It is pretty hard to build a brand without public relations. Especially, in modern days when businesses have moved their “brainchild” to the online world.
Digital PR has nothing in common with billboards and press comments. It revolves around “digital” things. Where SEO comes in the first place.
In this guide, you will find out everything about digital PR.
Let’s start!
The Essence of Digital PR
Digital PR represents a set of strategies marketers use to boost brand awareness in the digital space. The main point of digital PR is to make your brand memorable.
Digital PR is another form of marketing that suggests a strategy based on the company’s requirements and goals. Digital PR strategy combines different techniques like content, stories, and data promotion. The end goal is to deliver results that would meet the requirements of the overall marketing strategy.
What is the importance of Digital PR?
Digital PR has lots of benefits that will help your brand and the entire business strategy. For example, it helps drive more traffic, attract new leads, acquire new customers, and promote social media engagement.
When it comes to digital PR, people tend to confuse it with link building. However, digital PR is an individual marketing direction that goes hand in hand with SEO. Nevertheless, don’t confuse digital PR as one of the SEO tactics.
Digital PR complements SEO. It improves the E-A-T of the brand and helps with building high-quality backlinks.
Are there any goals that digital PR has?
Yes, digital PR has four main goals:
Brand coverage has always been a huge part of brand awareness. And no matter whether it is in a traditional or digital sense. It always attracts your target audience and helps get new customers.
Assume that your company has just entered the market. Your first step should be creating an online presence. It will help your audience find out about your company, your company’s values, and the way you want them to accept the brand.
- Create strong relationships with journalists
Journalists can help a lot in terms of building awareness for your brand. They create content mentioning you as a niche expert along with your brand. The only issue is to build relationships. Journalists are always busy. However, if you get lucky, they will start publishing content on high-authoritative sites with your brand mentions.
You are already aware that public relations have a tight connection with an SEO strategy. In most cases, SEO means link building. But not simple links from the guest post that nobody reads. The links that you can get from content with a high level of traffic and social shares.
Benefits of Digital PR
Now, let’s look at what benefits public relations have in detail.
Practice proves that one of the priority marketing goals is acquiring more leads and sales. These leads should be related to your target audience. And PR helps with getting your brand in front of the right people.
To put it simply, when you release a new product, you will have more chances to get new potential customers thanks to your PR activities.
- Build more authoritative links
From an SEO perspective, digital PR allows you to build backlinks across high-authoritative sites. And the majority of these sites are news related, like BuzzFeed, The Telegraph, Forbes, etc.
By building links on such websites, you will be able not just to make your site’s backlink profile stronger but make your brand stand out from the crowd.
- Acquire backlinks that your competitors can’t replicate
Keep in mind that it is hard to replicate links built with the help of digital PR in contrast to the links built using traditional link building.
In other words, if your competitors try to get a backlink from the same site, it doesn’t mean they will succeed. The thing is that their service might not be chosen by the journalists.
- Become an industry expert
It goes without saying that a well-designed site can gain some trust within the niche. People like it and visit it regularly. Sometimes it can be a reason to become your customers.
However, actions speak louder than words. Therefore, try to become an industry-leading expert. It will help build trust between you as an expert and your target audience. Eventually, digital PR allows you to speak to your audience directly and promote your product.
Does digital PR have any negative aspects for your business?
Nothing is perfect. Digital PR is not an exception to the rule as well.
Let’s see the downsides of digital PR:
- High level of competition
Public relations tend to be a highly competitive field. For example, earned media (when you provide some journalist with your expert insights) allows you to get published on a trusted resource quite fast. But dozens of other experts would like to use the same opportunity as well.
Consequently, you must be ahead of time if you want to win this kind of competitive game.
- Follow the constant changes
You already know that SEO is in perfect step with digital PR. Thus, you should keep an eye on the changes that happen in the SEO industry.
You can only guess what new algorithm update Google is going to release. Therefore, some SEO tactics might not be actionable anymore.
From this perspective, it makes sense to enrich your SEO tactics to stay afloat.
To summarize, digital PR has some drawbacks that you should take into account. Besides, there is no guarantee that you will get positive results.
To make your digital PR strategy effective, use the next tactics that will help.
Digital PR Tactics to Use
You know the digital PR background, and its pros/cons. Now, it is time to review tactics that work.
- Earned media
Earned media is a method when a journalist wants to write a piece of content and include some expert insights within the post. HARO is a good example of how it works.
How to get lucky with this tactic?
Share unique, actionable, and professional pieces of advice with journalists. For example, if some journalist asks to share tips for a job interview (while you are an HR expert), you should share some secret recipes but not ordinary tips from Google.
- Data-driven campaigns
Journalists are fond of data-type content.
Thus, if you run various research and collect data, journalists might be interested in your insights. Especially, journalists like data that you represent visually – infographics, charts, schemes, etc.
- Newsjacking
Newsjacking requires you to monitor news stories intensively. Once you find hot topics, you should jump on them and share your comments.
It is an actionable way to get your brand noticed by the audience.
You can start by setting up Google Alerts to get the latest notification on the topics you are interested in. It will help you react right off the bat and send your expert comments.
- Creative campaigns
Journalists do not just “hunt” the data-driven information. They love creativity as well. Besides, campaigns that include creative stunts or bold visuals capture the audience’s attention massively.
For example, the company Tailor & Hart launched a digital PR campaign that promotes a diamond Haribo ring.
The result of the campaign was impressive – 8,5K people visited the landing page. And 40 visitors bought a ring for £25K.
To Conclude
Digital PR is an actionable weapon that helps with establishing your brand and gaining more authority within the niche. Plus, it works closely with SEO to power up a backlink profile of the site.
Don’t hesitate to use suggested digital PR tips in practice. They work like a charm.
If you think the post lacks more information, feel free to share your ideas in the comments.
