Digital PR is a set of marketing strategies and initiatives designed to raise brand awareness and promote your online presence. It’s not too similar to standard “Public Relations” – the goal is to influence how people and communities perceive your brand.
The main difference is that with digital PR, you use a range of online platforms, from your website to social media channels, virtual publications, and video channels, to achieve results.
Successful digital PR strategies enhance your visibility and open the door for growth via improved backlinks, social mentions, and referral traffic. As for what’s involved in digital public relations, the strategies and tactics used can be:
- Prepare digital press releases and share them with relevant publications.
- Build relationships with thought leaders, influencers, and journalists.
- Collect and share reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content.
- Engage in interviews and collaborative content with other thought leaders.
- Create content that enhances the appearance and visibility of the brand.
- Earn backlinks and referrals from other well-known organizations.
- Monitor, protect, and improve the brand’s reputation.
Why is Digital PR Important?
As mentioned above, traditional “public relations” activities have always been essential to the success of growing brands. PR strategies boost your visibility, improve brand equity, and gain recognition from your target audience, leading the way for increased revenue and sales.
With the right digital PR strategy, companies can:
1. Increased Brand Awareness and Visibility
Probably the biggest benefit and purpose of digital PR is to increase brand awareness and attract more potential customers to your business. A well-shaped PR strategy will highlight the core benefits of your brand, products, and services to your target audience, differentiating you from competitors.
The right PR strategy also gives you authority and trust, thanks to references and recommendations from other well-known organizations. With the right media coverage, you can not only get more eyes on your content and business news, but you can also improve your reputation on a massive scale.
Authoritative endorsements from well-known media outlets are some of the best advertisements your company can access. They’re often seen as more authentic and trustworthy than any content you could produce yourself, too.
2. Improve SEO Results
While the main aim of digital public relations is to elevate and improve your brand’s image, the right process can have a significant impact on your SEO potential. Most digital PR strategies involve content creation, which improves your chances of ranking for keywords.
This content, if created correctly, also improves your domain authority and encourages customers to stay on your website for longer, interacting with your content.
The biggest benefit of digital PR for SEO, however, comes from the ability to drive valuable backlinks to your website. Companies covering your brand’s content in news stories or referencing your latest data drive valuable traffic back to your website.
What’s more, pages with more backlinks naturally gain a higher ranking in the search results. Any page’s Google search traffic is often strongly correlated with the number of sites linking back to it, particularly if those sites have existing authority.
3. Uncover Valuable Insights
Learning as much as you can about your target audience, their preferences, pain points, and perceptions of your brand is crucial to driving growth. A significant part of digital PR involves paying close attention to what people think and feel about your company.
To ensure you can protect your brand identity and send the right message to your target audience, you’ll usually access a variety of tools. Social media scheduling and analytics tools can offer insights into your target audience and their background. Monitoring tools allow you to keep track of brand mentions and reviews from a range of environments.
The data you collect not only helps you protect your brand from damage but also offers a useful insight into your target audience at a time when collecting customer data is becoming more difficult.
4. Boost Traffic, Sales, and Leads
Since digital public relations help to improve your search engine rankings, give you more backlinks, and boost your visibility, they also have a direct impact on your website traffic. You can quickly see an increase in visitors to your websites, driven by other companies and influencers, as well as your own carefully crafted content.
The referrals you get to your website can also be easier to convert into paying customers than the average person browsing for a solution online. If a customer clicks on a link from a press release about your business, there’s a good chance they’re already interested in whatever you offer.
What’s more, if you can demonstrate authority and expertise through a well-structured brand, you’ll increase your chances of earning high-quality leads that turn into long-lasting customers.
5. Develop Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is becoming increasingly crucial in today’s competitive world. With countless new companies emerging in every industry all the time, consumers are actively looking for evidence they can trust the companies they buy from.
While any company can produce insightful content showcasing expertise, having that content promoted or shared by other authority companies gives it a significant credibility boost. Digital PR offers an opportunity to encourage other brands to present you as an expert on your behalf.
This builds trust between you and the people you want to serve and gives you a more powerful brand image overall. Plus, the more coverage you get, the more likely it is customers will see you as a reputable source of information.