Do You Have a Digital PR Strategy?
Digital PR is the most results driven form of PR yet. Much like how digital advertising allowed businesses to start tracking their marketing spend ROI, the same can be said about digital PR versus traditional PR methods.
All PR activities are focused on the main goal of brand awareness. That’s why traditional techniques targeted TV, radio and print. These mass communication platforms allowed brands to get in front of their possible audiences and become more known over time.
Digital PR is less of a “spray and pray” approach though. And that’s all down to data – both before and after a campaign. Using the data at your disposal to create a strategic campaign, and then reporting back on it afterwards to see how successful it really was for your brand.
Digital PR also allows you to track results more effectively than traditional methods. A huge part of digital PR is its potential to have an incredibly positive effect on your website’s SEO.
Digital PR falls into what is referred to as “offsite SEO” and a main aim of this form of PR is to gain credible backlinks to your site. This is where a website that search engines such as Google considers to be high ranking links to your website – thus giving you some of its credibility by association.
It’s like making sure you hang out with the cool kids.
Digital PR Prep
Like I wrote above, data is your best friend in strategising a digital PR campaign.
The first thing you will want to look at is your target market:
Who are they?
What are their interests? What are they passionate about?
Where do they hangout online?
Who do they listen to?
Gather the answers to those questions and you will have the basis of your plan right there.
Next we move on to the possible digital PR options open to your brand after analysing the data. You need to look for options like:
Online publications that will provide you with high quality backlinks.
Bloggers or influencers with an engaged audience that looks like your target market. (It’s worth mentioning here that you don’t necessarily want to look at audience numbers here, but rather engagement. Sometimes the ROI from a micro influencer is much better than a large, inauthentic influencer.)
Offline events with an online presence that you can sponsor.
What your Digital PR campaign should do for you
Beyond just brand awareness, strive for building brand trust and brand love through your digital PR efforts. Basically, do enough and when a potential customer googles your business, they should see only positive mentions and reviews of your brand from independent sources all around the link to your own website.
Improve your own site’s SEO through credible backlinks. Like I said before, this is very important for your brand’s online presence. Credible backlinks help your site to look more credible in its own right and thus go up in search engine ranking for your targeted keywords.
A good digital PR strategy should also increase website traffic. If your PR avenues are working for you then not only are you getting SEO credibility from links, but also interested consumers clicking through to your site. This should be a main goal for ecommerce businesses, but ultimately every business should benefit from more website traffic.
And what’s the main thing that increases when more interested parties learn about you? Leads and sales!
At the end of the day, digital PR lets you into conversations and circles that you maybe couldn’t join as effectively on your own. When others speak on your behalf, it not only increases your reach past your own efforts, but also lends you a credibility that someone influential is impressed with your brand enough to mention you.
And being digital, allows you to track all of it.
Want to chat digital PR strategy? Email info@samantics.org for some options.