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This week in the newsletter, we spoke to Robyn Munro about using external experts in your PR campaigns and thought leadership pieces. With this strategy absolutely booming in the PR world right now, the tips below are useful for anyone who wants to know more about using them and how to spot the good experts from the ChatGPT ones.
What are the benefits of using external experts for PR campaigns and thought leadership pieces?
When it comes to digital PR campaigns and strategies, external experts are crucial. External expert comments are SO valuable as they add credibility to each campaign while accompanying client insight/data.
External expert comments are priceless nuggets of wisdom shared by industry spokespeople. From relationship experts to sleep experts, incorporating this commentary into your press release adds credibility, authority, and depth, as the quotes are from people of knowledge and authority within their industry.
Journalists receive hundreds of email pitches every day—Neil Shaw recently tweeted that he was receiving an average of 457 emails a day!
By utilising external experts, you can provide journalists with newsworthy tips and insightful opinions on topics relevant to the industry. You can capitalise on these occasions to garner media attention and, as a result, enhance a brand's visibility.
One key tip is as you continue to use external experts, you will gradually build a bank of comments that can be readily reused whenever relevant opportunities arise. This bank of comments will streamline your future interactions with journalists, making it easier to respond to similar requests efficiently and effectively.
Choosing the right external expert isn’t always as easy as it sounds, though. You put a tweet out hashtagging ‘journorequest’, and you get flooded with emails from eager people keen to help. It’s really important to double-check the potential experts you’re going to use.
Ask yourself some questions:
Are they credible?
Have they been featured in the news before?
Are their quotes helpful/useful to the consumer?
Do they even exist?
Recently, I had someone email me replying to my tweet with quotes, and I thought it sounded too good to be true. So, I asked ChatGPT the same questions that I tweeted, and it came out with the exact same content this “expert” had emailed me.
How do you maintain relationships with external experts for PR campaigns?
Maintaining relationships with external experts is pretty easy. They help you by providing their expertise, and you help them land in relevant, high-authoritative publications. All you need to do is:
Be yourself
Be honest about what you want to get out of the campaign - give them a brief outline of the campaign, along with questions, the deadline, and the publications you will be outreaching to.
Always respond in a timely manner
Previously, I teamed up with a relationship expert who is also a co-founder of a start-up dating app. As she was so incredibly valuable to me, my client, and my digital PR strategies, I wanted to ensure she was getting as much out of it as we were. So, I asked her what publications she would like to get on, and we worked together that way as well.
A quick win for this one was contacting the appropriate journalists and letting them know we were working together. For example, I emailed a journalist from Grazia and said something along the lines of, “Hi, I’m working with a relationship expert and co-founder of XX, on behalf of my client XX, throughout the new series of Love Island. If you have any questions or would like exclusive content, please reach out, and I’m more than happy to sort this.” etc.
We started working together in 2022, and journalists still contact me for her comments now!
Not only is maintaining relationships with external experts really important, but it’s also important to maintain relationships with journalists. Journalists are likely to save your information alongside your expert for future opportunities for similar requests. As with PRs, journalists will have a database filled with who presents which clients, so it’s important to maintain the relationship with the external expert and the journalist.
Once you’ve built that trust with journalists after providing your external expert commentary, not only does it save you a lot of time, but you will also get journalists coming directly to you. This eliminates the competition, and journalists who reach out to you for content will let you know exactly what they want rather than you having to try and guess.
Make sure you follow Robyn on Twitter.