 Our next speaker, Shannon, is the Client Services and Delivery Director at HERA, where she oversees all elements of delivery for the broad range of clients. She's super passionate and a genius at one of the artist's parts of SEO PR campaigns. So far in her career, she's helped create campaigns for brands such as IRS components, travel supermarkets, and pretty little thing. Today, she's going to talk about something very topical, how her company era navigated the COVID news agenda and what their lessons may mean for the future of digital PR. And if we're lucky, we may get to see an appearance from our super cute dog, Hudson, who'll see you soon. On the 19th of March, 2020, the first U.S. State stay at home order was issued in California. Then just a mere few days later, Boris Johnson took to our TV screens in the UK and the words, you must all now stay at home, rang across the nation. That meant that our lives as we knew them, they'd changed. They'd flipped in a hairpin and that forced our industry as we knew it to change. Things were different, they were never going to be what they once were. That forced the roles that we were in, in house, at agencies, consulting as experts in all things digital marketing and link building, they had changed too. Now, for our industry, it really felt like a tale of two halves was emerging and some agencies had seen a 95% increase in growth in their revenue. They had more clients on boarding than ever. They couldn't recruit quick enough and things were booming. On the other side of that coin, we had some agencies reporting a 95% loss in their clients and that may have been because they were working in specific industries and things were falling apart as they were trying to hold them together. Eris sits bang in the middle of that. We had the highs, we had the lows, we saw the changes and the churn with clients. We also on boarded new team members as well. Now, Eris story, two weeks into that and that very first lockdown, we lost more than 50% of our revenue and that's because we worked with a lot of travel brands and we were trying our best to help them get through this challenging time the best way we knew how. We wanted their businesses to come out the other side of this. In April, things looked like there were glimmers of hope and we won a huge project with a household brand that we are still working with today. A couple of months ahead of that, our largest client who paused back in March turned their activity back on. They were back operating at full steam and they saw the need and the opportunity to pick up activity again. Then six months from that announcement in the 23rd of March, our full team were back from furlough and this is a moment that I will never forget in my career. Being able to announce that everybody was back and that we were going to be one unit and one force to be reckoned with again, that was priceless. In November, as a business, as an agency, we had one of our highest revenue generating months ever. It was the third best in Eris entire kind of five, six years of kind of existence and we really, really thought we've closed the door on all things 2020 and we are looking forward, ending the year on a high and moving forward into 2021 with a back. But despite all of these wins overall, we were still down. Our agency world as we knew it, it wasn't working as it once had pre-COVID and this really challenging ongoing polarisation, it caused a state of survival mode, not just to trigger within me but within the leadership team and no doubt our team members too. This forced me to grow up and I grew up hard and fast across a period of 12 months. This is my personal journey so pre-pandemic in my head of PR and content role, you can see here the trajectory was fast and was going up in the right direction. We had onboarded some of the biggest names out there that we could potentially work with, some real top tier golden clients and we had some of the best minds in our industry working for us. Then like any roller coaster, things dipped and that is when that pandemic hit and it hit us hard and fast. Just trying to do my day job was a challenge, I was trying to get results with the team and we were working as well as we could in order to deliver, in order to perform and make sure that our clients were getting an ROI. The jumble squiggle there that you can see, well actually this was a real period of mixed emotion, mixed experiences, the highs as I said were getting the team back from furlough and in the same time as that, we had some really difficult business decisions and conversations to have. I battled imposter syndrome almost daily, are we doing the right thing? Am I in the right role? Could we be doing more? Should I even be here? Turns out my bosses thought I should and by the end of the year in 2020, I personally was ending on a bit of a high two and transitioned into this director role. Now defining my two roles at the start of 2020 in this head of PR role, my goal, my view, my vision was to adapt and find new ways to innovate in order to generate these all important links, drive coverage for our clients and impact real SEO results, trying to increase traffic and rankings. Then on the other side of this in this director role, my only goal here really was to get the company through this really challenging situation in one piece. So that's my personal story, that's how I experienced these in the last 12 months, but we can't deny as I've said this pandemic and everything that we've experienced, it also affected our industry as a whole. So the problem, surviving this COVID news agenda. This time last year, I was on the Moscon virtual stage and I walked you through the truth about digital PR campaigns. We spoke about successes and failures as such. We spoke about the highs and the lows, the challenges that you can have. And if only I knew in that moment whilst I was presenting to you guys that I was actually going through one of the biggest and largest challenges with the team that we would ever face, I probably would have laughed. I didn't know it, I couldn't see it. Now that challenge was that we have never ever seen a news agenda like this before. And this is it. This is it in visual form. And in the centre of that news cycle once COVID broke, we see all of these really, really important life changing stories coming out. We had everything from panic buying, people couldn't buy loo roll, right through to anti-vax campaigns, BLM, one of the biggest moments in again our lifetime changing culture, outlook, views, behaviours of people. Then we've got the Trump impeachment going through to the elections as well. In the US, Brexit, capital raids, you name it, these stories were huge. They will go down in history. But as an agency and as a team, whilst all of this was going on in the news agenda, we still had to get our clients into this so that we could drive coverage and links to increase search visibility. We did that using two different tactics. We have the evergreen campaigns that I'll walk you through and then the reactive side of things again, that I'll explain a little later. The challenge here was that the space for our clients to play in was getting smaller and smaller and smaller because these huge news stories, they were dominating. That meant that in eight weeks from Boris Johnson's announcement and this stay at home order coming in, furlough being introduced and everything like that, 75% of our campaigns were either paused, pivoted or stopped entirely. So what that looked like for a travel client of ours then, this is an actual email that was sent out and it says, we spotted that this morning the Maldives now has confirmed COVID cases with some tourists in isolation. Now our inspirational travel campaign was inspiring people to book holidays to the Maldives. It came in a top 10 ranking that we had come up with. There is no way that we could launch this campaign in this moment and try and encourage people to jump on planes, go across the world and expose themselves to this virus. Then another industry, a DIY client of ours, we were launching a campaign around mates rates and discounts that you give when you're in the building trade and when furlough kind of came in and Boris Johnson said, you cannot go out to work tomorrow and that industry paused. There was no way that we could go out and again be talking about discounts when people were ultimately losing their jobs and livelihoods. So we had to pause there too. And then the internal side of things, the things that our clients and stakeholders don't necessarily see in the outside world. We have one of our team leads here, Ruth saying we need to hold off on outreach this afternoon because of the announcement around the sad news and the Duke of Edinburgh passing away. So it's fair to say at points and at numerous points actually across the last 12 to 18 months, myself, my team, we felt like headless trick-ins trying to muddle through, trying to get our clients into that really, really small space in the news agenda. Now on top of those challenges, that 25% of campaigns that we were able to pitch in and that we could do something with, we could go out there on behalf of our clients and speak to the media. Well, actually journalists were coming back to us and saying that they were being kept on file. And again, a real life journalist response. This isn't of interest at the moment, I'm afraid, but I've got it on file in case anything changes. Now, we're pretty confident that had we pitched this campaign pre-COVID, it would have got coverage. It would have got links. It's because of that all-encompassing dominating news agenda that we believe it was parked and popped on file. Now it's fair to say that the summary of that and kind of where we are is that large evergreen campaigns, they weren't getting the cut through that they once were pre-COVID. And this was a real eye-opening journey and experience for us because we had spent five years putting processes and frameworks in place that made our approach to digital PR sustainable. It made our content work harder. We were trying to deliver the best ROR we could by not having these kind of one hit wonder campaigns. I even told you and shared some of these processes with you. This is my 2019 MozCon presentation. I took you through tactics and tips on how to supercharge link-building efforts with a digital PR newsroom. Some of the processes that I went to on that day or that I went through sorry on that day were around introducing and kind of linking your campaigns to a content calendar, looking ahead, seeing how you can make these days work to your advantage or should you not be launching your campaigns on these days because the news agenda is going to be so busy. 12th of July right here right now, it's national simplicity day and once we may have done something about this, we may have a campaign that hooked into it, but during COVID and this crazy busy news agenda, it's fair to say I don't think that many people care about this no matter how important it once was. So that meant that some of these processes as I said this content calendar in particular, it was redundant. We were having to work in a completely different way. And again, another process that I explained was about forward planning, looking three, four months ahead, getting your evergreen campaigns lined up so that you could execute them with efficiency, launch, drive those traffic, drive those pieces of coverage, including links, which will obviously impact traffic as well. But the challenge with this when you're planning so far ahead with the COVID news agenda being so busy is that actually long-term planning, it becomes impossible because it is so unpredictable and you're having to live and breathe these campaigns in the moment, not necessarily looking so far ahead anymore. Now the news agenda, as I said, it was changing so so fast that long-term and forward planning a process and an activity and an implementation of strategy that was core to what we were doing to deliver, it became practically impossible. Now as PRs, link builders, outreaches, we are used to the news agenda dictating our every move, telling us what to do, giving us hints on what we can kind of pitch in and stuff like that. But because of how busy things were, this was 100 times worse. And because of that, we were forced to move to a more reactive mindset, living and breathing in the here and now. This is an example of one of our content strategists, Lauren. We were working with a sparkline of ours, looking at things like glamping and spa breaks, stacations, that kind of thing because we can't travel. And we're having to keep one eye all the time on what's being played on the TV, what the news agenda is coming out with. And we can see here, this celebrity, Johnny Vegas, he's actually produced a television program on glamping. And that means because he's famous and he's got his name to it, that's probably going to be in the news agenda when it gets launched. And therefore, we can use that as a hook to get our client in it as well. Now, this short, sharp, snappy tactic, it worked, but there was also something much, much bigger at play. And that was the fact that journalism, as our industry was suffering, was and still is suffering. It's still having a really difficult challenge in time. And within the first eight weeks of furlough and kind of lockdown kicking in, 44% of journalists that we were going to be outreaching to, they were on furlough as well. So that space to play in, it gets even smaller. The news agenda is hectic, it's crammed, it's busy, and the people that we're speaking to, that pool is significantly reduced. Now, as we know, August, it's traditionally a really, really quiet month for digital PR campaigns and outreach. Often a lot of people are on there some holidays, there's back holidays and stuff like that in the UK. And so we can forward plan for that, we can build around that. But the last August, it was the quietest we have ever experienced, which brought forward a whole realm of different challenges once again. And for one campaign launch at the start of the month, we received 250 out-of-offices from 400 journalists emailed. That is insane. That's a huge, huge number. We've never seen anything like this before. And as I mentioned, that just goes to show that that outreach pool, those contacts that we're speaking to, it's also getting smaller and smaller because the industry is facing some big, big challenges. Now, that combined with the fast-paced nature of having to change tactics to drive links and coverage on a team that's reduced. Remember, it's only August and we're not quite back as a full team yet from furlough. It put an immense amount of pressure on us to perform. And this is, of course, the email that no client services director wants at any point. Now, this is a client, a really nice client. We've worked with him for years and he comes back to myself and our account manager, Charlotte, and he says, thanks for expressing your awareness of the current situation. It's actually really quite timely because we were only looking at your team's performance yesterday morning. He's clearly unhappy about where our results are. Now, the only saving grace is that we got there first. We identified the problem and we presented him with some solutions. So, it's fair to say that, yes, performance on some of our accounts, it was affected by what we were all going through. And as a unit, as a team, we had to dig a lot deeper than we already were. But I just want to remind you at this point that we are living in a global pandemic. We are still living and experiencing this. We didn't just have these challenges at work. We also had them in our personal lives. We couldn't see friends and family. So, there is a whole lot of stuff going on here, not just affecting our industry. And the performance side of things, we know the error wasn't the only agency to have challenges during this time. But we may be one of the only ones to speak openly about it. Now, this pressure that I've spoken so much about and this pressure to perform, it actually starts to, you know, you start to put industry standards at risk and we start to slip up and things that, you know, campaigns that would have gone out of the door watertight and without any kind of indiscrepancies or inconsistencies, we start to see things like small typos creeping on in because we have this pressure to get them launched and out in that really small window in order to get links and coverage. Now, performance pressures plus a really hectic news agenda, that's the perfect storm for an imperfect campaign, as I've said. And you do start to see quality and standards starting to dip. Now, performance pressures and the hectic news agenda once again, that can also force us as PRs and link builders to spend much bigger stories because we have to get that cut through. We have to ensure that our clients are getting into this really small space. So these campaigns here, creative genius or fake news. And in the top right here, you can see one of Aira's very own. We came up with the idea to launch on behalf of one of our clients, the ultimate work from home desk. It meant that you were still getting your daily dose of vitamin C with that light. It kept you cool. It meant that your posture wasn't kind of, you know, impacted as you were spending all of these hours working from home in an environment that your body wasn't necessarily used to. And we launched it. It did really well. It got coverage and links and top tier press. The middle campaign here you can see from another agency starts to consider and challenge the way that people's hands might evolve because we are all gaming more during lockdown. We've all got more time on our hands. And then the last one here, this ring, we also know that, you know, the ongoing story and kind of pun and play around Harry bow rings. This agency created the ultimate Harry bow ring, but it was for real this time. And you saw the gems there, you know, they were real. And again, you could inquire about this on the brand site. So it's fair to say we've responded to a difficult situation with bigger, bigger PR spins and stories and bolder ideas because we had to. We had to make sure that our clients were getting in that small and very, very busy news agenda. We also start to lean on formats that we know work really well. And this one here in particular reveals, you know, it's the dream jobs format that you would have seen no doubt. It shows that you can get paid money in order to go to the pub and eat steak with your pals. What a dream. And on top of that, we see lots of brands starting to come out with this story. It's been around for a little while. And we only see the successful ones, the ones that, you know, go viral, but I'm sure there are some out there that weren't as successful. But the core point here is that we respond to this difficult situation with tried intensive formats because we go back to what we know in order to get links whilst the pressure is on. Now I get it. I've lived and breathed it with the team and there is a awful lot of stuff going on. We have more news, huge, huge dominating stories as I walk you through. And that means that that space to play in for our clients is much smaller because it is such a dominating space at the moment. That forces planning issues. We can't look ahead. We can't use these processes that we've once relied on to drive links and coverage. We have to pivot. We have to embrace this more reactive style. The very real thing is that businesses, industries, they're still under threat. That's a huge, huge challenge here. And of course that feeds into this fourth point here around there actually being less journalists. Some were made redundant. Some were on the furlough scheme. And that meant that we had less experts, less journalists to speak to in order to try and get our clients in the news. The challenge with that is that we can start to risk quality and relevance in favour of launching quickly because of this huge mounting part of challenges that we are presented with and that we are living through. And yes, it works for now. There's tried and tested formats. There's bigger and bolder ideas. But we can't forget quality and relevance because actually that means that we're starting to be in danger of producing the same irrelevant stories, irrelevancy in terms of the link to our brand over and over again to get links. And we need to be innovating. We need to be keeping these core things in mind. Now, do we really think that Google wants us to be producing irrelevant stories? Actually, they want us to be looking at quality and relevance. And that's what they want to reward longer term. So this approach, it isn't sustainable and it never has been. It's going to present us with bigger and larger challenges further down the line. So the solution then and explaining what got us here, well, it won't get us there. Now, it's fair to say that Error has learned some really hard lessons whilst in survival mode. I've personally learned them and I know no doubt you guys probably have gone through some similar experiences as well. So these lessons, they span three pillars and I want to walk you through them today. So we've got ideation, production and of course promotion. And these are central to any campaign. I want to share three tactics to help future proof your digital PR work, try and increase relevancy and quality of output at the same time. These are going to help you survive this ever changing, dominating news agenda that we are still seeing and experiencing almost 18 months on from the very first announcements back in March last year. The idea is that they will also help you increase the quality and relevance of your output. So they're starting to move and encourage us to do things that Google wants to see and that Google will reward us for. So let's start by looking at ideation and this ROR framework. Now this is no surprise. Every successful campaign idea campaign starts with a brilliant and original unique different idea. So how do you know you've got a good idea? And we could talk about this for hours, no doubt. But when you're working under pressure and kind of you have this melting pot of challenges that you're trying to navigate through daily, I believe that there are three important things that you need to validate your idea against whilst working under this pressure to make sure that it's a success and so that you have the confidence it can deliver the impact that it needs to. Now these three things, we have relevancy, opinion and resolution. ROR. We need to start to think of this as a bit of a natural selection Darwin-esque way of validating our ideas. So let's start with relevancy and actually we need to ask ourselves a cold hard question. Should our brand that we are either working within in-house or working for in agencies, should they be talking about this topic and or theme? Now let's define topics and themes. So for topic it's three to five subjects that are defined at the kickoff point for any project and they directly tie into that product offering and they act as really really solid structure and guide rails for it as well. Now themes, they're a layer deeper within this and they often mean that your brand can have a solid opinion or voice and you can start to consider making them famous on them as well. So let's ask that question again. Should your brand be talking about the things that they have been historically? Should they? So once you're confident that they should and you have your topics and your themes there, let's head over to Reddit and BuzzSumo. Now I want to start with Reddit because we here you can see when we type in women in STEM and we start to look at that within the field of engineering, here in this screenshot we can start to see the trials, the challenges, the tribulations that women within this are experiencing and this shows you what people, that audience they care about. Then go over to BuzzSumo and again type in women in STEM and you can start to see some topics and emerging and some themes coming through. So we can link it into COVID speaker series, universities, you name it, it's there. Harvest this information and you have your topic identified as women in STEM and you can also start to see your themes emerging as well. Universities challenge the impact on COVID and of course scholarships. So my tip here is that you need to be establishing these topics and themes and then overlay them on Reddit and BuzzSumo to make sure you're producing very relevant ideas for your brand. Let's look at opinion. So this has to be your brand's opinion and what can they have a clear, unique, different, distinctive voice on? This should also be really relevant to the theme and the topic that you've already identified. Things that you might start to consider at this point, food for thought for you is time. How long has this challenge been going on? How can they talk about that? What should the future look like? Finance, what's the financial implication of, you know, the topic or the theme? Solution. Can they start to offer real life, tangible solutions to getting over hurdles, to make the industry better, to start to innovate against it? This opinion needs to go in any press material and you need to be ready to offer unique comments as well from a key stakeholder within the business. So my tip here, whether your brand or confirm whether your brand has a clear voice or opinion on an idea before creating it, you need to make sure that there is an element of confidence that can come across that then increases the relevancy too. And finally, resolution. So let's be honest, we are not going to solve real world issues with digital PR campaigns alone, as much as we might want to try. But that doesn't mean that your campaign shouldn't offer your brand's audience an answer to a query or in fact a resolution. This directly again ties back to relevance and being able to overlay that opinion that we've already spoken about on that topic and or theme. So real life audience query, how much would it actually cost in the UK to rent a royal residency? We then took this kind of, you know, back into the drawing board, had brainstorms around it and two assets were created for a client of ours that reveals the size and monthly rental cost of each royal property. And here we can see whereabouts the royal properties are located in and around the UK. The result of bringing all of this together was some great links and coverage. And, you know, this didn't go viral. The campaign is sitting between color 10 and 20 links. But all of these links and coverage that was secure, they're on high quality, high trust, authoritative, relevant sites to the brand. You can see here in the middle one there is in the real estate section. That is exactly where that brand should be sitting. And of course, your own lifestyle there as well. So my tip here, you need to be curious about the challenges that the audience faces. Be bold and be fearless, go and explore them, go and research them and start to think about how you can answer the questions that they have. Number two then, let's look at the pillar of production and start to explore format libraries. So we're big on sustainable digital PR, but it's as much about day to day detail as it is an overall approach as well. And given this really hectic, crazy news agenda, it makes complete sense and logic to spend more time on projects at the moment in the outreach and promotion stage than it may within the development and production stage. Now I have to stress production is still super, super important. If you are, you know, coming up with the design, it is important that it looks great. It's on brand and stuff like that. But do you really need to add interactivity parallax and stuff like that for it to go out and get results? It's actually all in the story. And our data tells us what formats work really well for digital PR as well. We can see here interactive, this was a study that we took a couple of years ago now, but we can see here the interactive come up on top trumps and they are on average secure somewhere in the region of 20 to 25 links followed by statics and gifts. So we can start to use these insights to create format libraries. And we've got three key formats here that we use quite often for our digital PR and link building campaigns. We've got the tile index there, stacked bar chart and of course the world map. And what we're able to do here is that because the code for interactivity is already written and the basic design is there, our designers and developers can lift these. They can polish them. They can make them bespoke. But a lot of the efficiencies are made because we have the templates and wire frames. As I said, they're tailored bespoke to each client. We put their brand in there and their needs, but it acts as a really solid foundation for efficiencies. It streamlines that process without compromising on quality and gives us more time to outreach so everybody wins. Action for you guys then when you go back to the office, research those popular formats for your brand and start to establish and think about creating these content libraries in order to drive efficiencies. Final pillar then promotion and starting to manage these unforeseen circumstances. Today, I am not going to walk you through outreach 101. There are plenty of brilliant talks out there from other agency kind of leaders and stuff like that. Instead, I want to walk you through what to do when the worst happens and you wake up in the morning and news story has broken and you shouldn't launch that campaign. We've experienced as I've explained, we've experienced this on a number of occasions, probably more than 10 times if I'm completely honest in the last 12 months, thanks to this incredibly busy news agenda, but that's okay because each time this has happened, our plan has become more and more robust and now we know how to get through this and that covers these three points here. We need to assess the situation, communicate well and then get a bit of perspective. So again, let's start with assess. So firstly, we need to review all social media outlets because news outlets kind of feed in and get their news from what's trending and stuff like that and start to put our thinking caps on our forward all seeing eye and make a call on how big we believe this story is going to be. And is it going to grow throughout the day? If it's trending, as I said, it's almost certainly going to be picked up by the press and covered in top 10 news sites. That's how we found out going back to the start of this presentation and that email that I had to send or the team had to send around the campaign in the Maldives. That's how we found out that holiday makers were asked to avoid going to the Maldives and we were able to act and react very, very quickly. Now, one person needs to be able to take charge and comfortable making this decision. It's a biggie. You know that you're going to potentially upset the client. You know that your team are going to be slightly disappointed. And you can see that's exactly what happened in that Maldives situation here on Slack internally. Jasmine spots it, she comes back and said, this is the government's stance on the Maldives. And I say, our hands are tied. This is the right thing to do to cause this launch. She goes back and says, no problem. I'll draft an email to James now. Secondly, we have communication. So you need to always be back to the client and stakeholder efficiently. You need to be really, really clear of this risk. You have to explain to them what happens if they do launch. And this is an email where you can see that kind of happening. We said we shouldn't be inspiring people to go to the Maldives at this time. You have to take the reins. You are ultimately the expert. They need to trust you. And then when you communicate it back to them, you'll likely receive an email like this. Hi, Jasmine. We completely agree. Let's put it on pause and follow your proposed next steps, which is to re-plan, make sure that everything is correct so that we can launch at a better time. And finally, making sure you have that perspective. You, your team, your clients, your stakeholders, your bosses, you're going to be frustrated. You have likely been working for weeks and months to get this launch and start to see this campaign do, you know, work its hardest and get these results in for clients. It's normal to feel disappointed and frustrated at this point. Be vulnerable. Ask those important questions. Say to your client, look, how has this gone down internally? What can I do to help you manage stakeholder expectations? Say to your team, I know this is rubbish. I wish we were able to launch, but it's just not right. And then start to channel this time to be productive with your relaunch planning. Go back into the press release. Start to change dates. Start to look ahead and have a positive productive time, instead of worrying about the fact that you've not been able to launch on that day. Now, I have to, you know, this is no secret, have to be honest with you, with the news agenda so competitive and full, this is likely to happen to you at some point when you're launching a campaign, especially at the moment. To my action and tip, take a breath in that moment, assess, communicate and have some perspective. So in summary, circling right back around, these frameworks have been born out of areas, out of mine, out of my team's lessons from being in survival mode when that triggered within. The goal of sharing them with you today is to, one, be more authentic with your campaign work. Two, do what's right for the brand. And three, place a larger focus on quality and relevance, because this is exactly what Google wants to see and hear us doing. You will have better digital PR outputs that are going to drive real business growth, not just focusing on kind of links there. You will start to look at traffic, rankings, revenue, business growth increases. This is what being in survival mode has taught us. Thank you.