End-to-end outreach workflow
Table of Contents
- Always build multiple angles into a campaign so you have a backup if the lead story doesn’t land.
- Map your ideas against a press coverage vs. on-brand matrix before you commit to them.
- Check how many articles have been written about your topic in the last year — if it’s low, think twice.
- Ask yourself if you’d genuinely want to read the story before you pitch it.
- Get journalists in a room and ask them directly what they would and wouldn’t cover.
- Don’t over-promise on timelines — four to six weeks is a realistic runway for a solid campaign.
I feel like the ideas coming out of digital PR as an industry have gotten a little stale.
As competition ramps up and more agencies enter the space, now is the time to push more creative ideas and stand out.
However, there are still some killer agencies out there pushing the envelope.
Bottled Imagination is one of them.
But creative ideas need measurement or you’re just reaching vanity metrics.
So, I reached out to chat with PR director and co-founder Katy Powell to talk all about ideating, creating, pitching, and measuring creative ideas, from fake footballers to pickle-flavored protein shakes.
What makes Bottled Imagination so creative?
Katy Powell
Yeah, I think that tagline perfectly sums up our positioning in the market and why we launched the agency in the first place.
When we launched, we felt like there was a bit of a gap — kind of what you were just saying — around creativity within digital PR.
But there’s also a gap with measurement and ROI in traditional PR. So we feel like we sit perfectly in that sweet spot: we’ve got the ideas that traditional PR agencies have, but we bring the measurement side from digital PR.
I think what makes us creative is that we say yes more than we say no. I love being in a room with the team and just saying, “Go big, let’s try it, let’s go.” We’ve never been ones to put time parameters on ideation, because I think it’s so important.
We’re really trying to take ideas to the next level. A lot of agencies seem to stop halfway through a really good idea — they get to something amazing and then just stop. It’s like, why? Let’s keep going. Let’s go bigger. Let’s think across different channels. Let’s think more like an ad agency. Why are we limiting ourselves to traditional digital PR formats — maps, dream jobs, indexes, all that kind of stuff?
We can be thinking like an advertiser or a creative, but still bringing measurement to it as well.
That’s kind of how we launched and how our positioning came to be.
How do you mitigate the risk of big ideas potentially failing?
Katy Powell
Yeah, definitely. When we build our ideas, we’re very focused on making sure we’ve got multiple angles for everything we do.
So if we’ve got something that is really creative — like a stunt or a competition with a client, something a bit different — we’ve got something else going on alongside it. We might have data that provides an additional story, or we might have something that functions more as a backup angle, so that if the creative doesn’t quite land the way we expected — and it’s PR after all, we can’t guarantee anything will ever land — we’ve got those backup angles to support the original creative story.
We also stress-test ideas quite a lot and look at what’s been covered before.
Do we actually think it’s going to work?
Have we got proof that stories like this have worked in similar industries or similar kinds of campaigns?
That also helps with client sign-off, because you can say, “Look, we’ve seen this work before, and if this angle doesn’t land, we’ve got five others we can go out with.” It just helps us minimise that risk.
What are some of the key signals that an idea is actually worth doing?
Katy Powell
Yeah, I really feel like creativity and process don’t always go hand in hand.
I’m not a process person — you just come up with ideas and you’re like, “Yeah, let’s do it,” without quite knowing how you got there.
But we do have an ideation process we’ve put in place. We start with what we call a “theme analysis,” where we look at all the different topics surrounding the client that we might want to talk about. We use various tools to do that, and then we map those topics out on a kind of matrix — is this going to land in the press versus is it on brand?
That lets us plot out themes that we think will land but are also on brand, because relevancy is super key. We want to make sure we’re not straying more than a degree or two from the product and the brand. That also helps us stress-test whether a topic is going to work and whether the way it’s being discussed in the press matches the sentiment our client wants to project.
That can come up a lot — sometimes the way a topic is covered in the press just isn’t right for the client, and we decide not to go near that conversation at all.
Then we go away and build out those topics, thinking about formats and ideas we believe will work, because we’ve already done that initial “Is it press-worthy? Is this a viable topic?” check. Then, of course, we look at things like similar campaigns, backlinks, social reach, Reddit — similar to what you described.
The thing is, though, we don’t want to find a campaign that worked really well, reskin it for our client, and call it a day. We want to be coming up with things that are new. So we look at past campaigns for reference, but that wouldn’t be the foundation of everything we do.
So what makes a press-worthy idea?
Katy Powell
It’s a really hard one, because sometimes I’ve had campaigns in the brainstorm stage and I’m thinking, “This is an award winner, it’s going to be amazing,” and then nothing happens and you’re just like, “Oh god, am I even any good at this?”
I think that happens to everyone, and that’s fine.
But I think, like I said, the topic analysis is really important. With the tool we use, you can literally see that 10,000 articles have been written about one topic over the last year versus two articles about another. We can also look at this on a publication level — if we want to land in Vogue, for example, we can look at how Vogue talks about a particular topic, and then think strategically: okay, these topics are talked about in these publications in this way, so if we want to land there with this topic, we need to create something that fits.
We’ve also done things like journalist roundtables, which is an even better way to do this because you can literally ask, “We want to talk about this topic — would you cover it?”
And they’ll tell you. That’s so valuable. It’s hard to get journalists in a room, but we’ve done it a couple of times, and it’s great because you can make all the assumptions you like from tools and reading the press, but when you actually speak to someone and go, “Would you cover this?” and they say “No, because of X, Y, Z” — okay, it makes sense, I’ll never pitch that again.
So where we can speak to journalists, that’s gold.
If not, we rely on data as much as we can.
I also just think you can’t easily shoehorn topics into publications that don’t want to talk about them.
And at the most basic level, asking yourself honestly: is this something I would want to read? Do I find it interesting? That’s always a good test.
Is it more important to create ideas that are wide-reaching or get into key publications?
Katy Powell
Yeah, it depends on the strategy.
If link velocity is the goal, we’ll set a minimum DA that we’re counting and go from there.
I’m a strong advocate of different press releases for different kinds of audiences. We’re not a spray-and-pray agency — that’s not what we do. So if we feel something has mass appeal, we’re still going to target different people differently.
However, something we’re doing more recently with some clients is where velocity matters to an extent, but we’re actually looking to build niche links — on charity pages, .gov.uk domains, educational websites, rather than traditional press.
Those require completely bespoke strategies.
We did one a couple of years ago where we really wanted to land a link on quickfit.com because it was a really niche, relevant link for one of our clients.
We built a whole campaign just to get that one link, and we did get it. But we had to do a whole campaign for one link. From a link equity standpoint, it was absolutely worth it.
So it just depends on what your strategy is. Sometimes things are widespread and you’re sending them to a load of different journalists; sometimes you really want to get on that one publication and you’ll do whatever it takes to get there.
Can you tell me more about pickles and chocolate protein shakes?
Katy Powell
Yeah, random, I know! So we work with ProteinWorks — they’re a nutrition company with a lot of meal replacement shakes, protein shakes, that kind of thing.
We were originally on a more traditional digital PR and link KPI with them. We’ve since expanded that to social reach and organic search metrics as well, and now we’re even starting to look at how they appear in LLMs. It’s kind of expanded that way.
But that campaign — we wanted to do something in person and get journalists and influencers involved.
We did some consumer research, and it was actually inspired by this thing people do where they dip their McDonald’s fries into milkshakes.
I’ve seen it, never done it myself, not sure it’s for me. But we saw that and thought: people eat really weird combinations. So let’s do some consumer research and ask ProteinWorks’ audience — they’ve got a really engaged following — what weird food combinations they want to see.
We ran a social competition where people could win a year’s supply of protein by suggesting a flavour combination they wanted to see. We actually then created a whole line of these weird and wonderful flavour combinations.
But to take it another level, we organised a day with journalists, content creators, and influencers where we got them in to actually try making and tasting these weird combinations. Some of them were less weird than expected — the mango and chili one was actually kind of nice. The pickle and chocolate one… I’m not really a pickle person, but it was a great one.
Getting the journalists there physically increases the chance of coverage because they’re immersed in the session with you.
They get what the brand is about. It gives us a chance to talk about the brand even if they don’t end up covering that specific story — it’s still great for relationships. And from the client’s point of view, they got coverage from the data angle — here are the weird flavours people actually want — plus coverage from the in-person event, plus social content from the event that reached a good audience.
So we got loads of different things out of it. It’s just a fun campaign. I’m really passionate about the fact that PR is not just press. It’s social, it’s real life, it’s everything.
It’s bigger than just press.
Should all agencies consider social-driven campaigns—and still get links?
Katy Powell
Yeah, definitely, 100%. PR especially now — journalists are looking all over TikTok for their news, so you need to be doing things that are appearing on other channels as well.
The key is taking the client on the journey with you — and the journey for the user or customer who might encounter this thing in the real world. Maybe they scan a QR code and it takes them to a landing page that you’re also building links to. You have to connect the dots and make sure these offline activities can work online and digitally in a way that doesn’t feel forced.
Our best client relationships are the ones where we’re collaborating across more teams — their social team, their PR team, their SEO team. These kinds of events or stunts that involve the social team especially work really well, because then everyone is working toward the same goal together. Budget can be a consideration with bigger PR stunts, of course.
But I’d say we always ask our clients which campaigns they admire and who inspires them from a marketing perspective. Those conversations really help us work out whether there’s appetite for these more creative approaches, or whether the client genuinely just wants a straightforward digital PR campaign — which is absolutely fine too.
It all comes down to asking the right questions of the right people. So I’d say: go for it.
What are some challenges that come with creative campaigns, and how do you solve them?
Katy Powell
Yeah, I would say in general: give yourself longer than you think it’s going to take. Never over-promise. Be realistic with timelines, both with yourself and with the client.
It’s really easy to over-promise. We’ve all done it — “Yeah, we can turn around this massive campaign in three weeks, no problem.” And then you start and you realise you can’t, and everyone isn’t sleeping.
So I feel like being really honest with yourself and the client about what’s actually achievable is key.
We usually say it takes four to six weeks to run a campaign. We can do it faster — we’re working on one right now that I’m so excited about.
We did a video shoot this week, it’s for a charity, it’s going to be an amazing piece, and we turned it around in three weeks.
But that has been all hands on deck, and it required the client to be fantastic with sign-off. These bigger campaigns require that two-way relationship.
The initial planning phase is so important as well. When you’re pitching the idea, if you’ve already got a really clear sense of how it’s all going to work — a proposed roadmap, knowing you need sign-off by this date for it to go live on that date — you’re in a much better position. It should, touch wood, play out the way you want it to.
I’d also say: don’t over-complicate it. If you’re involving third parties like creators, that’s another party who can potentially introduce delays. It really does just come down to good planning.
Do you ever feel hindered by not having access to the right data?
Katy Powell
100%. We went through a phase where we kept falling back on surveys, and I’d think, “I know, they cost so much money — can we think of another way to get this data?”
Data is incredibly valuable but also really hard.
And with AI coming into play now, trust in data sources is being scrutinised more, because I had this idea once where we wanted to look at the walking distances to the toilets in Wetherspoons pubs across the UK.
They’re always miles from the bar, and we wanted to do a campaign around that.
The data challenge was that we’d need floor plans for every single one of these pubs across the whole country.
Then ChatGPT had just come out, so we asked it: “Can you give us the floor plans of all these restaurants?” And it said, “Yeah, no problem,” and gave us all these floor plans. We kept pushing and asking where the data was from, and it said something like “floorplans.com.”
We kept pressing, and eventually it admitted: “Actually, I just made that up.”
So I think people are using AI for that kind of thing, and it isn’t trustworthy — and that was a good example of us having a great idea and getting stuck at the data stage. We ended up not doing the campaign. There are a lot of good data sets out there, and we now ask clients from the onboarding stage whether they have internal data, because that’s a gold mine if they do.
Sometimes they can’t share it or we need to anonymise it, but we’ve got a few clients who are really into data themselves.
The challenge is often that they have the data but no one internally knows what to do with it or how to use it.
So we say, “Give it to us — we can look at it, we can find the stories.”
That’s the dream.
Do you use AI in your ideation process?
Katy Powell
Yeah, I feel like I might be controversial saying this, and maybe I’ll regret it in a year, but I’m not fully there with AI yet when it comes to creativity.
I don’t think it’s as good as a human, and I’m yet to see an idea from AI that’s better than one a team member could come up with.
Once you’ve got a good idea, AI can sometimes help you shape it — but you have to put something of value in to get something of value back out. I’d hope none of the team are just typing “come up with a creative idea for so-and-so” — it shouldn’t be used like that.
When you think about how AI works, it’s analysing loads of existing content and recombining it into something new.
So if we want to be coming up with genuinely new things, it’s probably not the right tool for that stage.
The one area where it has been genuinely great for us is mock-ups. When we have a really unusual idea and we’re talking it through with a client and they’re looking at us like, “What on earth are you talking about?” — we can quickly use something like Midjourney to generate images that show what the campaign could look like.
Obviously, it’s AI-generated and might not look exactly like the final thing, but it helps illustrate the story you’re trying to tell. So we’ve been using it more for creative mock-ups and scouting rather than for generating the initial idea itself.
Vince Nero
I’ve heard of a handful of agencies doing it that way. I love that. And yeah, we do the same with data visualisation — struggling with how to represent something, and my colleague Steven will say, “I just put this into Claude, check out how they’re presenting it.” Sometimes it just gives you a different angle to think from.
Katy Powell
Yeah, exactly. Wider than that, we don’t use AI all that much.
I do think data analysis is quite good — if you’ve got a data set and you want to save hours and hours of someone’s time analysing it, AI can help there.
But when it comes to writing press releases and that kind of thing, no. I think you can spot AI writing from a mile away, and I would hate for clients to come to us thinking we’re just pumping everything through AI — they’d leave.
I went to a conference once where someone described AI as your “clumsy assistant,” and I quite liked that framing.
It’s there, it’s helpful sometimes, but it’s not going to outperform you. It’s about finding the bits where it can save you time so that you’re freed up to do the things it can’t.
That’s how I’m thinking about it at the moment — maybe I’ll be eating my words eventually, but that’s where I stand.
Did you use AI image generation for your Jordan Rees campaign?
Katy Powell
So we actually didn’t use AI for that one — we did a real virtual shoot. That was about three years ago, so it was before AI image generation was readily available. It’s a good story though.
We had just launched and, obviously, we’d been making this big deal about creativity and about campaigns not being dead. We were entering a very saturated industry and we said to ourselves: we cannot launch with something boring. Our first campaign has to be good — we’d been talking about creativity the whole time, so we had to put our money where our mouth was.
We were working with a gambling client at the time.
Gambling clients can be quite difficult, because the press agenda around gambling is complex, and that was during Gambling Awareness Week. We looked at all the existing gambling awareness campaigns and found they were basically all the same — a celebrity in front of a camera saying, “Gambling can be harmful.”
That’s usually the message and they all look identical.
So we thought: what can we do to stand out?
We did some research and found that something like 70% of people who gamble don’t research their bets. We looked at where people get their betting information from — their friends, social media, wherever — and found people just don’t research.
So we thought: let’s test this. We created a fake footballer called Jordan Rees.
We hired a model, did a shoot with him — he’d never played football before, which was a challenge because he could barely kick the ball, but anyway. We built a landing page and worked with football influencers and football meme pages to build up hype around Jordan Rees, suggesting he was a serious contender for the next England squad.
Football fans were getting riled up, genuinely debating who this guy was and why he was being talked about for England. The football community is very passionate, which worked in our favour.
Then we drove people through to the landing page where they could find out more about placing a bet on Jordan Rees — and then they were hit with the message: “Jordan Rees is not real. Research your bets.”
It was essentially a funnel that drew people in with the hype and then educated them about gambling awareness.
One of the headlines we pitched was something like “5,000 people tried to bet on a footballer who doesn’t exist,” which let us be really clever with the messaging.
It was a really nice campaign.
It gave us a strong case study around ideation and creativity right from the very start, and it was a lot of fun. But yeah, it was a real shoot — it predated AI image generation.
Vince Nero
Yeah, I guess you could redo it all now using Midjourney or something.
Katy Powell
Way easier.
How do you measure campaigns, and do you go beyond counting links?
Katy Powell
Yeah, so we have different packages we work on with clients — all named after bottles, because that’s our brand.
The entry-level is “Pure Imagination,” which is for people who want to build links.
The KPI is links. We set a minimum DA, and we’re focused on high-quality links — we don’t build rubbish links for our clients.
Then the next tier is more of a planned package, where our Search and Insights team get more involved.
They’ll do more search consulting, look at organic visibility, and also start looking at things like LLMs — are we ranking in LLMs, and do we need to be thinking about owned media strategy and how that feeds into LLMs?
Then looking at ranking changes and so on.
Our full package — “Full Imagination” — looks at links, organic and search visibility, and social as well: reach, follower growth, whatever is most relevant for that specific campaign. It’s a more well-rounded strategy.
A lot of our clients still want backlinks, and we do think that’s a metric we’ll continue to measure.
But we’re also tracking brand mentions a lot more now, because we believe those are going to become almost as important as links going forward.
It also depends on who we’re working with.
Often we’re working with SEO teams, but sometimes we’re working with PR teams who want something completely different. So it really comes down to the onboarding process and understanding what their actual goal is. There’s no point telling a client you built 10 links if that doesn’t move the needle for them.
We actually call it “So What Reporting.” The whole framework is built around asking yourself “So what?” after every result. So you’ve got a link — so what? So you’ve got press coverage — so what? Because then you can have a meaningful conversation with the client about the actual value.
We’ve seen it before: you hit every KPI and still lose the client, because the work didn’t connect to what they were actually trying to achieve.
Is it leads?
Is it sales of a specific product?
What does the CEO actually want to hear?
What does the CMO care about?
We’ve framed our reporting around that question to get everyone on the team — from executives to account directors — thinking about the real value exchange and what we’re genuinely bringing to the client. It’s really helped our ROI conversations, because we’re able to attribute what we’re doing to the wider marketing goals of the brand.
Is there anything I didn’t ask that you wish we’d covered?
Katy Powell
I don’t think so.
I just want to say: think bigger than digital PR. I keep coming back to this idea of “digital PR versus PR” — because I feel like PR is PR. We’re all trying to do the same thing, just through different channels. It’s very easy for digital PRs to get stuck in a rut of doing what’s always worked, but why not think bigger and better?
Think like those advertising agencies and big creative agencies — because we can do that. And it will still work for search, if you think about it properly, think about the measurement you want to get out of it, think about what’s going to live online, and think about who you’re targeting.
We can be more clever and more creative.
So: don’t limit yourself.
That’s what I want digital PR to take from this.
Check out the BuzzStream Podcast
