How Digital PR Drives UK Leads | James Dooley ft Ben Nicholls, Peter Jones & Paul Truscott

James Dooley: How digital PR is important for UK lead generation. Today I'm joined with Ben Nicholls, the founder of Jam Press and JamPrime, Paul David Truscott, who is brilliant when it comes to Google Business Profiles and is the founder of Mattr Media, and Peter Victor Jones, who does a lot of local lead generation throughout the UK. So Peter, I'm going to start with you. How important is digital PR for lead generation in the UK?

Peter Victor Jones: Very important. So digital PR, getting your, your brand mentioned in the press, online and in traditional PR, um, causes brand search. So people see you in the press, search for the brand. That causes the, your rankings as a whole for the business to potentially rise. Um, positioning, it gives positioning of the brand. So I think when the LLMs, so the large language models, are assessing one brand versus another, if a brand's been mentioned in the press in a positive light, it's got more chance of being, um, recommended by the, um, ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini than a brand that hasn't. Um, yeah, it's just really powerful, one of the most powerful tactics.

James Dooley: Yeah, and then Ben, over to you. Obviously, you're doing a lot within JamPrime and Jam Press of digital PR campaigns throughout the UK, um, well, worldwide. But for in the UK, there's quite a lot of people that are looking to try to do it to strengthen their brand and then strengthen basically to try to get not just the backlinks, but to try to get the brand exposure, which helps their website to rank for more terms, for them to look good. What type of campaigns could you be doing for someone that wants to grow their UK business and wants to try to start generating some more leads?

Ben Nicholls: Yeah, thanks, James. I think, um, you know, when it comes to lead generation, there's a number of things that you can do in terms of PR. So I would really highly recommend running case study PR, especially if you've got a product that, you know, consumers use and they've had a good experience with it and it's changed or, or they've had a benefit in some way and can really show you a good before and after. Case studies can be really good. So especially when it comes to things like health products and stuff like that. But there's a number of other things you can do. You can also use expert-led campaigns. So, you know, if, if, if you are the business owner and you're, you're the expert in your field and you've created a business or service that is, you know, you're the champion of, I would highly recommend doing expert-led PR, talking about the subject matter of your business, explaining how it works to people, answering any queries that they might have in the form of, like, a journalistic news article. It's a really powerful way to get yourself sort of seen and, and published on national news publications and also regionally as well. And then, you know, we can also look at, like, the brand's data. So if you're a business, you're likely sitting on a lot of data these days. Um, you know, people are interacting with your websites, they're interacting with your social. You might be collecting other, other data within your business that you can use to tell a story. Um, I think news publishers are always interested in finding out, you know, what the general public are doing, what they're buying, how they spend their money, what they like to do and things like that. So I think there's lots of stuff you can do with data, especially when you cross-reference it with other sort of data, like regional data, like certain demographics, that can really make compelling sort of stories for, for journalists and news publishers. Um, and you can also commission research as well. So sometimes if, if we've got a client that doesn't have data within their system, we will commission a sort of consumer poll. We'll speak to the general public, we'll ask them questions that are relevant to the brand, and then we can take that piece of research, write a really sort of, like, interesting story based around the facts that we've found out, which are genuinely new because we've commissioned that piece of research, and then the brand will get a credit and, and a mention off the back of that research. So there's a number of things you can do.

James Dooley: Sounds great. Paul, over to you with regards to digital PR for UK lead generation. The amount of lead generation agencies that we speak to throughout the UK, they seem to cheap out on buying guest posts. And they go, "But James, I'm getting a DR 70 backlink and it's a dofollow backlink. Why would I need digital PR when I can get a DR 70 dofollow backlink?" I'm like, well, for one, they've just pumped the DR full of... It's just fake and it's not getting any traffic. Can you just explain the difference to a UK lead generation agency, business owners listening to this now saying, oh, but it just seems a bit expensive to run a digital PR campaign, of why it's important to go with some of these trusted kind of articles to build up the brands?

Paul David Truscott: There's a few things here to unpack, but we'll do this really quick. But one of the key things is, as you mentioned, fake metrics for one thing. Also, these guest posts, even if they work to improve your, uh, PageRank and your rankings, very few people are going to see the guest post itself. They're not going to consume it. So that's the big difference. People are going to consume the information, um, that comes through Ben's channels because it's going to be through respected publications. The other thing to bear in mind with that is now that we're in the age of AI search, we've got to think about how Google and how the other, uh, LLMs, you know, the large language models, connect the dots. And through that, we... You've mentioned before about harmonic centrality, uh, James, and having really trusted seed sets that sit at the centre, um, of the, the, um, the, the knowledge... The equivalent of Google's knowledge base, if you like, for the LLMs. And it's these publications that sit at that centre. So the closer you are to them, um, and in this case actually on them, uh, you're going to be part of the training data for all of the models. This is the big difference. So somebody who's cheaping out is hoping that they get found online by one of the AI search engines. Somebody who's used a Ben is going to be part of the actual training data of the latest models. And so they're going to be grounded in it. It's a huge, huge difference.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then just moving on a little bit, you've both there mentioned, Paul and Peter, about large language models. Obviously there you're speaking there about harmonic centrality within... That's what Common Crawl's using as part of their... They don't, they don't use PageRank, use harmonic centrality. The, the closer you are to those seed set of sites, the better. And like you said, with digital PR, you've actually sat on the sites.

Paul David Truscott: Exactly.

James Dooley: So that, that's brilliant from a large language model point of view. Peter, how important is it nowadays to not just think about Google rankings, but also how, as a lead generation agency within the UK, that if now we're saying that digital PR can help you get seen by the large language models more, how important is it that people should be looking to make certain that they are not just being cited but being recommended within AI Overviews, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, because these large language models are also now generating inquiries for businesses as well?

Peter Victor Jones: Yeah. And I think the large language models generate a lower volume of inquiries than Google currently, but quality... A higher quality of inquiry. So a consumer who's done more research, they're closer to the decision. They trust in the recommendation of, of whichever AI engine they're, they're questioning. And also for Decision Engine Optimisation as well, where they've got two quotes from one company for a service and then from a competitor, and they're putting it into ChatGPT and asking it which company to go with, and people are explicitly trusting the decision of the AI engine.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for me, obviously I'm doing a lot of lead generation throughout the UK. We're in a lot of different markets with FatRank and within PromoSEO. We've now started to take the measures that we need to start making certain on our flagship brands that we're getting digital PR. If I'm being honest with you, I was always one of them because with the volume of sites what we had, I was always trying to be that little bit frugal and look at other ways of doing citations and doing guest posting and niche edits and stuff like that. But the minute I started to do the digital PR campaigns and I started to get that branded search and getting those trusted seed set of sites, what happened then was query augmentation. So Google started to augment and started to rank my website for a load more keywords than what it was previously because of the brand search demand. Like I said to Peter on the previous episodes, for anyone who should... Anyone who wants to get a Google Knowledge Panel, check out the link in the description and how we've been using digital PR to get a Google Knowledge Panel. Which, if you can get it for the lead generation company but also the founder of the lead generation company, both of these tied together, again, you're starting to do an entity-based algorithm. You're connecting these dots online, and this is what digital PR campaigns can do, especially if you're looking to grow more leads within the UK. Ben, Paul, Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Ben Nicholls: Thanks, James.

Paul David Truscott: Thank you.