At its core, digital PR is a promotional activity which is used by marketers to help get a business in front of potential customers online. It can be a super powerful part of your business’ marketing mix, helping to improve your online presence and visibility in a measurable way. Unlike more traditional marketing where you directly promote a product or service, digital PR aims to promote a brand in a more subtle way.
The aim is to create a positive impression of your brand through brand awareness, utilising independent, unbiased, third parties to positively influence a brand’s target audience. Different techniques are employed to reach an audience, such as content marketing, influencer outreach and social media. Time to delve into the concept a bit more thoroughly.
Making Your Content Work Hard For You
Now you know what digital PR is, our attention turns to a very important question: how can you make your content work for you? Before a search engine lists content in their results page, it assesses it to ensure users are being provided with the most relevant content. Therefore, it’s imperative to create high-quality, original content as part of your PR strategy. Search engines want to reward content that has strong E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness). When it comes to trustworthiness, it can be measured by who’s sharing your content, how long people read your articles, how many people save your content, and what your bounce rate is. Brand mentions are also becoming increasingly important in the ranking systems alongside a wide range of other benchmarks, which aren’t disclosed to help protect the integrity of results.
What's Involved in Digital PR?
Digital PR is a vast area with a wide range of strategies. When building your plan, you should consider doing the following:
- Research and prepare online press releases,
- Build relationships with online journalists to generate online press coverage,
- Arrange business profiling and thought leadership opportunities,
- Organise online reviews and interviews,
- Ensure that press releases are supporting your organic optimisation efforts with relevant and genuine links. (The reason for this is twofold; it helps readers by offering useful links to more information, while also giving your search rankings a boost by securing high authority links to your website from high-traffic blogs and trustworthy news sites),
- Create reliable, unique, and authoritative online content to gain a trustworthy reputation and high-quality backlinks,
- Build relationships with influencers and top bloggers in your niche to obtain brand mentions on influential social media accounts and blogs.
Will Digital PR Help With SEO?
A focused and thoughtful PR campaign will not only establish your online identity and define what makes your brand unique, it should also encourage traffic to your website. When your business is mentioned online in relevant places, there’s a high chance that more people will head over to your website. It’s important to make sure your content is being published on high authority sites that will link back to your website, as this will help to improve your SEO ranking through association.
Will Digital PR Help Generate Business?
As your SEO ranking improves organically over time, your website traffic and leads should also increase. Because these metrics are measurable, you should be able to see a correlation between what you’re spending on activities and any associated increase in website traffic (and hopefully increased sales – assuming your website is working optimally; there is no point in raising awareness of your brand and driving traffic to a terrible website). Anything that’s directly responsible for increasing website traffic and conversions is valuable to a business and something worth paying for.
If you’re in need of a bit of help when it comes to building your digital PR strategy, contact the Victress team today. You can book a free consultation to talk through your brand’s goals and start laying the groundwork for a successful, well-rounded strategy.
