January 23, 2023
3 minutes
Over the past year, our digital PR team has gained a whopping 955 links for our clients, but, nevertheless, building links is getting increasingly harder – especially for international brands.
International digital PR can be a tough nut to crack when you’re working from a UK base as the approach tends to vary a lot between different countries. We’ve managed to build some amazing links in Canadian publications over the past 12 months and it’s working wonders for our clients’ brand awareness and SEO value.
Here are three ways we smashed outreach in Canada in 2022:
Getting to know the media contacts that write for your target audience and building rapport with them is hugely important.
Keeping a list of people and websites who regularly link and putting them at the top of our contact list has helped secure some amazing coverage and backlinks for our clients. Sending relevant content to journalists who link will increase your chances of securing a win and will also help build a relationship with them, as they can rely on you to provide content that works for them.
Understanding what different publications are publishing and the style of press releases that they feature on their site also means we can send over relevant content we know will be published.
We have spent the past year pinning down what kind of assets work for our creative campaigns and measuring the success of the campaign by how many links we have built via this. Surveys are something we’ve found to be a massive hit in Canada with many journalists covering survey content regularly in their articles. We’ve learnt that Canadian journalists absolutely love survey data led campaigns and as a result we built 64 links in 2022 alone by using this approach in our strategy.
There are other assets you can use within your campaign strategies to drive results such as visual infographics. However survey data has been the absolute winner for our Canadian client and ensuring the data set is broad, can open up opportunities for brand new campaigns and pivots.
We found that creating a press release for both lifestyle and regional writers, and avoiding generic news desks completely, creates better results. Our most successful campaigns in Canada have gained amazing links in both of these sectors and these are the types of publications our clients’ key customers are reading most often. Identifying the type of publications that a client’s customer reads is crucial to building highly authoritative and relevant links.
To gain online coverage for your brand, it’s all about giving the journalist the best reason you can to cover your story. Creating a super strong news hook will definitely increase your chances of building high authoritative links no matter which country you’re targeting!
For more tips on how to maximise your link building efforts in Canada, head over to the NORTH blog or learn about our digital PR and SEO services.