The ultimate digital pr guide to successfully making your brand stand out from the crowd!
Building a brand wouldn’t be complete without considering and integrating effective digital public relations into the equation. Times may have changed, but the necessity of having effective public relations hasn’t.
Digital PR is much more than dealing with problems or issues when they arise. Effective digital PR also incorporates seamlessly into your company’s SEO plan when done effectively.
In the following guide to effective digital PR, we’ll focus on:
What Is Digital PR?
Why Is Digital PR Essential to your Organization?
What Are the Goals of an Effective Digital PR Plan?
What Are the Benefits of Digital PR?
Five Effective Digital PR Tactics that Work!
Are you looking to improve the way your company communicates with customers and other businesses? Check out The Dangers of Speaking Too Corporate for Your Audience for a comprehensive breakdown of effectively getting your message across in a way that suits its intended audience.
What Is Digital PR?
Digital PR is one of the promotional tactics that’s utilized by both public relations experts and marketing professionals worldwide. When it’s done right, digital PR combines traditional public relations tactics with today’s digital landscape to successfully promote and boost brand awareness for businesses, companies, and brands.
The Digital Marketing Institute defines digital PR as:
“Digital Public Relations (PR) is a strategy used to increase awareness and visibility of your brand using online channels. Digital PR is similar to traditional PR, but it offers the opportunity to reach more people in a measurable and targeted way.”
The simple goal of digital PR is to stay ahead of the curve and position your brand or business as a market leader.
Like all marketing efforts, digital PR should have a clearly defined strategy that is based on your organization’s goals. It will combine marketing techniques such as stories, content, and data to deliver results that best suit your marketing goals.
Currently, according to Statista, the global PR market is worth over 97 billion USD, and that number is expected to rise in the coming years.
Why Is Digital PR Essential to your Organization?
Along with improving brand awareness, digital PR also boosts organic website and social media traffic, leads, and sales, all while increasing brand social engagement.
“Digital marketing is not the art of selling a product. It is the art of making people buy the product that you sell.” – Hecate Strategy.
While some people try to lump digital PR into their SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the two are different, but they should be done harmoniously. It may not be an SEO tactic, but when it’s done right, your digital PR will complement your SEO efforts by establishing topic expertise and trustworthiness and creating high-authority backlinks.
What Are the Goals of an Effective Digital PR Plan?
So, by now, you’re probably asking, ‘Why should I invest my time and money into building a digital PR strategy?’ In this section, we’ll further explain why businesses are investing heavily in their digital PR strategy. These include:
Compliment and Boost Your SEO Strategy
Increase Brand Coverage
Build Brand Awareness
Form Relationships with Media Partners
Compliment and Boost Your SEO Strategy
The main priority of digital PR will always be to build your brand up, but the secondary benefits you achieve for your SEO efforts aren’t insignificant. Why? Backlinks. High-value links that will drive traffic back to your website, encourage engagement, and increase your brand search results.
Web pages with more backlinks, especially high-value backlinks, will appear higher in search engine results. And let’s be honest, nothing establishes your expertise in a particular area like being quoted by various high-authority websites.
For more information on backlinks, read Developing A Strong Backlink Strategy.
Increase Brand Coverage
Getting media coverage for your brand or business is always the highest priority of any public relations strategy, either digital or traditional PR. Getting an endorsement from a respected 3rd party media agency or company is an amazingly positive endorsement and advertisement for your company or brand.
Build Brand Awareness
When you first start your business, you’re a small fish in a very big pond. It’s hard to make your business stand out from all of the already established businesses, especially online, with thousands of new websites popping up every day.
You need to quickly establish yourself as the ‘new kid on the block,’ define what separates you from the crowd, and why people should choose to work with you over other, more established brands. Doing this in a newsworthy way is the best way to create a longlisting impression, especially when you’re just getting started.
While making a name yourself, in the beginning, you need to keep that momentum going, and even the most well-established brands are continually looking for new opportunities to get their name in front of a broader audience.
Form Relationships with Media Partners
Building a relationship with a media outlet or journalist can be tedious, time-consuming, and challenging, but it’s one relationship that may benefit you for an extremely long time, ultimately making it well worth the time investment.
When building and establishing a relationship with journalists, traditional or digital, guard it with your life. When it comes time to do a press release, product launch, or a crisis-management scenario, those relationships will prove invaluable.
What Are the Benefits of Digital PR?
Now that we know why you should be pursuing digital PR, it’s time to look at the benefits and why it’s worth investing all that time and money into your digital PR strategy.
Some of the benefits of digital PR include:
Increased Leads and Sales
Boosting Link and Brand Authority
Build Trust
Increased Leads and Sales
Regardless of your business, more leads and sales are always going to be at the top of any priority list. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been in business for one week or one decade; leads and sales are the driving force behind most marketing campaigns.
Digital PR will get your brand or business in front of the people you need to be in front of. Whether it’s a new product or service release, seasonal campaign, or promotion, digital PR is the way to do it.
Boosting Link and Brand Authority
Commenting on an article or video as a guest post is one way to create a backlink, but how much value is it truly worth? Being mentioned in a leading media outlet is priceless. A truly valuable backlink will provide years of leads, and being mentioned in an article or video is hard for your competition to beat.
Build Trust
A well-written about us page or YouTube video is an easy way to tell everyone how great you are and may even gain you some industry trust, but getting an endorsement from a mainstream media publication is priceless.
Nothing tells potential customers they should do business with you better than an industry recommendation from a trusted source.
Five Effective Digital PR Tactics that Work!
Now that we know what digital PR is and its benefits, it’s time to look at some practical ways to implement a successful digital PR strategy for your brand or business. Five effective digital PR strategies are:
Reactive Public Relations
Proactive, Data-Driven PR Campaigns
Press Releases
Campaigns
Newsjacking
Reactive Public Relations
Reactive PR, or earned media, is when a journalist is writing an article and requires subject matter experts to give their opinion or comment in order for them to add an authority source to their article or story. It’s a great way to establish yourself as an industry expert while at the same time building trusted sources.
Proactive, Data-Driven PR Campaigns
People, including journalists, love some juicy data. It’s always great to slot some statistics into your article. Using this, if you have collected some interesting facts, stats, or data, you could proactively approach a journalist with an idea for a story. Not only is it a great way to get a mention, but it’s also an effective way to build relationships with journalists. One day, they’ll remember you and could possibly reach out to you for a comment or opinion on a piece they’re writing.
In a survey conducted by Cision, 68% of journalists revealed they preferred data, such as original research and reports, from PR experts.
Press Releases
Recently been awarded a prize or won an award? Merged your company or expanded to a new location? You’d be surprised what many media companies consider newsworthy. Sure, it might not be front page or headline news, but you’d be surprised at how much content media outlets churn out daily.
Campaigns
Journalists love data, facts, and statistics, but not every story has to be data-driven. You’d be surprised at how many major companies and brands are coming up with creative campaign ideas that are generating newsworthy buzz.
An excellent example of this is Taylor & Hart’s campaign in conjunction with Haribo, where they produced a diamond version of the candy valued at over $30k. This campaign made it into the mainstream media and drove almost 10k people to their landing page.
Newsjacking
This strategy will require you to be ready to go at a moment’s notice if you want it to be successful. When a new story related to your industry or expertise breaks, you jump on the news story and create a thought leadership piece or comment on the article. An easy way to do this for beginners is to set up Google alerts.
Make Your Brand Unmissable
Effective digital PR not only establishes you, your brand, or your business as an authority in your space, but when you do it right, it works effectively with your SEO strategy to boost your visibility and link building.
If you need help with your brand, business marketing, or social media, including blogs and articles, to improve your search rankings and website conversion rate, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 6° Media & Marketing. Our experienced and professional team not only understands the importance of online marketing, but we can help you grow your business organically.
You can contact us directly using the contact form, email us at info@6degrees.media, or even book a complimentary 30-minute phone consultation to discuss your needs.
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