How to Get the Most Out of Your Digital PR

Digital PR is an online marketing strategy used by businesses to increase their online presence and overall brand reputation. Digital PR agencies build positive media relations through networking with journalists, bloggers and influencers. This includes sending online press releases to gain high-quality backlinks and social media mentions to improve a brand’s or business’ Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). 

Digital PR helps you to reach your target audience by gaining media placements on websites they read, featuring guests on podcasts they listen to or working with brands with a social presence that your audience subscribes to. Ultimately, digital PR positively impacts a website’s search engine visibility and ranking. 

A good digital PR strategy can effectively communicate brand values, build or resolve a company’s reputation, especially in crisis management situations, as well as provide any updates on the company, product or service. These messages will be conveyed strategically, generating relevant backlinks from credible sources to drive traffic to your site which in turn will enhance authority, brand awareness and reputation. 

Define your goals and objectives

It is impossible to build a good strategy without knowing what it is you’re trying to achieve. For any good PR strategy, it is important to keep these objectives in mind:

• Increased brand awareness: When a brand launches a new product or service it won’t mean anything if no one knows about it, hence the need for publicity when launching an e-commerce business, product or service. With good PR, you can make your content more visible to the people who matter within the target industry. 
• Improved SEO: In order for any SEO campaign to succeed and get you to the number one position on Google, digital PR is a necessity. This is due to things such as brand mentions, keywords and backlinks provided by PR coverage.  
• Building high-quality backlinks and driving organic traffic: Quality backlinks refer to the links obtained from trusted websites, supported by users and search engines. If you’ve got valuable content with credible sources in it, more users will read it and therefore increase your search rankings. 

The clearer you are with your goals, the better results you will achieve. 

Know your target audience and target media

In order to plan a good PR strategy, it is vital that you know exactly the types of people who will be consuming your content, whether it’s B2B or B2C. A useful tip is to create detailed personas for your target audience. These will include information such as their gender, age, jobs, income, family life, hobbies and interests. Once you have done this, it will be much easier to tailor your content to make it more relevant to them and their needs. 

Once you know your target audience, you’ll have a better understanding of the type of media they’re more likely to consume. Thus, you’ll need to create a target media list, ranging from online publications to journalists to bloggers and influencers. Regardless of the type of digital media you’re targeting, you’ll need to consider who it is you need to get in touch with. For example, if you’re targeting an online publication is there an editor or writer who specialises in your particular topic?

Conduct a competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is useful to find out how your competitors are performing. Carrying out a competitor analysis will tell you what ideas have already been used, what has worked and what hasn’t worked so well. Using this information, you can then tweak your PR strategy to get the best outcomes. 

For example, if your competitor achieved over 50 strong backlinks, you would need to create a goal of achieving over 60 stronger backlinks. Also, knowing which websites are linking to similar content from your competitors to the type you’re producing will encourage you to build media relationships with these websites as it is likely they will link to your content as well.

Content ideation and creation

You’ll need to allow time to brainstorm ideas and angles for your content. Having detailed your goals, target audience and media and competitor analysis, you should have a good idea of the sort of content that will be most effective. Once you have a list of ideas, prioritise them based on which ones are more likely to grab people’s attention and then research them further. 

Once you have an idea you’re confident with, you’ll need to get into the nitty-gritty of content creation. This includes drafting and redrafting to get the angle and tone on point. You should feel as though your final draft gets your point across clearly and concisely and to a high standard.

Have an effective pitch

An effective digital PR strategy should be both proactive and reactive. If you start by building an editorial calendar consisting of topics that your audience is interested in, you can use these topics to ensure your content is relevant to proactively pitch to your target media. 

In addition to proactive pitching, you should also look for opportunities to provide reactive content and comments. A good way of doing this is to identify the key publications you want to be seen in and read them daily. Another good method is to set up Google Alerts for your chosen topics so that you’re always aware of when and where they’re being talked about. 

Measure your success

Continuously evaluating your strategy against your objectives to adjust where necessary will make your strategy as effective as possible. Regularly reflecting on the results you’re getting from your strategy will allow you and your team to pinpoint what worked and what didn’t work as well so that you can brainstorm new and better ideas moving forwards. 

Today, good PR has never been more important. By blending the classic public relations approach with creative campaigns, we can create a strategy that works to achieve your goals.

If you’d like to know more about how a PR strategy could help you and your business, say hello!