Anatomy of a data study that earned 412 links
What it actually takes to earn a link from a publication you did not pay.
Rohan Shetty
Digital PR Lead
The angle
We had access to anonymised payments data from a fintech client. The instinct was to publish the average. We did not. Averages are boring. We published the outliers.
The story became a city by city ranking of where small businesses were getting paid the slowest. Local news desks love a ranking that includes their city.
The pitch
- One sentence subject line with the headline number.
- Three sentence body. The finding, the city specific number, the link to the methodology page.
- An attached chart. No PDF. No deck.
- A name and a phone number, not a no reply mailbox.
What did not work
We sent a national pitch first. It got us thirty links. Then we segmented the same data by region and pitched local desks one at a time. That second wave got us three hundred and eighty more. Lesson learned. Local angles compound.
The other thing that did not work was a follow up cadence longer than ten days. After that, replies dropped to almost zero. We stopped chasing.
Work with us
Want this kind of thinking on your next quarter?
We take on a small number of new engagements each quarter. If the brief is interesting, we will say so. If it is not, we will tell you that too.
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