Earning Editorial Roundups and Affiliate Placements with Performance PR

Is paying your PR agency per placement a good idea? Short answer - no. Paying per placement may sound like a good idea...but it rarely is beneficial to anyone! 🙅🏻♀️ While some brands aren't ready to commit to hiring a PR agency full-time, paying an agency only when coverage lands usually doesn't work for the agency, the media, and ultimately, not the brand. Why? There's a few reasons! 🛑 A Solid Strategy Can't Be Developed Securing placements isn't an agency's only job - they use their insight and relationships to develop a comprehensive communications strategy that builds brand awareness and supports positioning. When they're contracted only to secure placements, they don't have the time or bandwidth to create a meaningful strategy that ultimately supports the brand. 🛑 Opportunities Are Often Missed If an agency works on the model of only being paid when coverage is secured, they may not go after loftier, more time-consuming placements. Additionally, brands that pay per placement may get put on the back-burner for clients that pay on retainer. 🛑 You'll Have Less Insight Into Metrics An agency won't have as much time to do in-depth reporting (if any at all) if it's not part of their scope. As such, the brand won't be getting insights into metrics surrounding coverage, as well as which messaging/hooks are working and which aren't. Have any more questions on securing media coverage and why we don't encourage P2P? Drop 'em below!

Prospective Brand owners ask us all the time: “How do I get my product into more editorial roundups?” Usually, the answer isn't that the product isn't good enough. The media landscape has changed. Editors are evaluating products differently. Affiliate economics matter. Existing editorial authority matters. Your positioning matters. And increasingly, the coverage you earn can influence something brands weren't thinking about a few years ago: Whether AI recommends you. Ask ChatGPT: "What's the best vitamin C serum?" Or: "What are the best beauty products on Amazon?" Where do those recommendations come from? AI systems don't simply take a brand's word for it. They look for third-party authority and trusted sources that validate which products deserve to be recommended. That's one reason we've evolved what we do at Push The Envelope PR beyond traditional media relations into what we call Visibility Intelligence, connecting earned media, affiliate PR, digital PR and AI discoverability. We just published a guide explaining how brands can increase their chances of getting into editorial roundups, “best of” lists and gift guides, and why those placements are becoming even more valuable in the AI-search era. Read it here: https://lnkd.in/dgKdAwji

The best marketers won’t just run ads in the future. They'll be the reason AI recommends your brand. For most of the last decade, that job of a performance marketer had a simple shape: Pick the channel (Google ads, Meta ads, TikTok ads), run the test, report the return (ideally, most customers for the least spend). It didn't require understanding the whole business, but the ad platforms. That is changing fast. The cost of buying a customer through ads has gone up every year, and the return has gone down. So you can't just spend more. At the same time, a growing number of shoppers are skipping ads altogether. They ask AI directly for a recommendation and buy what gets suggested. That is not a paid channel, and no one can buy their way into that recommendation. The only way in is trust: reviews, reputation, and being visible in the places AI actually looks. So the performance marketer's job just got bigger. They can no longer just ask "which ad performs best." They now have to ask "where does our next customer actually come from?" and "Is it still an ad?" That question pulls them into trust and discovery, whether they were hired for it or not. In a few years, I think the best performance marketers will be the ones who treat trust and visibility as media, the same instinct they've always had, aimed at a different set of channels. The people already asking the bigger question are the ones who will be running the whole growth function, not just the ad account. Would AI recommend your brand right now? #marketing #digitalmarketing #ai

The days of loud, interruptive advertising are officially over. Marketing isn't getting harder, but It's getting more honest. For years, "more" was the whole strategy; more ads, more channels, more content. Today’s market doesn't want to be sold to but it wants to be connected to. Buyers now skip the ad, skip the website, and go straight to the people and platforms they already trust. So, if your marketing strategy still relies on the old playbook, you're likely shouting into an empty room. The most successful brands right now are shifting their focus to 5 critical areas: 1. Trust beats reach: recommendations outperform advertising and answers happen before the click. So, you want to ensure that show up inside the feed, not just at the end of it. 2. AI drives execution, not strategy: Companies are using data to deliver hyper-targeted experiences at scale. Meaning, even if AI drives the execution, judgment still has to be human. 3. Conversion beats traffic: You will have to fix the leaky bucket before buying more water. That's why might want to partner with micro-influencers or Partner with niche creators who hold deep community trust. 4. Real employees beat polished brand accounts: focus on hiring for decisions, not just tool knowledge None of these are exotic. They're a return to something simple: be useful, be findable, be honest about who you are. The teams that win this year won't be the ones running the most campaigns. They'll be the ones who picked two or three of these and actually built around them. Which one is your team furthest behind on? Curious what's on people's minds — drop it in the comments. #Marketing #DigitalMarketing #B2BMarketing #MarketingStrategy #2026Trends #BusinessGrowth #ContentMarketing #MarketingTrends

Google is killing how Search ads used to work! ↳ One skincare brand cut CPC by 52%. 90% of brands haven't noticed it yet 👇 Google is quietly replacing Dynamic Search Ads with AI Max in early 2026. Most brands haven't heard of it. Here's what it does: - Read your entire website. - Finds searches you never bid on. - Rewrites ad copy in real time. The early results are wild: → Skincare brand: CPC from $2.40 to $1.15 in 8 weeks → Supplements brand: 4x ROAS on 6 old SEO blog posts Same account. One setting turned on. AI Max in 2026 is where PMax was in 2022. The brands that learned it early got a 12-month head start. The ones that waited paid for it. The same window is open right now! I built the full AI Max Playbook for eCom brands: 1. What AI Max actually does 2. Why Google is pushing it hard 3. The 3 real use cases that work in 2026 4. The 5 settings you have to get right 5. Weekly optimization routine Full launch checklist One setting. That's the whole shift.

"Remember, the goal of positioning is to create and occupy a space inside the target customers' head." I read that line in the great business book Crossing the Chasm years ago and circled it in my paperback copy. Geoffrey Moore wrote (and italicized) it in 1991. It still holds true. The importance and work of positioning hasn't changed. What has changed is how we talk about it. Currently search engines are giving way to answer engines, and SEO is bowing to AEO. Every few years we get a new acronym and treat it like a new discipline. A new channel doesn't equal a whole new world. Your target customers still have heads and brains that need to receive information, process it, and decide it's true before they'll buy anything from you. No algorithm update changes that mechanism. This is where it's really hard to get it right. The moment a new channel shows up, teams rewrite content for it: new keywords, new formats, new FAQs to rank in AI answers, before doing the harder work of deciding what space they actually want to occupy in that customer's head. Targeting and engagement come first. Messaging comes second. Creative, including the channel content, comes third. AEO is a creative layer decision. Positioning sits upstream of it. If you skip that order you're optimizing distribution for a message that was never positioned to begin with. The channels will keep changing. The valuable work is still occupying space inside the target customers' head. #Positioning #GoToMarket #MarketingStrategy #B2BMarketing #CrossingTheChasm #FractionalCMO

If you are looking to get onto the shopper’s shortlist, prepare for an interrogation: Do your claims stack up? Is your product worth the money? Who does it better? WPP’s research among 2,500 Australians already using AI to help make purchase decisions suggests plenty of shoppers are already are asking those uncomfortable questions. Two-thirds had used it to check an advertising claim, while one in four said it completely changed their intended decision. And while a familiar name might get a brand into the conversation, it won't spare them from the difficult questions. For marketers, the awkward question is how much of that conversation they can influence, or even measure. WPP’s Daniel Benton and Catherine Wolkers argue that brand building still matters, alongside the product information, reviews, expert coverage and creator content that can inform AI answers. Their advice is to keep the differentiation while answering the questions shoppers actually care about. With trust potentially built in one place and the sale completed somewhere else, the dashboard recording the final click may tell only part of the story. Andrew Birmingham 🕵️♂️reports https://lnkd.in/ghumfizH

The biggest change in marketing right now isn’t AI-generated content. It’s where customers are starting their research. For years, the playbook was fairly predictable: Someone sees an ad → searches Google → visits a website → compares products → buys. That journey is changing. NIQ reported last month that 74% of shoppers now use AI for product discovery, while 20% already use AI somewhere in the shopping process. And there’s another number I find even more interesting. Shopify’s Q1 2026 commerce data found that visitors arriving from AI sources converted at nearly 50% higher rates than organic search visitors. AI-referred orders also had 14% higher average order values. That changes the question brands should be asking. It’s no longer just: “How do we rank on Google?” It’s becoming: “Will AI recommend us when someone asks what they should buy?” That is a very different marketing problem. A brand can have a beautiful website, thousands of followers and a healthy ad account, but still be almost invisible inside AI-driven discovery if its products, reviews, brand mentions, comparisons and information aren’t clear enough for these systems to understand. And this is happening while advertising itself is becoming more concentrated. WARC forecasts global advertising spend to reach $1.30 trillion in 2026, with almost 80% flowing into retail media, paid search and social platforms. So I think the old separation between SEO, content, social media, PR, influencer marketing and paid advertising is becoming less useful. They all contribute to the same thing: How easily can a customer discover, understand, trust and choose your brand? That’s what modern customer acquisition is starting to look like. The brands that win won’t necessarily be the ones producing the most content or spending the most money. They’ll be the ones building the strongest digital footprint across the places where customers — and increasingly AI — go to make decisions. That’s a much bigger opportunity than simply “optimizing for AI.” It’s about becoming the brand that gets recommended. #DigitalMarketing #AI #CustomerAcquisition #Ecommerce #SEOStrategy #MarketingStrategy #PerformanceMarketing #BrandStrategy

For years brands optimized for search rankings and social reach. Now they also have to ask: what does AI think we’re known for? That pulls PR, editorial, reputation and discovery much closer together than most org charts are built for. https://lnkd.in/g3_9NUUD

SEO is dead. PR is dead. Media is dead. AI changes everything. Or does it? For Conor Bant, our Head of Media & Performance, one word sums up B2B marketing right now: conflicting. There’s no shortage of strong opinions about where the industry is heading, but the reality is, nobody knows exactly what comes next. Conor joined Chloe Addis on B2B Marketers: Off The Record to dig into that uncertainty, from the real impact of AI and LLMs on search behaviour, to changing paid media performance, increasingly complex B2B buying journeys, and why brand, demand, PR and performance shouldn’t be treated as separate silos. They also get into where marketers should focus when budgets are squeezed, why tighter targeting can beat spreading spend too thinly, and the importance of looking beyond individual channel performance to understand what’s actually influencing an opportunity. 🎧 Listen to the full episode: https://lnkd.in/ePXuaM5c