Digital PR Strategy
A solid digital PR strategy is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have. While digital PR is a relatively new field, it has exploded in popularity over the last few years out of a need for building brand awareness online but before we delve deeper, what exactly is digital PR?
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR, at its core, is the art of building a strong presence for your brand online. Digital PR is a marketing strategy that brands use to build awareness and authority.
Digital PR allows you to connect with your audience on media websites that they read through strategically placed, engaging content. It’s more than just social media posts or blog articles. It involves a broad range of activities, such as influencer partnerships, online press releases, search engine optimisation, and creating buzz on social platforms. The ultimate goal? Build brand awareness, foster trust, and drive website traffic, contributing to higher conversions and a thriving business.
But all of that doesn’t happen by accident, and if you want to hire a digital PR agency to run a digital pr campaign to get you media coverage then it all starts with a digital PR strategy.
Do you need a digital PR strategy?
Now that you understand what digital PR is, let’s look at creating a strategy that can help your business grow.
A digital PR strategy is essentially a game plan for achieving your online PR goals. It’s a structured, tailored approach to using digital PR tactics to your best advantage, depending on your specific needs and aspirations.
Without a strategy, you could be creating campaigns that won’t get your brand in the relevant publications or in front of your target audience. The whole point of online public relations is to get you in the relevant publications so that you can increase your impressions and visitor count in Google Analytics, increase your search engine rankings and increase the sales or leads generated for your business. As you can see, there are many benefits of creating a good digital pr strategy.
Benefits of a Digital PR Strategy
Creating a digital PR strategy has many benefits for your brand. It brings clarity to your PR efforts, allowing you to focus on tasks that align with your objectives.
Improving your online presence also creates consistent messaging across all digital platforms, building a solid, recognisable brand image.
Your strategy can directly impact your SEO ranking, as digital PR is a form of link building that can earn you backlinks from high-authority sites, this can boost your position on search engine results pages.
This increased visibility can drive organic traffic to your site, ultimately improving conversions. Plus, the relationships you build during your digital PR pursuits can serve as a solid foundation for future collaborations.
By creating a strategy for our clients, our digital PR experts have been able to get our clients featured on some of the biggest websites in the world including Washington Post, MSN, Yahoo, Ideal Home, The Sun, Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Lad Bible and many more.
But how exactly do you build a winning digital PR strategy that earns you brand mentions, links, and coverage on your favourite websites?
Building Your Digital PR Strategy
So, how do you go about creating a killer digital PR strategy? Follow this step-by-step guide to set the stage for digital PR success.
1. Understand Your Audience
A deep understanding of your target audience is the cornerstone of any successful digital PR strategy. Who are they? What are their interests, needs, and pain points? Where do they hang out online? This knowledge will help you craft messages that resonate and choose the most effective platforms for reaching them.
Creating user personas can be a difficult task but even doing a task as simple as writing down a name, an age, a sex and where these potential customers hang out will give you a better start than randomly firing off digital PR campaigns and hoping for the best.
Understanding your audience will also help you to narrow down the publications or journalists you should be pitching to. When you know who you should be pitching you can read their content to see what content they write about so you can later target them with a relevant press release, this allows you to create engaging content that earns media coverage.
2. Create Engaging Content
Once you know your audience, it’s time to create content that caters to their needs and interests. Depending on your brand will depend on how provoking your content can be, but with that said digital pr specialists will be able to create engaging content without the need to offend anyone.
Once you know your audience you can figure out what they would like to read about and it can also help you with collecting data too. You can use tools such as Google Trends to look for trending topics that potential customers would be interested in.
When you have your content created for your campaign, you can then begin to find journalists who write about similar topics. This will increase the chance of getting media coverage.
3. Pitch to the Right Journalists
Getting your content in front of the right people is crucial. Research journalists and influencers in your niche who might be interested in your story. Journalists receive hundreds of stories a day, so being relevant is going to help you land coverage.
While some digital PR agencies recommend creating ultra-personal pitches talking about the journalist’s recent work or something they have done on social media, we disagree and create pitches based on stories they write about.
Some people also may think that you need to build relationships with journalists and while this may help, in our experience we have noticed that pitching relevant stories to the right type of journalists is the best way to get your business featured in the press, by doing so you will build credibility and brand awareness.
4. Increase Credibility and Brand Awareness
Digital PR Services can generate traffic after one campaign but to get the best results you should be running more than one pr campaign, this way you can build up your credibility in your industry and allow your target audience to become aware of you.
Building brand awareness, quality backlinks and credibility is not an overnight process and it will take months of hard work to position yourself or business as the go to business in your industry, this is why it’s important to set clear objectives and KPIs as both an agency and a client.
5. Set Clear Objectives and KPIs
What do you want to achieve with your digital PR efforts? More website traffic? Brand recognition? Set clear, measurable objectives and corresponding KPIs to track your progress. Without setting your objectives and KPI’s you will have no idea if your digital pr strategies have worked and will have no way of measuring success.
6. Measure Your Success
There are many ways of measuring success when running online PR activity, and these will all differ depending on your goals. Some brands may be happy with an increase in brand mentions, while others will use digital PR for link building purposes.
Other companies may want an increase in search engine rankings or others may want to use a digital pr service to increase their brand reputation with potential customers.
Whatever you use to measure your success it’s important that you stick to that metric so you can record and grow. You can use external tools such as Google Search Console or Google Analytics to see if your website traffic has increased, or if you are gaining referral traffic from your placements.
You can also use SEO tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush to monitor an increase in search engine rankings. You can also use these tools to see if there has been an uptick in brand mentions too.
A brand mention is when someone goes onto a search engine and types your brand name in. When you are featured in media outlets and other digital channels you will see an increase in branded searches.
Whatever objectives or goals you have with your business, when it comes to creating digital pr campaigns you should always start with a strategy first.
If you would like to see what digital pr can do for your business get in touch with us today for a free 15-minute consultation, to see if you could use digital pr to grow your business.