Product-led digital PR drives 83% more impact on the bottom line.
We analyzed 100 unique SEO-focused blog posts on the same website, 45 of which did not use first-party data and 55 of which did.
The performance difference is striking.
Keyword-driven blog posts that reference first-party data have:
- 83% more traffic value
- 51% more traffic
- and 34% more links
… than their data-absent alternatives.
This use of product-led digital PR makes even more sense in the age of AI.
It enhances your content sitewide, builds thought leadership, and takes the broken parts of digital PR into a new, more modern approach that solves for its oft-criticized failings.
- What is Product-Led Digital PR?
- Product-Led Digital PR Examples
- Using Data Outside of Statistics Posts
- Why Now?
- How to Execute Product-Led DPR
What Is Product-Led Digital PR?
Product-led digital PR is a strategy focused on building content with first-party data that can be repurposed across most content sitewide.
These strategies are product-led because they pass the test of allowing the data to be leveraged on sales pages (even if they aren’t).
Because of that, they will naturally fit on content across the site.
For these same reasons, they will truly be brand-building/sales-generating, which is what great digital PR content should always achieve.
Compare this to bad or dated approaches which focus on link volume, often disconnecting from the product in their ideas.
And because of this disconnect, they will rarely generate sales.
For this reason, if the data you’re collecting wouldn’t make sense on a sales page, it’s unlikely to drive long-term SEO value.
Product-Led Digital PR Examples
At Siege, we’ve created a content marketing trends report for two years running.
It contains data on how people are thinking about content and SEO each year. This data ties directly into our offering, and it could easily appear on our sales pages.
The below examples show where data points from the study could live:
- “95% of businesses are focusing on link building in 2024” could be leveraged on a link building services page.
- “Interactive content creation is on the rise, with 62.3% of companies investing in it 2024” could be leveraged on a content creation page.
We could then directly leverage these same data points on other relevant content pages throughout the site, making them more helpful — and truly differentiated from competitors.
For example, we have a post on interactive content.
We reference that data point at the top as a hook, even repurposing the image from the post:
We also have a post on link building strategies.
There, we lead with the insight from our trends report that link building emphasis is on the rise.
This differentiator immediately hits readers, gives them something else to read, and creates credibility that is likely to keep them reading the post.
As you can see, this trends report is a strong example of product-led digital PR.
We can create and promote this asset, it builds brand awareness, and, in turn, it has the potential to enhance almost every single post on our website.
Talk about a huge SEO win!
And the results speak for themselves.
The graph below highlights the impact this strategy has had on the Siege Media website to date:
It’s also worth noting that we have only recently started incorporating the first-party data across our SEO content to the extent we should be, so we believe there’s still upside from here.
Another one of our clients has already made this a heavy part of their strategy. Their graph looks pretty, too. As context, traffic value metrics are in the several millions per year: We started with this process by adding the first-party data to the top of statistics posts. This is hyper-powerful as statistics posts serve as a secondary search engine for users, and many reporters and bloggers will skip the general “KEYWORD statistics” post and link directly to the first-party data at the top of the post. This can generate thousands of links on its own, but the step-change philosophy from this process is that stopping at statistics posts is shortsighted. This data belongs everywhere. Those who put it everywhere will win. As we’re all aware, AI is here. Getting cited in AI Overviews and/or search engines long-term is most reliable where your website provides information gain.
Generating and referencing unique first-party data sitewide is the most reliable route to doing that consistently.
Additionally, over the last several years, social media websites have made it increasingly difficult to send traffic to third-party websites. They prefer you stay on-network to drive up engagement. This incentivizes content creators to publish more on these network rather than on their own websites. As a byproduct, there are fewer opportunities to get links due to less mid-tier blogging overall. This means a data-first approach is especially valued, since this is the type of asset the remaining news publications that are still publishing on their website reference the most. If there are fewer net linkers, the value of the remaining, higher-leverage ones increases. If you don’t have internal data to leverage, you can purchase it through services like Qualtrics, Wynter, and SurveyMonkey. Otherwise, you can directly poll your audience via social media and email marketing. As you can hopefully tell from the above results, this — when done correctly and with the right topic — is also always worth maximizing promotion for.
The reason is that these topics are high-leverage and can generate hundreds of external links and, more importantly, sales. When an asset has a high probability of someone sharing it when shown, there’s value in maximizing the time promoting it. A high share probability is also a strong indication it has brand-building value and sales opportunity, not just link value. When that ratio drops significantly, often due to approach frequency, manual outreach becomes less valid. That’s why this sequence is one we’re so excited about for clients: A few years ago, we wrote a post on why we were stopping (most) email outreach. Deep within that post was the idea that we wouldn’t stop doing high-leverage outreach for our clients — situations exactly like this one. That post would have a different spin today. We now think most companies would benefit from strategic content promotion. The tone is different, though. Brands benefit when it’s done sparingly, remains high leverage, and is in concert with using that data-driven content across their site in a way that exponentially increases its value. That’s good outreach. That’s product-led digital PR.
Using Data Outside of Stat Posts
Why Now?
How To Execute Product-Led DPR
Strong Opinions, Loosely Held
