Glass Digital
Glass Digital is an SEO and digital marketing agency based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The company specializes in helping businesses to improve their online visibility, and puts a focus on transparency, so their clients know exactly where their money is being spent and when. Here, Creative Director Jonathan Birch outlines how BuzzSumo has helped the business to get results.
Jonathan Birch
Glass Digital
We hear that you use BuzzSumo at Glass Digital to support ideation for your agency pitches, what part of the platform do you find the most creative inspiration from?
Here at Glass Digital, we definitely get the most use out of BuzzSumo’s Web Content Analyzer. Our outreach team in particular will use this tool to get an idea of what kind of content is already out there about a certain topic. This allows them to spot where there might be a gap in what’s being talked about and can also give them some inspiration when it comes to how our clients can contribute to a specific conversation.
It can also be really helpful when it comes to seasonal ideas, or topics that are linked to the likes of awareness days. A few weeks ahead of time, we’ll look into what has been covered in previous years, and we can then use this as a starting block to decide what kinds of articles we want to pitch now.
Finally, our outreachers will often use BuzzSumo to look for seasonal gift guides. If these have performed well, we’ll typically expect the same sites to publish a similar piece the next year, and we’ll want to ensure our clients are part of them. This allows us to be proactive and pitch our clients’ products for inclusion way ahead of time, which gives us a much better chance of securing a space.
Once you have got your idea, how do you go about refining that concept?
Once our outreachers have come up with an idea using BuzzSumo, there are a number of ways in which they’ll refine it before writing their pitches. First, they’ll look for similar pieces that have already been written and published to ensure we’re not just going over well-trodden ground. This means, even if they pitch a topic that has already been covered online, we can make sure we’re always offering a different perspective and some completely unique points. This means our clients
always bring something new to a conversation.
They’ll also look for the most up to date information and stats, which will be included in their pitches and the resulting articles. This means, even if we’re covering a subject that people have written about before, our content is always fresh and unique.
What kind of clients do you find this process most valuable?
We use BuzzSumo to come up with outreach and content ideas for all of our clients, but it tends to work best for those who are B2C. Industry-focused content doesn’t always perform as well when it comes to the likes of social shares, so the tool can’t always give us an accurate picture of how valuable a piece of B2B content is going to be. But it works wonders for finding more B2C content like gift guides, interior design guides, and fashion advice.
How do you track the success of your work using BuzzSumo and other software in your MarTech stack?
We’ve built and recently launched our own reporting tool, which allows both our clients and the team here at Glass Digital to track how our work is performing. This primarily shows how our clients’ on-site content is doing, and outlines how many visitors a particular page gets, how long people spend reading a specific article, and how our articles are ranking for the keywords and phrases we were targeting.
We’ve only been using it for a couple of months, but it’s made it incredibly easy for us to assess all of our content at regular intervals and tweak it where necessary, which means our results are better than ever.