Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond e-commerce marketing podcast, host Greg Shuey interviews Chris Porteous, founder and CEO of SearchEye, about the evolving landscape of online public relations and the role of automation in PR strategies. Chris shares his journey from finance to digital marketing, explaining how SearchEye uses technology to streamline PR processes for brands, particularly in helping smaller companies gain valuable media placements typically reserved for larger brands. The conversation explores the challenges of traditional PR, which requires significant investment and relationship-building, and highlights how automated PR can democratize access to top publications. Chris explains that although automation enhances efficiency, the importance of authentic relationships and tailored content remains crucial for PR success. They also discuss the impact of AI on outreach quality, the need for brands to invest in building their identity across multiple channels, and how PR and organic marketing are shifting due to changes in consumer behavior and media consumption.
Key Takeaways
- Automated PR for Accessibility: Traditional PR has been costly and exclusive, often out of reach for smaller brands. Automated PR platforms like SearchEye democratize access to top media placements, allowing companies with smaller budgets to secure valuable press coverage.
- Building Relationships Remains Essential: While automation can streamline outreach, forming genuine relationships with publishers is still crucial. Personal interactions and tailored content help brands stand out among the high volume of pitches.
- Targeted, Personalized Outreach: AI-based tools enable SearchEye to match brands with publications based on their specific requirements, improving the relevancy of pitches and cutting down time spent prospecting and negotiating with editors.
- Value of Brand-Building in a Competitive Market: Investing in brand-building across multiple channels is vital for long-term growth. Brands can no longer rely solely on SEO or paid channels; they need a strong, recognizable presence to maintain market relevance.
- Organic Marketing is Shifting with AI and Consumer Behavior: AI-driven outreach is leading to higher volumes of pitches, which can dilute quality and make it harder for brands to stand out. Additionally, the rising personalization in content consumption is shifting how audiences engage with brands, necessitating new approaches to organic marketing.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Chris Porteous LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-porteous-9594323/
SearchEye: https://searcheye.io/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey
Hey everyone, welcome to the seven figures and beyond e-commerce marketing podcast. Hope that everyone is having a fabulous day. So today’s topic that we are going to be diving into has not really been discussed on the podcast before. We’ve touched on it in a couple of places, but haven’t gone deep. So it should be a really fun discussion. It’s also something that I don’t know a lot about. And so I’m just excited from like a student standpoint to be able to learn from our guest today.
My guest today, his name is Chris Porteous, and he is the founder and CEO of a company called SearchEye. SearchEye helps brands grow through publisher collaborations, securing placements that no one else can. These unique placements not only help supercharge your SEO, but they’re also designed to build strong brand awareness that supports all of your other marketing channels. It’s one of the things that I really love about online PR, but that’s not all Chris and his team at SearchEye have set an ambitious goal to build an ad marketplace that’s layered on top of organic content, effectively helping anyone with an audience monetize their content. Pretty cool. I’m excited to hear a little bit more about that. Today’s topic, guess what? I mean, you can probably guess it’s going to be about online PR.
It’s going to be specifically about how to scale your brand’s reach with automated online PR. And yes, you heard that right, automated. I didn’t even really know automation and PR was a thing. Historically, PR has been known to take so much time and effort, making it incredibly costly and out of reach for a lot of brands, especially smaller brands. So we’re really here to unpack how automation can transform this landscape. It’s going to be an awesome discussion.
Chris, thank you so much for being with us today.
Chris Porteous
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show.
Greg Shuey
Cool, well, the first question I ask everyone is to take a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and really help them understand where you’re coming from, your personal story, and what has led up to where you are today.
Chris Porteous
Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to take a step back there, but it’ll all come together. My background is actually in finance. I had the opportunity of working at Goldman Sachs and UBS securities during my co-op terms. Loved it. That was all during the 08 recession, so not an easy time. During this time when I was trying to go into the job market after university, I created a macro finance niche Canadian blog. I was working with other publishers across the web that were in the finance space, pitching myself, doing it to get more audience and attraction with people hiring. I didn’t realize at the time that I was effectively doing SEO or PR. I grew that site to something like 30 to 50,000 visitors a month just on the back of writing content and getting other publishers to print it. I had no idea what I was doing.
Anyway, I got my first job after university in the structured finance space, creating or helping rate those fun asset-backed security products that everyone loves from the 08 recession. A few years later, a colleague of mine who I was working on another project with in a cardboard furniture space asked if I wanted to do SEO for a law firm he was doing PR for. At the time, they were a small local law firm in Toronto and now they’re one of the largest in Canada. I Googled “what is SEO” and thought, I could totally do this. This was back seven, eight years ago when you could work remote.
Greg Shuey
That’s awesome.
Chris Porteous
So when I started there, my background being in finance and ops, the first thing I did was first understand the space and then I built a scalable system. I hired an engineer out of India, which is all I could afford, to basically build a system to track all the publishers that I have relationships with. I was reaching out manually to other law firms, other blogs, mommy blogs, things like that, and put this into a database. From there, I started automating. I have 10,000 sites in my database; I can pick 10 a month that have specific specs and then task that all out in Asana, making it a task management system for link building and kind of automated the process. We had a writer doing the content, and we were producing 10, 20, 30 links a month, scaling that to the point that the law firm became number one in the space.
Greg Shuey
That’s amazing. That’s a wild story. Finance to marketing agency owner to software company. That’s cool.
Chris Porteous
It’s a transition, and I think anyone who’s gone through it, transitioning an agency to a product, would agree. We raised the pre-seed last year, and it’s been the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done because you have such a different culture. You have people on the agency side running in one direction and people on the product side running in another. Both sides don’t like each other. The product side is there to automate the agency, and the agency’s bringing in the money. It just creates a lot of friction.
Greg Shuey
Awesome. Very cool. I love hearing people’s stories and histories and how that all comes to fruition. Are you ready to jump in and talk about PR?
Chris Porteous
Absolutely. Let’s get started.
Greg Shuey
Cool. So for our listeners who are new to online PR, walk us through how traditional PR has worked, what that process looked like, and then help us understand how that has evolved over the last couple of years.
Chris Porteous
Yeah, absolutely. PR is going through the same timeline as other industries. Think of tax or hotels; they had a monopoly in local markets, but that changed with platforms like Airbnb. PR has always been an exclusive product, often only available to well-financed companies. Think of the Mad Men days with big budgets out of New York, fancy suits, and agencies charging 10, 20, or 30 thousand a month without guaranteeing results. So, for smaller companies, PR wasn’t always a great investment.
Greg Shuey
Absolutely. And that takes a lot of time and effort, right?
Chris Porteous
When we looked at this, we wanted to democratize PR. Our goal was to make it accessible for anyone to work with publications. We focused on the automation of the outreach process, including prospecting, email pitching, and back-and-forth communication. We worked with publishers to understand what makes a good match for them and then connected brands that fit.
Greg Shuey
For brands just getting started with online PR, what are some first steps they need to take to be prepared for this strategy?
Chris Porteous
PR is generally a luxury. It’s important to evaluate if PR is the right channel for you. Brands we work with usually have traction in other areas before they start focusing on PR, which is more about building a lasting brand.
Greg Shuey
Switching gears, how do you maintain high quality and personalization when automating this process?
Chris Porteous
The entire process involves understanding the goals and requirements for both brands and publications. With SearchEye, we’ve taken steps to streamline the prospecting process by directly matching brands to relevant publications. This eliminates a lot of the heavy lifting involved in outreach.
Greg Shuey
For brands that are just getting started, what are some of the biggest mistakes they make?
Chris Porteous
The biggest mistake is usually in the outreach side, especially with AI making it easy to send mass pitches. This can lead to hyper-competitive outreach where quality pitches get lost among hundreds of generic ones.
Greg Shuey
How do you help people stand out from those 500 AI-created pitches?
Chris Porteous
It’s about building relationships. Even with SearchEye, where we’ve automated many steps, relationships still play a huge role. Meeting publishers in person and building connections can make a big difference.
Greg Shuey
Can you share a case study where automated PR boosted a brand’s reach?
Chris Porteous
One brand started small and gradually increased their investment as they saw positive returns. They achieved around a 200x increase in traffic over two years by leveraging PR and SEO.
Greg Shuey
Looking to the future, where do you think audiences for brands will come from?
Chris Porteous
Organic marketing is changing, but the search space is growing. Big brands have an advantage because they’re more visible. Small brands can succeed, but it requires more effort.
Greg Shuey
Any final thoughts?
Chris Porteous
PR is becoming more accessible, and brands can start small to test if it’s the right channel for them without needing a massive budget.
Greg Shuey
Thank you, Chris! We’ll include links to SearchEye and your LinkedIn in the show notes.
Chris Porteous
Absolutely, thanks for having me.
Greg Shuey
Thanks, everyone. Make sure to focus on a few key strategies to stretch your marketing budget effectively.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
