 Our next speaker is a PR campaign genius. Shannon McGurk has strategically been crafting campaigns and honing effective outreach for years. And when I reached out to her current boss, Patty Mugen, for some fun insights, he mentioned that she also has a newish puppy named Hudson. Such a cute name. She's a huge lover of cheese, pasta, and carbs in general. And in fact, she actually set off the office fire alarm once while making toast. And firemen arrived. That is unbelievable, Shannon. You are my hero. So buckle up. Here is the head of content and PR at Aira Shannon McGurk. So we've got a problem within our industry. Here is what Twitter has to say about our digital PR campaigns. Digital PR is getting ridiculous. The industry itself is becoming attention-seeking. And finally, and probably most prominently for me, the digital PR community shouldn't feel pressured to post their best work and highlights all of the time. But you know what? I'm guilty. And I'm really guilty too. So here I am back in 2017 excited as we're coming to the end of the year. Really proud of the team. I take to Twitter and announce that this year we generated 2,400 pieces of coverage for our clients. Then in 2018, I keep going on this theme. And instead of talking about our clients, travel supermarket, sharing their coverage and the top 15 most popular cities that tourists will be in by 2025. Then you can really see the sheer impact and how much I was tweeting around the successes of our campaigns. And ultimately, this comes down to the fact that I'm super proud of the work we're doing. And I want to be lifting the team's confidence up, sharing the wins, sharing the successes as well, so that we can hopefully inspire others out there who are doing lots of digital PR and link building. But it didn't stop there. So this time last year, I stood on the Mazcon stage. That's a little old me up there looking like a tiny dot. And I spoke about the campaigns that had generated the most successful numbers of links that our team had gone out and created. We've got this one here, Modern Santa, that got 468 pieces of coverage and 324 linking domains. A second one I stood on that stage and spoke about was the most popular beaches according to Instagram. This one we were nominated for an award for 224 as well. And again, this one got 150 pieces of coverage and 66 linking domains. And finally, and this campaign is super close to my heart. It's one that I will always be proud of. It didn't get the biggest and most viral results in the world, but the story behind it and the approach that we took generated 68 pieces of coverage and 45 linking domains. So here is one of those successful campaigns stood alone. You can see here on this graph, we're mapping coverage against the month. And this was a really, really good month when we launched this. We got up to 70 pieces of coverage and a really solid amount of links too. But this is what it's like in context. And you can see that we see that really big spike, but then after that, the months to follow, they're a little bit more inconsistent. You can see the highs and lows of link building. And I'm going to be honest and tell you guys that there, I'm not showing you the full picture. When I'm talking about those successes and those successes alone, I'm not being honest and talking about the other challenges or the other wins that we potentially have in the months to come. So my promise to you guys today is that I really do want to show you the full picture. Now, for me, the full picture covers these three pillars with creative campaigns. We've got the huge wins that we love talking about. We share them for inspiration. We have those steady performers in the middle. And that's really the day to day of what we do, the campaigns that go out there and get 10, 20, 30 links. And then we have those fails, the ones that crash and burn and the ones that really struggle to get off the ground because of whatever reason. But this is how we talk about our work. So we place a huge focus on those wins, right? They're the things that we talk about on social media and LinkedIn and Twitter. They're the things that we write case studies about and we talk about on stage, but we don't necessarily talk about those steady performers that are actually generating real business results because of the SEO KPIs in place. And we don't necessarily share those fails. Those campaigns that, yes, they're hard, but we can learn from them the most. This, in reality, is what the day to day looks like, right? So we have one in four campaigns, maybe a huge win and one in 10, maybe a huge fail. But our day to day lives is digital PRs. Actually, the steady performers are what we do day in, day out, the campaigns that go out there and do get those 10, 20 links. So what's the problem then? And why am I showing you this? Well, ultimately, if we talk about those huge wins all the time, we're giving the impression that we don't have those campaign fails. And that means we're putting too much pressure on ourselves as digital PRs and newbies within the industry, people that are junior coming into things and feeling the pressure to get more than 100 links with every campaign. And because of that, we're starting to normalise the idea that each campaign launch actually does need to go out and get those 100 plus links. Now that feeds into really setting unrealistic expectations and KPIs. And that can lead to really difficult conversations as clients further down the line, because what you put in front of them and then what you produce versus a sales meeting and a pitch to then the reality of what you do could be two very different stories. But one thing we need to recognise here that if we constantly talk about those huge fails, those huge wins, sorry, all the time, it means that we're making others think that those 510 or even 20 links can't be effective. Now we know that those steady performers, they can be effective. And actually, as an industry, we need to talk about them more, we need to celebrate the impact that they have. If you're generating those three links that go out and boost that page, you know, that product page up to page position one, celebrate them, learn from them, share those tactics. There's nothing viral about that, but you're still winning. So I believe, as an industry, we can do better. Now, the first step in doing better is really looking at the habits that our industry has, and this rinse and repeat nature. So why do we focus on the wins? Let's go back to our first era viral campaign. And this is the campaign as a status presentation that really is close to my heart. It's the first campaign we launched in 2017 as a really small team that actually went off and started to generate links and coverage on its own. And that really is kind of the key to success, right? When your story that you're sending out starts to get picked up organically. So we launched this in January, it was a dry January in the UK, a time where most people really aren't supposed to be drinking after quite a heavy Christmas. But I don't know about you guys. January for me is the time that I'm more than likely to drink because of the doom and gloomy weather, the pressures that you face as well coming back after relatively slow December most often. And so this campaign here got 68 pieces of coverage and 45 linking domains. So really, it was around the point of this campaign then that we as an as an agency and as a relatively small team at the time, we started to really focus on the wins and only the wins. So guess how many maps we launched that year for one client and one client alone. We launched 12 campaigns out of a total of 18 campaigns. 12 of them were maps and some of them, yes, were interactive, others were static, but you can really see the sheer volume there because we found this recipe of success and we wanted to push it as hard as we could. Now that is us focusing on those huge wins, right? That is us realising that we've got something that really works for digital PR and link building because we know as an industry, it can be risky and results aren't are given. So we keep pushing it and we keep pushing it because we know that we're going to get something back. And those maps, they went out, they did their job. They got links from top tier sites all around the world and no doubt they had a positive impact on traffic and rankings. This sounds really familiar though, right? This is something we're really guilty of as an industry. And so if we take a look and rewind time a little bit, what do we actually do to get links then? So in 2009, we focused on guest posts and that was the tactic we relied on to generate links for our clients and brands we worked with. In 2012, Distilled started to set the precedent for creative and they were producing high quality static infographics that were going out. The Instagram one comes to mind, for example. In 2014, again, pioneered by Distilled, I would imagine, we were looking at creating lots of interactive infographics, they could have been interactive maps, for example, indexes, that kind of thing. In 2017, we saw the trend of Instagram maps emerging. We alone, obviously, you can see we produced the one around the best beaches. You could tie this into proposal locations, business locations, anything really relating to that platform because the platform was booming and again, tying it into maps, we know it was going to generate links. In 2018, we move forward into indexes and that was creating an asset that had multiple data points so that we could go out to different sectors of the press and continue to push different stories to generate those all important links and coverage. And then in 2019, we saw the rise of the best job ever. So within the US, we saw theme park testers for theme parks in Orlando, Florida. And over here in the UK, we saw Yorkshire pudding testers because, you know, we all love a roast on a Sunday. Then finally, in 2020, we're starting to move towards product stunts. We're seeing new products be created on behalf of brands and then we're driving links into those product pages. They're often stunty and creative and add a new dimension to link building. So what about next year and beyond then? What are the trends that we think might start to shine through for digital PR and link building formats? Well, in 2021, I think as a prediction, it's very likely we're going to be moving towards video. We've seen the emergence of video within our industry kind of dominate over the last couple of years. And I think more and more, we're going to see journalists and consumers want this. So we'll be creating video assets to drive links and coverage. In 2022, we can look to move towards virtual reality, that's gamification, starting to use headsets to really immerse our brand audiences in creative campaigns in order to go out and again, get those all important links. And in 2023, I think we'll be moving towards more experiential stuff. So setting up, you know, stunt like rooms and takeovers, for example, to submerge our brand audiences, to really get them feeling emotions that tie in with the brand. And again, all comes down to getting that coverage with those followed links. So that's 10 winning formats in 14 years. But we were doing more in those 14 years, weren't we, than just those winning formats. We were doing different types of link building and experimenting with different formats. So what about those formats? And why didn't we celebrate them? Why didn't we share them more? Well, because we were focused on celebrating those wins and those recipes for success. So as an industry we're guilty and we love to rinse and repeat those formats. And again, I understand why, because what we do can be risky. But unfortunately, that doesn't show the full picture. So again, another step in, you know, showing this full picture today and sharing the truth about digital PR is talking about failure and embracing failure. So I want to share a couple of failures with you. And for me, this is really, really important, right? I want to air out some of the challenges and struggles we've had as a team, because for me, one of the biggest steps in sharing and talking about the full picture is to actually address failure. So hands up, who's had a campaign fail? Now I know I would have hopefully have been on stage doing this with you. But this is a safe space. This is, you know, the Moz fans, you're all a community and I can put my hand up to this question and say, absolutely, I've had a campaign fail. I'm even going to show you it. So this is a campaign that we launched in the first three months of me joining Arrow back in 2016. I was working with Mark Johnson, who headed up for some time, the creative team, it distilled and again, still in my preparation, really had something to prove, especially with Paddy as my boss as well. And essentially, you land on this landing page, you hit that watch it disappear button and that oil drum, that depletes and you can see it compares there to the Empire State Building. Now this shows you just how quickly the US is going to go through their oil reserves if we don't start to address things like climate change and being more efficient with our energy use. So when I launched this and I was a lead PR at the time, I was the one that was hungry to go out and get links and coverage. I was asked by the Daily Mirror, a leading national publication in the UK, their science editor at the time, where I've been for the past four years. He actually emailed me that back and I got that gut wrenching stomach drop feeling where I thought, OK, something's not jelling. And it turned out there was some questions over the data. So it was no surprise when we got zero links, but actually I'd missed something else and that wasn't the only hurdle that I had to overcome with this campaign. Why then? What was that additional thing that I'd missed? Well, actually, we launched our campaign here in early November. I think it was around the second week and you can see that something huge happens and that big spike there that I probably should have caught at the time. Can anyone guess what that was? Trump beat Hillary and won the US presidential election. And I had taken my wonderful campaign that I thought was going to do really well out to US press in the same week. Now, it's no surprise there was a bigger story that week. And actually most of the news outlets in the country were covering this. Most of the news outlets in the UK were also covering this. It was not wise of me at all to launch a campaign to press during that week of the US presidential election. I should have caught it. I should have known better. You know, that that falls on me in that instance. And no doubt you can imagine I kept that one pretty quiet on Twitter. You didn't see me tweeting about this. Now failures, they also come in all shapes and sizes. And this is a format that again tying into that map wins there that we were talking about that works very well for digital PR building. You'll notice that, you know, some of you in the audience may have even created a similar kind of format here. But this idea essentially shows the words top selling car model in every country. You can see it's very visual, quite busy. That's kind of the point with these. But one thing that actually is a huge challenge with these is that during the QA process when our designers and our content strategists are reviewing everything, you have to because there's so much text, you have to really, you know, have a BDI and keep your own attention to detail because in really busy sections, just like this one here, you can see we're not just talking about countries, we've got the brand names there of the cars and also the models. So there is quite a lot going on. And if you haven't spotted it yet, I will reveal the big mistake. You can see here rather than say Hong Kong, we put Hong Kong huge fail. And what's more, we actually launched it with that on the map. This had got through our QA process. This content campaign was live on our client's site. And we even got a link with that typo in place. Now, luckily, I had a really understanding client at the time, we kind of went into panic mode the next morning, was really honest with them, said we needed to fix things quite quickly and damage was really, you know, limited in that sense. We, you know, we were able to turn it round. And eventually this campaign went out and got 80 or so links. So all was not lost. But again, that's the kind of thing that you don't see and hear us talking about in the industry. And I have to admit that Hong Kong will always hold me. This is one of the failed stories that we can sit and kind of laugh about now and have a joke about. But at the time, it was absolutely mortifying. Now that two campaign failures, right? But as an industry, failures don't stop there. So again, hands up, he's had to report on a campaign fail. I know I definitely have. And you can see this email here that I received at 10 to nine first thing on a Monday morning, which is brilliant. Our client of ours and actually one of our favorite clients comes to me and says, Hi, Shannon, how are you? Have you had a good weekend? I just wanted to get your view on how January unfolded as it was below normal standards on a link building front. Now this hurts, right? The clients got there before I have it's 10 to nine on a Monday morning. I probably haven't even had enough caffeine yet to deal with this. But ultimately, you know, we were struggling at this point and reporting back on this has its challenges on its own. This is not the kind of email that anybody wants to be receiving. So here's how to pull their team through a campaign failure. And again, I can put my hand up to this. And this is the reality right of heading up a team and having different kind of disciplines within the team as well, where we all have to muck in and drive forward together. And you can see this again, it's a real life slack message where I'm saying, well done for pushing the team on things today, guys. You know, they've been a bit of a bit of a slow start on a campaign. We repivited and got it out there. Our account manager, Livy was in a bit of hot water with the client. And again, having to report on things. And you can see that we all have each other's backs at this point. And we're literally saying that to each other as well. So you have to have each other's backs through these failures. You have to have each other's backs through thick and thin because we have them struggles happen with what we do. And sometimes it really hurts, right? It's painful when you believe in a campaign, you're emotionally invested, you believe you've got something that's going to go out and deliver on a link building front. When things don't go to plan and those links don't come in and you've got a team that you're trying to boost morale on, you know, it can be really challenging. And that is the reality, unfortunately, with link building. That is, you know, the industry that we work with them. So to continue on this theme of truth, then, what is normal then when it comes to digital PR and link building? Well, earlier this year, Paddy led this survey and launched a survey questionnaire style research piece out to our industry. We had more than 300 replies from digital PRs, content marketers, heads of marketing all around the world. And we were eventually able to create this asset, the state of link building report 2020. And it covers things like the future of link building, where brands are spending their money, the tactics they're using, and also the realities, how many links that we're generating. So there's a couple of data points that I just want to bring to your guys' attention that almost shows you the reality of link building, right? And this is a really important question throughout this report. Have you ever had a campaign that received the following number of links? And you can see in the top spot there that actually 61% of respondents that even answered this survey got between one and nine links. Then in second place, you can see that 55% of respondents got between 10 and 19 links for their campaigns. And then in third place, you can see that 46% of respondents got between 20 and 39 links. Guys, there's nothing viral about that. These are all steady performers. Now again, in position five, talking about that theme of fails and struggles with what we do, 28% also said that they'd launched a campaign that hadn't got any links. Now, I'm a little bit suspicious about that. I know that, for example, we've had more than one that's been a struggle over the last four years. We've got processes and stuff in place to bounce back. But I do think more than a third in our industry and more than a third of campaigns or people out there have, you know, experienced zero links. Now, despite what Twitter shows then not every campaign is going viral, right? Those are steady performers that we just talked you through. And the research here from our state of link building report shows that actually the majority of campaigns are getting between one and 20 links. And you know what, that's really good. Let's celebrate that. Let's learn from that. Let's look at those campaigns and find out what's working and take that forward with our strategies as well. So to give you a bit more insight into, you know, normal and what normal is for digital PR campaigns, I want to talk you through what's normal for error. So across a 12 month period, we launched 138 campaigns. That received 2381 followed links and around 5000 pieces of coverage. That gives you an average of just 17 links per campaigns. Now I have to caveat that some of those campaigns in there, yes, they did go off, do a brilliant job. They got into, you know, top tier figures and stuff like that. But when you're looking at the law of averages, there's nothing again viral about this number. Actually, all of the averages that we've just shown here fall into the study performer category. And these study performers, we know because they're high quality links, they're relevant to our clients and from, you know, they're all earned organically. They're actually, you know, having positive impacts on our clients bottom line and having, you know, real world impacts on their increases of the traffic and rankings too. But one thing I have to say here is that actually link numbers themselves are almost irrelevant because if they're not having those bigger impacts on SEO KPIs, you know, from my position, I would rather have 17 high quality links that are having an impact on those keyword rankings and traffic and driving the audiences into our client sites than a hundred spammy links that aren't going to shift the needle at all. So for us, really, it is about quality over quantity and it's about consistency over virality. Because you don't always need loads of links to go out and generate those business results. And again, I want to talk you through some examples here. So this is what 47 links across five campaigns with the perfect blend of technical SEO and research and keyword research can do. You can see session traffic here for a client of ours doubles year on year because we have that perfect mix going on. And what's more, the client then provides a testimonial to say the error have consistently provided great guidance on setting targets, setting targets, communicating their progress and helping us grow as a company. Now, the most important thing to me and error at this point will be that last line there. Those 47 links, that perfect recipe of technical SEO as well, is adding revenue to the client's bottom line and is inspiring and achieving growth. So actually, those steady performers can make a big difference to the bottom line. We need to talk about them more. We need to embrace them. We need to, you know, celebrate them. So I want to take you through next around learning from these steady performers and what we can do in order to take them forward into our wider strategies. So let's go back to that challenging email that I received on that gloomy Monday morning in February last year. We actually managed to turn it round to this. And by the end of the year, last year in December, the same client, the same guy came back to us and said, great job, guys, you're finishing the year on a real high. Keep it going. Now, there's a reason that we were able to finish the year on a real high. And that's because we've got a number of processes in place that help us learn and develop as a team and help us get things back on track when they might not be going quite to plan. One of them is the content evaluation matrix. So where this matrix started then was with Mark Johnson. So he headed up, as you guys might know, the creative team that distilled for some time. He's recently just launched a new project called content Hubble. You should definitely sign up to that because it analyzes some of the most important and, you know, biggest campaigns and shows how agencies out there like Aira, Rise at Seven, Digital Last and stuff like that had come up with the ideas. But essentially, we were sitting in a brainstorm and you can see the squiggles on the side here that are really hard to decipher. We started to look and pull apart some of these campaigns. And this is what our matrix looks like in person then. So we have successful campaigns versus not successful. And that's in terms of a link building front. And then we have complex versus not complex. And that is in terms of a build and creative front. So design, dev, coding, that kind of thing. Now, what we were doing at the time when we came up with this matrix was necessary with kind of really focusing on those wins. And we were looking at that top box there, going back to those campaigns, trying to work out why they, you know, why they performed so well, what the formats were, what the pitch angles were, how we were speaking to journalists building relationships from them. And we were able to spot trends off the back of that. And we could see that, you know, at this point when we were starting to really drill into the data here, that maps were great for link building. Here were some of our most successful maps that we've ever launched. There's 300 links alone between these campaigns here, which is brilliant. And it's something that we're really proud of. But again, to go back to that rinse and repeat nature that I was telling you about, we really, really pushed maps and probably a little bit too hard at the time. One thing we didn't do, though, was look at this second box here, the campaigns that weren't so successful, that actually were quite challenging to build. And we didn't go back and learn from our phones. And this is one of them. So the most lucrative movie quotes of all time. And this was for a voucher code company that we worked with. And essentially, we launched a huge internal data pool. We looked at a number of films. We were able to essentially put a monetary value to some of the leading movie quotes that are famous all around the world. So we can see here that Tom Hanks, a hefty amount there, saying his all important line, Mum always said life was like a box of chocolates and you never know what you're going to get. Again, we did this with a number of other quotes. So you can see here the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club. And you can see how much the actor earned for saying that quote them. One thing to note here is that this is quite an experimental format, right? We probably could have made this quite simple. We might have been able to put this stuff in a blog post. We could have done a different visual with it. But at the time, we were trying to push our designs and created formats and a second example them. So here we were working with an online gambling company. And to play on the pun and a theme of odds, you know, you can get odds against horses at the Grand National, you can get odds against American footballers and stuff like that with the Super Bowl. We wanted to look at the odds on life events. So the likes of getting into college, if my baby will be healthy and we were able to plot these against you know, life and death, politics, curiosities and stuff like that. And we were sure that this campaign was going to go down really well with top tier press and specifically lifestyle press. Then when you go down into the campaign design a little bit more, you can see some more of these scenes coming through. So we were able to, you know, talk about living in a simulation and that tapped into things that Elon Musk was talking about at the time. We thought this campaign was going to be a huge success. And it was one of the hardest campaigns that we've ever launched and had to outreach at the time. But we should have taken a step back at that point. And what should we have learned from these campaigns then? Well, actually, if we looked at that trend, we realized that we were complicating things too much. The ideas themselves were quite original. They were quite inspiring. But the formats and the design that we choose to illustrate our stories actually they could have been potentially quite off-putting. We could have distilled them in a much more simple way that let the data and the story sing. Now, not learning from these, it did produce inconsistent digital PR results. You know, there were fluctuations with the link building results. And ultimately, this can put you in tricky situations with clients. And ultimately, you can lose them. You end up having graphs like this. So you have huge spikes. And then you really topple off because you're not getting things right and you're not going back to look at where things were challenging so that you can learn from them. Whereas if we look at the study performers, instead they can produce consistent results. So let's look at the middle of this matrix. So the trend we found here then was that campaigns with multiple data points on their evergreen can work really well for consistent results. So this is a campaign then that does just that it does what it says on the tin. It was for a travel tech client and it reveals the world's best cities to stay connected. So you can see we took a multitude of data points. We looked at free Wi-Fi hotspots per square kilometer. We then combined that with airports with free Wi-Fi and the cost of downloads and stuff like that. And we were able to produce this unique data set that could provide us with a ranking to be able to go out to more than one sector of the press. We could go to Paris and Parisian press and say, hey, you guys took the crown for the world's best city to stay connected. We could go to business press and say that, you know, if you're in, you know, you're working and traveling as a business traveler, these are the best airport cities to stay connected. And again, it allowed us to take all of these different angles and generate really solid consistent results. So that's just the steady performer. I think that campaign alone got, you know, 25 links again, nothing viral about that. But looking at those steady performers in that middle category of the matrix, it helped us get a 95% increase in organic traffic for this client and a 63% increase in organic revenue. Again, the perfect mix of digital pair link building, technical SEOs producing solid consistent results that are impacting this brand's bottom line. So when it comes to the content success matrix, then you should be reviewing your work every quarter to find these trends and implement them. I've given you a template here. I'll be sharing my deck and no doubt Moswell as well, that you can download. You can mess around with it. You can put all of your campaigns against every quarter and start to draw out these trends and insights so that you can take it forward into your future link building strategies. So in summary, I just want to circle everything background and say that today in sharing the full picture with you guys, digital PR can be really hard. And we focus so much on the winds, but we're doing so much more. You are going to experience a campaign fail, maybe two, maybe three. It's going to happen. It's in the nature of what we do. It's important to keep consistency and quality in mind over virality again, going back to that point. Huge campaigns that fly are great, but you need those links to be high quality. They need to be relevant. And in my opinion, I would rather have 20 solid high quality relevant links than a hundred that aren't going to shift the needle when it comes to traffic and rankings. We are the consistent guys here. So step one in doing all of that really is taking the viral pressure off yourself and start talking more about those steady performers and sharing those styles so that you can learn. Step two is to realise that those steady performers can consistently impact weighty SEO KPIs like traffic, rankings and ultimately revenue. And finally, step three then is to use that success matrix to review campaigns, patch those trends early, jump on the recipes for success with those wins. Look at those steady performers to see what the steady B is for consistency and learn from those fails. Today I really hope I've showed you the full picture. Thank you.