Expert Commentary PR: A Better Approach to Press Mentions

Most digital PR campaigns suck for brands earning 6-8 figures annually.

We’ve spent the past 2.5 years building something better.

My Issues with Digital PR

We’ve seen multiple clients spend $5-10k/month for PR services.

In most cases, the experience was the same:

The PR firm earned them mentions in 1-2 online publications per quarter. Once a year, they were featured in a tier-one online publication like Forbes, Business Insider, etc.

Investing $60-$100k/year for one Forbes feature and 3-4 miscellaneous publications seems ridiculous to us.

Sure, this investment can be justified by a brand with an 8-figure annual marketing budget. But what about everyone else?

The issue with most digital PR strategies stems from two sources:

1. Most PR doesn’t guarantee any form of results. They launch a campaign. You foot the bill whether it works or not.
2. Most PR is relationship-driven. Most businesses end up paying for the connections of a single PR specialist at a PR agency. If that specialist leaves, the PR agency is left scrambling to find a new specialist with new connections. You’re stuck paying the bill without results until that happens.

The result is an inefficient and unpredictable marketing campaign.

Our Approach: Expert Commentary PR

We built our Expert Commentary PR service to be the opposite of what most PR firms do.

We focus on helping journalists first and guaranteeing results for you.

We operate on three main principles:

1. You only pay if we deliver. With most clients, we launch quarterly campaigns with budget approval to secure a set number of links. If we only deliver 90% of those links, you choose whether we extend the campaign to deliver the final 10%, or give you a 10% refund.
2. PR should be able to succeed without relationships. Relationship-driven PR can work when agencies have hundreds of established relationships. PR services built on a dozen journalist connections are doomed to failure. If we build a relationship with a journalist, that will boost our success rate, but our process works whether or not we have established relationships.
3. We help journalists first. We monitor their needs and provide them with the expert insights they need to write stories.

What Does Expert Commentary PR Look Like in Practice?

We start by building a profile of your articles, podcast interviews, and existing content to capture your brand voice.

From there, we monitor the databases where journalists request quotes from subject-matter experts.

When a relevant request comes in, we ghostwrite a response in your voice and send it to the journalist.

When it lands, you see your name and brand appear in the publication. We track every pitch and link in a shared document so you can see our progress in real time.

Expert Commentary PR Results

In 2025 alone, we secured 72 links in tier-one publications for one client operating in the travel and insurance industry.

A few examples of media outlets we got them quoted in:

• Forbes
• Kiplinger
• Yahoo
• Fortune
• Newsweek
• Inc
• GOBankingRates
• NASDAQ
• Travel + Leisure
• Lonely Planet

Each of these press mentions plays a vital role in helping search engines and Large Language models to see the brand as more credible, and thus, a better business to recommend to customers than their competitors.

How You Can Take the DIY Approach to Expert Commentary PR

If you prefer the do-it-yourself approach to building thought leadership through press mentions, this is for you.

We’ll break this into a few segments:

How Can I Find Expert Commentary PR Opportunities?

There are dozens of platforms to consider. A few of our favorites for providing expert comments:

1. Qwoted
2. Help a Reporter Out (HARO) — formerly Connectively
3. MentionMatch (formerly Help a B2B Writer)

Outside of this, we’ve seen success in connecting directly with journalists in relevant industries on LinkedIn and other social media platforms (specifically by searching for posts containing #journorequest). Many journalists post regularly about stories that they’re looking to add expert quotes to.

What Should I Expect for Results (If I Do PR Myself)?

Let’s start out with goals and backtrack from there. With most clients, we generate 5 links/month. Managing the process yourself, I’d recommend starting with a goal of 1-2 links per month.

Our success rate on quotes provided to journalists in 2025 was 26%. That being said, much of it comes from higher success rates with several journalists our agency has built relationships with.

Our success rate in 2024, before building those relationships, was 14.3%.

So let’s call our success rate, without those relationships, closer to 15%. Managing the process on your own? Expect a 5-10% success rate that will improve with more practice.

How Can I Improve My PR Pitch Success Rate

There’s a lot of overlap in best practices for securing links with various platforms. We wrote about how to earn more backlinks from HARO here.

Use this as your starting point. I’ll add a few additional pitch recommendations to further boost your success rate.

1. Marketers: Use Audio Transcriptions to Get SME/Founder Responses

If you’re a marketer implementing this system to get another member of your team quoted, you’ll likely face a roadblock: your subject matter experts are busy.

Typing out a quote to a journalist pitch will likely be low on their list of priorities. Make life easier for them by asking them to record an audio response to the topic.

I find this particularly useful. Our Project Manager, Ed, spends an hour per week finding and sending me relevant requests to respond to.

I record a 3-5-minute audio response via Slack. Slack creates a transcript of the recording that we edit and clean up internally. Ed sends v1 of the written response to me that I review before sendoff.

Here’s an example of one of those pitches that we got quoted in: https://mintposition.co/blog/fractional-content-marketing/.

2. Test Credentials at the Top and Bottom of the Response

Chris Zacher and I go back and forth on this a lot.

For quick context, journalists will always ask for your name, job title, and other relevant info somewhere in your response. This is a great place to add a note explaining why you’re qualified to respond to this request.

We see mixed results when starting the response with those credentials vs. ending the response with those credentials.

Run internal tests of both approaches to see what works better for your team.

Conclusion

Expert Commentary PR gives 6-8 figure businesses a proven framework to earn features in the world’s leading publications.

Interested in having Intergrowth® earn you features in the world’s leading publications?

Contact us today to see how we’d help your business profitably and predictably grow your customer base through Expert Commentary PR.

PR FAQs:

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR is an online marketing tactic that combines public relations with SEO to earn media coverage in major publications, improving brand awareness and reputation.

What is Traditional PR

Traditional PR is a marketing strategy focused on managing a brand’s reputation and building visibility through offline media channels such as TV, newspapers, and radio.

What is Expert Commentary PR?

Expert Commentary PR is the process of providing helpful information to journalists that they can quote in their articles. The process creates a win-win situation. Journalists get insights from industry experts to make their articles more informative. Experts get featured in major publications.

Why Should I Invest in PR?

Press mentions provided three benefits for brands.

1. Press mentions play a large role in showing search engines like Google that you have a trustworthy brand. This plays a large role in ranking in search engines for keywords that your customers search for when they’re looking to make a purchase.
2. Press mentions offer legitimacy, especially to newer brands. You’ve probably seen a website that includes a callout on its homepage listing awards they’ve won and publications they’ve been featured in. Expert commentary PR allows you to create a section just like this on your site, listing the tier-one publications that have quoted you.
3. Press mentions play a large role in LLM recommendations. Similar to search engines, LLMs look at mentions of your name and your brand name in major industry publications as a trust factor. Earn a dozen relevant press mentions and watch your revenue from LLMs soar.

SCALE YOUR ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter

Δ

• URL
  This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
• Email*
• CAPTCHA