S1 E6 Sophie Coley & Digital PR Strategy

Stephen Baker:
Hello and welcome to the Digital PR Podcast. A podcast that will cover the big talking points of the digital PR industry. My name is Steve Baker and this is Louise Parker. Hello. We both work at digital marketing agency Propellernet and we’ve both been working in digital PR for a long time. Nearly a decade for you, Lou, right? Yep, that’s right. and over a decade for me now. In the last few years, we’ve seen the digital PR industry explode and with that has come a lot of interesting conversations about how the discipline works and where it’s going. From creativity to relevance to burnout, this podcast will cover the subjects that everyone is talking about with the help of some very special guests.

Louise Parker:
In this episode, we are joined with a guest in the studio, which is very exciting, and it’s someone that myself and Steve know very well. Sophie Coley is the Director of Strategy at Propellernet, working over the years on clients such as Waitrose, Pure Gym, and Cooney. A fun fact about Sophie is that she started her career at Propellernet as a PR intern 13 years ago, but today is in charge of making sure that our work not only gets links, but also speaks to the right audience, and crucially, delivers the right results. Hi Sophie, welcome to the podcast.

Sophie Coley:
Hi, nice to be here.

Stephen Baker:
Thanks for joining us, Soph. Obviously we know you quite well, having worked together for quite some time now, but our guests might not. So tell us, let’s start, tell us a little bit about yourself. What’s your background? What do you do?

Sophie Coley:
Who am I?

Stephen Baker:
Who the hell are you?

Sophie Coley:
Well, as Lou said, yeah, 13 years I’ve been at Propellernet, which I think makes me like the second oldest timer there, which is weird. I still feel like I started yesterday. So I originally trained in journalism down in Bournemouth, which I loved. It was multimedia journalism. Really enjoyed it. I think I’d always thought I’d go into something like journalism. And then I always tell people this, my lecturers at uni spent half the course telling us that if we wanted a career that we could earn half decent money and not have to work ridiculous hours, then we should try PR because we would be well equipped with the journalism skills that we had. And I came out of uni obviously sort of straight into that either trying to get a job or intern, came back home to just near Brighton and there was a really great intern scheme at the time where they paid me, I mean it was a pittance but it was payment which is what you need when you come out of uni and they also paid the business to have you as an intern and it was kind of a bright and wide scheme and I got into Propellernet that way and been here ever since but in a variety of roles so I think I did maybe three years in the PR team. I would say that the PR work we were doing back then was very, very different to the work that we do now, which is good news for you guys. I used to cringe quite a lot. It was a lot of like advertorials, trying to place articles. I felt I didn’t feel comfortable with the work that I was trying to sell into journalists having had that journalism background, I suppose. And so I worked within Propellernet to kind of create a new role, which I think we called like a creative strategist or something at the time. And my focus was on being a lot more creative with our ideas. And I did that for a bit. And then some years later, we got a director of a creative director from London, big sort shiny London agency and that made me realize actually that it wasn’t so much just the just sort of pure creativity of things that we were going out with it was more the why like does this work why are we doing it who are we talking to that kind of thing which didn’t know at the time but it’s sort of a more strategic role and so then I moved into strategy and I think I’ve been in the strategy team maybe six or seven years now so a not very potted history of my time at Propellernet but I like to think that sort of moving between various teams overcoming different problems and challenges and figuring out what it is that I do best has kind of got me to where I am in strategy now.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, that’s a really useful part of history. Some things I’d forgotten. I mean, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. We’ve worked together 11 years.

Sophie Coley:
Why have they been the best 11 years of your life? That’s a good question.

Stephen Baker:
You don’t have to answer that, but we can spend 20 minutes on it if you want. The highlights, the lowlights, the moments.

Sophie Coley:
I think the best thing working with you sometimes is that when I go to the footwork right and I can say to people, I know this guy.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, there you go.

Louise Parker:
A fun fact about Steve is that he’s also the commentator at Brighton and Hove Albion. There you go. I got your plug in. Thanks.

Stephen Baker:
I’ve been fishing for that on every episode but it’s finally happened and I knew you’d be the key to unlock that.

Louise Parker:
So you mentioned how you started in the PR team. This is a podcast all about digital PR. You do strategy. The question that’s coming up is what to you is a PR strategy? How would you define it?

Sophie Coley:
Well, I think probably to answer that question you start with what is a strategy full stop and then maybe it’s like how do you apply it to digital PR and I would say this as a strategist, I think, am I allowed to use rude words in this podcast? Absolutely, you are. I think strategy as a thing can be incredibly like wanky sometimes. It feels a bit superior. I’m a strategist. I was once told that having strategy in my job title was really important because it would mean clients would take me more seriously. You do all the thinky stuff as a strategist, right? And I guess that kind of is it. It’s being that person that can like really think things through. Why are we doing this? What are we actually looking to achieve? Yeah. And that, for me, is the crux of a strategy. So in a digital PR context, I think probably exactly those questions. What are we trying to do? Why are we trying to do it? And who do we need to speak to to achieve those goals? I think in the digital PR world, your digital PR strategy needs to sit very, very closely, sort of hand in hand with the broader SEO strategy that you might have on an account. And I think that’s an interesting observation sometimes of the industry. It’s very hard sometimes to look at other people’s work and go, oh, that’s their strategy, right? Because it’s never a document that someone puts out there, a message, a campaign you see very clearly and you go, oh, I like that or I don’t like that. You don’t ever quite see the bones of a strategy. So it’s sort of trying to have that x-ray vision, I suppose. But yeah, it should sit closely, unless you are solely doing digital PR work for someone, and then your goals might be around just literally achieving links, for example. But I think the best digital PR strategy is to sit really, really closely with a broader SEO strategy so that you are all working together and the digital PR is part of trying to drive real SEO growth.

Louise Parker:
If, for the benefit of the listeners, could you describe what would be in an SEO strategy and then what would be in your strategy so people can know the kind of difference and how they complement each other?

Sophie Coley:
Yes. So I think one of the things that you absolutely need to have in an SEO strategy is like, like I say, what are you trying to do? I think sometimes you can take on a client and like, completely depends on the client. Some clients will have brilliant briefs and some need a lot more help in getting to like what is it that they’re trying to do. One of the main key like strategic pieces of work that we would do upfront with any client is that kind of keyword research and opportunity analysis. And the opportunity analysis is crucial in helping us focus where we’re focusing, right? You have a client that sells fashion. You have a fixed amount of resource. You could just say, we’re gonna get you ranking for more stuff. but you’ll probably have better success and be able to measure that success a little bit better and prove it and to be more focused if you say, do you know what? We can see a real opportunity for you in skirts because there’s huge volume. You don’t have that visibility yet. Competitively, you’re up there. You’ve got real authority to talk about this thing. So the first thing in an SEO strategy would absolutely be that focus. I think to take on an account and just be like, yeah, we’ll make you more visible is very unstrategic, for example. So focus on what you’re doing and how you’re going to do it. a bit of diagnostics work around, you know, is it that the site is really, really poor from a technical point of view, and therefore, as an agency, we need to focus a lot of our resource on that kind of technical improvement side of things? Or is it that they have no links? And that’s obviously where digital PR comes in. So you’d need that kind of groundwork before, what are we focusing on? What are the real problems? Or what activity is going to deliver the best results for this client? And then you bring in your digital PR. Which obviously, I guess, given what I’ve just said, is all about building the links. And I think we’ll probably come on to this. But for me, it’s super, super crucial that your digital PR activity is not just link building. And that’s not to say people do link building, right? You can go off and do link building. It’s semantics and it’s ridiculous. But for me, if you’re calling it digital PR, it needs to be a bit more than link building.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, we’d completely agree and I know we’ve kind of discussed this like internally quite a lot and I think we’ve started to touch on it a little bit here but one of the things that we’ve discussed a lot over the years and you actually explained to me several times before it properly landed because I thought before I joined Propellernet I knew exactly what a strategy was and I didn’t. What is the difference between a strategy and tactics and how often do you see it kind of mistaken in the industry? I see it quite a lot and I’m sure you do but yeah.

Sophie Coley:
I do and it annoys me and then I annoy myself because again I’m like we’re not doing like life-saving surgery it doesn’t really matter if your work’s effective it’s effective but all of that said Yeah, I think there is confusion between strategy and tactics. I would say a strategy, and I know I’ve just sort of touched on what’s an SEO strategy, what’s a digital PR strategy, at its core, a strategy should be a statement, a diagram, whatever the format is, that I could give to a team and they can look at and they can plan out their work and say, yep, we should do this, no, we shouldn’t do this. When we do our strategy and induction for new starters at Propellernet, Jim, who’s the other director of strategy, and I have a slightly cringe slide that is like the yellow brick road. And we kind of made that point, right? That almost is what your strategy should be. It should be a really nice pathway that helps you go, okay, yeah, we can do this. We can’t do that. And again, it goes back to like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And I guess the tactics then become the, how are we going to do that? And that’s where the confusion is for me. So I think in the digital PR world, you might have tactics like being reactive or newsjacking, whatever you want to call it. You might have tactics like campaigns. You might do some influencer work as another tactic. To me, all of those different executions almost are tactics. And you might build a strategy that focuses solely on a tactic. So you might say our strategy is to, I don’t know, be the best in the market, focusing on those like reactive opportunities around topics XYZ or stuff that matters to our audience. And that’s what we’re going to do. But I think if you just go, oh, newsjacking is our strategy. I’m like, is it? Because if I gave that to a team and said, here, your strategy is newsjacking, I don’t see how that gives them the clarity to go about planning work, to say yes or no. I mean, it obviously does to the extent that if they’re not doing newsjacking, they’re not following the strategy, but it doesn’t give any further guidance, right? So you could be newsjacking, I mean, really hope you wouldn’t, but the Queen’s death, or the fact that Neighbours ended. you go really, really broad with it and it becomes a bit confusing and I don’t think there’s that clarity and again, that kind of focused impact around something. So you’re trying to own everything. Where your strategy might be to do newsjacking around X, Y and Z, it’s just making it more focused than just saying like, this is the thing we’re going to do. Like, this is the thing we’re going to do. These are the areas we’re going to focus on. This is why this is what we’re trying to do with it.

Stephen Baker:
It’s that why thing, isn’t it? So it’s like if you’re just doing newsjacking, it’s like, well, okay, it might be effective, but like, why are we doing it? But if you say we’re doing newsjacking in these areas, because if we do it at greater speed, we’re going to have more success against our competitors building. So you understand the why. And you’ve got something. I didn’t know you did the yellow brick road slide, but you’ve got the kind of the road ahead of you rather than just like one step. We’re just doing newsjacking. We don’t really know why we’re doing it.

Sophie Coley:
Yeah. And I think that’s Probably one of my favourite things about working in a more strategic role is it’s almost being able to give other people tools to go off and do their work so that it has more impact. I would hope that if I do strategy well that I make other people’s lives easier because they’re focused, they don’t have to spend time delivering campaigns that aren’t going to have that impact because Yeah, I’m very aware. It’s funny having been in a role for many years of my career that was very much hands on doing the doing. As a strategist, certainly in our agency, you step away from the doing. It’s a lot of the planning up front and then you hand stuff over, which is a different change. But I appreciate that as someone who does the doing, quite often you’re just so heads down in trying to deliver results. You don’t always have that space to step back and think like, am I doing the right thing? And particularly, I guess, in digital PR, the number one metric is always going to be links. And I get that. But again, sometimes it’s like, OK, but are we just going after all the links in the world just because? Or could we be more efficient with our time? So yeah, I would hope that a good strategy and a good strategist would always be helping other people around them and making their lives easier and giving them those tools.

Louise Parker:
When you get told you’ve got a new client, when the agency gets a new client, where do you begin when you’re pulling together and devising your strategy?

Sophie Coley:
That’s a good question. Probably a big question. It is a big question and I think there’s a really interesting thing that comes before that almost, which is strategy around pitching. I think the pitches that we have like really smashed as an agency are the ones, and it is the feedback we get, are the ones that we are, we do display our kind of strategic chops a little bit more. It’s something that I think we’re quite proud of as an agency that we do have a dedicated strategy team. And as I say, it’s feedback that we’ve got sometimes in pitches is that we are able to kind of maybe just show our thinking at a slightly different level. So yes, you get a new client and you need to start with strategy, but sometimes you would have started beforehand because we’ll have gone that extra mile to kind of try and show some strategic thinking in the pitch. The caveat with that is that obviously going into a pitch, you quite often go into it blind, if not slightly blinkered, because you don’t have, it’s not that kind of collaborative working relationship with the client. So you might have some initial thinking from the pitch, but ideally, I guess you start off, you need to have a conversation with the client. You need to know what it is that they’re looking to do. I mean, that’s the key thing. And even that, I would say, it massively varies in terms of certainly the clients that we work with. Sometimes you’ll get clients that come to us and just say, we just want more SEO, more SEO traffic, whatever it is. We just want to do better. You get some clients who have a really, really clear idea of what it is specifically that they want to rank better for. So yeah, it will depend on the client and the brief that you get from them. I guess it’s rarely as defined as like, here is a brief. It’s something that you have to pull out of conversations with them. The first piece of work that we would always do then is the keyword research. And I think even when we take on clients who have worked with another agency previously, it’s always a good idea to refresh it, see if you can expand it at all. I think, again, we’re trying to get a bit more thorough and strategic with our keyword research at Propellernet in terms of how we approach that. I, more recently, I keep leaning back on something that, again, I learned at university with just journalism training. It was always around putting together press releases and you always tackle the who, the what, the why, the where, the when, the how. And very like coincidentally, not anything I’ve kind of deliberately done, but I’m finding those words crop up more and more in my working world and they become a really useful framework to go back to. So I like that as a bit of a checklist for keyword research to make sure that we’re covering off the full breadth of what a client could be ranking for. And then the opportunity analysis is obviously the next really, really important piece, which helps us to understand where the opportunities exist for that client. I think, again, it’s important to remember that that is only the SEO input. You have to present that to a client and find out Do they have certain business priorities? Are there areas within that that they just would never touch because it doesn’t feel like the right fit for them as a brand? And from that, you have your focuses. And that, for me, is the important thing across the whole SEO account, right? It needs to feed content, it needs to feed digital PR, and it feeds technical work to some extent in terms of pages that we might focus on for optimization. The other thing to layer onto all of that, as well as the diagnostics that I talked about earlier, so like how are they performing technically from a links point of view, from a content point of view, Audience, like audience for me is so important and it kind of crosses over to some of that keyword research side of things as well. Who are these people? Why are they searching? When I’ve talked, sort of done talks previously, I’m really, really keen to always remember and I think it can be so easy to forget it in working in SEO. There are real people performing all of the searches that we see, right? It’s not just an anonymous bot at a keyboard or typing into their phone. So who are they and what are they actually searching for and why? Because I think that can help you identify other areas and again on an audience level. I think we have some clients who know their audiences really well, and some clients who do not know. And also, some clients who don’t really care. You do get clients who are just like, don’t care about who it is, just get the traffic to our website. I have to say, I find those ones a little bit more challenging, personally. I like to think of SEO as being a part of kind of joined up, grown up marketing. I think it’s been on a journey. I think as an industry, it probably is there now, but you do get clients who perhaps are sometimes in that slightly more old school way of thinking. So really understanding the audience and we do a whole, we have a whole sort of toolkit of processes and pieces of work that we might go through to do that from sort of search and social listening. We have YouGov, which is really, really useful in terms of understanding motivations and behaviours of audiences. So yeah, whole breadth of that. And also the brand then, right? The brand is the other important part in all of this. And again, I would say that differs because you might have some clients who it would be very difficult to describe them as being or having a brand, like they might just be a website. And those are probably the types of clients who care a little bit less, again, about what you are putting out there as a brand. But again, the sorts of clients that we work with, more typically, I would say, definitely have a brand and want to be putting out a certain tone or type of story. So it’s really important to understand all of those things. I think once you have all of those, and it is a lot of pieces, you can probably start distilling it into a digital PR strategy that says, Like I said, these are the tactics we’re going to use. These are the things that we’re going to focus on. These are the people that we’re going to speak to. And it’s all because we want to rank better for X, Y, Z. There’s a lot to it.

Stephen Baker:
Yes, that was long. No, no, there is a lot to it. And actually, I want to touch upon one of the things in there, which was, you mentioned clients a few times. How important is a client in devising a successful strategy? So can you do it without them? I know you’ve referenced some clients differ. They’ll be really interested in their audience and the motivation. Some won’t, some will have loads of info about their brand, some won’t. But in your opinion, how important is it? Are the most successful strategies always with clients who are properly invested in it and give you lots of information and you work collaboratively with, or is that just not the case?

Sophie Coley:
I think it is the case, yeah. And I think there’s two elements to clients around strategy. So one is, like you say, kind of buy-in and what I would describe as strategic appetite. I like clients… Have you coined a phrase? I’m not sure. I like clients that have like a good strategic appetite and you see those, right, the ones that you present some thoughtful work and, you know, that’s all strategy needs to be sometimes, just something you put some thought into and they love it. And I think One of the most useful things from that is that if the client is really bought into the strategy, then the team by default, as in the agency team, has to be bought into that strategy as well, and you’re all on the same page, and it’s really clear what page you’re on. If you present a strategy and a client’s not bought into it, then it can be difficult to stick to that strategy, because actually, if the client doesn’t really care, and starts getting into that mode of like, well, we just want like thousands of links, like do whatever you’ve got to do for it. Then, yeah, it becomes really hard to stick to a strategy because why would you, right? And I think one of, I don’t know if we’re going to talk about this, but I’m always conscious working with you guys in the digital PR team. I think one of the challenges sometimes with strategy is that it can feel limiting. Like, I’m aware sometimes it’s like I’m coming in and putting a bit of a fence around you guys and saying like, no, you’re not going to go near that. So we have a client in the car world, Scrap Car Comparison, and I think they’re really interesting in terms of that kind of strategic constraints, if you like. So I think when we started working with them, they were publishing content on their site around things like the best Christmas gifts for petrolheads or who the new Top Gear presenters were going to be. And I totally understood it, right? They play in the automotive space. Those are two fair, sensible topics. But equally, and I described them as this to themselves, and I think it clicked and helped sort of land the strategy a little bit. They are ultimately the funeral provider of the car world, right? they aren’t as much as you might want to go there with like here are the amazing road trips that you can do in a car or all the fun good times of a car or owning a car they ultimately are that like end point that no one really wants to get to you don’t want to have to scrap your car because it either means that you’ve probably had a nasty accident or it’s broken down or or it’s died somehow and actually the bit that you’re excited about is the next bit where you get the new car so they’re kind of in this real like icky space within the car world, like in terms of trying to get people excited and talking about fun things. And I’m really aware when we, I guess, took them on as a client and went through the strategic work, that was very much where my strategy was kind of focusing in terms of trying to be realistic about the role that they played in the automotive space. And I think really, really conscious with, again, handing them that strategy over to you guys as a digital PR team was like, It feels like sometimes I can be kind of restricting your creativity, and I think Scrap Car probably is a good one. I think perhaps in our first round of ideation with them, there were ideas around, you know, like road trips and all the nice things. It’s one of the worst bits of my role. I really hate coming in and being like, no, no, not that one. But actually, what I love about Scrap Car is that I think probably one of our best ever Propellernet digital PR campaigns. I reckon it’s top five at least. 100% yeah. So RayJard came out of that, right? It was such a great campaign for me strategically because it links so closely to the client and really unashamedly so. It was totally about the crux of what they do. It totally fit with them as a brand. one of the car sellers, retailers, couldn’t really have gone out with that or it wouldn’t have felt so natural. It was the perfect campaign for them and what they do. So what I like about that is that actually as much as strategy, particularly in a digital PR sense, sometimes can feel like I’m, yeah, putting the shackles on, I think sometimes shackles really, really like actually help to unlock creative thinking. And I know there is some thinking behind that, which I think I’ve spoken about with Lou previously.

Louise Parker:
You mentioned it to me before and I included it in a talk, which is around… I’ve taken some creative liberties with this story, but I feel like it’s either some kind of psychological experiment or something that was done in which children were asked to play in a wide open space. And because this was a wide open space with no constraints, actually the children all ended up playing, or hardly playing, like right in the middle and they were a bit nervous and scared and didn’t really know what to do because they didn’t know where they’re… how far they could go. It was just all a bit scary. Whereas, apparently, when you put a fence around your kids in a field or wherever you are, and then you ask them to play, their reaction is much more to go to the outer rims of the fence. And they’re much more comfortable and free to play and enjoy because they know and they feel safe and they know where the kind of end point is and all that kind of stuff. And I think that definitely is a case with coming up with PR ideas, because if you literally get told you have a car brand come up with a car idea. Like you just said, that could be about scrapping a car, that could be going on a road trip, that could be about buying a car. The options are endless. And of course we like to make sure we have enough time to come up with our ideas, but you can’t spend months on it. There is some time constraints.

Sophie Coley:
And also I think sometimes you default to the same old things, right? Because it’s just like, well, if you just play it safe, it’s easy. Yeah, very much in the middle of that field, if you like.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, and we actually, I don’t think we would have got to the Rage Yard campaign had we not had that kind of restriction or those parameters because we would have been looking at other campaigns or thinking about too many topics. It does, it feels worse initially because you’re like, oh, I can’t do, I’ve got a really great idea about, I don’t know, like tattoos and cars or something. But actually when you, yeah, as you say, Lou, like when you restrict yourself, it can aid creative thinking. It’s just a bit more of a challenge. With that in mind, what do you think are the most kind of common mistakes that either you’ve made or you see other brands or agencies or what have you, obviously you don’t have to name names, but like when devising a strategy or things that kind of, what are your strategy icks ultimately, what vexes you?

Sophie Coley:
It’s really hard to critique other people’s strategies, like I said, because you almost need like an x-ray machine to be able to see into a campaign and go, oh, well that was the strategy. But there are some that are very overt, and I probably would say my biggest ick is actually when there clearly isn’t a strategy, and Lou will know this because Lou constantly sends me campaigns, and I probably do the same back to her, from, I’d say brands, I don’t know, businesses, brands, websites, whatever, who’ve gone out with something that is so far removed from what it is that they do, and it’s clearly you know, an SEO PR thing or a digital PR thing that they’ve got to get links and the agency has been employed to get links. So I understand the activity on that level. There’s a campaign that’s gone out and some of them are really successful from that point of view, like you put them through one of the tools and you can see they’ve got loads of links. But my biggest dick, yeah, when something is so far removed from If you ever see a campaign and then see the brand or the website that are running it and go, why are they talking about that? It’s so bad. And I love it that I think, you know, Twitter for all of its fun, you often see now like journalists actually calling out PRs who just send them something that is so random. And I think that’s fair game. Like, you know, I think we have a responsibility as people who work in this industry to put out like half decent stuff.

Louise Parker:
it kind of falls into the area of just because you can doesn’t mean you should because I’ve heard some people will come back to it and to be honest I’ve had this response too as well like well the journalists will cover it or some journalists will cover it or it will get linked so why not and it’s like well it’s not the only way like you could you can get links and also have it make sense for your brand and for your audience and it’s like why wouldn’t you tick more more boxes and it might be harder to get there but ultimately you’re getting more from it. You can see why people do it and I am definitely guilty in my younger years. I’m only wanting to tick one box.

Stephen Baker:
There’s an awkward look between Sophie and me there, a smile and nod.

Louise Parker:
But yeah, I’ve seen the light.

Sophie Coley:
You have. And I think it comes back to what I said earlier about it’s the difference between link building and digital PR, right? Like if you’re going to call it like PR, public relations, right? So you have to think about the people who might be reading the story. And just because it’s digital PR and it tends to fall into the SEO space, I think. I don’t know, it’s very much semantics but I would much rather that if you’re going to do that kind of more icky side of it, call it link building, please don’t call it digital PR, just to make me happy. But I think you miss out the tangible PR benefits of a good story that is interesting that journalists want to cover, that relevant audiences want to read, that builds your brand, right? All the other metrics and benefits and value that comes with that is great for your clients, like you’re building their brand, you’re speaking to potential customers. And if it just takes a little bit more upfront thinking to get to the right campaign to do that, rather than, like we say, going with what’s easy and just chucking something out there and going, oh, well, it got like seven links, so we’re happy. It’s just working a little bit smarter and harder sometimes.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, it’s good to challenge yourself and like all the work has gone into the understanding like why we’re doing this, why this is relevant. So like it’s really good to always to think about that. And it’s also easy to forget that we’re not just, I think maybe like the early days of link building, it was getting links from like quite niche sites. And now we’re, you know, we’re getting links in our PR team from some of the most read publications on the internet. So like on a regular basis. So you’re putting clients brands out there. So it’s got to be, It’s got to be relevant, but I was going to ask, do you think there’s ever an example, I’m sure there is, but I’m just interested in your view, where you’ve seen a story where X brand has done X thing, and I can’t think of an example now, and it doesn’t make sense to you, but you talking about needing an X-ray to see someone’s strategy, do you ever think there’s an example where you’re like, Oh, actually, maybe it makes sense to them. Maybe there’s like a reason behind this. So what I’m asking really is, is there like a middle ground between the highly irrelevant, tenuous, the extremely relevant and there’s somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t make sense to me why this jewelry brand would be talking about Matt Hancock’s hairline. There might be. Do you know what I mean?

Sophie Coley:
I’ve given a zany example. I think there’s like a sort of spectrum of obvious relevance. I feel like I’m coming up with more sort of slightly wacky strategy phrases there. Yeah, there’s a spectrum of relevance in as much as, I guess if all you could think of it as a funnel, I guess like bottom of the funnel is going to be the commercial things that your client does or sells or the stuff. Yeah, the commercial opportunity to them. So for a fashion client, that’s going to be all your clients. And if you’re going to do campaigns about those super, super obvious link that no one really has to find that x-ray machine, the real top of the funnel or the complete other end of the spectrum, depending which device we’re sticking with, is probably more like audience lifestyle focused things, right? And I think this is where it gets a little bit more grey, because if you do really understand your audience, you might have some absolutely killer piece of audience insight that says, do you know what? We have this little niche audience amongst our audience groups. They’re really into X, Y, and Z. People probably don’t know this about us. A nice example, and we never did anything with it, but we previously worked with Forest Holidays, who had lovely sort of cabins with hot tubs in lovely sort of rural locations. And we used a tool at the time that you could run their social following through, and it kind of clustered all of their followers according to commonalities. And one of the clusters that we had was people who were really into reality TV. It was all like TOWIE and Made in China. Chelsea and stuff. And Forest Holiday is quite a fairly premium, like high end, not cheap, probably more middle class. You’re going away with like maybe young kids or that sort of thing. And it felt really odd. It was like, that’s not the audience. Like what’s going on there? And we dug into a little bit further and we think it was that it was just the hot tubs and there was that real kind of like slightly bougie like, you know, weekend away with a hot tub. It wasn’t so much about the cabin or the forest location. And that was really, really interesting. So that was something we knew that two other people And as I say, we never did anything with it. But if we’d have put out a campaign for forest holidays around TOWIE, it probably would have felt quite jarring. But we had that kind of like, I guess, missing piece of the puzzle that other people didn’t see. So I do accept that, I suppose.

Stephen Baker:
Begrudgingly?

Sophie Coley:
Not begrudgingly, but I do question. I think that digital PR and SEO is probably an industry where there is sometimes less of a strategic focus. I think there is so much pressure on like, do stuff quick and get links quick and get as many as we can. And we see that from our clients sometimes, but a general sense around the industry. I think that’s how I see it quite often. And we see it, it can be really, some clients don’t want to pay for strategy, they just want the doing and they want results fast. Ironically, I think the strategy helps you get the results better, but if it’s literally like the links or just the immediately tangible thing that feels like the thing that they want, and actually what they want is the results. So actually, as I say, kind of ironically, if they pay for some of the strategy work up front, they might get their results better. it feels weird to pay for strategy because there’s not a beyond like a strategic statement or a plan or a diagram at the end of it there’s there’s nothing really super tangible for them to be like well we’ve spent all this money and here it is right it’s the thing that enhances everything else yeah you can’t you don’t get the results from the strategy it’s then the work that feeds from there

Louise Parker:
Which actually, it comes on to our next question quite wonderfully, which is around how difficult is it to sell a strategy to new clients?

Sophie Coley:
Well, exactly what I said. And again, I’ve said it a few times, it massively depends on the clients and we have some clients who have that good strategic appetite. They’re hungry for strategy. They are hungry for strategy. And they’re great, right? Because absolutely, they get it and are happy. You can put your roadmap and your scope of work together and they’ll see that chunk of strategy time up front and they buy into it and they’re like, great. But you do get clients who, as I said, are just like, just get going, just get going. We want results now. And it’s wrong, right? It’s back to front, but I guess it’s just a difficult thing to get your head around to be like, actually, do you know what? We just need to delay getting going on the work. It’s not always the case. There obviously is sometimes like just some sort of kind of hygiene, basic stuff that you could be getting on with while you’re devising the strategy. It’s not that strategy has to completely hold everything up. But wholeheartedly, I mean, I’d be out of a job if I didn’t believe this, but, you know, the strategy work will make everything that comes better and more effective. So it’s being able to convey that convincingly to a client. And as I say, generally different clients, depending on their background, what their experience previously will take that in. differently. I think it’s really good if you can, like I said earlier, like establish a bit more strategic thinking at pitch stage because particularly if you’re, and we never really know who we’re pitching against, but if you, if your strategic thinking kind of elevates you amongst the people, beyond the people that you’re pitching against, like obviously it helps you stand out and then a client hopefully would want to kind of continue the benefits of that through to actually working with you. So to answer your question, it can be very, very difficult, but it completely depends on the client. And you get some clients who totally get it and you get some clients who are just like, nah, just get going, which is difficult.

Stephen Baker:
It’s such a temptation to do, particularly when you’re trying to save time or budget. So it’s easy to see things like strategy or reporting as nice to have when actually they’re both essential to understand, to lead to your success and understand what you’re doing. And it doesn’t always happen. So I’ve had the pleasure of watching you present strategies, but I also feel your frustration when it’s kind of When it goes well, it’s magical because you’re like, oh, this is amazing. They totally get it. The team gets it. We buy in. Everyone buys into it. Brilliant. We’re off and running. But then sometimes when they don’t, you can sort of see it almost like, yeah, get to the stuff, which is like the idea or the thing, almost like the shiny bit at the end. And digital PR is so much more than that. But it is the shiny bit at the end in lots of ways. So, yeah, I don’t actually have a question to follow up on that. I just wanted to say I sort of, I shape it. Actually, I do have a question. I do have a question, which is how difficult or how, actually, I’m going to rephrase it. How do you keep a strategy on track? So you’ve, you’ve, you’ve come up with it. You’ve sold it into the client. The internal team understands it. How often do you check in with the teams to sort of say, are we on track? Do we need to, and how often do you tweak things?

Sophie Coley:
I guess keeping your strategy on track should massively fall into reporting. Ideally, you’re going to work with whoever builds your reports in your agency to make sure that report actually really, really reflects what it is that you’re focusing on. And by that, I mean, you might report on the overall SEO health of a site on a monthly basis, which is typically how often we report. But you would want like your primary portfolio of keywords that really lean into those sort of topics or the pages that you’re focusing on for the links that you’re getting from digital PR. You want those to be sort of front and center of your report. done well, that then means that your report becomes your tool to say this strategy is working or it’s not working. So ideally you’d have like at least a monthly check-in of like actually is the strategy working and your report helps you to do that and then you might have a quarterly or a sort of six monthly checking more with the client to say, like, actually, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what’s working well. Here’s where we need to dial up, dial down, whatever it is. So, yeah, I think almost touching it in the last question where it was saying, like, you know, strategy and reporting can become or sometimes feel like they might become like the optional things, but they’re so crucial. And I think they really, really go hand in hand. I think the other interesting thing with all of that, and again, trying to bring it back to digital PR specifically, is like, There’s two levels of reporting really, right? There’s the channel-specific reporting, so there will be campaign by campaign. You might have a Coverage Book report, for example.

Sophie Coley:
But you will have reports specifically focused on the activity that you’re doing from a digital PR point of view. Our content people will report on the success of the editorial content or the commercial content that we’re focusing on from the client site. And text, you know, it might not feel like a report, but you might have like a list of tickets that you’re working through with a dev team. And actually, there is some element of reporting in just saying like, here’s what we’ve got through, here’s what we’ve still got to action. So I think of those as like the channel specific reporting bits. And then the overarching bit of all of that, like the kind of umbrella that sits across them all is the site’s health, the traffic that it’s getting, the conversions that it’s driving, and that is the culmination of all of those different channel-specific things. So I think, again, from a digital PR point of view, very much, yes, the campaign side of things, but remembering and like, you know, celebrating the fact that that actually is driving overall site visibility, traffic conversions, etc. So yeah, the kind of culmination of everything will be your probably your monthly report, but you will have like more ongoing things. And then there’s other facets within that, you know, like if part of it is part of your strategy is specifically trying to focus on new audiences, for example, like you’d be able to dig into things like that. So it kind of depends what your strategy is as well to what you’re gonna report on.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, we’ve gone through a period of quite a lot of change in the last couple of years with COVID. And the industry, digital PR industry or SEO industry, changes quite frequently, and not drastically necessarily, but there’s always little tweaks. So how often do you think you have to tweak a strategy in your experience where you’re like, oh, actually, what I came up with was right, but they’ve now got a new product line, or they’ve done some more research into their audience, what we’re doing in this area just isn’t working, there’s a new competitor. I’ve just thrown out a few examples, but how often do you tweak it?

Sophie Coley:
So I’m going to do the really horrible thing again, but semantics here, I think… Are you going to say it depends? No. I prefer thinking about strategies as things that evolve rather than tweaking it, right? Ah, okay. Strategies should not be reactive. That’s where you get into trouble because you’re trying to ride out every little bump that happens and reacting accordingly and I think then you kind of go all over the place and you lose sight of that sort of single focus. I’m trying to go back to the yellow brick road analogy and I don’t know where I’m going to go with it. If you think of a strategy as a map, it’s helping you get to a certain place and if you’re going to constantly tweak that direction, you’re probably going to take longer, might get a little bit lost on the way, you know, really sticking with this analogy. But yeah, I think a strategy should be something that you are committed to for the long term. It’s not to say all those things that you’ve listed out can happen and you should perhaps look at can you evolve the strategy a little bit to factor in those things. But I think also maybe just sense checking Is this a real thing that we do need to build into our strategy or is this something that we can just ride out? And I’m not to say, you know, bury your head in the sand about it. There will be things that sometimes you do need to massively change and things like a new product range or something that actually becomes a massive opportunity. Absolutely, go for it. Going back to the opportunity analysis, I think that’s a piece of work that should be refreshed on a regular basis so that you are constantly aware of where the big pockets of opportunity are for a client. I don’t think, to your question, I could necessarily put my finger on a specific when should you tweak it. I think what I would say is to try and stay away from the temptation to tweak it too much. I think it should be something you try and stay true to.

Stephen Baker:
How has the way you think about strategy changed over the years and do you think it will continue to change in the future?

Sophie Coley:
I think one of the biggest things that has changed for me is just confidence in my ability. And it’s really fresh. I spent ages, like obviously we’re really big on sort of personal development at Propellernet and I can think, I spent so many years like tapping into all of our resources being like, I need to be more confident, I need to have more gravitas, I need to be able to like sell strategy better. And it’s just one of those things, isn’t it? Like you can’t give someone a confidence pill or like, I don’t know, maybe you can. You can’t teach confidence. It just comes with time. And I think I’m fortunate now that I’m at a point where I’ve been working in the industry for 13 years. I’ve had a brilliant place to learn and to pick up stuff. I sat next to one of the techs that I always say is like one of the best techs I’ve ever worked with, who was the guy who sort of went on to build answer the public. And I sat next to him for a year or two when I was really junior and just picked his brain. about all, you know, what’s a canonical tagline? I don’t know. And it just gave me like a real good understanding of all areas of kind of SEO, I think, which I think has helped me get into like a strategic role now. So biggest shifts in thinking is kind of like, there isn’t a formula, there isn’t a process. It’s giving yourself time and asking the right questions and really understanding what it is that you’re trying to do for the client. And then being able to distill that in a way that is really, really easy to understand. So you want to share back insights and the interesting things that you found, but ultimately you need to get to something that is the strategy that you give to the team or the client. And it could be a diagram. It could be a statement. I love a diagram. I love a Venn diagram. You see them in many of my decks, but something that brings it all together and makes it tangible for people, right? You need to bring people on the journey that you’ve been on in terms of your thoughts and then land it with a point that actually then is the springboard for all of the plans and the executions that are coming. And yeah, I think probably the biggest shift is I used to think, right, strategy, I’ll just do X, Y, Z, done. And now I probably recognize that it is just that process of thinking. Yeah.

Louise Parker:
We have a last question for you, which is asked to every guest. Okay. And the answer doesn’t have to be necessarily about strategy. What do you want to see more of in the digital PR industry and what do you want to see less of?

Sophie Coley:
Well, I mean, I feel like I’m just echoing points that I already made. I definitely would like to see less of the stuff that leads you questioning like, why? Why did you do that? Why? But not in a good way. Yes.

Louise Parker:
Oh, yes.

Sophie Coley:
Not good. Maybe that is what I want to see more of. I don’t know. But yeah, less of the like, oh, head scratching like. just do better guys like I don’t mean any personal judgment in that but I just think we all you know you’re working in this industry you’ve got to be capable. I’m sure you’ve got a great brain in there somewhere. I appreciate there are pressures, but just please don’t go with that thing. Also, I would say on that, I do appreciate that some clients, it’s really hard. They work in a really unsexy industry. They’re not a brand, it’s just a website. I don’t know, a website that sells screws or something. It actually probably is quite tricky, but I do think, we talked about it with Ray Jard, if you’re the funeral provider of the car world, you can still have some creativity with that. So that, and I think I would like to see more of SEO, I guess, being considered in like the wider marketing mix. And by that, I mean, I think, you know, 13 years in SEO, it’s definitely grown up in that time. Like I say, the sorts of stuff we were doing back then were questionable. The industry was very questionable back then, and it’s definitely grown up. But I still think sometimes like SEO can be so focused on just like performance and I think actually if you integrate it with other marketing channels and really try and plan from that top-down marketing approach rather than SEO just being like that one like acquisition performance focus thing then you can build in all that kind of creativity it can sit a lot more nicely alongside like more traditional PR or above the line advertising, all of that. So I guess more joined up-ness with SEO and it’s probably also a good point to plug. I think more using search insights to fuel stuff more broadly. I obviously have spent a lot of time talking about search listening, which I haven’t talked about today, which is mad, because normally when I do these things, it’s all about search listening. But such a huge believer, it’s not my quote, it’s Seth Stevens-Davidowitz, but people tell Google things that they don’t tell their partner, their best friends. I do a fair bit of training on this. One of the first exercises I always get people to do is just to jump into their Google search history. And it can be quite enlightening for some people who are just like, oh, yeah, I told Google that. And I love like we’ve had clients in the past who take that insight and actually use it to take to their product teams to launch new products because there’s a gap. No one’s doing it. We can see people searching for it. So I think the two points are linked, but perhaps search living in less of its own little box, right? It’s a great indicator of consumer interest in stuff, full stop, that could be met by SEO or by other marketing activity. And I think SEO being, like playing amongst the big boys, right? It doesn’t need to be, I think we’re quite capable of it and I think it can add a lot of value.

Stephen Baker:
I’d wholeheartedly agree with that, 100%. So, me and Lou have realised, throughout the recordings we’ve done so far, that by far our weakest point is the outro and how we end the podcast. Absolutely shocking. I’m just going to ask directly, Lou, who’s going to do the outro today? Me or you? I think it should be you.

Louise Parker:
I think you’re better at it. No pressure. Sophie, Sophie Coley, thank you so much for joining us, been an absolute pleasure. Is there anything, would you like to plug your Twitter for example, if anyone has any strategy related questions?

Sophie Coley:
I can plug my Twitter, I can’t promise much strategic goodness on there, it’s mostly posts about Aston Villa to be honest. I am coleybird88, or no, I’m just coleybird on Twitter.

Stephen Baker:
We can put it in the notes. That’s the first guest that hasn’t specifically known their Twitter handle.

Sophie Coley:
One’s my Instagram, one’s my Twitter, and you definitely don’t want to follow my Instagram. My Twitter is just, it’s at Koli Bird, but as I said, you might not get, you’ll get some strategic goodness, but you’ll also get it sprinkled with a bit of Aston Villa, so. And if someone wanted to ask a question. If you want to ask a question, you are more than welcome to. Find out more about search, listening, etc. Yeah, much better on Twitter than LinkedIn. LinkedIn really gives me the egg, so. Please message me on Twitter, not LinkedIn.

Stephen Baker:
Wow, that seems like the topic of another podcast which we’re getting back on to discuss. The state of LinkedIn.

Louise Parker:
Oh, it’s horrible. And thank you everyone for listening. If you have any questions for me or Steve or any suggestions for future podcasts, then please find our Twitter profiles and we’ll take that on board.

Stephen Baker:
Thanks all. Thanks, Sophie. Thank you for having me. It’s been fun. Bye. Bye.