Digital PR is one of the best digital marketing strategies that can boost your brand’s online reputation. It's the weapon many businesses are using to increase their brand visibility and if you are not yet deploying it as part of your marketing strategy, you may be missing out on a lot of opportunities to increase your brand awareness and organic search traffic.
In this article, we’ll be discussing everything you need to know about digital PR, and how you can get started with it.
Here we go!
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR is an online marketing strategy used by business owners and companies to build or increase their brand’s online presence. The main objective of a Digital PR campaign is to boost and maintain the online reputation of a business or brand.
Digital PR allows companies and businesses to share online publications that promote their brand in influential media outlets in order to increase their brand awareness, generate qualified referral traffic, attract high quality backlinks, and improve search engine ranking.
What Are the Types of Digital PR?
There are different digital PR strategies that can be used to create brand awareness. Here are the most commonly used ones.
- Online Press Releases: This involves sharing newsworthy content with influential media outlets in order to increase the credibility of your brand.
- Guest Posting: This involves writing and publishing content on other websites in your niche in order to attract referral traffic to your website.
- Influencer Marketing: This strategy involves partnering with social media influencers with large followers to increase your brand's visibility.
- Listing in Online Directories: This involves adding your brand’s website to an online directory in order to gain recognition and boost your website’s search engine rankings.
- Unlinked Mentions: This is a strategy used to find where your brand name is mentioned in a blog or news site, so you reach out to them to link the post to your website landing page.
Digital PR vs. Traditional PR
Traditional PR and Digital PR share one common objective, which is to increase brand awareness. The difference between these two is the effectiveness and mode of execution. Depending on your brand and your goals, you might want to explore both methods to see which one is right for your brand.
Now, let's see their differences.
1. Different Outlets
Digital PR and traditional PR use different channels to communicate with the audience. Traditional PR uses “old-school” channels like television, newspapers, radio, billboard, flyers, and magazines to reach the audience.
Digital PR uses digital channels to reach the target audience. Examples of digital PR information outlets include social media platforms, websites, blogs, and mobile apps. These are the modernized means of transmitting the information.
2. Interaction
When you promote your brand through digital PR campaigns, it's easier to receive feedback and engage with your audience. Digital PR gives more room for interaction. It's easy to receive instant feedback from your audience if you post on social media platforms or websites. They can easily comment on your post and share their opinions.
Traditional PR, on the other hand, doesn't give room for interaction. It's like a one-way relationship. If you reach out to your audience through newspapers or magazines, they just receive your message and don’t have the opportunity to interact with you or give feedback.
3. Success Measurement
With digital PR, it's easier to measure the success of your campaigns and how visible your brand is becoming. There are many digital tools like Hootsuite, Facebook Business Suite, and Sprout Social that you can use to track and manage your social interactions.
You’ll also be able to know which strategy is working and which is not so that you can restrategize accordingly.
Traditional PR does not have this advantage. It's harder to track how many people your campaigns or adverts have reached when you reach out to them through newspapers or radio. The least you can get is to predict the average number of people that read newspapers or listen to the radio.
4. Content and Messaging
Digital PR allows you to be creative and engage your audience subtly. The most reliable way to get engagement through digital PR is by creating quality content.
The goal of digital PR is to improve brand awareness and generate traffic. There are many available tools on social media and websites that you can use to create engaging content that would increase your brand visibility.
Traditional PR gives little room for creativity. The messaging is always direct and not too detailed because of its mode of transmission. For example, you can’t include every detail when advertising on a newspaper page because of limited space.
5. Audience Reach
Digital PR is more likely to reach a wider audience than traditional PR. Because the means of transmitting information is plenty, and people can share your content easily, it will reach more audiences than you had even planned.
Traditional PR however, cannot reach a broad audience because it does not offer sharing options and it is only limited to the people that come across the campaign on TV or in the newspaper.
6. Target Audience
It's easy to target your audience when using digital PR. You know where to find your audience, so you know where to post your content and what strategy to use.
Targeting your audience with traditional PR might be difficult because you don't know where your target audience is, you don't know who is reading your campaign in the newspaper or listening to it on the radio.
Benefits of Digital PR Campaigns For Your Business
Are you still contemplating whether or not to start digital PR for your business? Well, let's look at some of the ways a good digital PR campaign can benefit your business.
1. Brand Awareness
Creating online awareness for your brand is the ultimate goal of digital PR. Your online media outlets such as your social media platforms, websites, and blogs will serve as an avenue for you to publish your content and share valuable information regarding your brand.
You need to also have a strategy in place to make sure you’re targeting the right audience and that they understand the information you’re sharing.
2. Brand Image
With the right digital PR work, you can build a brand image that commands authority. After people have gotten familiar with your brand name, you have to create an impression that you are trustworthy.
When your brand is in the news, people feel proud to be associated with such a brand. This increases trust and they are more likely to recommend the business to other people.
3. Improved Search Engine Optimization
Digital PR can boost the organic search rankings of your website. Building quality backlinks is an effective strategy that SEO professionals use to boost a website’s SEO.
The more high-quality and relevant backlinks your website receives, the more it increases your business chance to appear on search engines’ first page for your target keywords.
4. Increase Website Traffic
What happens after your brand starts ranking in search engines? You generate more traffic!
After using digital PR strategies to optimize your brand’s website to rank in search engines, your site starts getting traffic and generating organic leads that could turn into potential customers.
You can also track your lead conversion rate with digital PR tools like Hootsuite, to measure the quality of the traffic your website is generating.
5. Increase Sales and Revenue
The end game of every digital PR is to increase sales or revenue for a brand online. If your website generates organic traffic, it's most likely to convert this traffic to customers.
How to Get Started With Digital PR
Now that you’re convinced that you need digital PR as part of your business digital marketing strategy, let's dive into how to get started and give your business more awareness and hopefully, more traffic and sales.
Step 1: Set Your Goals
To start digital PR, you need to set your goals. What do you hope to achieve with this campaign? Knowing this will help you know the best strategy to use and how to execute it. Here is a list of what your goal could be.
- To drive traffic to the homepage of your website.
- Driving traffic to a landing page or form page.
- To increase your website domain authority to build relevance for a specific keyword.
- To increase your brand website engagement.
Step 2: Know your target audience
You need to understand who you want to reach with your digital PR. Create a customer avatar to understand who your ideal audience is so you can create content that will be relevant to them.
Step 3: Write a Press Release
A press release is a brief report about a brand's achievement, status or activity written by an expert reporter for publication in an online media outlet. Depending on what your goal is, you can write a press release to inform the public about what you're promoting.
Here are some tips on how to write an effective press release that would arouse the readers’ interest and gain editorial coverage.
- Add appealing visuals that are related to your content. This would help catch the readers’ attention. People are more likely to engage with content with visuals than just plain written content.
- Make it reader-friendly and engage the audience. Don't let it be too formal or uptight, make the readers comfortable while reading it.
- Make believable offers that can build trust and credibility for your brand.
- Make it newsworthy and shareable so that media outlets will be willing to cover it
- Include a Call-to-Action.
Step 4: Finding and reaching out to journalists and bloggers
The next step is for you to find influential media outlets that would be interested in publishing your content and pitch it to them. You need to target journalists whose media outlet can cover the area that your campaign is targeting and whose audience will be interested in the product or service you’re trying to promote.
Step 5: Press Release Services on Legiit
With the online press release services of reputable sellers such as Spine Pr, you could get a ranking boost in as little as 24-48 hours without breaking the bank. In fact, in less than a month, you could begin to attract solid traffic for your local business and get them ranked in the map pack.
Another notable premium PR service worthy of mention is 38DigitalMarket. With less than 200 bucks, your publication can get listed on more than 400 popular news media sites in top countries of your choice. And you can begin to see explosive results in your marketing campaign.
Interestingly, you don't even have to stress yourself with coming up with a news idea for your brand. Their DFY press release services cover everything from content creation to publication and distribution.
Step 6: Repurpose and Distribute Content
Repurposing your content involves reusing your content according to what your audience wants to know. Content repurposing boosts your website's SEO and grows your brand's online presence to reach a new audience.
How do you determine which content to repurpose?
- Find out which content is generating traffic to your site. Use Google Analytics to track the content conversion.
- Do some keyword research to know what people are looking for about your brand and how you can repurpose your content around it.
- Refurbish the evergreen content on your website and distribute it on your social media platforms and media outlets.
- If it is a blog post, you can also turn it into a Youtube video and also create a short video of the content for your TikTok and Instagram pages.
Step 6: Create Relevant Content and Distribute It
It is crucial for you to create relevant content and distribute it appropriately. A relevant content speaks to your audience's pain point or provides a fresh perspective to their problem.
You need to research properly in order to surprise your audience with your discovery.
More importantly, you need to distribute your content with the right news media channel. The right media channel would give your content its due exposure and they would promote the content to the right audience that would be interested in your brand's report.
Digital PR: Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Digital PR important?
In today's world, every brand needs to build a reputable digital footprint. Digital PR provides many strategies that you can use to expand your online reach and harness customer loyalty. A good online reputation is the bedrock of a successful brand.
Having a good digital PR strategy for your brand will help boost your website’s traffic and generate leads to your site.
What is Digital PR SEO?
Digital PR SEO involves building your website’s search engine ranking to increase your brand awareness. SEO is very important in building a brand’s content marketing. Its purpose is to improve your website’s position on the search engine result page.
What is Digital PR full form?
The full form of Digital PR is Digital Public Relations. It can also be referred to as Online Public Relations because it uses online platforms to share information.
What is the difference between Digital PR and Traditional PR?
The difference between Digital PR and Traditional PR is the channel of communication. Traditional PR uses offline means to pass information while digital PR uses online means.
Traditional PR channels: Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, leaflets, and billboards.
Digital PR channels: Social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. It also makes use of websites and blogs.
Final Thoughts
Digital press releases are a proven online marketing strategy with many success stories. Whether you're thinking of doing it yourself or outsourcing it to a digital PR agency, the key to excelling in digital PR is to consistently create quality news content that can build a good conversation rate. You also need to be able to keep up with new trends and new tools that are emerging every day.
Unless you've got all the time in the world, and you've established a long term relationship with reputable media sites, coupled with decades of experience in setting up a PR campaign that actually boosts your online reputation, then it may be impossible for you to launch a successful digital PR campaign by yourself.
But that doesn't mean all hope is lost in terms of getting a quick and effective digital PR setup for your business. Start your digital pr campaign on Legiit today.
Download