of course it is.

We’re not experts in every single market out there.

So yes, it’s possible.

But for real success, I do believe you need those natives in-house to build that content and translate it, because it doesn’t just come down to translation — it’s the language you use, the tone of voice. Each market is completely different. We’re not going to know that for a specific market, whereas the natives are.

If I had to pinpoint the actual line of getting coverage using AI or Google Translate, it’s how niche your pitch is.

Say you have an exclusive — an interview with an athlete. Even if you used AI translation and pitched it to a really relevant publication in German, they might be able to tell you translated it, but they get what you mean, they get the exclusive. I think you’re going to get the result. But would you build a relationship with that publication or journalist? I don’t think so.

That’s the only way I can see it happening long-term if you use AI.

Vince (15:58): Right — and the story has to lead it. It sounds like if it’s not an interesting story, you’re still going to strike out.

Libby (16:14): One other thing to mention on your question, Vince — when you’re building an international team with native experts per market, there’s a lot of crossover, especially across European markets. For example, we’ve got a fantastic French team who also have experience across the Spanish market.

So while we may not have a Spanish PR lead, we’ve got French execs and leads with Spanish market experience. At that point they’re able to jump in and support that market. We find a lot of similarities and crossover, so that’s another way around it I’d suggest.

What are some differences you see across markets, regions, and countries?

Erini (17:11): While I was thinking about this, most of the time what I say to people is: the working culture.

Take Europe as an example.

Journalists in general — I think everyone will agree — have a really competitive work schedule.

It’s competitive to get into a big national, get the exclusives, hit their KPIs. That relates to every country; all media landscapes are quite similar in that they work at the same pace. But there are key differences we’ve noticed.

I’ve been doing EU outreach for the past four years, and there are so many aspects of how journalists work per country.

For example, if I pitched to Greece on a Friday, I might not get a link later that day, but I might get a response on a Sunday — it’s quite common for people to work their own hours.

But if I pitched in a Scandinavian country, even if it’s climate-sensitive, something really relevant happening right now, it’s highly unlikely they’ll pick it up because they’re really strict on their schedule.

That also translates to the timeframe from pitch to article. Even if I know they’re going to cover it — because I have a relationship with them or it’s really relevant — there are so many different timeframes per country. As a continent, Europe isn’t as big as the US, but there are so many differences in how they work, when they log off, how strict they are with timelines, whether they work for a national or regional.

Especially compared to the UK, where if there’s a really relevant, competitive pitch and I pitch it to a journalist at the Metro, they don’t want anyone else to get it. That’s the key difference I highlight in every conversation.

How about you, Libby?

Libby (20:09): When it comes to international, at the end of the day it’s still PR, and the PR fundamentals still apply.

The trend that’s the same across every market is that you still have to have relevance in your pitch to the journalists you’re pitching to. Why is it relevant to them, to the audience, to the market, to the publication? That applies in whatever market you’re operating in.

Your data methodology, too — as PRs, no matter what market you’re operating in, you’re still responsible for making sure your data is accurate, sense-checking the numbers and the data you provide, and making sure your methodologies and sources are super clear.

Those are the two key main trends, and it’s important to state it’s still PR no matter what market you’re reaching in.

Creating those relationships remains key, like you said. In some European markets — say the UK — you might every so often pick up the phone.

It’s not as common nowadays as it once was, but across European markets and the US you probably don’t do that anymore. So there are a few differences, but creating those journalist relationships is definitely key.

Erini: It varies. It’s quite a generalization, but I’d say European and even smaller countries appreciate feel-good stories more than the US. I find most of my scaremongering pitches do well in the US or UK, but they won’t perform as well here — they won’t perform well in smaller European countries. It depends on each, but as a generalization we definitely notice feel-good pitches tend to get more traction.

Libby: And this isn’t really a trend, but one thing we were talking about earlier is that some markets are still behind in terms of digital PR — they’re not quite aware of what it is. In the UK or US, you can send an outreach pitch and the journalist knows what you’re referring to and they’ll cover it.

But there are some markets, especially across Europe, where digital PR is still not widely known.

So we’ve found that in some markets we’ve got to explain our story to a journalist in dummy terms — explain what we’re sending, why it’s relevant, and what we want them to do with it. Put it on your website, it’s brand momentum. You’ve got to be really clear, because we’ve had a lot of responses in markets where people have gone, “What is this?” or “What do you mean?”

So it’s interesting how some markets are still a little bit behind — not backwards, behind.

Vince (23:04): Right, right. It’s funny — I remember when I started, this was more blogger outreach, the small blogs you’re trying to get links from, and they’d be like, “This is really cool, what do you want me to do with it?” That is interesting. Erini, going back to your finding about understanding the schedules and the nuances — is this just trial and error?

How do you get to recognize the nuances in different regions?

Erini (23:36): Even though I’m from Greece, I never pitched to Greek journalists growing up.

I didn’t know how it worked, but I understand the nuances and even smaller details — holidays, different bank holidays per region, cultural differences, language.

Greece is a smaller country, but talking to our German team, I’ve learned there are so many language differences across the DACH region. So that’s definitely something you have to try a lot of things to get right. But there are some things I wouldn’t ever be able to learn or understand because I’m not from there.

So you do need an aid to make it long-term successful as a PR strategy — but you can definitely try and find out yourself.

Even in countries that don’t have PR-heavy pitches — say most European countries — it’s worth reaching out and asking: “When do you want me to pitch? Can I send you a resource on XYZ because I know you’re covering it?” There’s still a plethora of countries we haven’t talked into, where you can use trial and error, but you won’t be able to find meaningful relationships with the publications or journalists because you’re not a native.

Vince (24:55): Yeah, that makes sense. This leads to a question I was going to save for the end, but now feels like a good time. If you were starting from scratch — let’s start with you, Libby — on building a team, what are common pitfalls now that you’ve done this for a bit? How would you start? Walk me through that, and then I want to get into content ideation.

What are some pitfalls you’ve run into building a team for international PR?

Libby (25:30): Yeah, of course.

I’ll start with where I’d begin if I were to start again: defining your proposition and your niche values — what areas you’re an expert in and what you can leverage. That would be the key thing.

And understanding which markets I’m going to target first — the ones where me and my team have expertise and can dominate from day one.

Another thing I’d do is build a core team — a strong team with your managers, strategists, and execs — and not just rely on one or two people to do everything, because they’ll burn out, people will leave, and clients won’t be happy. You need your core delivery team, again with experience in most of the markets you’ll operate in.

Vince (26:41): Can you break down what each of those does, just so people can understand?

Libby (26:46): Absolutely.

Executives are your junior, entry-level PRs who are brilliant at taking your campaign content and research, forming fantastic press releases, and outreaching them to the media.

They’re the ones speaking to journalists, pitching your stories, and getting results to build case studies for new business.

Then you’ve got your strategists, who are amazing at building strategy — knowing your client’s goals, what they want to achieve, and building the PR strategy, then working with execs to distribute it.

And your managers — you need people to manage a team, to carve and progress them, upskill them, teach them the ropes. So those would be the three key hires if I were starting from scratch, because sometimes you rely on all of this within one person, and we’re only human — we can’t do everything.

That was my biggest tip.

Another one — something we’re all maybe guilty of — is not being very process-driven.

I’d develop core processes from the very beginning, before you get too busy.

We know that introducing processes once you’ve been through a lot of growth is so hard, because we’re creatures of habit.

Teaching someone something new when they’ve done it one way for so long takes more than not.

So having your processes nailed from the start would be a big one. So: value proposition and knowing your niche; building a core team so you’re not relying on one person who’ll burn out; and nailing your processes from the start.

Another one would be having a proof-of-concept client. If you want to target a specific market — say France — start with a client and sector you know your team can dominate and get quick results, because then you’ve got your success story to go out and win business with.

Vince (29:07): Yeah, I love that.

Erini (29:09): The only thing I’d add is, in an ideal world, if you could have feet on the ground — immerse yourself in the culture for however long, even with the natives there if possible — or if you have a brand, say for France, that’s already there. In order to work with you, they might not have an SEO team or have done PR before, so you have a lot to learn.

Being there will speed up the process of getting success. It’s not ideal to create a new agency in every country, but if you can immerse yourself even from afar — reading the news, subscribing to newsletters, even learning the language, as simple as getting on Lingo and understanding why you’re pitching — that’s something I’d add.

What are some pitfalls you’ve run into creating content for international PR?

Erini (30:17): Definitely it’s not one size fits all.

As PRs, we’ve all used the spray-and-pray method before, dating back to the old days of just doing UK PR and building, building.

It was definitely more on the quantity side back then. I’d say start from the national point of view, but before you do anything, understand the market. Create a wish list of publications you want to be featured on and work backwards.

See how they publish — even if it’s not PR-led — because some countries don’t get enough PR pitches.

Understand how they format their articles, what type of data they include, if any. Speak with your natives and understand what content would perform better. Say you have the finance industry — would it be expert commentary, interviews, reacting to market news, or a data-led story?

Then I’d start ideating. It’s good to have a well-rounded strategy — it’s better to have your data-led pieces but also some backup proactive pieces you can easily pitch whenever something relevant happens in the market. But the core content strategy is sitting down with your natives, understanding the media landscape, getting a wish list of publications to target, and then creating your content.

The main pitfall I see all the time is a lot of index pieces.

We know they work — especially for lifestyle topics — but it’s died down.

More and more, especially non-native brands, keep doing them just because it’s what we know. I don’t think we should eliminate them from all international ideation sessions, but ideally we need a global approach — global and local together.

You need to take into consideration the whole country, region, or state, but make sure you understand the nuances more zoomed-in: areas within a state, regions within countries, cities, capitals, or metro areas across the key countries you focus on, instead of just generalizing with a local approach of “this country ranks X.”

It might help drive links in the beginning, but it won’t crack the surface or get you reached out to by journalists for more topics.

So I’d say get more local knowledge on what works, what doesn’t, what people actually read about, and where they even read the news — each country is different.

How do you recommend breaking away from index pieces if that’s what many lean on for international PR?

Erini (34:19): I’d answer with a question, because I’ve had this debate for two and a half years — everyone’s going on about it at every conference, every talk, and I’m guilty of saying it too. But we keep doing it because it works.

The question is: why are consumers so quick to stop for those articles?

Why is there a need for people to find out where their city ranks in some random index?

The worst thing I’ve seen recently is the best-smelling city. If I saw my hometown ranked the number one best-smelling city in the world, I’d click on it. It’s clickbait, isn’t it? It’s difficult to resist that clickbait.

That’s the thing — I get why we create them and why journalists still pick them up, not as often as they used to, but I don’t think they’re going anywhere.

I’m not sure they’ll go extinct, like the “drink job” campaign you find the odd one of going around. But I do think the more niche the topic, and the more relevant and localized your approach to the index, the better — to create credibility and a viable pitch you send only to specific journalists you know, maybe in that city, who follow that niche or cover that industry.

You won’t find “best countries to retire” going around for long, but you might find “best areas to raise a family in a metropolitan area” — make it even more granular.

Libby: It’s about the best place to retire — I mean, we did that in 2020, six years ago, so that’s how old those campaigns are on an international scale. I think for most there’s still a place for index campaigns, but you’re right, they are a bit more old school.

We’re seeing a lot of success at the moment from interviews, especially across the sporting and lifestyle sectors — interviewing sports stars, trending-topic celebrities, influencers, and so on. We’re also seeing success utilizing our clients’ internal data to form stories.

I know not a lot of brands can use their internal data, but that’s been a huge success when we can — using their data, nothing across the media, around awareness days, etc. And by awareness days I don’t mean National Doughnut Day.

Erini: That’s another issue — even to this day, not as often, you’d see pieces on World Doughnut Day and “the best states for a doughnut,” that type of content getting picked up in the US. But not across Europe.

Even if you try this for something really niche, like a “World Happiness Day,” something needs to be in the actual European country.

That won’t get picked up at all. That was really big back in 2021, those awareness days in the US, and it went everywhere — mostly lifestyle topics — but that hasn’t happened across Europe or Australia.

I’ve not seen world awareness days, mostly lifestyle, getting picked up in those countries. So that’s a cultural difference.

But what we’re seeing more is that utilizing our clients’ brand data is key.

A lot of the time, brands — especially on an international scale — have a goldmine of onsite content or reports they’re doing nothing with. So we leverage that and form PR stories to distribute to the media. That’s really successful. Reactive newsjacking still dominates across some European markets.

And then even surveys — survey-led stories where we survey 2,000, 2,500-plus respondents. We’ve always done that across the UK and US, but it works across European markets too — Spain, France, Italy, Germany.

So that’s another tactic we see success from.

Back to the trial-and-error thing on surveys — that would be the representative sample.

Some European markets, regardless of population, are so strict with this before they’d accept the claim. We’ve seen some companies with a thousand respondents across the US — different countries — and you’d think the story is backed up by a survey.

You could never have enough people to back up your claim, but you find other countries that are very strict — say 10 million population, they’d expect 10K respondents, for example.

If you wanted to expand your PR offering, which content and regions would you recommend leaning into?

Erini (40:00): The most fertile environment right now is Europe, for a UK brand — depending on the industry, I guess — but it’s such untapped territory when it comes to PR.

So I’d definitely delve into the European market. And like you said, it needs to depend on where the brand has built their presence and where they’ve got actual products to sell within that market.

You don’t want to launch randomly in a market — it needs to be based on business focus too.

Say they have a service they can use in all European markets — like a travel-fare comparison, something everyone can purchase from their site. I’d definitely go to Europe, and I’d start by immersing into each market. I wouldn’t tackle Europe as a whole — I’d choose whatever market makes more sense financially, then look at the cultural influences, find my natives, build a strong team, and then understand why their link-building strategies work, where they’re getting links, and build my strategy from there.

Libby, how about you?

Libby (41:23): I’d do the absolute same. I’d choose a market based on the business’s focuses and where they want to take their presence and products, then work backwards.

I’d do my research on the market, make sure I’ve got a team in-house — and if I haven’t, lean on freelancers for the consumer research, market research, and what’s getting picked up by the media.

Then I’d work with the client to understand their core focuses: are they launching a particular product, or focusing on a particular category on their website? From that, I’d form my strategy and ideas around their core focuses.

If it was a new market where we didn’t have lots of expertise, another way around it would be looking into marketing or PR agencies already in that market.

You can look at their websites — a lot will have their portfolio or case studies — and see what the agency has done for other brands.

Then you can take a little sneaky inspo and cover the interest of the brand you want to work with in that market. And then maybe get some journalists for a coffee, if possible.

How do you stay on top of trending in different countries?

Erini (43:45): The trends definitely still apply — social listening, Google Trends, Google Alerts, that absolutely still applies. But, like we were saying earlier about doing French — whenever we have a new market focus for one of our brands, I subscribe to the equivalent of BBC newsletters for that region, just to get the key general news.

They do have a lot of English newsletters for that.

I wouldn’t go on X and change my VPN to Germany to get the trending news for the day, but it helps to subscribe to the equivalent newsletters. You even have industry newsletters for a specific niche if they’re big enough — say you’re in finance.

I’d create Google Alerts, or Brand Alerts, if I have a mention of a key competitor of one of my brands, just to make sure I get everywhere they’re mentioned.

The more social-listening tools, you can easily translate that and find what people are talking about, what journalists are covering. And in an ideal world, I’d have time to scroll through TikTok, find trending news in that region, and get ideas from it if I have to add data.

Libby: Like you said, it’s PR at the end of the day — we should all be reading the news. If we’re operating in certain markets, we should be reading the news within those markets to understand what’s going on across the market and the consumers.

So on my way into work, I might be reading the BBC, whereas Erini might be reading an equivalent publication.

So no matter what market you’re operating in, you should be familiar with trending news stories within it. You can find all the information you need online; if you want to cut back the time, just subscribe to your newsletters and create alerts — you’ll get information in your inbox or on your phone.

Erini: What a tool on the other hand would offer you is a much shorter timeframe.

For example, we had a travel piece around airfare a few months ago — I think earlier in 2025.

Then in January there was an airspace blackout in Greece, and the moment it happened, I found out. It was big news — a big European country, flights affected from all around the world flying to Greece — so it was relevant to global media. It just happened in Greece moments after I found out. So I re-angled and pitched the new angle to the media across those different regions and Greece, which helped us get more coverage.

You’d get this information if Greece was your market — you’d already subscribe to travel alerts on Google for the region, or use a major publication in Greece — but you wouldn’t be able to find it ASAP as it was happening. So that’s the timeframe trade-off.

Libby: What our team’s really good at is, we’ve got a newsroom Teams chat we use daily. Pretty much all the time, the team are posting trends or trending news stories they’re seeing across the globe. It’s really interesting — “Hey, have you seen this? Could this work as a reactive angle for this client or brand?”

So the team are really good at that, especially across international.

Erini: Like Black Friday, for example — it’s huge in the US, and the moment we had some Black Friday news, people were dropping ideas in the chat. In the European part of the international team, that wasn’t really a big thing — I was asking some German people on our team, and that’s not something they’d pitch. I would pitch it in Greece, because I grew up in a lot of US culture. Even the English I was taught was US English. Everything to do with US culture is so big in Greece. But bigger countries in Europe, like Germany, couldn’t care less — Black Friday isn’t a thing there. But it is in smaller countries like Greece.

What didn’t I ask you that you think is important on this topic?

Libby (48:53): From my perspective, it’s around building an international team.

It’s so important — as managers, directors, heads of, whoever’s responsible for building and growing the team — to understand that once you start building an international team, you’re hiring people from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds.

They all communicate and work differently. So my biggest piece of advice would be to make sure you’re speaking, communicating, and getting to know your team one-on-one to understand how they work and communicate, then adapt your management style to reflect that.

The more you support and work alongside your team, and communicate with them how they want to be communicated with, and give feedback how they like to receive it, the stronger your culture and connection. That’s key for success, because at the end of the day, if your team are happy, feel supported, and feel fulfilled at work, they’re going to do a good job across their accounts.

Erini: For me it’s more or less the same, but tapping into and leaning on the people who work with you to learn from them — especially if you hire people who are better than you when it comes to tapping into different markets and understanding what you can offer different brands.

I’m a great example: since I joined as an exec, I was trusted to lead with my international background on different projects, in order to learn from the team and teach them what could work and what couldn’t. So lean on your people and understand what you can offer from their capabilities to different brands and crack into different markets.

Again, as Libby said — people buy from people.

Libby: Absolutely. And like you were saying, if you’ve already got a UK team and you build an international team, don’t forget about your UK team.

Make sure your skills are transferable — educate your UK team on your international presence, and get your international team to upskill the UK team. At the end of the day, we want a team that all have transferable skills. That’s really important, because it gives you bigger business buy-in. So that would be another key: make sure you’re upskilling the entire PR department.

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A few months ago, I set out to answer a question I kept seeing dodged in the AI SEO conversation: which sites are actually getting cited, and why?

So I partnered with the team at Citation Labs and Xofu: Garrett French, James Wirth, and Valerie Cecil, to dig into a dataset of four million AI citations across platforms, prompt types, and funnel stages.

What came back surprised me.

There’s no universal list.

The top cited domains shift dramatically depending on the prompt, the platform, and the intent behind the query. The stuff being shared on LinkedIn is typically way too broad to act on.

So I brought the team together to talk through what the data actually means, and more importantly, what to do about it.

This is our conversation.

Here’s a slightly-edited transcript:

What were your initial thoughts on the study?

Garrett: The variability of cited domains — yes, that’s a fundamental reality now when it comes to figuring out what work to do. At Citation Labs, where do we start? What thread do we pull?

We’ve seen very consistent high variability by platform, by vertical, by prompt type. B2C vs. B2B, what does this cost, what’s the purchase decision cycle — all of these influence what gets cited. So if you’re taking anything away from high-level aggregate studies other than “I need to figure this out for my specific vertical,” you might be taking the wrong things away.

That said, LinkedIn is one thing we do see consistently, particularly at the bottom of the funnel across multiple verticals and prompt types. We see LinkedIn getting drawn in pretty reliably in bottom-of-funnel queries.

Vince: That’s a good segue. I think your initial comment when I shared the study was that the type of prompt you’re using dramatically changes where the information comes from. Let’s dig into that — you spend a lot of time building prompts and getting very granular.

Can you talk about how Citation Labs thinks about prompt design?

Garrett: For sure. And I want to speak to digital PR practitioners who may have a narrow view of what prompts they should be tracking. The first shift is: think in a multitude of prompt types. And second, look at how cited sources vary as you move up and down the funnel.

If you’ve earned coverage in a major publication — great job — but ask yourself: will that get cited in bottom-of-funnel prompts that actual buyers are using? We don’t have a perfect sense of the exact prompts buyers use, which means there may need to be a more comprehensive approach to the surfaces and publishers who could carry your content.

If you’re in digital PR and you’ve gotten a big piece covered, how should you frame or discuss it so that it’s contextually relevant at the bottom of the funnel? Could a version of it live on LinkedIn as brand content? There’s a lot of support work this kind of study points toward.

The bigger question for any practitioner is: do we have a sense of all the possible prompt types our market might be using? Are we over-indexing on big entity-knowledge prompts?

Or are we modeling the user in the middle of a real working context — trying to solve a problem — and understanding where LLMs draw their information from in that scenario?

James: And are we looking at this for our particular brand? One of the things that jumped out at me as Vince started sharing data was the high level of variability. I was seeing domains I hadn’t seen frequently enough in my own analysis to recognize the pattern. So I went down some interesting rabbit holes comparing his data to client-specific data.

The recognition for me was: this is highly customized — not just by intent type and AI system, but by the brand, the category, the niche, whether it’s B2C or B2B.

The national and international studies are helpful for direction, but are we taking it one step further and looking at this for a given domain, across different AI systems and intent levels? That’s where it gets really actionable — and it’s reasonably accessible.

If the AI results are tailored to personal history, does that make these lists meaningless? Am I being too pessimistic?

Garrett: No, I love the challenge. But I want to reframe “personalization.” What I’d encourage us to think about as an industry is something closer to role-based relevance. What role does this person occupy? What types of information do they need? That’s what personalization should mean for us as marketers.

We can’t know someone’s favorite music. But we can know that there is a logic and structure behind the types of information humans in a given role need in order to make the best decision.

That’s what we ground our prompt design in — a baseline assumption about who’s involved in a purchase decision, what context they’re operating in, and whether we as a business are providing enough information for them to make a great decision.

Valerie: Garrett, let me push back slightly. Would you even look at a top-cited domains list at all? Like when does that come into play?

Garrett: Rarely as a starting point. I’d look at content patterns across surfaces — why is this specific page getting cited? I may not be able to get cited on Forbes, but I can understand what that content does and potentially replicate the approach elsewhere.

The personalization piece — meaning the role-based framing — is the most important starting point.

Valerie: And what I’d add is that rarely are clients already thinking that way.

When you start getting granular about specific roles, specific use cases, specific working contexts, a lot of times marketing isn’t connected to those details. That’s usually the salesperson in the field who knows them.

But I think we would consistently find similar probable surfaces if we start at the bottom of the funnel and work up. We’d arrive at Forbes eventually, but along the way there are a lot of other types of publications and surfaces to interact with. And here’s the thing — you don’t have to be on Forbes to get cited.

If you’re providing genuinely useful information for people trying to make real decisions, you can be drawn into AI answers. That kind of content isn’t commonly created by marketers because we’re typically not on the ground. It’s more field-based.

Vince: So the takeaway is: do your audience research.

Showing up in AI is less about finding exploits or pattern-matching, and more about finding where your customers are and answering the right questions. If you do that well, you’ll influence AI as a byproduct — not as a primary goal. What’s your take, Valerie?

Is showing up in AI more about answering the right questions for your customers?

Valerie: Totally agree. When we first started doing link building — 15 years ago — Garrett’s ethos was always about valuing the reader. Valuing their time. Valuing the person who’s going to read whatever we produce. That’s still at the heart of this.

The closer you get to those unasked questions — the things someone didn’t know they needed answered but are critical to their decision — the better.

If you’re generating content from that place, I believe it gets picked up by LLMs because it’s answering questions that haven’t been well-answered before. It’s genuinely valuable, and the rest follows.

I’m not saying it’s purely magical and you don’t have to think about anything else. But positioning and value are foundational. James would push us to look at query fan-outs as well —

James, correct me if I’m off here — but my understanding is the more fan-outs that run, the less confident the LLM potentially is in its answer, which creates more opportunity for us to get in at the grounding layer?

James: Yes, keep going — that’s right.

Valerie: So combining Garrett’s role-based framing with the QFO data is really valuable. It also gives you guardrails. Without some constraints we’d end up producing 400,000-word guides.

Garrett: It’s a nice constraint. I’ll allow it.

James: And one more reframe on personalization: what we’re really talking about isn’t personalization based on someone’s search history — it’s personalization based on deeply understanding your target customer. Their needs, what they’re up against, their main considerations.

To Vince’s point about whether to throw out big studies — I wouldn’t throw them out, but take them with a grain of salt. They give direction.

The real work is doing your own research, specific to your domain, your ideal customer, and their journey. Because all of those factors determine who and what gets cited in the conversation that’s actually relevant to your brand.

What’s more important, AI mentions or citations?

Valerie: It’s all over the place, honestly. We get client demand for both AI mentions and citations — and even for positioning of mentions within a response.

Like, am I the first recommendation or the fifth? So it really depends on what visibility they currently have within a given use case or product category.

Sometimes the real problem is actually the opposite: they have visibility in all the wrong ways. In those cases you’re almost doing reputation management first, then building from there. And how do you decrease mentions and citations when they’re negative?

That’s its own challenge.

So we really do consider both wins.

Right now, mentions are probably our bigger focus — partly because influencing a mention can sometimes be accomplished by getting other websites cited. Controlling content on a site that impacts mention visibility is more scalable than directly chasing citations.

Citations are harder to crack.

One of the biggest barriers is that we don’t get to control client on-site content. I can’t just tell BuzzStream to rewrite their service page. That’s presented itself as a hurdle — not insurmountable, but real.

Vince: That’s a great transition into owned versus earned. In this study I broke citations into owned — coming from the brand’s own site — and earned — from third-party sources. For the evaluative prompts it was roughly 80% earned, 20% owned. Earned obviously dominates.

When you’re working with a brand, do you focus on getting the owned content right before going after earned?

James: It’s a challenging position. Organizations are largely still running the old playbook, and the person in an SEO or content role — even if they have expanded responsibilities now — often doesn’t control the core messaging. They own the blog. They don’t own the strategy.

And the challenge with that 80% earned side is that most of those surfaces are closed systems. They have their own editorial controls. They’re not handing over a platform where you can say whatever you want.

The other wrinkle is that LLMs aren’t primarily looking at your own website — they’re looking at other websites talking about you. Websites you don’t control. And you may not even be talking about your brand the right way on your own site in the first place, which is part of why owned is only 20% of citations. If the content isn’t useful or germane to the actual prompt being asked, the LLM has nothing to pull from.

What are the actual tactics for getting citations?

Garrett: I’m going to frame it and then hand it to James and Valerie, who are actually running operations.

One of the most exciting things we’ve done recently is grounding our prompt selection in real customer data. We had visibility into HubSpot for a client — specifically leads coming in from ChatGPT. When someone came from an LLM and landed on the site, they’d type what they were looking for.

That language — the actual words real buyers used — became our starting point for the prompts we track.

You work backwards from there. What are people who came in from LLMs actually asking for? Then: how do we support them getting that information?

That’s the most crystallized starting point I’ve had recently. If you can access that data, whether from HubSpot, customer support logs, or sales interviews — start there.

James: Exactly. Whatever the data source — HubSpot, customer support logs, sales interviews — deeply understand who your customer is and what they’re looking for.

Then make sure your own content reflects that. Then go do outreach to that 80% earned side. And if you can’t get the right message out through owned or earned surfaces, create new surfaces.

That’s the toolbox. We can help with all of it, but that’s the framework.

Valerie: It does depend on what visibility gap you’re trying to close and which surfaces you use to close it. Garrett built a process that starts with a prompt and builds out content that addresses visibility gaps across specific surfaces — the client’s website, a LinkedIn article, a YouTube video, a Chamber of Commerce site.

The goal is that the answer is unified across multiple surfaces.

We have seen relatively fast uptick from this approach. I’m not talking about citation change necessarily — I’m talking about mention change.

We’ve seen citation of a placed article within a week when we narrowly and verbosely address a single query fan-out tied to a specific bottom-of-funnel prompt. A week.

I’m not saying do that a million times and you’re set. How long does that last? Does it translate to your own site getting cited?

Those are the next questions. But every step gives us more to test and learn from. And the clients who are willing to go along for the ride — those engagements are genuinely exciting.

James: One thing I want to flag for people watching: this may sound ambiguous, and we don’t mean it to be.

It’s just that every engagement is highly customized to that client’s specific visibility challenges, KPIs, and goals.

It’s hard to say “do X, Y, Z and get ABC” because we’re still in early days of figuring this out.

Citations, mentions, and recommendation rank are all distinct. Recommendation rank — actually being named and recommended in an AI response — is often a shorter list than traditional search.

Maybe three to five brands that are genuinely recommended. Getting cited is different from being mentioned. Being mentioned is different from being in that recommendation set.

Each is its own challenge.

Garrett: And we’ve been doing some of this work at the page level — finding articles that are already being cited, reaching out, asking for a mention insertion or a link. Some are pay-to-play, some aren’t. We call it anchor context rather than anchor text, because what matters isn’t just the link but the editorial framing around it. The AI system can find your website on its own — what it needs is the context and descriptors that properly frame your brand in relation to the query.

What kind of backlinks actually move the needle for AI citations?

James: We start by doing a deep dive into what’s currently showing up in the answers for the prompts that matter to us.

Who’s being mentioned? What sites are being cited?

Then we figure out what message we want to get out there and which surfaces to use. It’s rarely about raw link quantity.

There’s almost always an editorial component — some contextual value being added.

That editorial aspect may actually be more important than the link itself, because the AI system can already discover your brand.

What it needs is the right framing around that discovery.

Garrett: Valerie coined the term “anchor context” for this — how are we structuring the information we want ingested? What impact are we trying to have, on which needle, measuring what outcome? That’s been one of the core driving questions at Citation Labs. Links are still part of it — we still build a lot of them — but we’re also thinking about how to affect rankings for query fan-outs and support all the different types of visibility opportunities that exist now.

Quick one: which tools are best for identifying AI citations?

James: We built Xofu because that was a hard question to answer. That’s our answer.

Valerie: Xofu.

Can you give a quick overview of how to do an AI audit?

Valerie: We actually have that functionality built into Xofu.

It starts with a competitor landscape comparison, then lets you drill down by URL — like a specific product page — and build out prompt sets from there.

You could run a thousand prompts for a single product, or ten prompts across a thousand products. We can also track the output over time: how many offsite placements have we built addressing these prompts, what gap are they closing, and against which competitor?

It’s genuinely hard to give a one-size-fits-all answer because it’s such a moving target, and the specifics vary so much by brand and category.

But the Xofu audit is built to handle that variability.

Vince: The takeaway from this whole conversation, for me, is that there’s an inherent specificity to this work that gets lost in the LinkedIn discourse — where someone says “I did this one thing and increased visibility 1,000%.”

It’s never that simple.

And even metrics like “number of citations” can be vanity metrics if you’re not tracking them against the right audience.

If BuzzStream is getting tons of citations around affiliate marketing use cases, but our core audience is digital PR and link builders — there’s a disconnect.

You have to work backward from the questions your actual customers are asking.

Garrett: We haven’t always been invited into that room as an industry, Vince.

We were held accountable for traffic, for top-of-funnel keywords, for visibility. We weren’t invited into the conversations where buyers are actually making decisions, interacting with sales, wrestling with real working problems.

Google never invited us in either. They said rank for this, make non-commodity content — but didn’t tell us how.

Then it was chase the keywords that drive the most traffic. As an industry, we haven’t been working at this long enough to have a fully functional model for thinking at the individual user level the way AI systems do. That’s what’s shifting.

Vince: It’s a mindset shift. Round peg, square hole — we’re trying to solve new problems with old frameworks.

There will definitely be a part two of this. Stay tuned and subscribe to our respective newsletters.

Thank you all — Garrett, James, Valerie — for your time and insights. And thank you to everyone who listened.

The post Webinar: How to Appear in AI Citations and Mentions (with Citation Labs) appeared first on BuzzStream.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that all AI platforms operate differently.

Even some of those within the same family, like Google’s AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews, offer wildly different answers, brand mentions, and citations.

So, the short answer to the question this post asks: “Do AI platforms cite the same websites?” should be an obvious no, but the scale of the divergence is larger than I expected.

In a previous study, we examined how AI citations differ across prompts.

For this study, to understand how different these citations were, we studied overlaps from a 30,000-citation analysis across 595 prompts on Google AI Mode, Gemini, AI Overviews, and OpenAI ChatGPT using Jaccard similarity.

(Basically, Jaccard similarity is a statistical metric used to measure how similar two sets of data are. You divide the number of elements they have in common by the total number of unique elements.)

Here’s what we found:

Most Citations Are Platform-Exclusive

Across 595 prompts, 76.1% of citations were unique to a single platform.

Conversely, only 184 citations (or 0.8%) overlap across all four platforms.

When looking at unique URLs across the entire dataset (regardless of prompt), 65.8% of the 16,764 unique URLs appear only once.

96% of those identical citations came from pages I categorized as blog/content pages, meaning they weren’t news, social, or any type of transactional content.

For instance, when we asked “What products or services does Adidas offer?”, all four platforms cited Adidas’ 2024 Annual Report:

But let’s look next at how the different platforms differ.

Google’s AI Clusters Together, But Not That Tightly

The strongest overlap is between Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode, with a Jaccard similarity of 37.4%.

Surprisingly, the three Google platforms don’t overlap much.

Then, as you can see, ChatGPT barely overlaps with Google properties at all.

When They Do Agree, Wikipedia is the Main Source of Consensus

Of the 184 URL–prompt pairs cited by all 4 platforms, 65 (35%) involve Wikipedia.

Almost every “What does [company] do?” and “What is [brand] known for?” prompt in my study returns the brand’s Wikipedia page.

It appears to be the single source all four AI systems reliably converge on for questions about brand awareness and company identity.

But does that mean you should run out and try to get a Wikipedia profile created?

Probably not; Wikipedia made up just 3.8% of all 30,000 citations in the dataset, which is one domain out of 5,587 unique domains cited across the study.

(Not to mention the fact that Wikipedia is notoriously difficult to game.)

What Does This All Tell Us?

If you are trying to build citations based on most-cited domain lists, you are chasing the wrong thing.

What gets cited depends almost entirely on the platform (and the prompt, which we covered extensively in our previous study).

The best way to show up in AI is to build a consistent set of messages and a brand identity across the web to ensure your brand is measured.

The post AI Citation Overlap: Do AI Platforms Cite the Same Sites? appeared first on BuzzStream.

There is a lot of data on the best time to pitch a journalist, but the best time isn’t universal. Every journalist has different priorities and different events going on in their beat or newsroom.

So, nailing that timing is key.

In my F.I.T. framework, which helps you decide whether a journalist belongs on your media list, the T stands for timeliness.

Is your story something that makes sense for them to cover right now?

The best way to answer that question is by clearly conveying the ‘why now?’ in your pitch.

So, in this post, I’ll help you understand why and how you should answer “why now”.

Why Does “Why Now” Work So Well?

Answering “Why now” can check off tons of boxes that are critical to increasing the odds your story will get covered. It also:

• Tells a journalist why they need to act on it right away.

• Tells a journalist why it will be relevant to their readers.

• Tells a journalist why it will be easier to sell/pitch to an editor.

But don’t take my word for it…I also asked a few journalists about this.

Freelance journalist Rob Waugh, a previous podcast guest, told me:

“Pitches don’t just have to be on-point (and ideally backed up with collateral like spokespeople available for interview); they have to be timely.

Making sure the ‘why now’ is clear is a way to ensure journalists know that this story is current, and it increases the chance they’ll read further and feature your pitch.”

Freelance journalist Joni Sweet added:

“A new product or service isn’t automatically newsworthy, but connecting it to a timely trend, new research, or a current conversation immediately makes the story more compelling.”imgimfimfaifmfasfimfafim

But one underappreciated consideration for most PRs is that journalists often need to “sell” ideas to editors and producers.

Mike Fahey, of Fahey Communications, who spent over 15 years as a news producer, told me about the impact on editors:

“The strongest pitches don’t just present an interesting company or person — they explain why the story matters right now. That immediacy helps reporters frame the story for their audience and gives editors confidence that the coverage will feel timely instead of promotional.”

So, let’s look at some of the ways you can answer this in your own pitches.

The Four Ways to Answer “Why Now”

There are four main ways to consider answering “why now” with your pitch: seasonality, trends, breaking news, and recurring events.

1. Seasonal Hook

Look in any news outlet at the beginning of a season, and you’ll find everything tying back to some type of seasonality.

There are the obvious four main seasons:

But there’s also weather-related seasonality like fire season, hurricane season, allergy season, and cold and flu season.

Most of these aren’t official holidays, but are generally recurring. Using our PR calendar, you can see that Back to School season starts in July.

Then you can confirm by doing a Google search:

There’s election season or financial season:

Wedding season:

Awards season:

You get the idea.

Hooking a pitch into seasonality gives it a reason to add to a busy calendar.

2. Trending Topic

Trending topics are incredibly effective for certain types of journalists and another great way to demonstrate timeliness.

Trends can come from publicly available sources, such as social media, such as TikTok:

Google Trends:

Reddit:

Exploding Topics and Glimpse also provide great insights.

Needless to say, the trending topic must still be relevant to the journalist.

3. Recurring Event

Recurring events can be holidays, major events like the Super Bowl, or social media “holidays”.

This overlaps with the seasonality hook, but I’d think of this more as a specific event rather than an entire season.

For instance, as you can see in our PR calendar, Memorial Day is the 25th of May.

If you were wondering what to pitch for Memorial Day, do a Google search for the phrase “just in time for Memorial Day” for last year, and you’ll see all the different ways brands and locations tell stories using Memorial Day as the timely hook:

Remember, though, the bigger the holiday, the more likely other brands are to jump on it as well.

In our podcast with digital PR expert Mark Rofe, he recommended thinking of reactive opportunities in this matrix:

His sweet spot is the unplanned, high-media-interest quadrant.

But for that, you need to be in tune with breaking news (aka unplanned). So let’s look at that next.

4. Breaking News

Newsjacking, or reactive PR, relies on breaking news to catch a journalist’s attention.

A great version of this is when a celebrity gets engaged.

You typically see publications lining up to write articles about how much the ring actually costs, like this story from Michelle Lee at People after Zoe Kravitz got engaged:

Or this story about Aryna Sabalenka’s $1 Million engagement ring by Rachel Burchfield:

But catching this breaking news is key.

We interviewed Madeleine Dykes about reactive PR in the US, and she had five main places she looked to stay on top of these stories:

• News podcasts
• Google News Headlines
• Social accounts
• Google Alerts
• Industry newsletters

But when I asked if this was always on, she told me something that was surprising:

“Most days, I don’t walk away from consuming the news with a genius idea. It’s more about generally absorbing what’s happening so that when something does break a week later, I already know it’s relevant, I know my client can comment on it, and we can move quickly to catch the wave.”

So it’s less about grabbing something and more about keeping your clients top of mind.

Where to Convey “Why Now”?

Your subject line is the best place to convey why now, followed by the email body.

How to Convey “Why Now” in a Subject Line

Pitches live and die by the subject line.

Typically, a subject line should match the headline style of your target journalist.

The good thing is that “why now” is a very powerful clickbait tool, so journalists often include it in their headlines as well.

For instance, here is a story from Erica Loop of Parade on Cracker Barrel’s free gas giveaway:

Chances are the subject line from the Cracker Barrel PR team would have included something like:

“Cracker Barrel free gas giveaway for Summer road trip season”

Or this one about Sprite’s new flavor drop by Marisa Losciale on Parade:

Working backward from the title, the subject line may have looked something like:

“Sprite is bringing back viral flavor this summer.”

But it shouldn’t stop at the subject line; the body needs to convey urgency as well.

How to Convey “Why Now” in Your Email Body

The second place is to convey it in the opening of your pitch email.

It should be in the first or second sentence.

For instance, in this example from the Digitaloft team, they shared how in the first sentence of their pitch, they stressed the seasonal connection: “stay cool when sleeping this summer. ”

Then the pitch adds some supportive commentary and tips.

Here’s another example from the Digitaloft team in the housing space.

As you can see, the “why now” is clearly answered by connecting it to sluggish real estate sales in London and the South East.

Exclusives Don’t Really Count as Why Now

Exclusives can definitely help the case, but they don’t provide enough of a reason to answer the question of “why now”.

Our research on subject lines found that emails using “Exclusive” do get better engagement, but if it’s an exclusive to a topic with no urgency, that doesn’t help the case.

It may get a journalist to open the email, but if there’s no impetus that connects with seasonality, trending topics, recurring events, or breaking news, there’s much less chance it will get coverage.

Three Real Life “Why Now” Examples

I reached out to the Digitaloft team for some real examples of “why now,” and they didn’t disappoint.

1. Sleeping in a Heatwave

Digital PR Manager with Digitaloft, Charlotte McManus, told me that as the UK is predicted to hit temperatures of up to 30C next week, “we have sent a series of tips for how to sleep during a heatwave on behalf of our bedding client, in conjunction with a sleep consultant.

We pitched subject lines like:

• Struggling to sleep in the heat? Sleep expert shares tips as UK temps rise to 25°C
• The UK is set to be hotter than Athens, Barcelona AND Marbella this weekend- reaching highs of 26°C
• Sleep experts recommend ALL Brits do these 9 things ahead of this weekend’s heatwave”

As you can see the “why now” is clearly tied to relevant, seasonal/trending/breaking hook of a heatwave.

2. Stroke Awareness Month

>Digital PR Manager with Digitaloft Emilie Warner, told me they also work with a supplier of adjustable hospital beds for the elderly and disabled.

“We ran a research report into which areas of the US are most at risk of having a stroke.

With May being Stroke Awareness Month, they have re-sent this campaign to US national, regional, health and lifestyle publications, with subject lines including:

• Stroke Awareness Month: New Report Reveals The 10 States Most At Risk
• Stroke Awareness Month Report: Where Over-65s Are Most Vulnerable”

Here we can see that Stroke Awareness Month is the key “why now” focus.

3. Brits are leaving London

This one came from Harry Judd, Digital PR Executive, with Digitaloft.

“For property company Sell House Fast, we noticed a news story of a mass London exit with people leaving London as property and rent prices become unaffordable in and around the city.

We used this as a why now to hook to our campaign on the most underrated property hotspots in the UK.

We focused on areas outside London in our data. We used this both for national and regional headlines, and it resulted in lots of coverage (including Manchester Evening News and Property Investor Today) from subject lines including:

• [Town] ranked amongst the BEST places to buy as property market ditches London in 2026″

This one is an example of jumping on breaking news.

Consider “Why Now” As Early As Possible

The earlier you consider “why now”, the better.

When coming up with story ideas, consider the calendar and trending topics.

• Is there a holiday coming up?
• What are people talking about in your industry?

For instance, if you are planning to make a big company announcement, don’t just choose a date at random.

Instead, choose one with some significance, like the company’s founding anniversary, or a response to another rival’s announcement.

Connection to Your Brand Should Be Immediate

The last note on this is that the connection for a journalist should be obvious and immediate.

The “why now” needs to be logically connected to your brand.

And it needs to be an instant connection for the journalist.

For instance, if I was launching a new PR product and wanted to get some press, I wouldn’t say “BuzzStream Launches New Tool Just in Time for Summer.”

There’s no clear connection to Summer.

Instead, I’d lean on an event like a conference, a trending data point, like the fact that based on our State of Digital PR report, 62.8% of digital PRs said the main challenge with current media list-building tools in 2026 is outdated or incorrect journalist information.

Why Not Now?

Now that you have this trick, it’s time to go out and use it.

To ensure your journalist is a fit for your campaign, definitely give them a F.I.T check.

Then, when crafting your email, gauge the email body with the C.H.A.M.P. Outreach Method.

Questions? My DMs are always open.

The post Why You Need to Use “Why Now?” For Your Journalist Pitches, Now! appeared first on BuzzStream.

But thinking about email subject line length raises even more questions: how many characters can be shown before a client truncates, and how many characters should you use to actually get opens?

These are related but two very different things.

The other thing this misses is that the words you use in a subject line (long or short) have a huge impact on engagement.

This post aims to answer all of them for you and provides a free tool to check your email subject line length against best practices and visual constraints.

Email Subject Line Length Tool

Here is the interactive tool for email subject line length based on usage research from our testing.

But a tool is nothing without understanding how and why it works. Next, we’ll get into the character limits per platform.

Email Subject Line Character Limits by Platform

Before you can write a subject line that gets opened, you need to know whether it’ll even be read in full.

The numbers below come from real device testing conducted on an iPhone 14, iPad (10th gen), Google Pixel 7, Samsung S22 Ultra, and standard desktop browsers at a width of 1400px.

BuzzStream also added our own tests on iPhone 15, 15 Pro, Google Pixel 10, and Samsung Galaxy S21, and iPad Pro 11-inch to the overall findings.

Here are the email subject line character limits for Gmail:

Gmail 

Gmail is the most widely used email client, and although we don’t know which platform journalists use, BuzzStream’s data show that Gmail addresses are the most frequently used domain type in digital PR outreach.

That makes desktop Gmail your most important viewport to optimize for.

Next are the character limits for Microsoft 365 aka Outlook:

Microsoft 365 (Outlook) 

Outlook’s desktop view shows notably fewer characters than Gmail at the same screen width.

Outlook reserves more horizontal space for its action button panel.

If your contacts skew toward corporate email addresses, this may matter more than it might appear.

Last are the Apple Mail email subject line character limits:

Apple Mail

Apple Mail on iPhone is the most generous of the three mobile clients, showing around 48 characters.

One thing worth noting: Apple Mail on iPad actually shows fewer characters than on iPhone, because the iPad uses a split-pane layout that allocates less width to the inbox list.

The Safest Universal Length is >40 characters

If you want your subject line to show in full across every device and client listed above, you need to stay under 33 characters, which is roughly five words.

But that’s a very tight constraint that would sacrifice most of your message.

The more practical approach is to front-load the important information within the first 40 characters, so the hook lands even when the rest gets cut.

But a viewable character count is one thing; getting them to click is another.

So, let’s next look at some data from our subject-line study of over 6 million emails.

What Actually Gets Journalists to Open: BuzzStream Data

The character limits above tell you what can be seen.

This next question is harder: within those constraints, what works?

BuzzStream analyzed over 6 million email subject lines sent through the platform as part of digital PR campaigns. The results challenge some widely repeated advice.

Subject lines in the 9–13 word range had the highest open rate

Subject lines in the 9–13-word range had the highest open rate at 40.20%, and the 14–30-word range was close behind at 39.97%.

More pointedly: subject lines over 71 characters had the highest open rate of any length bracket, at 40.71%.

You have to consider that most journalists use desktops to read their emails.

But the takeaway isn’t “write longer subject lines.” It’s not all about length.

The words you use and how you use them seem to have the biggest impact.

The opening words carry disproportionate weight

Structure matters as much as length.

In our study, subject lines that led with brackets, such as [Expert Quote], had the highest open rate of any structural format at 52.08%, with a reply rate of 2.24%.

Even trailing brackets performed well (49.42% open rate).

The brackets may function as a visual pattern interrupt in a crowded inbox.

“Study finds” as an opening phrase achieved close to a 41% open rate with a 1.25% reply rate, which is the best-performing phrase pattern in the data.

“Data reveals” came second at 37.55%.

Both signal that you have something concrete to offer, which is what journalists are looking for.

Personalization using journalist names hurts more than it helps

This one surprises most people. Using a journalist’s first name in the subject line negatively impacted performance in our data.

The reason is likely that name-based personalization has become so overused in outreach that it reads as a template signal the opposite of what you’re going for.

What works instead is relevance to the beat.

A subject line that matches exactly what that journalist covers performs better.

Title case outperforms sentence case

Subject lines written in title case, like “New Study Reveals Best Time to Pitch” rather than “New study reveals best time to pitch”, had higher open rates in the data.

Higher reading-level language (10th grade and above) also correlated with better performance. Both likely reflect the norms of the journalism world your outreach is targeting.

The Bottom Line Before Sending

The data points to a specific profile for high-performing digital PR subject lines: title case, 9–13 words, leading with a bracket or a data-forward phrase like “Study finds,” front-loaded with the most compelling hook, and written for desktop Gmail.

That’s not a rigid formula — but it’s a starting point grounded in 6 million real sends rather than conventional wisdom.

Use the preview tool above to see exactly how your subject line renders across Gmail, Microsoft 365, and Apple Mail before you hit send.

The post Email Subject Line Length: What the Data Actually Says (and a Free Tool) appeared first on BuzzStream.

Most digital PR professionals have never sat in a newsroom morning conference.

They’ve never watched a news editor scan 30 pitches in under a minute, or felt the pressure of being 100,000 page views behind target by noon with half the day still to go.

That gap in experience between the person sending the pitch and the person receiving it is where many digital PR campaigns quietly die.

We recently sat down with Jade Denby, head of digital PR at Marketing Signals, and Sam Forrester, who spent over 15 years as a news editor at Reach PLC before switching to agency life.

The conversation that followed was one of the most honest, practical breakdowns of the journalist-PR relationship we’ve had on the podcast.

This is a must-watch for everyone in digital PR.

Below is a slightly edited, AI-assisted transcript:

Jade, what is your role with Marketing Signals?

Jade Denby (02:27) Yeah, sure. I run a team of around four PRs at the moment. We have a roughly 50/50 split of clients across the UK and US, and some with more global remit. We do the full range of digital PR, really — media monitoring, reactive, proactive, newsjacking, hero campaigns. We do bespoke strategies based on each client’s needs at the time. At a top level, I just make sure the team’s happy, that all the strategies are in place, that clients feel well-serviced, and look across everything from above.

Vince Nero (03:12) Are you still in the day-to-day pitching these days, Jade?

Jade Denby (03:16) Only recently — only in the last two to three years of 15. I think you naturally reach a point where your skill set sits more in client servicing and making sure clients are happy and retained. There’s so much to keep up with in digital PR at the moment. We have to be upskilling everything — tools, AI, what we’re activating and why. Every PR knows there’s not much thinking space in a day when you’re on full delivery. So I’m sitting above it now. I’m always happy to muck in, but my team are amazing and do pretty much the majority of that.

Sam, what is your role with Marketing Signals?

Sam (04:06) Yeah, of course. At the moment I’m the acting head of content at Marketing Signals, on maternity cover for a friend of mine who was in the role before me. I’m responsible for all content output — everything from creating outlines to editing copy. I have one full-time writer on my team, but we also outsource to freelancers, so I manage a freelance writer list as well. It serves the aim of link inserts — not just new content, but also optimizing existing client content for SEO. The buck stops with me for all content deliverables while I’m here.

Prior to that, as you mentioned, I was at Reach PLC for over 15 years. It’s been bought out so many times — I worked under the brands News, Trinity Mirror, Local World, Northcliffe Media. I’ve been there since late 2007. I started when I was 19 and have done almost every role since I joined.

I started when it was very print-led — we didn’t even have a website when I began. I was a junior reporter straight out of college. I didn’t go to university or anything, so I lucked into that one. I did some work experience there, they liked me, and kept me on. I took my seniors exam, the NCTJ qualification, and became a senior reporter. A few years after that, I wanted more, so I moved to the news desk as assistant news editor. This was what was called the Western Gazette, which is now Somerset Live — one of the Live titles throughout the Reach brands.

Around the time I became assistant news editor, they were starting to bring in digital publishing and take online news much more seriously, which later led to Newsroom 2.0, where everything was digital first. I kind of saw the change from literally writing to shapes on newsprint to, eventually, managing a catalogue of websites for Reach PLC. Very briefly, I was at NewsQuest as well — not for long before I made the switch to agency life.

What is something that digital PR professionals consistently misunderstand about how newsrooms work?

Sam (06:36) This is an interesting one. When Jade and I first met — when she was new to the agency — we started talking about this, and she was shocked by some of the things I was saying.

The biggest one is that newsrooms are much more KPI-driven than you’d think, and more so than when it was print-only. It’s all about page views. They have monthly and daily unique page view targets.

When I was at Somerset Live — which is where I spent most of my time — we had a daily target of 250,000 unique page views and a monthly target of around 8 million. It’s not easy to achieve. And this is something I’ll get into a bit later: digital PR is actually in a really good position to appeal to journalists, because essentially you’re helping newsrooms achieve those targets.

There have been a few rounds of redundancies at Reach PLC over the past few years.

These newsrooms are on a bit of a shoestring. When I was there, we had four news editors, 11 or 12 reporters, a sports person, and editors sitting above us. It was really busy — this was right after COVID, so it was all remote, but still felt busy. And I think it’s been further reduced since then. It was already a challenge with all those people to hit a quarter of a million unique page views a day.

I’m not there anymore, obviously, but it’s even harder for them to achieve these targets now.

There’s a huge window there for digital PR to essentially help out. As a news editor, you’re looking for stories that will help you reach a very lofty page view target. They need to be interesting, they need to appeal to the public — you need to be able to say with reasonable confidence that a story will help you hit that goal, because there’s no point writing stories nobody’s going to read.

If they’re not interesting, they won’t be shared, and you can’t put them on your Facebook channels — which is where the majority of traffic for these titles comes from.

I think that’s the bottom line: it’s all about achieving page views, and it’s much more KPI-driven than most people assume.

Jade, from your perspective, how does that change the strategy?

Jade Denby (10:32) I think it adds another layer for a PR. When I started out and was doing a lot of data storytelling, journalists would say, “I quite like this story, but what’s the cause and what’s the correlation?” That was the theme for a long time — you’ve got some great data, but tell me why it matters.

You really had to make the case for why your story had any kind of importance, because back then newsrooms were more focused on the story itself.

It just shows the cultural shift.

Journalists have gone from writing maybe five really well-considered stories a day to sheer volumes of stories a day.

And whilst we always think story first — balancing the story with the client — I do think the outlets we’re pitching to can sometimes feel like the last step. We’re trying to shoehorn a story in.

We talk a lot about personalizing each pitch to the journalist, but we’re still really working with one story and trying to make it fit.

Time is always against everyone — journalists and PRs alike.

Maybe, to Sam’s point, we need to look more at social media first.

Read the headlines on social media and ask: do we sometimes overcomplicate things with data storytelling?

Do we need to get back to human interest stories?

One thing I love that my colleagues and I talk about all the time is: does it pass the pub test? If you read a headline and it sparks a conversation in a pub, you’re onto something.

Sometimes with hero campaigns, especially, we can get lost — we have this great data, 10 different data points, scored and indexed, applied to XYZ — but if you still can’t explain it in a punchy one-liner, you’ve overcomplicated it.

I think we sometimes overcomplicate things for ourselves. In some ways, since COVID, we’ve seen a trend toward more reactive, quicker storytelling — more stories, more often, to match the pace of journalists. But we still get stuck in plans and ways of working: we’ll do a set number of activations this quarter, and we put all our eggs in one basket — one story that has to work in multiple ways.

Actually, do we just need multiple, simpler stories with executions that land more cleanly?

I think we have to change our thinking and become as agile as journalists now have to be. It has been eye-opening to realize that they’re under pressure just like we are.

It always felt like we were the ones at the mercy of journalists. But journalists are now at the mercy of their bosses and their audiences. People demand stories on social media, the comments can be brutal, and journalists have page view targets to hit just like we have coverage numbers and link targets.

Something Sam and I spoke about earlier — when I first started, journalists seemed quite scary to me. Maybe that was a youth thing, or just the way journalism was back then. But every time I ask Sam a question, he says, “I wouldn’t have minded that as a journalist,” and I think maybe journalists are just people too.

It can feel like an us-and-them dynamic, but in actual fact, we’re all trying to do the same thing and should be trying to help each other.

Sam (14:27) It does depend on when you have that experience. When I first came into a newsroom as a teenager, it was very scary. And maybe it’s the benefit of hindsight, but people did seem harsher back then — not cutthroat, but they didn’t really suffer fools. One thing I wanted to pick up on, Jade — the pub test is definitely still the way to go. If you had a story about police being called to a drug den, you wouldn’t write it as, “Police were called today at this time on this road for this reason.” You haven’t got to the point. It’s more like, “There was a drugs raid on this street today.” That’s what you’d say to somebody, and that’s when it clicks.

Just to pick up on something else: one thing Newsroom 2.0 did was allow editors and reporters to know which stories worked and which didn’t, because you’d have real-time data.

In print, everything was packaged together and you were judged by circulation figures.

I remember writing what I thought was a great front-page story, and when the circulation figures came in a few weeks later, we were up 3% that week — but then someone told me, “Yeah, but that was also the same week we had that free-sausage-roll-with-every-copy offer from Gregg’s.” So you never knew if it was your story, the offer, or a combination of both.

That completely changed.

Now every single story has a unique page view count next to it.

News editors sit — I guarantee it — with something like Chartbeat or Omniture open constantly, watching concurrent visitors on their websites.

A reporter writes a story that sounds okay, you publish it, share it on social media, and it might get a few hundred views that day. And you go, right, that kind of story just doesn’t work — and now you know instantly.

It’s a double-edged sword, and it’s something you alluded to before we started recording, Vince.

Those nice community stories sat really well in newspapers, but in the cold light of day, when you’re trying to get page views, nobody really cared.

That part of journalism is kind of going away, for better or worse. But ultimately it comes down to what people actually want to read.

Jade Denby (16:57) PRs would love to have access to that software in real time — knowing what’s working and what isn’t.

I think we still assume that journalists work from editorial planned calendars for the most part, and that everything else that lands in an inbox gets picked up just because a headline piqued their interest.

But it again shows that they’re quite data-driven in their approach, just like digital PRs have to be.

When Sam mentioned the software for tracking topics and performance — how a story that doesn’t do so well on day one might get moved down the homepage — that’s a high-pressure data environment that we can actually relate to. I found that really interesting.

What does a typical day look like as a news editor?

Sam (18:00) Yeah, so in my experience, we had a few news editors in the newsroom.

A typical day would run on shifts — early, mid, and late — from around 6 in the morning until 10 at night, with each of us overlapping. So someone would take the 6am–2pm shift, another 9–5, and another 2–10pm.

The first person in would check Chartbeat or similar software to see how the site was performing so far.

There would be some content from the day before possibly scheduled to go live.

We’d pick up any breaking news — and as we talked about just before we started recording, that’s a huge traffic driver. It sounds morbid, but if there’d been a crash on the M5 overnight, you’d almost think, “Good — that’s a live blog, and that’s going to get us off to a really good start today.” You’d cover the breaking news, pick up the overnight file logs, check emergency service stories, go through the inboxes, then start planning the day.

We’d normally schedule a homepage refresh the night before so that as soon as midnight ticked over, you’d have a fresh homepage ready to go.

One thing Jade was surprised to learn was that we have news conferences every single morning — not just weekly. It was: what’s going on today? I’d get my team — nine, ten, eleven reporters — on a call and go through them individually.

Essentially, they’d pitch to me. There’s a real similarity there between digital PR and what reporters do.

The reporters I had would pitch to me in much the same way anyone with a press release or campaign would pitch via inbox.

They’d come with a story, and I’d evaluate it: on average, we needed each story we wrote that day to do around 5,000 views each.

So it’s got to be good, it’s got to be shareable. I’d okay some and push back on others — maybe a story was in a town that doesn’t have a particularly big Facebook group, so you can’t share it as effectively. All these things go into consideration.

So a large part of that time was planning the day based on what reporters had pitched.

But it was very reactive as well. We planned ahead for big events and things we knew were coming, but it was much more day-to-day than you might think.

From there, my day was largely editing copy as it came in, which could take time — some stories might be legally contentious, for example.

And then a big part was scheduling social media. We’d say: if Emma turns around her story by 3pm, that’ll be our 3pm post, and we’d schedule social content throughout the day.

And then you’d react as you went. By midday you might think, “We’re in a really good spot — we’ve already hit 100,000 concurrent views.” Or it’d be, “Oh no, we’re at 50,000 — we need to pick up pace to hit the monthly target.” In between all that, there was weekend planning, looking for evergreen stories to hold back — something might be pitched on a Thursday and I’d think, “Actually, let’s save that for Saturday.”

Then the general management side: one-on-ones with reporters, mentoring.

Most reporters at a local level are trainees, many brand new.

A lot of them are very young, very capable, very intelligent people — but for many it’s their first job, so you’re managing and mentoring them, explaining why you’ve passed on a story or what made another one work.

And then dealing with the occasional complaint and answering to your bosses.

How has your pitching strategy changed?

Jade Denby (22:57) I think it’s pushed me toward thinking social-first — especially when we talk about Sam’s experience in regional news and Reach PLC and those beloved Facebook groups.

When Sam mentioned the size of the Facebook groups — not necessarily the Somerset Live group, but the general Somerset groups — it made me think.

I’m on those kinds of local Facebook groups myself, and it’s made me think we should probably start doing more grassroots Facebook research to see what gets engagement, what people comment on, and then ask: can we take that and make it work for a client?

We have to remember that a lot of clients want to be super brand-safe and positive, and we know from experience that the best, most conversation-sparking stories can be slightly divisive.

You pit older drivers against younger drivers, or you say something a little more controversial. Some brands I work with don’t even want to say anything is “the worst” — they’ll only say these are the best places and won’t touch the negative angle.

Some clients are a better fit for that kind of thing than others. If a client can be that agile — if they can do social-first headlines that really engage people on an everyday level — that strategy will work for them. But we always have to remember there’s a layer of blue-chip corporate clients that are never going to fit that model. You have to find ways to make digital PR work for them too.

It’s possible — it’s just a longer game.

Speaking to Sam, it was interesting to realize that newsrooms have KPIs, and that they’re trend-led, because we’re going more trend-led too.

It used to be about checking a set number of news sites in the morning, but now I check TikTok creator insights and Pinterest trend reports. I think going social-first from an ideation standpoint, and being a little more human in how we storytell — as opposed to purely data-led — is really valuable.

We can all be a bit guilty of leading with “X percent of the population,” which can feel cold. Humanizing and lightening up stories a little, where the brand allows — I think that’s a really interesting space for 2026, because what works in digital PR and how to approach it does change every one to two years. You can’t just reuse the same strategies and tactics. You have to refresh constantly.

A social-first lens is a good starting point for sparking ideas, and then you reverse-engineer it based on what works for the client.

Sam (25:50) Yeah, and journalism has changed so much too.

Just to give you an example — some of the biggest stories we’d do would be things like when Nando’s opened somewhere new.

That would get thousands and thousands of clicks because people were genuinely excited: When’s it opening? Where’s it going? That kind of thing.

When I was coming up in print, you would not have done that story.

That’s advertising — you just wouldn’t pitch that to a news editor. They’d say, “They can pay for an advert.”

Whereas now it’s so much more audience-led than it ever was.

When I was in print, we were sort of — not dictating to people, but more like: this is the news, this is what we found, this is what’s going on.

Whereas now, there’s much more room for that audience-led stuff. Some stories that would historically be considered journalistically relevant you might not do because they won’t perform as well as, say, a KFC opening in Yeovil.

So you’re thinking outlet-specific rather than story-first?

Jade Denby (27:59) Yeah, I think one thing digital PR doesn’t get enough time for is general research. Unlike some other teams, our whole fee is time — and digital PR is so time-intensive.

It can look quite pricey compared to other marketing channels, where someone might be taking a commission on a media buy.

We’re pure time.

So what we tend to do is cut out anything that’s hard to justify simply: here’s how we do the work, here’s how we activate, here’s how we do the outreach — and here are your hours in a nicely packaged campaign.

I think that’s the biggest battle I always have internally: giving us time to do proper research upfront.

Unlike more traditional PR, where you might spend years embedded in a client sector, our client base can change so regularly that by the time you’ve dug into the weeds and figured out the formula, that client might be gone and you’re onto the next one. News research is probably where we fall down most.

We try to reverse-engineer at the end — we’ve got to get activations underway, align with the brand, make it seasonal and on-trend.

And then we get there and think, “Now we need to make this work for the masses without coming across as fake or over-personalizing pitches.” So a lot of it comes back to strategy, to educating clients, and to budgeting — not underselling our hours, because underselling hours leads to a lot of pressure.

What’s your take on the fake expert debacle at ReachPLC?

Sam (31:13) I think it all comes down to angles. A good journalist is going to recognize a good story.

It’s a tricky one, because the fake experts situation really escalated after I left. But I would always say that the strength of a digital PR campaign will get past the noise.

As long as digital PR professionals stick to their guns — and there are some really, really good people in this industry who know what a good story is, even without direct newsroom experience — it comes down to being true to that and making sure that what they’re offering is the best it can be.

To pick up on what Jade said about how much work goes in at that research stage — how much do you localize the outreach?

I remember when there was a real focus within Reach on hyper-local content. We were talking before the podcast about the kinds of stories where journalists will do some of that legwork for you.

For example, if you had a story with national education figures showing that school attendance had fallen 20% since COVID, you could break that down by region.

A good journalist and a good news editor will recognize that they can take that, build off of it, and use the national data as a baseline — then go interview a local head teacher about it.

Suddenly that story becomes very relevant to the local audience. You get a picture with the head teacher outside the school, and every parent in that town is asking, “What’s going on here?” It immediately appeals to that audience in a way that pure statistics never would.

Nobody in a digital PR agency is going to interview head teachers in every region of the UK just to get 76 localized versions of that story — that’s an enormous amount of work and frankly unnecessary, because you can do that story once, give the regional breakdown by area, and send it to the newsrooms.

They should pick up on the fact that these are shocking figures and go localize it themselves. That’s how they make it a story worth reporting and worth sharing — rather than every Reach title running the same data-led story, which while worthy, won’t have the same impact as a genuinely localized take.

Vince Nero (35:30) Let me flip that a bit, because the feedback digital PR teams have gotten is that journalists are so time-poor that you should be including expert quotes and case studies in your pitches to take that legwork off their plate. I think people have run with that advice — and you end up building an entire strategy around that pain point, inserting your brand into every commentary opportunity. But what I’m hearing from you is that it still needs to be as localized and as authentic as possible. Your random brand reviewing headphones doesn’t need to be commenting on something in Yorkshire.

If journalists are time-poor, should you include expert commentary and whatnot in your pitch?

Sam (36:38) Yeah, absolutely right.

Journalists are time-poor.

In my experience, it was very reactive and there wasn’t much time to plan far ahead.

And because of the redundancies and how much smaller news teams are now, that’s even more true.

But I would say — and I’ll come back to my original point — it’s still something journalists should be doing.

It doesn’t take an enormous amount of time for a reporter to reach out to a local contact to localize a story.

And that work is much more efficiently done on that side. One or two people at a digital PR agency simply can’t ring head teachers across the whole country. That’s not a good use of their time. But a reporter in each of those cities can and should — that’s how they add value, that’s how they make it shareable. That work should be done by the journalist, and as it should be.

Has expert commentary worked for pitching, even with fake experts?

Jade Denby (37:57) Yeah. I think if you’ve relied heavily on media monitoring, product gifting, and expert commentary since COVID, you might feel slightly panicked by what’s happening right now.

But for me, every time a big update like this happens, it gives me a sigh of relief — because it always comes back to SEO, and it always helps strengthen E-E-A-T factors that we’ve been telling clients to focus on in more technical terms for a long time.

I can’t tell you how many SEO meetings I’ve been in with clients where we’ve said, “Authorship in your sector is really important.

Competitors are doing it.

Update the blog, spotlight some experts you can attribute to content repeatedly, build that profile — search engines love it, it’s going to help you rank.”

And it’s met with tumbleweed.

It’s one of those SEO strategy items that never gets actioned.

But then you add in the layer of: journalists are crying out for experts now, but there are so many fake ones that there’s a bit of scaremongering.

So we just need to make it super easy for journalists to identify someone as a genuine expert. That could start with the website — digital profiles that are clearly verifiable, so journalists can vet them quickly. We just make it simpler.

The onus has been on journalists to do that vetting until now, and now we can add that layer of ease in for them, while at the same time reinforcing to clients that authors and experts aren’t going anywhere — they’re important for PR and they’re important for SEO.

A lot of what’s changing is about bringing it all together.

Some things felt like they were very technical SEO recommendations that never quite made it into the PR conversation. But for the first time, I feel like the whole SEO picture is merging with PR quite nicely. So while it’s a slightly unsettled time, if you’re doing all the right things there’s no reason any agency should be blacklisted. Yes, your experts might not have a digital footprint right now — but you just need to work a little harder to explain that to the journalist upfront.

Give them the context: this person is in a niche industry, they haven’t spoken up much publicly before, but here’s why they are genuinely experienced to speak on this topic.

Give the journalist all of that so they don’t have to question anything. All good for SEO in the long term, I think.

Do newsrooms understand SEO?

Sam (41:19) Yeah, it’s definitely something digital PR professionals can capitalize on.

I had the benefit of going from a newsroom — where we tried to do SEO, though it was quite limited, which I’ll touch on — to a dedicated SEO agency before Marketing Signals.

I learned a lot, and a lot of what I learned was what newsrooms were doing wrong.

As far as I could tell, there was no keyword research at the local newsroom level.

There was a central team that wrote articles around trending SEO topics — you know, around the time of Strictly Come Dancing or similar, all the Reach sites would have articles about it.

It might work for The Mirror or the Manchester Evening News with their larger audiences, but it doesn’t really work for the smaller regional titles. All it does is drag things down by publishing essentially the same article across many sites.

When I was there, we didn’t do any real keyword research.

We got lucky with a few things. One of the biggest accidental SEO successes at Somerset Live was when there was a Channel 5 show called Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country. She bought this big fixer-upper in Bruton, Somerset, so there was a local link — we wrote a few articles just because of that.

We weren’t thinking about SEO at all. But because it wasn’t the biggest show, and it was on Channel 5, for a few months we were the only ones writing about it.

When it was on TV, people were Googling it — and we did really well. Eventually the bigger titles noticed, wrote their own articles, and outranked us because of their domain authority, but for a while it was genuinely excellent.

The thing is, that happened by accident. We wrote it to share on Facebook, and the search traffic was a happy bonus.

Nobody thought, “This will be great for SEO because nobody else is covering it.” Knowing now what I know about SEO, if I had my time again, I think we could have done an awful lot more with it.

There are so many easy wins — quick informational posts about things people search for all the time: Stonehenge, local events, all sorts of things you could rank for with relatively little effort.

We also didn’t really know about link building. We knew it was good if people linked to you, but we didn’t do outreach — we didn’t even know about it. So what Jade mentioned about getting SEO-led stories into newsrooms is, I think, a huge potential win.

Unless things have changed dramatically since I left and everyone’s much more clued up now, it’s something newsrooms are not doing — and digital PR could be doing it for them.

How do you communicate SEO value to a journalist without turning them off?

Jade Denby (46:03) Yeah. Weirdly, when I’m actually pitching a story, I’m not thinking about the SEO.

I’m treating it like I need to pitch a story to a journalist and meeting them where they are.

We do a lot of backend keyword research and create landing pages and optimize where the traffic is going to land — that’s where I think digital PRs wear two hats.

It’s being more like a traditional PR when you’re doing the outreach, but also being technical SEO when you’re compiling campaign landing pages or thinking about where to drive links for maximum impact.

It’s interesting what Sam said about the SEO and trending articles across regionals, because that was actually a bit of a relief for me as a digital PR.

They’ve always had some level of awareness — there are people who pop up with stories clearly designed around search — and they must have been piecing things together when we keep asking for links after coverage.

You can see the knowledge building over time.

I found that when I was pitching data-led stories to SEO journalists or trending news journalists, they took them straight away.

It was like an unspoken understanding: this is more data-backed and about what people are talking about right now, and I’ve given you solid data to back it up.

That kind of bridged the gap. There was still a strong story, and they wanted it for that reason, but they were accepting of the data angle because it was a data story.

When Great British Bake Off was on, for example, I could constantly pitch my baking clients’ recipes and expert chef tips — “here’s what not to do when you bake those jammy dodgers” or whatever was on the show the night before.

That was such a successful run for the entire length of the show. We sent in the expert tips but backed them with search data — a two-pronged approach.

That hit a really nice sweet spot.

I don’t think we need to get too bogged down in the weeds, because something that passes the pub test, feels trendy, and that anyone scrolling on their phone would recognize — that’s the goal.

Keep the PR side about trends and what people actually want to talk about. Keep the technical stuff to the website, the strategy meetings, and the big-picture conversations with clients. It’s a two-pronged approach, really.

Anything you want to leave us with that we didn’t discuss?

Jade Denby (49:41) Ha! Yeah. On a positive note — digital PRs and journalists have started to merge.

I see way more journalists speaking at digital PR conferences and sharing knowledge with us.

We probably need to do the same and hear more from journalists and people who work in actual newsrooms. I feel like the last few years have broken down some of those barriers between “us and them.” It’s going in the right direction. We just have to keep learning from each other — which sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

Sam (50:06) It’s really good to see. And I’ll add to that — I think journalists need digital PR now more than ever.

If I could give anyone in digital PR one piece of advice, it would be: pretend you’re a reporter at that publication, pitching a campaign to a news editor as if you didn’t work in digital PR — as if you were in that newsroom — because that’s essentially what will happen with what you send them.

If you send a reporter a campaign, a press release, a story — whatever it is — it has to pass muster with them, but they then have to pitch it to their news editors and say, “I think this could do really well.”

And like I say, there are now much smaller teams trying to hit very lofty page view targets, and digital PR is helping them do that.

That’s probably one of the reasons the barriers are starting to break down — newsrooms are genuinely grateful for it. In fact, just as I was leaving, they were starting to bring in individual page view targets for reporters too, not just the team as a whole. So these reporters are really held to account. Anything you can do to help them, they’ll be your best friend.

Act like you’re there to help them achieve their page views, and I don’t think you’ll go wrong.

The post What Can Digital PRs Learn From Journalists? W/ Jade Denby and Sam Forrester appeared first on BuzzStream.

Few people know this, but one of my first jobs was marketing for a tooth-whitening client that played well in the beauty space.

I really wish I had known Claire Coleman back then because my results were not pretty…

Claire is a freelance editor and journalist in the beauty space who has been featured in major publications, including Elle, Stylist, the Daily Mail, and Women’s Health, among others. She’s also a brand consultant and has a fantastic Substack called Beauty Geekery.

In this episode, we talk all about PR and the beauty industry.

Here is a slightly edited transcript:

Have you always been a freelance editor or have you worked in-house too?

Claire: My very first job out of university was work experience on a website, working across features in a whole range of things. It was at the tail end of the dot-com boom — I don’t think anyone had really figured out how it was going to be monetized, and in a lot of ways it was ahead of its time.

I made myself indispensable and stayed for a year and a half, and then when about 90% of the staff got made redundant, I was out on my ear.

At that point, I just contacted everyone I knew in the industry and started doing a little bit of work here and there.

I thought I’d freelance until a proper job came along, and then by the time a proper job came along, I was loving freelancing too much. I very much enjoy the diversity and flexibility it gives me.

What does a day in the life look like for you as a freelancer?

Claire: I genuinely do not have anything like a typical day — that’s actually what I love about it. Some days I’ll decide it’s going to be a pitch day and go through a load of emails. When pitches come in, I might scribble down ideas, think “that makes me think of another thing,” and if three things line up as a trend I’ll pitch that straight off.

Other days I might be researching work for one of my consultant brands. Right now I’m working with a dermatologist helping her write a book, and I’m working with an aesthetics brand helping them write a trend report. I’m also keeping an eye on emails coming in and thinking about what might work for my Substack or for various clients.

When you’re asking about the difference between what I do and what someone in-house does — I don’t have the same rhythm to my days and weeks that they might. In a newspaper, you know there’s a features conference every day at 11 a.m. In a magazine, you know you’ll have a features meeting every Monday.

Those rhythms are something I really encourage PRs to understand: get to know the rhythms of various publications, and know when a good time to pitch is.

For me, there isn’t a particular good time of day or week. Something might land right when I’m looking to pitch a story, or I might put it on the back burner and come back to it later.

Have you written more in print, digital, or is it a mix?

Claire: Historically, my background was print, but now there isn’t so much differentiation. A lot of what I write for the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, or Metro will end up going online as well — sometimes behind a paywall, sometimes not.

I’ve gone through that whole evolution where people used to ask, “Is it going in the paper or just online?” and now I’m getting, “Is it going online or just in the paper?”

Print used to be king. But what’s most interesting about the changes I’m seeing is that, particularly here in the UK, newspapers were relatively late to paywalls and the expectation of free content may be a lot higher here than in the States.

Because of that, a lot of newspapers are increasingly commissioning in a different way. They want a really grabby headline or a brilliant before-and-after image to put behind a paywall and pull readers in.

That’s actually part of why I set up my Substack — the geekier, more in-depth beauty pieces that I used to be commissioned to write a lot more aren’t getting commissioned in the same way.

I still believe there’s an audience for them; I’m just not sure that audience is still looking to traditional media to provide that kind of information.

Vince: That makes a lot of sense. It seems like people are changing the way they interact with media, and it’s easy to blame AI, but I don’t think that’s the full reason.

Claire: No. I think the minute that media started giving content away for free, that’s when the problem started.

Part of the reason I point to the UK specifically is that we’ve always had the BBC as a free news source, and I think that has fed into this idea that content can be free.

Why is the fashion/beauty industry so difficult to get coverage?

Claire: My experience of the way PR has evolved is that the relationship-building aspect of it seems to have been forgotten.

I understand why — things like hybrid working, where junior people don’t sit next to senior people and don’t see them picking up the phone to have difficult conversations with clients and journalists, have played a part in that.

But I also think there has been a real shift in the fashion and beauty space toward paid content on Instagram and similar platforms. Traditional journalists may have been overlooked in the rush to get someone with 100,000 followers to talk about a product.

Just as journalists are asked to do more for less, I know my PR friends are being asked to do more for less.

Trying to keep very disparate groups of people happy is a very difficult thing to do.

And I know there are websites that won’t include a product in a roundup unless there’s an affiliate link — which is depressing, but that’s where things are going.

What kinds of pitches do you get?

Claire: Largely it’s about product PR.

And that’s really problematic for me, because I think it comes back to people not having enough time to work out who they’re targeting.

I understand that blanket emailing gets results for some people — I don’t think it gets the best results.

It’s really easy to tick a box and tell your client that you’ve sent the mail out to a hundred thousand people and however many have opened it.

But I don’t feel like that gets the same results as looking at who the most relevant people are for your client, and looking at how your client might be covered by those individuals in very different ways.

You can make a list of people doing product roundups every week, and maybe this week it’s peptide serums, so you send out all your clients’ peptide serums and you might get some hits.

For me, it’s just another one where I’m hitting delete.

What I have the biggest problem with is the idea that a scatter-gun approach is going to be appropriate for everyone.

It feels lazy.

What makes a pitch land?

Claire: The best features come out of a PR saying, not “I’ve got a product to sell you,” but “I’ve got a story to tell you.”

It’s not about ignoring your competitors — it’s about looking at trends. I’m not going to write about a new lipstick just because it’s a new shade. But I have written about a refillable lipstick that was presented to me this way: “There’s a trend for refillable lipsticks. Dior is doing refillable lipsticks. So-and-so is doing refillable lipsticks. And this industry trade magazine referred to them as the new heirlooms — instead of watches.” That’s interesting. You’ve given me a bunch of data points, told me this is definitely a trend, and I don’t even have to do very much work — I can package that up in my own words and pitch it to an editor. And that’s exactly what I did, and it made a story.

Vince: So if someone listening has a beauty client with a new product, the message is: don’t focus on the product’s features alone. Focus on what the story is going to be around the product — connecting it to trends, finding timeliness.

Claire: Exactly. The idea that people are going to write about one product or one brand these days is so, so rare. And pretending your competitors don’t exist isn’t helpful, because I’m going to be across your competitors anyway. What’s your USP? What are you saying that nobody else is saying? What is the story that you can tell that nobody else is telling?

Numbers are not what’s relevant — what’s relevant is the story those numbers tell. Taking things to the next level, working out why those sorts of things are going to be important to my audience. Rather than giving me something that makes me think, “So what? What’s new?”

Can you elaborate a bit more on the competitors?

Claire: I mean — one of my big bug bears is getting a message like, “I see you wrote a piece about peptides, could you put this product in?”

That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how I personally work.

Once that piece is written and gone, I’m done with it. I’m onto the next thing.

I’m still in a print mentality, and also as a freelancer I don’t have access to a CMS — none of that is relevant to me.

It’s very rare that a product is a true first-to-market product doing something completely new.

Don’t try to pretend that’s the case, because I will call it out.

What you’re better off doing is saying, “We know this isn’t the first to market.” What did I get a press release for today? A wet-to-dry straightener. Traditionally you can’t straighten wet hair because it’s damaging.

But I can think of at least two or three brands who have now come out with versions of this.

So what is your product doing differently from your competitors? Do you think your product does it better? Then challenge me to do a tried-and-tested. Put it through the wringer.

You have to be okay with the fact that I might find it wanting — but those are the kinds of things I mean when I say consider your competitors.

Do you appreciate when PR professionals reach out without anything to pitch?

Claire: I don’t vehemently object to them, but I don’t love them either.

“Do you want me to set up a chat with someone?”

No — unless I’m working on a story, I’d be wasting my time and their time.

But if you’ve got something to talk about and you can bring them in to talk about it… sometimes it’s serendipitous.

Maybe it lands when I’m researching a piece and it’s bang on, and I’ll say, “Can you let me know what they would think around X, Y, and Z?”

I’m not saying don’t send those emails, but don’t be offended if I don’t respond.

Vince: It sounds like you’re more about utility — if there’s a breaking trend and your client can add commentary to it, that’s going to land better.

Claire: Exactly.

Go talk to your client and find a story for them to comment on — that’s what I’m hoping people would do.

GLP-1 stories are clearly doing really well for newspapers right now.

If you’ve got a different angle on a GLP-1 story, I’m probably interested.

I actually got pitched a story about what GLP-1s can do to your intimate area.

I probably wouldn’t have been that interested in talking to a gynaecologist out of the blue — but suddenly you’ve given me a story where I know there’s a market for it right now.

I’ve got my story, I’ve got my expert, and now I have that person in my back pocket for next time.

Vince: Where people miss the mark with relationship building is thinking that because you have a relationship with someone, they’ll cover everything you send them.

Claire: Yes — the peers I have the best relationships with are the ones who will pitch me something and I’ll say, “It’s not for me, and here’s why,” and they’ll say okay. Or they’ll pitch me something and say, “I’m not sure if there’s anything you can do with this.” It’s a relationship of honesty.

I’m not going to cover all of your clients. But if I know that when I was in a bind and needed a quote within five minutes flat, you found me someone to talk to — then you are going to be my first point of call. You are going to be someone I rely on.

Are there ways to build relationships beyond just sending great pitches?

Claire: I think those are old-fashioned tactics but I do think they work. Back when I was active on Twitter — I don’t really touch X anymore — there was a skincare brand called Sam Pharma, targeted at young people just starting to use product.

When it first started, the PR pitched it to me and I just wasn’t interested in teen or kids’ products.

But then I would find that the geekier tweets I put out, the founder would respond to — not in a weird way, but in a way that showed we were thinking along the same lines.

So I rang up the PR and said, “Set up a meeting, because this guy sounds interesting.” That’s an example of a brand doing it directly rather than a PR, but it works.

I think increasingly there’s a quid pro quo element.

I have my Substack — if you want to support me, subscribe.

You want me to support you, there’s that kind of exchange going on.

And beyond that, it gives you an insight into how my brain is working.

If you’re looking at my Instagram at @featuresjournal, that’s where I post the stories I’m working on. In my stories I’ll say, “I am looking for someone to comment on X” or “I’m looking for products that fit this brief.”

I know it’s hard to keep on top of everyone on social media, but you don’t have to.

Pick three people who you think would be the best outlets for your clients, engage with them, and look at what they’re doing.

Building relationships is so much harder than it was pre-pandemic, and harder than when people worked on magazines and you’d go out and have your nails done together.

But there are still ways to do it. It involves an investment of time, energy, and thought — but it does pay dividends.

What is your Substack newsletter about?

Claire: I work in various ways with PRs and with brands.

With PR agencies, I do workshops — a lot of younger PRs don’t necessarily know how print newspapers work, so I work internally with agencies on pitching, angles, and leads.

On the brand side, I love working with brands on NPD or new ranges coming out, helping them take great science and distill it in a way that the consumer can understand, and working out what’s going to be genuinely interesting to that consumer.

And Beauty Geekery on Substack is where I’m having an awful lot of fun writing all the geeky beauty stories I know there’s a market for. It’s been really enjoyable to get back to writing those kinds of pieces. You can also find me on Instagram at @featuresjournal.

The post PR in the Beauty Industry: A Journalist’s Perspective appeared first on BuzzStream.

Most people know they need to track AI visibility, but what’s more important: citations or mentions?

One may inspire clicks, but the other can push brand awareness.

Understanding how they work and the differences between them can help you better determine what to track for your brands and clients.

In this post, we’ll cover the definitions of AI citations and AI mentions, where they come from, and most importantly, which you should focus on for your goals.

What Are AI Citations?

AI citations are references generated alongside an answer to support or verify the answer’s findings.

These aren’t necessarily meant as recommendations, but rather just validation or accuracy for the model.

There are a few different kinds of citations, and platforms differ a bit.

For instance, here are Google’s AI Overviews:

ChatGPT looks like this with sources inline and at the end of the answer :

Gemini, similarly, shows inline and at the end:

We’ll discuss whether people click on these citations later.

But first, let’s talk mentions.

What Are AI Mentions?

AI mentions occur when an AI platform simply “mentions” a brand, company, product, or term, with or without a link, within a generated answer.

For instance, when I asked what the best digital PR tools were, ChatGPT mentioned “BuzzStream”:

A mention can come in the same answer as a citation, but a citation won’t always show up.

Let’s look at how and why AI platforms use them.

What Triggers Mentions vs Citations in AI Search

Mentions and citations in AI search are triggered by training data and live retrieval.

Training data is everything the model learned before it was released (e.g., web pages, publications, books, etc.).

But the model doesn’t look these up like traditional search; it pattern matches.

Live retrieval is different.

When a query needs more specific or fresh information, the AI system pulls from external sources in real time. Then it grounds its answer (with citations) against what it finds.

This is the image Google shared to help understand how “grounding” works:

Think of this this way: mentions represent how AI understands your brand based on everything it’s ever seen.

Citations are a real-time collection of sources to support a specific answer.

Though a third layer is emerging called ‘cached’ retrieval, which James Wirth of Citations Labs explained to me, “This is pointed to as one of the reasons why query fan outs (QFOs) are going down in newer versions of AI models.

It’s not that they’re building a public ‘index’ of the web to rival Google, it’s just that as they run QFOs (that they page for), they’re caching and categorizing results and querying against those instead of running a new API call to Google (eg executing a query fan out) every time they want to ground a prompt to generate an answer.”

Now that we know what they are, we need to understand why and how AI chooses what to mention or cite. For this, we need to dive into the research.

How Do You Get Cited By AI?

To be cited by AI systems, content likely needs to be retrievable through search, semantically relevant to the query, and contain passages that are easy for the model to extract (often called “chunks”), understand, and reuse in its answers.

Here’s why:

When AI determines it needs outside info to answer the query, it doesn’t just perform one search. It breaks them into multiple subqueries, a technique known as query fan-out.

So if you search for the best digital PR tools for link building, the model might fan out “digital pr tools”, “link building software”, and “media database tools”, then synthesize everything into an answer for you.

The underlying mechanism is what you’ve heard called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG.

Here’s what it looks like, and here’s where you need to be included:

1. Performs the search.

The system searches across potential sources. To be cited, you need to be included in the initial search set.

2. Analyzes the search “candidates”.

AI systems then evaluate the candidate documents.

We don’t know exactly what they look at, but it may consider factors like:

• SERP position
• domain reputation
• freshness
• topical authority
• engagement metrics
• Semantic similarity determined by vector embeddings

Right now, we can only rely on others’ studies and data to connect the dots.

For instance, Ahrefs found that 38% of AI overviews cite pages from the top 10 search results, suggesting that SERP position may influence retrieval.

Ahrefs found that AI Overviews tend to cite “fresher” content, so AI systems may take content’s publish date into account.

These are all unconfirmed factors for citation.

3. Passage extraction

Then it retrieves the information in chunks and passages (think small paragraphs, tables, bullets, definitions, etc.)

AI researchers often talk about how, during retrieval, AI systems break your document into chunks and embed them in a vector database.

Here is a fantastic image from the iPullRank team on the concept of chunking:

But if the chunk is too disjointed and contains unrelated ideas, it’s seen as less relevant, as this research from Budapest University of Technology and Economics and Nokia Labs revealed.

This means that if I ask AI, “What are relevant links?”, it’s more likely to cite a post on “relevant links” than an “ultimate guide to link building.”

Sometimes, it might only look at the SERP title or search summary and not even read the article.

4. Relevance and grounding evaluation

Then it decides whether the extracted chunks, passages, and information agree with each other, which likely involves some form of semantic relevance scoring.

5. Then it gives its citation based on what it thinks most effectively supports its response.

Keep in mind that the systems are built to cite sources that support their response, not necessarily to provide alternative views, refute what they say, or prevent misinformation.

(For more, I definitely recommend looking into Cyrus Sheppard’s work at Zyppy, where he put together what he calls AI citation ranking factors.)

How Do You Get Mentioned by AI?

You can get mentioned by AI if your brand is strongly associated with the query in the training data or the retrieval process.

At their core, AI systems predict the most probable next word based on patterns it’s learned during training.

During training and/or retrieval, the model isn’t just memorizing facts; it’s building a web of associations between concepts, entities, and terms.

So, the stronger the association between a brand and key terms, the more likely AI is to mention it.

For instance, the more times BuzzStream is mentioned alongside “digital PR tool,” the more likely the training data will group the two semantically.

These are known as “descriptors.”

As James explained:

“AI ‘descriptors’ are the attributes a system associates with a brand.

The more consistently those attributes appear across credible third-party web surfaces, the stronger the association becomes.

Once established, that association can persist through ‘semantic inertia,’ a nod to Newton’s First Law: an AI brand perception tends to stay in motion unless acted on by stronger evidence.

For example, repeated mentions of BuzzStream as a ‘digital PR tool’ make AI systems more likely to treat that phrase as a defining brand descriptor.”

Associations can be on social channels, on a site (e.g., an About Us page), or off-site (think digital PR).

However, as I mentioned before, when the AI system deems it necessary, like when the training data is limited, AI will also perform live retrieval to help support its answer.

So, content surfaced through that retrieval can also result in a mention (even if your brand had no meaningful presence in the training data at all).

Can You Get Mentioned But Not Cited?

Yes, you can get mentioned but not cited, and cited but not mentioned. Each occurs frequently.

In one study by Kevin Indig, he found that only about 13% of brands are both cited and mentioned, calling this the “ghost citation” problem.

And as we’ll see in the next section, each AI platform varies in how these mentions vs citations occur:

So, let’s briefly touch on how each platform seems to operate.

Each AI Platform Operates Differently

There are significant differences in how AI platforms operate behind the scenes. Some, like Google’s, have access to an incredible search index.

ChatGPT, for instance, has partnered with a lot of publications to train its AI systems.

What this amounts to is a big gap in how these systems work.

Top-mentioned or cited sites may differ across platforms.

When we compared the top-cited sites across three Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT, you can see very little overlap:

According to a study by Kevin Indig and Omnia, 2% of citations appear only in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

When we measured citation overlap for individual URLs in AI Mode, AI Overviews, Gemini, and ChatGPT, just 0.8% (184 URLs) were cited by all four platforms.

This means that 76.1% are unique URLs.

Should You Measure AI Brand Mentions or Citations?

You should measure both mentions and citations because each has its own merits, but let’s break down why each is important:

Why Measure Brand Mentions

Mentions measure the AI model’s brand awareness across everything it has access to, including both training data and retrieval.

These are the best ways to show how AI understands your brand (and the potential gaps where it doesn’t).

You can also measure brand mentions vs. competitors, which can help you set a baseline. (Xofu calls this its Brand Visibility Score.)

James also mentioned a visibility concept that overlaps with mentions called “recommendation rank”:

“This is the lower-funnel ordered list of 3-5 recommended offerings the AI model has generated based on the prompt/conversation, and heavily influences click-through rate and final selection.

In fact, a recent study showed 74% of users chose the top-ranked item.”

But if your goal is to drive website traffic, measuring brand mentions can be a little nebulous.

Why Measure Citations

Citations are the closest approximation to links, which is why people have gravitated towards them. And clicking them is how you’ll drive referral traffic to your website.

However, they are incredibly volatile.

AI can hallucinate citations. In fact, one study from Ahrefs found that AI sends visitors to broken links 2.87x more often than a typical Google Search.

Plus, we aren’t sure how many people actually click on these, aside from checking referral traffic in Google Analytics (which Google just announced has a new default channel group).

As of now, we only have limited evidence.

Google says yes, they click, but haven’t provided any real click data as of the publishing of this article.

On the flip side, Pew Research found that among 900 US adults, 1% clicked a link in the AI summary when it appeared on a page.

Our study on AI citations and news usage says that 32.1% of Americans who get news from AI always or often click the cited links.

So, it may depend on the type of query and information provided that prompts a user to click through.

Realistically, You Should Measure Both Citations and Mentions

Each tells a side of the story about your brand’s exposure. One drives clicks, the other awareness. But AI visibility isn’t just one thing. It’s a system with distinct layers.

Training data shapes mentions while retrieval shapes citations.

Query fan-out and RAG determine what gets pulled, chunked, and surfaced. But because each AI platform runs its own retrieval with its own logic, there’s no single lever to pull.

What this means, practically, is that optimizing for citations or mentions is about managing reputation across multiple platforms simultaneously.

Your brand needs to be present enough to register in training associations and your content needs to be structured well enough to survive all of the chunking and retrieval evaluation when AI goes looking in real time.

Track both, but understand what’s actually driving them.

The post AI Citations vs Mentions: What’s the Difference and What’s More Important? appeared first on BuzzStream.

Chances are, they used a content calendar and were planning way in advance.

And although it’s important to stay flexible for tactics like reactive PR, planning is still essential in any PR strategy.

In this post, we’ll walk you through setting up your own PR calendar to help you get the most coverage possible, and we’ll also share our interactive (and downloadable) calendar with over 650 verified events globally that all teams should use.

Interactive PR Calendar for 2026-27

We’ve built an interactive PR calendar featuring over 650 verified key events and holidays across various industries in the US and the UK.

It defaults to the current month, but you can use filters to adjust. (Learn how we built it.)

But a calendar is nothing without understanding how to use it.

Using and Managing Our PR Calendar

This PR calendar is designed to save you time and help you plan smarter campaigns.

Here’s how to get the most out of it:

Filter by region

Use the US, UK, and Global buttons to narrow the calendar to the dates most relevant to your audience.

If you’re running a campaign for a UK brand, filter to UK and Global to remove US-specific days that won’t resonate.

Filter by type

The calendar includes three types of entries: Holidays, Awareness Months, and Seasons.

If you’re a health brand, switch to Awareness Months to instantly see every relevant observance.

If you’re planning seasonal content, switch to Seasons to see when allergy season starts, when back-to-school kicks off, or when holiday shopping season begins.

Filter by month

The calendar defaults to the current month, so you can immediately see what’s coming up.

Switch to a future month to start planning ahead, which is exactly what good PR requires (even if you have a reactive element).

Search by keyword

Type any topic into the search bar: “mental health,” “food,” “dog,” “cancer,” and the calendar instantly filters to matching entries.

This is the fastest way to find every date relevant to your brand or client.

Download the CSV

Every filtered view is downloadable.

Set your filters first, then hit Download CSV to get a clean spreadsheet of exactly the dates you need.

Drop it straight into your editorial calendar or outreach planning tool.

How Far in Advance Should You Pitch for Each PR Calendar Date?

Knowing that a date is coming isn’t enough; you need to pitch at the right time for each media type.

So, asking around and based on my own experience, here’s a quick guide to how far in advance you should pitch:

Here is a little more info on each:

National print magazines – 4-6 months out

National print magazines, like Entrepreneur, may plan issues 4-6 months in advance of publication.

(So if you’re targeting a Valentine’s Day feature in a national magazine, you should be pitching in August.)

If you’re pitching a product, you should send it 6 months in advance to ensure they have time to review it as well.

Regional print magazines and newspapers – 2-3 months out

Regional print magazines and newspapers, like The Daily Mail, plan about 2 months ahead of publication, sometimes three.

National online publications – 1-2 months out

Some national online pubs plan about 1 month out, sometimes two.

TV morning shows – 2 weeks-2 months out

TV morning shows at the national level have a lead time of two weeks to two months.

Allow yourself a week or two if it’s a feature that can be pre-planned, rather than a live news item.

Blogs, podcasts, and niche outlets – 1-4 weeks out

Blogs are kind of a free-for-all. Some need more time than others.

I’ve found that with the BuzzStream podcast, about one month is great, but some news items come up quickly, so just one week can be more helpful.

Every Publication is Unique

Reminder that every publication is unique.

Some publications start holiday coverage earlier than others. So, it’s always important to keep an eye on when these posts go live on their website.

For instance, if I were pitching something Christmas-related to Parade, I would check Parade’s coverage from last year:

This should give you a sense for how early to start pitching specific targets.

When talking with PR expert Collin Czarnecki of Noble, he recommended leaning into the publishing cadence as well:

“A national magazine that publishes monthly operates very differently than a digital reporter at a local news station who’s filing multiple stories per day. The publication’s editorial cadence often tells you more about lead time than the outlet category itself.”

But there’s one more place to understand when to pitch: the journalist.

Focus on the Journalist

Furthermore, as with everything in PR, tailoring to a specific journalist is key.

Collin told me:

“Focus on the publishing cadence at each news outlet as well as the publishing cadence of the journalist you’re actually pitching.

A reporter publishing three stories per day may need only a few days’ notice, while a publication producing one major feature per month may be planning editorial coverage weeks or months in advance.

Let’s look at a seasonal campaign, for instance.

When I’m planning a seasonal campaign, I’ll often start by looking at last year’s coverage. When did the story publish? Who wrote it? Are they still at the publication? How frequently do they publish? Did the outlet cover that topic once, or revisit it throughout the season?

Those answers help determine not only when to pitch, but who to pitch.

If a reporter covered holiday shopping trends last November, summer travel in June, or tax season in March, there’s a good chance they’ll be interested in a fresh angle this year, especially if you can bring something new to the conversation through original data, year-over-year trends, expert commentary, or findings that challenge conventional wisdom.”

We cover some of this in our podcast conversation with Collin.

How to Build Your Own PR Calendar

To build your own calendar, you can use a spreadsheet like Google Sheets, or level up to a project management tool like Asana or Airtable.

Then comes the strategy.

Here are the steps I recommend if you are starting a brand new industry or client:

1. Map Out Key Dates and Opportunities

Start out with your key internal dates. These may be product launches or company milestones.

Then you expand into industry events, seasonal campaigns, and relevant awareness days.

For a lot of these awareness days, you can use a tool like the PR calendar above.

For industry events and conferences, you’ll want to do some Google searches to find events going on this year:

You can also find them in industry newsletters and on social media.

But not all events are newsworthy; next, we’ll brainstorm the digital PR angles and hooks.

2. Brainstorm Digital PR Angles

This is where the fun (and challenge) starts.

The best way to think of this is through the “why now” lens. When you pitch a story to a journalist, they are looking for the answer to “why is this important to me now?”

For events like industry conferences, you might want to schedule a product launch to demo the tool to conference attendees. (This was what we did for our ListIQ launch!)

For awareness month, you might want to launch a research study, like this one from the Kids Mental Health Foundation did for Mental Health Awareness Month (May), and got them coverage on WAFB.

For major events, you could launch a product collaboration like this one from Lays for the World Cup:

These don’t always have to be fresh ideas, either. If you see an upcoming event, you might look for existing content to re-pitch with a new angle.

For example, Digital PR Manager with Digitaloft, Emilie Warner, told me they ran a research report into which areas of the US are most at risk of having a stroke for a client who supplies adjustable hospital beds for the elderly and disabled.

Although the campaign went out early in the year because May is Stroke Awareness Month, they planned to re-pitch it with a fresh media list, templates, and subject lines.

3. Assign Tasks and Deadlines

Then, as with every campaign, you’ll want to assign your tasks and deadlines.

My one big piece of advice here is to always give yourself longer than you think you need.

The more intricate the campaign, the more time you’ll need.

4. Update Consistently

Realistically, your calendar is going to change.

And as AI continues to accelerate everything, I’ve found it’s going faster and faster.

So, it’s important to do monthly check-ins with your strategies.

Not All PR Needs a Calendar, But It Always Helps to Have One

A well-managed PR calendar is the backbone of any successful digital PR strategy.

It keeps your team focused, your outreach timely, and your brand top of mind for journalists and influencers.

Ready to see the difference?

Dive into our interactive PR calendar above and start planning your next digital PR win—with the data and expert insights to back it up.

How We Built This PR Calendar

Most PR calendars are a static list in a PDF or a blog post you have to scroll through. We wanted to build something better — a fully interactive, filterable, and downloadable tool that actually saves time.

Here’s how we built and verified it: I used AI to gather holiday data from four primary sources: NationalToday.com, Brandwatch’s social media calendar, HeyOrca’s holiday calendar, and Iconosquare’s content calendar.

Each source was cross-referenced against the others, and any conflicts were resolved by checking the originating organization directly, whether that’s the UN, WHO, CDC, gov.uk, or the relevant charity or foundation.

For floating holidays, such as Easter, Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, UK Bank Holidays, and Cyber Monday, that don’t fall on the same date every year, we built an algorithm that calculates the correct date for each year using standard calendar rules.

These are the same methods used by timeanddate.com and federalpay.org.

Every floating date was verified individually for both 2026 and 2027.

One of the biggest problems I found with existing PR calendars is that they’re US- or UK-centric, depending on where you search. And since we know digital PR in the US and UK is very different, I thought we should split it.

So, we had AI audited every single awareness month against UK sources, including the NHS, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Stroke Association, and others.

For awareness months, we cross-referenced against the CDC, WHO, UN, and major UK health charities to ensure every entry is tied to a real, recognized campaign with an official source.

Beyond astronomical seasons, we added cultural and industry seasons that PR teams actually plan around, like allergy season, flu season, hurricane season, back to school, holiday shopping season, tax season, and more, all with their “official” start dates sourced from NOAA, the CDC, the IRS, and the NRF.

See an error? Email me and let me know!

The post 2026-27 PR Calendar: Interactive + Downloadable for Smarter Campaigns appeared first on BuzzStream.

The media landscape is very different across the world. Different countries, states, and regions all have cultural nuances and localized preferences for news. What resonates in one area of the world most likely won’t resonate elsewhere.

As more teams jump on the digital PR bandwagon, it’s important to understand the nuances. For this webinar, I asked Eirini Theodoridou, Head of International Digital PR; Marc Bulsa, Senior PR Strategist; and Chloe Keys, International Senior Digital PR Strategist, all from Connective3, to join us to discuss international PR.

Here’s the video:

Here’s the deck:

And here’s the transcription:

Introduction

We will be talking a lot about the US and Europe, and how to apply best practices when pitching in an untapped market — or perhaps you’ve already tapped into some of these markets. We’ve split the presentation into three parts, just to make sure we have a lot of checklists and tips on how to best target any strategy for any market, to help you kickstart your journey, and then some Q&A.

So, to kickstart our conversation — it will be more of a discussion — we’ll be talking about international PR. It’s going to be a no-brainer to say that we’ve seen a lot of international PR practices evolve over the past few years, not just in the UK but internationally across Europe. It’s about spelling and send times, but it’s not just that.

In general, digital PR has changed a lot.

Even if you’re just tapping into it today, or you’ve been working in digital PR for a long while, you’ll agree that with all the Google updates and algorithm changes, it has changed a lot — it’s all about relevancy.

We went from campaigns that some people will obviously have seen before — the listicles, the dream jobs, the “best cities for X” — to more all-around, connected campaigns that work harder for you.

Not just by attracting media attention and online publications, but also attracting social media attention, and perhaps even incorporating out-of-home practices like taking over gyms, as you can see here. These are just some examples from key brands I think are known worldwide, and they’re quite more on the creative side, which is something we’re focusing on in 2026.

The types of campaigns in digital PR have also changed a lot. A great example — this is part of the digital PR report that BuzzStream does every year — we went again from your listicles and “best cities for ads” to more data-led content, expert commentary, and case studies.

The way we pitch to journalists has changed a lot, and the formats that actually bring links have changed dramatically.

The industries that used to be easier to get links in can now be more difficult. Again, this is part of a study — you can see industries like education, fashion, and tech have all proven a bit harder to earn links in.

The European Landscape: Culture Over Translation

So what’s the big difference between the US and Europe? I think we treat Europe as one big market, but if you think about it, there are 24 official languages across Europe and 7 different time zones.

It’s a continent, not just a market. A common misconception is: “I’ll just translate my release with some EU destinations — it’s got Spain on there, it’s fine, that’ll do the trick.”

But in reality, to achieve successful multi-market execution, we’ve got to translate culture, not just language. We’ve got a whole lot of blogs on our website that talk about different markets — Spain, Italy, France, etc. — that you can have a look at.

But I thought it would be good to show you what it actually means to know your market.

If you put France into ChatGPT and ask for the 13 regions of France, it’ll just come up with those.

But if you know the history — I think it was about 10 years ago — we went from 22 regions to 13. But merging those regions doesn’t mean the people merge their culture with the region next to them.

Someone from rural Limousin, which I call the outback of France — there’s nothing going on there — doesn’t share much with someone from Basque Country, which has a completely different culture and language.

They’ve just been put in the same pot. So if you’re outreaching to those people, you need to understand that difference.

If you look at France on the department level, there are 101 administrative departments.

They all have their own foods, their own culture, their own special days. So it’s one worth considering.

So what’s the European landscape like? It’s shaped by fragmented, region-driven media.

We see — especially in a lot of the Latin countries — that regional outlets are more prominent than nationals, and that’s where you need native content, not only for cultural relevance but also for keyword relevance, because at the end of the day, we’re building links for our clients to get better rankings, so we need that keyword relevancy.

Lead times are slow, which we’ll touch on a bit later, and there’s also far more scrutiny — journalists need to check where the data comes from.

They essentially need to know: where did you get that information?

So I guess an actual insight for how to find success in Europe is to understand your market first.

What’s the media landscape like?

Are there cultural differences between different regions?

When it comes to crafting your campaign, you want to prioritise data-led content, because that’s what’s working at the moment — but you have to make sure you’ve got local data to build out all your angles. But local isn’t enough; you also need regional trade coverage if you’re looking at industry splits. It’s really important to target the people you want to outreach your campaign to precisely.

Then you have to localise — you’re not tailoring to a country, you’re tailoring to a city.

One thing we’ve found is that using previous press coverage to look at headlines and see how you can angle a story works quite well. You need to include details of how this study is relevant to a specific town of 20,000 people.

Finally, you have to prepare your sourcing evidence.

It’s crucial that you have a blog or landing page because the journalist will ask for it to fact-check, and then you can always upload it to Google Sheets or Flourish if you want them to be able to explore it themselves.

Be prepared to defend your campaign, essentially.

The US Market: Nuance, Relevancy, and the 50-Market Mindset

Yes, so — market differences in the US. I think it goes without saying that winning digital PR in the US isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.

I think one of the most important places to start is reiterating that US success means thinking in terms of 50 different markets — just exactly as Eirini was saying about France — each with its own behaviours, values, and news priorities that must be embedded into everything you do from a PR perspective.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of treating the US as one single market — outreaching something in Michigan and thinking it’ll resonate the same in Arizona.

It won’t.

And these differences can also be seen on a much more granular level, even state by state.

But I think the real golden rule here is to hammer home that relevancy drives coverage, coverage drives links and results for your campaigns and your clients, and the more locally and culturally relevant you can make your campaigns, the more your chances of success really do increase.

I think the first step I really want to touch on today is hammering home the importance of nuance in digital PR, and realising that it’s so much more than a nice-to-have — it’s genuinely what determines whether a campaign will feel relevant enough to be picked up in the first place.

Here are my top three tips to make sure you hit that nuance mark in US digital PR.

1. Understand local context

Number one: at the ideation stage, the genesis of your idea needs to be essentially rooted in a clear understanding of the local context that surrounds it. For example, are there any local laws or political narratives that would directly influence how your campaign’s narrative could be received or picked up?

2. Data must speak locally

Secondly, data sets are great — they’re amazing — and we sure do need them to really cut through the vast landscape that is US media.

But if they don’t reflect real, lived community experiences, it unfortunately just won’t work. The data sets we pitch need to speak directly to a current issue.

And finally, this “weave into current conversations” notion goes for all markets, but especially in the US.

3. Weave into local conversation

Audiences and journalists are so smart, and no matter how shiny your release or email pitch is, if the content feels disconnected from what’s already being spoken about — or is about to be spoken about — it just won’t work.

US Case Study: B2C Dental Client

I wanted to show you really quickly what understanding nuance can deliver in the US. Our previous B2C dental client operated across a really diverse range of US communities across Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Texas.

They had very minimal digital PR presence, and over 12 months we were able to create a media trust blueprint, building them up as a credible dental authority figure in the US.

We put the success down to three things.

When building out their strategy, we really got to know the client, the patients, and the dentists, which enabled us to recognise that across all of our campaigns and all of our digital PR work, it didn’t matter what was relevant to one patient in one area versus another — even though we were all talking about the same topic, which is teeth and oral health, it didn’t necessarily always translate.

Knowing this, we made sure that every single campaign was backed by social listening data to most accurately reflect what individual communities were talking about in terms of dental topics.

And where we could, to bolster that, we made sure we were able to layer our standard data collection or survey data campaigns with the client’s internal data too, to really make sure we stood out every single time we landed a pitch in a journalist’s inbox.

If we did all these things, that’s what got us the really strong results.

US Case Study: B2B and the Four-Tier Pyramid

What you’ll find is that nuance isn’t exclusive to B2C clients. In my opinion, it’s actually more important in the B2B space, where content is very heavily driven by editorial and economic agendas. Understanding that nuance, we were able to be really successful in the US with a B2B client. So if you have a client in this space or in the finance space, this four-tiered pyramid lays out the approach we recommend for the highest chance of success in the B2B space.

At the bottom sits expert opinion.

Expert Opinion

What we find helps build genuine credibility amongst US editors is the inclusion of strong internal and external expert commentary that goes beyond just presenting a data set — it explains why that data matters. Having a large data set is amazing, fair enough, but it really means nothing to a journalist if you can’t provide opinion on it. You can’t sit on the fence.

Existing Conversations

Next is aligning with existing conversations. Business publications are built around feeling like a natural contribution, talking about the same things repeatedly. We were able to recognise that, and we actually ended up being published on a Texas government site because we were aware of tapping into existing conversations rather than reinventing the wheel.

Arguably, what I think is the most important tier on this pyramid is commercial relevance.

Commercial Relevance

Editorial decisions are driven by commercial audience needs, meaning stories are judged by how well they fit wider narratives around money and growth. So it makes sense why an outlet like Fox Business would want to cover a story that presents a strong business picture, which is what we find for our specific client.

And at the very top — the cherry on the top — is editorial timing.

Editorial Timing

Common sense goes a really long way here. If you’re paying attention to market dates, the economic calendar, and the business calendar, and you’re ahead of those, then editors will be primed to cover your story.

To sum up everything I’ve been saying — for anyone who wants to start doing digital PR in the US, or if you’re a brand wanting to start tapping into it this year — this is what’s working across our clients across a range of different sectors. ‘

Just to note: we know the landscape is super dynamic, but time and time again, we see these four steps standing the test of time.

The most important thing I want to drill in is that success will never come from just having a really strong data set or a really shiny press release.

It comes from, first of all, studying where your audience is consuming news — getting a really high DA link on a publication or site where your audience doesn’t read or doesn’t care about it essentially means nothing.

Researching your publications thoroughly too:

• Does it feel natural when it lands in that journalist’s inbox?
• Is it something that publication covers time and time again?

And reading the cultural room when it comes to topics — as Eirini was saying earlier — localising every single touchpoint, from your data sets to your email pitches.

We believe that if you get a good mixture of all these things right, your chances of success in the US are pretty much increased.

I wanted to leave everyone with a bit of food for thought.

This is a piece of feedback I received from a US freelance journalist a few months ago, during a time when the news cycle was really heavy in the US — a lot of political uncertainty, everything was just going crazy:

We received this, and it made the wider team reflect on the growing appetite from newsrooms and individual journalists for more positive, solution-led stories that offer relief from heavy news cycles.

So if I were to give my top tip to anyone today that you can implement right away: before you push out your next angle in the US, reflect — is there a way you could potentially make it a bit more positive?

Building a Targeted Media List: Tools and Techniques

So now let’s say you’ve focused on a specific market, you’ve understood the cultural nuances, you’ve built some confidence in understanding what you want to push in those markets — but how do you actually find the best people to reach out to?

Let’s cover the basics first.

I know there’s a great webinar that Vince ran on how to search effectively on Google, specifically if you’re looking for journalists’ email addresses, and that can be the first step here.

We have a few various tools you can use. But the first thing I’d say is: lean on Google.

Google

Don’t be afraid to search in a language you don’t know. There are plenty of ways to go about it.

These are some types of searches you can do on Google. The example here is if you were searching for Greek media — if you had a piece of content around the World Cup, you can find publications and hence find the journalist’s email from publications that will be relevant to your story.

DuckDuckGo

Going beyond that, there’s another tool worth mentioning — DuckDuckGo. We like DuckDuckGo.

This tip actually comes from one of our RPRs who doesn’t speak a European language but has been able to earn coverage in those markets without knowing the language.

The reason is that on DuckDuckGo, at the header level, you can change the country you’re looking for.

So you’re doing Boolean searches with localised keywords, but when you go into Google you have to change the language and region settings, which can be a bit fiddly.

With DuckDuckGo you can just change it really easily, and I think that helps get the best results, because your UK or US Google is not going to return relevant results for Italy or Spain, for example.

For a more publication-specific example: if you were starting with Google, even just to source names of publications — to understand what the equivalent of The Guardian is in Spain, for example — using advanced search, you would change your region to Spain, change the language of your search to Spanish, and then choose your topic, let’s say “World Cup,” to find publications.

You can see here, as an example, the equivalent of The Guardian is, I think, El País — don’t quote me.

From there you can begin your journey of finding the most relevant publication for your story and then working through to find journalists and their emails.

Another way to find the best people to outreach to is to track media link activity.

Track Media Link Activity

This is based on a paid tool called Majestic, which is mostly used as a content database, but you can actually use their internal tools to track different domains in specific countries, to find journalists or outlets that talk about a specific topic and have linked back to relevant websites more often.

You can then export this from Majestic — or its equivalent — and find the best targets for your topic.

And of course, AI — we couldn’t not mention it, since it’s part of life.

I wouldn’t use an AI tool to create a media list by itself, but it’s nice to use effectively, so think smart, not hard.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo would be step one. I’m sure most people here might know it. If they don’t, it’s another tool that helps you track links and analyse topics, and it has a really nice feature called the Backlink Analyzer.

You can input any travel topic — let’s say you have a travel story for a cruise client — and export the results from BuzzSumo to see backlinks linking back to that specific topic for a specific country.

ChatGPT/AI

You can then upload this list of backlinks to ChatGPT, ask it to analyse the linked topics, and find how many people from a given publication have linked back to those topics over time.

This lets you time your pitch perfectly, and then to find the exact journalist’s email, you can often just go to their Twitter page — most people have it in their bio — or go to their publication and figure out the email format.

ListIQ is also something worth trying if you haven’t before. We use BuzzStream primarily for our outreach internally, but ListIQ is a good tool to cut back time on all those manual steps I mentioned — finding publications relevant to your topic, across different markets, and sourcing journalists’ emails.

If you have the Chrome extension, you can input an example — say a Germany-specific piece where you want to find German journalists. Let’s say it’s about divorce rates or relationships.

You would go on DeepL — this is the only free translation tool we lean on internally, and while it’s not perfect, it’s definitely good for this purpose.

You’d check the specific term, search it on Google, then use the Chrome extension — as you can see in the screenshot on the right — and choose the most relevant publications for your topic.

You’d click “Add to your media list” and, apart from the URL and article, make sure you select the author, email, and social media fields so you have the journalist’s LinkedIn.

That’s one way we’ve found works best to cross-reference how current and accurate the information is for these journalists.

Journalists do tend to switch publications, go freelance, or change beats — so check their LinkedIn, see if they’ve moved recently, and make sure the most recent article they’ve written is on the same topic as your press release. Spend more time here, because a tailored, accurate media list will make or break your campaign.

And here’s a little checklist for you to take away if you’re starting in an untapped market and looking to build a tailored media list.

This is a good starting point, in addition to the tips we’ve just covered.

So — let’s say you do have your tailored media list, you’ve chosen the best market to focus on, and you’ve understood the cultural nuances.

How do you actually build the perfect pitch?

Crafting the Perfect Pitch: Subject Lines and Standing Out

Yes, so — anyone who works on accounts with me will know I always harp on about this one phrase: a great story poorly pitched doesn’t get seen.

I think this deserves its own slide, because even with the strongest campaign idea and the strongest data set, it won’t land if it doesn’t cut through in the inbox.

To be transparent, it’s not something to get paranoid or super worried about, but there are a few things you can do to pull out all the stops and make sure your email stands out in a journalist’s inbox.

We know that journalists are incredibly time-poor and incredibly stretched. As PRs, we don’t want to add more to their plates, so we must work on the assumption that they will only read our subject lines. So what do you do from there?

Use Buzzwords

Tip number one: because the subject line is our first point of contact with a journalist, lead with buzzwords to instantly signal the value of your pitch.

A really great study from BuzzStream analysed common phrases used in terms of open rates, and it’s really interesting to see just how different the performance is depending on whether you use words like “tip,” “revealed,” “case study,” or “research.” Our biggest tip is to use buzzwords to instantly stand out.

Some other little tips to really capture that five-second attention span — and we find these apply no matter the market, whether Italy, Spain, or Germany — follow these three self-reflection questions to really increase your chances of getting that open.

Number one: realistic bias. If I can’t summarise the angle in a short sentence, a journalist won’t be able to do it for me.

Make sure you can briefly summarise the main angle you want to get across in a nice, short phrase for your subject line. Think in headlines from the ideation stage right the way through.

Match the Journalist’s Tone

Number two: does your subject line match or sound like the publication’s tone of voice? This is where AI or your favourite LLM can really help, because you can quickly put in a prompt like “give me the 10 most recent headlines this publication has covered.”

If your subject line doesn’t match their tone, you’ll need to go back and do your homework.

Front Load a Stat

Number three — and in my opinion the most important — have you front-loaded the data or stat?

There’s no point having a really strong survey stat or indexed statistic if it’s hidden inside a press release. Make sure it’s front-loaded at the start.

The proof is in the pudding: at C3, we find — most of the time — that journalists will literally copy and paste the subject lines we outreach.

The top example shown here is a campaign I was outreaching for our lifestyle client, and it literally did get lifted and uploaded onto a North Carolina news site.

And one of our team members working on NFL Draft campaigns repeatedly finds that journalists love to just copy and paste.

I think this tells us everything: the story is clear, it’s relevant, and it’s ready to use.

Localising Your Pitch: One Story, Multiple Markets

So, touching on the perfect pitch — let’s say you’ve written it perfectly, you have the perfect subject line, it’s data-led and relevant to the journalists on your media list.

How would you make it resonate locally?

How would you make sure your pitch works harder for you?

This is one of my favourite things to quote on.

You wouldn’t spell “favourite” like that in a US pitch.

So why would you pitch Spain to a Spanish publication using an EU-wide data set that doesn’t include Spanish data, or pitch a Cypriot data set to Greek media just because they speak the same language?

There are so many different cultural nuances you need to take into consideration before you even click send.

We have three key markets where we’ve seen the most differences.

Obviously, when we say “Europe,” most of the time we think Italy, France, and Germany — the major economic markets. So, as a practical example: how would the same data set work differently for each of those three countries?

We had a travel client with a campaign around cycling, and the same data set got picked up three different ways across those three markets.

United States

For the US, it was around school holidays, and the timing was perfect for a family-friendly angle: “What are the best family-friendly cycle destinations in the US?” It was a more light-hearted, country-wide piece.

It got picked up by some regionals and radio stations, with the major takeaway being on the positive side, without getting into the nitty-gritty of infrastructure data.

France

For France, a city pride angle performed better.

We localised it by city — places like Paris and Bordeaux — and it got picked up with a hook around the best French cities for cycling.

City pride is something they care about deeply.

Italy

In Italy, the core idea was the same but the pitch was different, because we saw that a lot of people in those areas were more interested in fitness.

We included data on infrastructure — specifically which cities had better roads and cycling routes — and the local city angle that got picked up was that Bologna was the best city for amateur sport.

It was a sport angle that got picked up by major outlets: “The best cities for cycling and running.”

If we had pitched the family-friendly angle in Italy, it wouldn’t have worked — it wasn’t well-timed to school holidays, and it wouldn’t have resonated in cities that aren’t known for good cycling infrastructure or amateur travellers coming specifically for cycling routes.

B2C vs. B2B: Key Differences Across the US and Europe

When we think about pitching, we often think in terms of B2B and B2C.

The key takeaways we’ve found for B2C across the US versus Europe: in the US, lead times can be longer, and you need to take that into account in your roadmaps.

Make sure your outreach timeline is longer, and don’t shoot yourself in the foot by not allowing enough time. Also account for time zones, which we’ll cover more on shortly.

In Europe, local angles work best, as we’ve said. Another key takeaway is that lifestyle, B2C consumer-led studies need to be positive. If you’re pitching finance content, you can be a bit more critical — frankly, nothing is going particularly well financially in the world right now — but lifestyle needs to stay positive. We don’t have tabloids in Europe, or they’re far less prominent, and that creates a need for positive news.

When it comes to B2B, expert commentary becomes critical in the US. We also see embargoes being important — sharing the data in advance with insights, so we can pitch in and get coverage ahead of time.

In Europe, the most important thing is that journalists will question your data.

They will literally ring you and ask:

• “Can you tell me more about this data set?
• How was the data compiled?
• How many people did you survey?
• What was the gender split, the city split, the industry split?”

You need to be prepared to share far more information than you would for a lifestyle piece.

In practice, for B2B outreach, we used a national catalyst in France.

We chose a topic from a client’s industry report — it was a 90-page report — and worked out which angle would resonate in the French media landscape.

We aligned it to media trends to maximise national traction, then leveraged our contacts at those nationals to help strengthen the credibility of the campaign.

If you see a study featured in The Guardian, El País, or a major European outlet, you’re more likely to trust it.

That’s exactly how it plays out — to the point where brands featured in the ranking are making LinkedIn posts about being included, and our client’s name and that ranking in that major publication is being referenced in articles.

For B2C outreach, it’s local insights for local press.

The cycling study we did for Spain and Italy involved looking at national holidays and building a data-led campaign with specific angles crafted for local outreach — not just “we’re sending this to Italy, to Bologna, to Milan.”

You can see in the subject line for Málaga that it includes data specific to that city within the headline, which shows how it’s done.

Timing Your Pitch: Calendars, Holidays, and Editorial Habits

I appreciate there’s a lot of information to take in here. We’ve tried to compartmentalize a lot of insights and links on how to make your pitch newsworthy and how to get a head start on the best times to pitch per different markets.

For the US, there’s the well-known factor of multiple time zones, weather, and so on.

It does make sense to take all these variables into account regardless of your topic or industry, and to act like a local, think like a local.

It’s really hard to keep track of everything, so these are a good starting point.

Obviously, there are federal holidays, but each state also has its own specific holidays that differ from other states.

Even local authorities differ, and there are different weather events each state is known for — hurricane season, tornado awareness, extreme heat periods, and so on.

What we tend to do internally is set up Google Alerts on different topics we’re focusing on for different clients or industries.

That way, whenever something is picked up in the news, we can be the first to react.

It could be anything from sports like the NFL, to consumer impact stories around cost, safety, health, family — anything that locals would stop and read about while scrolling on their phones because they’re from that state or that city.

It’s hard to be a genuine local across so many different markets, but this is a good starting point.

The same goes for Europe, though there it’s not something we’d suggest doing with a single US-wide story — we’ve never seen a single pan-European pitch really land effectively. You need to get more granular with your research.

These are some good starting-point data sources to begin your journey.

Yes, there are many more links out there for different countries, often in different languages, so if you don’t know those languages, start here.

Look at awareness days, time zones, and how each country is divided — from a governmental or cultural perspective.

Some countries have different dialects. Consider the main religion, the public holidays — Easter, for example, is celebrated differently in different countries across Europe.

There are name days and bank holidays that vary country to country.

Just as an FYI, tomorrow there’s a bank holiday in parts of Europe, but it’s not on a Monday as it would be in the UK, so that’s something to think about.

One final point specific to Europe is editorial habits, and I think we have the expertise internally to make this statement: it really is culturally quite different from UK or US media.

Such a relatively small geographical region has such a vast range of editorial guidelines and habits.

In the UK or the US, you’d never pitch a story on Black Friday, for example, regardless of whether you’re news-jacking something happening right now.

But in a lot of European countries — Greece is a good example — the media landscape is smaller, yet they’re really hungry for news.

They’ll react really positively to a pitch at almost any given time, especially if it’s tailored to them and their region, and specifically covers the topics they focus on.

They don’t have the same “I only pitch to my editor at 10am” rule.

There are so many differences.

The examples here, which you can take away, I’d definitely suggest paying attention to when the main news publications in each country publish their articles, just to understand what’s best for you and the best practices for pitching.

Making Your Pitch Human: Templates, Send Times, and Follow-Ups

Another top tip — and we do love our tips — what we’ve seen work best, especially when outreaching a story in an untapped market where journalists aren’t used to getting emails from PRs, is to help them by essentially writing the article for them.

What we do internally — and it’s worked really well to cut back the back-and-forth of explaining what digital PR is and why we’re reaching out — is to include a specific sentence on our page.

You can tailor this however you like: “We are sharing this because we represent X brand, and it’s free to use. It’s been editorially tailored for your publication. If you need more information, feel free to reach out.”

I’ve also started including my LinkedIn as a hyperlink at the bottom of my pitches. You can add your phone number, but I wouldn’t recommend that if you’re sending to many countries whose languages you don’t know — they might ring you and you won’t be able to respond. But it makes your pitch more human, and it does cut back time on educating journalists about what digital PR is.

On the question of when is best to send a pitch — and putting data behind it — we’ve analysed a lot of data from the past four years of pitching US stories internally across a range of industries.

You can see here a little overview of analysis from our BuzzStream data, based on projects across different clients and each state.

We’ve identified what percentage open rate you can expect per state, and when you’re most likely to get your email opened.

For example, a journalist in Nevada is most active between 6 and 7am, with up to a 63% open rate in that window.

In North Carolina, the peak engagement happens mid-morning, with the highest open rate of around 54% around 11am to midday — which is quite unusual, especially if you’d expect journalists to open emails earlier before pitching to their editors.

Another tool we want to share: if you’ve already earned coverage in a publication that’s written in a language you don’t know — most likely a European market — we have a list of copy-and-paste templates for chasing a link, which we call follow-up templates.

They’re all hyperlinked here for you to take back and check. There are specific instructions on how to input your own link for whatever domain you want to chase.

Most likely, if this publication isn’t used to getting pitches from PRs, they’ll be more likely to add a link. So we want to give that to you to use.

If you have any more questions or want us to sense-check your European pitch, we’re here.

Q: What’s the Formula for Success in Italy?

Yeah, so — the formula for a successful story in Italy. I read this question, it’s very interesting. Italy has been one of those markets that’s harder to crack in Europe. To be fair, Greece I’d say is easier — they’re really hungry for information, especially if it’s tailored to them. But for Italy, based on our experience, and bearing in mind I’m not a native but we have worked with Italian natives in the market — I would say they are really data-led.

They do like their data. They do like exclusives. The media landscape there is actually quite competitive, but it’s also smaller than other major European markets like France and Spain, and there isn’t a huge hunger for listicles or country-wide city comparison stories.

So I would say: before formulating a strategy for Italy, spend time building journalist relationships.

This can make or break a campaign regardless of the territory, but for Italy specifically, I’d make sure to craft the perfect opening pitch and outreach to journalists who are relevant to the industry you’re focusing on.

Ask them: “What do I need to do to get featured in your publication? What are your editorial guidelines?” Spend time one-on-one with them.

Ideally you know the language, but even if you don’t, try to be their right-hand person in helping them formulate a story. They’re really keen on exclusivity.

And as we said at the start — get to know your market.

Where do you want to outreach your study?

Do those cities have a lot of publications? Sometimes it’s not the biggest cities that have the most media coverage, so you’ve got to think from a link-building perspective as well. Know the region, make sure it’s localised, have multiple angles ready, and if you need any more help, send us a LinkedIn message.

Q: How Effective is Pitch Personalisation?

I think we might all have different answers to this.

I won’t speak for everyone, but one of the team members who isn’t here today is probably one of the best at doing this effectively. When I tried it at the start of my PR journey — outreaching in the UK for UK journalists — it was something I attempted, but it didn’t work for me. Everyone has their own style. It felt forced. I think it works best when you can see that a journalist is very likely to cover PR stories, and that’s something you get a feel for over time.

I wouldn’t pitch a story to a journalist at a national publication saying “I saw you cover X,” because this person might be covering so many different beats and it might not even register with them that I read one of their stories. But if it’s something really niche, or perhaps an untapped market, I’d potentially do it — though it’s not really my style. Chloe, I think it’s better coming from someone who actually uses it regularly.

Yeah, historically, when I first started in PR, I was obsessed with personalising every single email. But upon reflection — as Eirini said — it can come across as quite fake and forced, and journalists are so attuned to us these days. Digital PR isn’t a new thing, and they can easily catch on.

What I find most beneficial is: if you’ve got a media list of around 30 really strong contacts, for maybe three to five of those, if a journalist has covered something very similar within the last six to twelve months, I would reach out and say, “Hey, I noticed you covered this — I actually have an updated angle or updated data set that I think adds to your piece.” That way you’re inserting yourself much more naturally, rather than just popping up out of the blue and saying, “Hey, I noticed you published this — cover my thing instead.” It makes it feel more organic.

But personalisation doesn’t always mean that classic opening line of “Hey, I noticed you wrote this — here’s mine.” Sometimes, journalists are genuinely just grateful that you’ve even pitched them something that reflects their beat. One quote we got recently from an Axios journalist was that he’s just grateful to receive a relevant pitch these days. So I think personalisation can go two ways. I hope that answers your question, Vince.

Q: Is it more or less effective in different countries?

I think again in Europe it depends who you’re pitching to and what you’re pitching. Take France, for example — they use a lot of interns in those big regional outlets, so it won’t always be the same person covering a story. There’s no point doing it if you’re targeting a newsroom intern or a fairly junior journalist who’s going to move on. But if you have a long-standing relationship with someone you know is the head of their editorial department, then yes — you’re going to want to show that you have a genuine interest in their publication and what they cover.

It also depends on what you’re pitching. If it’s a new study, not so much. But if it’s something that relates directly to an article published two or three days ago — maybe a week before — and you’ve got data that adds to it or offers a contrasting perspective, then I’d absolutely reference it. “I read your article about this. I’ve got data that supports your piece” — or that offers another angle. It shows you’ve read their work and that you’re either adding to or challenging their claim. It feeds into that whole notion of credibility and getting your client positioned as a thought leader.

I’ll put myself out there here: I know I just said I wouldn’t always personalise a pitch like that, but what I do — and it might sound a bit stalker-ish to some people — is do my research when I’m outreaching in untapped markets or on really niche topics. For example, I’m not a football fan, but I had a pitch for some European football teams and was trying to get coverage in really relevant publications, which is hard because they have their own editorial guidelines and internal experts who write their own opinion pieces.

They don’t need PR. So I had a pitch about football stadiums in a specific region. I found the most relevant journalists for that publication and topic, and I went on one of their public social media profiles — they were very vocal about their favourite football team. So my pitch was tailored to their favourite club.

I did get coverage — not a link, because the publication had a no-follow/no-linking policy — but I got a reply. I got into their inbox and they said, “Send me anything relevant you have.” The pitch was relevant to their beat, but grabbing their attention by referencing their favourite team didn’t hurt. Obviously my pitch was a general one — “these are the best stadiums for X” — but the entry point was tailored to their personal interest.

So, if you have something niche, I’d suggest doing a bit more research.

They are people. They have their own agendas, their own preferences.

You might grab their attention by connecting on something personal, but that doesn’t mean they’ll cover it — it just means you might get the open.

I’d definitely encourage it.

Q: Can Case Studies Work Internationally?

Eirini (50:56)

I would say the best people to speak to this would be from the UK team, who have been doing it for a long while. In short, I haven’t done it in European pitches — potentially because it’s hard when you’re not on the ground. I wouldn’t feel comfortable using people’s case studies unless it was someone well-known.

What I have done — it’s not quite a case study, but it’s about providing more local expertise to strengthen the story — is lean on local expert commentary. For example, I had a car-related release with European data about congestion, about how much time people spend behind the wheel. I found the head of traffic — whatever that role is called in different countries, because it varies — and I emailed them first, reached out to them to give a comment on the data.

The data was already there, so I was doing the journalist’s job for them. I made it really local with someone from their own region, and I gave them data they didn’t have.

So that’s the notion of a case study, but it’s not quite the same as what we have in the UK, where there are Facebook groups where you can find, for example, someone who went to a Harry Styles lookalike contest. That’s quite a commercial, UK-specific thing. I wouldn’t do that if I’m not on the ground.

I think it needs to progress in Europe, because there is an appetite for it — journalists do want more case studies. And I think that’s where video plays a role, because in Europe, journalists are very critical about fact-checking.

If you just send quotes, they could have been written by AI. There needs to be living proof: “Is this person real? Are they relatable to our readers?”

That’s why a PR-plus-social approach works well — you’ve got living proof that’s very shareable, and your experts are clearly who they say they are and relevant to your audience.

Q: How Do You Choose the Best Story to Pitch?

Yeah — instant gut feeling. You need to earn attention quickly, and the best way to do that is through a really strong data set. If you’re starting anywhere, don’t push out a storytelling narrative without data behind it, and don’t sit on the fence in your expert commentaries. I would 100% start with a really strong data-led campaign, either by going out and collecting the data yourself and building an index, or by using your client’s internal data. That would be my top tip.

Best story — I don’t know, gut feeling is good, because if you’ve done everything right, if you’ve done your research and have the perfect pitch, I would say: go positive first. That’s a good rule of thumb.

If it relates to you, it will relate to whoever you’re targeting — if you’ve got the market knowledge. And I always start my PRs with the hook: why is this relevant now? It doesn’t have to be something that’s been talked about this week, but why is it an issue, or why does it matter right now? That’s just what makes a story good.

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