Discovery
Discovery at Type A is not a creative brainstorm. It's a structured study of who the campaign needs to reach, which publications they read, and what kind of link a placement would need to leave behind to be worth the budget. We do this before anyone opens a doc.
Audience and keyword targets
We work with the in-house SEO team and the sales team to agree the personas, the territories and the keyword clusters this campaign exists to support. Coverage that doesn't reach those audiences is, for our purposes, not coverage — and we'd rather kill an idea than book a placement on a publication your buyers have never read.
Target link profile
Before we ideate, we agree the publications a link from would actually move the needle — for rankings, for referral traffic, and for buyer trust. That list goes in the SOW. We report against it every month, and we'll tell you when an angle is going to land coverage off-target so you can decide whether to fund it.
Brand-safety questionnaire
A short written questionnaire that captures what we can and can't do in your name — sectors to avoid, claims that need legal sign-off, regions that are off-limits, named publications you don't want a link from. It saves a fortnight of pitch-deck rewrites later in the cycle.
Ideation
Ideation is where most agencies fall over. They generate too many ideas, none validated, and ask the client to pick. We generate fewer, validate them with journalists, and bring back a short list with evidence behind each one.
Whiteboard ideation
A two-hour session with the strategist, the data lead and the outreach lead — the three people who'll actually run the campaign. We come out with eight to twelve angles built for programmatic-scale outreach, not one big-bet hero idea that depends on a single national outlet picking it up.
Data viability scoring
Every idea gets a confidence score on whether the data exists and whether we can get it in time. Client first-party data is a 1; a multi-source scrape with FOI requests and licence reviews is a 5. Anything above a 3 needs a written data plan before sign-off, with named owners and a date.
PR validation block
We email twenty journalists from the target list with the proposed headlines and ask which they'd cover. The angles that come back warm get budget. The ones that come back cold get cut, even if the client likes them — because the only opinion that earns a link is the journalist's.
Sign-off
Sign-off is where the work becomes a contract. The deliverable is the document the CMO takes to the board, and the document the senior outreach team uses to plan the next four weeks.
Validated headline list
A short written deck — not a 60-page strategy slide — with the angles that survived journalist validation, the proposed headlines, the data sources and the editorial hook. This is the document we ask the client to sign. If we can't say it on three pages, we don't understand the campaign yet.
Coverage forecast
A range — top, mid, bottom — for placements, links and referring domains, with named target outlets behind each tier. We forecast against the target link profile, not against any DR you can buy on a marketplace. Surprises get flagged in week one, not at the end-of-campaign review.
Written outreach plan
Who's pitching what, to whom, on which date, with which follow-up cadence. Finance gets the budget split by stage. The senior team gets the named owner per outlet tier. Nothing kicks off — no list-building, no press release — without this on the page.
Creation
Creation is the part most agencies under-resource. They write the press release and call it done. We treat the on-site page, the press kit and the methodology as first-class deliverables, because that's what turns coverage into a link your buyer trusts.
Press releases
A core release plus regional and angle variants, with fifteen minutes of customisation per outlet. Written, not spun. The journalist gets a story shaped for their desk — not a generic "national" pitch with a different intro and the same data table copy-pasted underneath.
On-site blog and methodology
A blog post on your domain with the full data set, the methodology, social embeds and a clean CTA. That's the page the link points to, the page that pulls the keyword cluster the campaign was built to support, and the page a fact-checker can land on at 5pm and verify in five minutes.
Press kit and assets
Embed-ready charts, an image pack at the right resolutions, expert quotes ready for attribution, and a one-line spokesperson bio. Coverage stalls when journalists have to chase assets the day before deadline — and the placements that fall through that gap are the ones you wanted most.
Outreach
Outreach is the easiest stage to outsource and the hardest to do well. We don't outsource it. The senior people who pitched the idea to you are the people emailing the journalists.
Prospecting
List building and sending sit on the same desk. We don't pay a junior to build a list a senior never uses. Three-hour blocks for fifty contacts, then straight into outreach. Sending is the priority, not list size — a list that doesn't get emailed is a cost, not an asset.
Outreach blocks
Three email templates — initial plus two follow-ups — with mail-merge fields for outlet, beat and angle. We don't blast scraped lists. Outreach goes to journalists who've covered something close to this story in the last 90 days, with a one-line reason in the opener that proves we read it.
Follow-up and ad-hoc data
Warm leads get ten focused minutes of follow-up each, including bespoke regional or sector cuts of the data when that's what unlocks the placement. Anything that takes more than an hour to produce is a scope conversation with the client — not a quiet favour that eats the week.
