Promoting your brand at the right place is of utmost importance. Now, people are more engaged in the digital world so brands have moved toward the Internet to advertise themselves.
In this move, Digital PR has emerged as one of the most expedient strategies being promptly adopted by brands for awareness and engagement.
Not just brand engagement and awareness, but the right Digital PR strategy produces more results than this for building your brand. Here, we discuss a few major advantages of Digital PR but first, let’s make a few things clear.
Table of Contents:
- What is Digital PR?
- Traditional PR vs Digital PR
- Is Marketing and Digital PR Same?
- Who Runs Digital PR Campaigns?
- What are the Types of Digital PR Strategy?
- How Digital PR can Build Your Brand?
What is Digital PR?
These days, businesses are adopting Digital PR which is a strategy for improving online presence, and most companies associate this type of work with influencers, bloggers and journalists.
These agencies network and send online press releases for increasing the number of their backlinks, enhancing SEO, and surging social media mentions.
The target of Digital PR is to get high-quality backlinks from online publications and websites. It also focuses on gaining more customer reviews. You need to target the websites, podcasts, and social media accounts being browsed & loved by your target audience.
By following the right Digital PR strategy, you can even find your business rated 5-star by any customer on Amazon, Google, or any other website.
The right Digital PR strategy gives better visibility of your website and ranks it higher in search results. You can even target local newspaper websites, local reviews, local blogs, etc., to get yourself featured and start increasing your visibility from local areas.
Traditional PR vs Digital PR
The difference between Digital PR and traditional PR is quite clear by the name only. Traditional PR is done in the real world while Digital PR is done in the digital world.
The main focus of traditional PR is newspapers, radio, TV, and printed publications. Digital PR is focused on online publications and websites to gain high-quality backlinks and coverage.
The target of both the PRs is to gain brand coverage but the channels are different. After the introduction of Digital PR, the line between traditional PR and SEO has blurred.
For getting backlinks, businesses use newsworthy hooks on relevant websites and publications using optimized content.
Both traditional PR and Digital PR are targeted to boost brand reputation and enhance brand awareness. But as people are turning more towards online resources, Digital PR is gaining traction to improve keyword rankings, online traffic, and brand awareness for leveraging the fact that people spend a lot of time on the internet.
Is Marketing and Digital PR Same?
The major difference between marketing and Digital PR is marketing aims at sales while PR aims at presenting the brand in front of the target audience in a positive way.
Digital PR spreads the word about your brand and its uniqueness. It is about making people familiar with the latest events happening in your company.
Simply put, marketing is aimed at initiating conversations. Marketing is done to prompt service or product directly and on the flip side, Digital PR prompts a brand or company. The basic principle behind Digital PR is to increase website traffic & brand awareness.
Before selling anything, building a relationship is a must. For fulfilling this purpose, Digital PR and marketing has to go hand in hand. Digital PR can be used to increase brand awareness and build a relationship. Then, marketing can go into the picture for selling the product or service. In this way, both strategies can complement and enrich each other.
The major advantage of Digital PR is it improves your keyword ranking. If you are a business owner and want your brand to rank higher in Google’s search results, you must adopt a Digital PR strategy.
Who Runs Digital PR Campaigns?
The Digital PR strategy is targeted at boosting the SEO of the website. Keeping this in mind, Digital PR campaigns can be run by a person with a decent understanding of Google’s ranking signals and guidelines. The best people to run Digital PR campaigns are SEOs and Content Marketers who are familiar with the industry.
What are the Types of Digital PR Strategy?
The major focus of the Digital PR strategy is gaining backlinks and publishing articles from relevant blogs and websites.
You have to nurture your relationship with journalists so that you can secure as many backlinks by getting mentioned in the press. To accomplish this task, different strategies can be adopted.
Here are some of the common Digital PR strategies:
- Build a relationship with bloggers to get quality backlinks.
- Get online coverage of offline press events.
- Syndicate newsworthy content and publish a press release to get featured.
- Publish your articles online for securing quality backlinks.
- Adopt influencer marketing strategies to increase the number of mentions on the social media accounts of the relevant industry influencers.
- Build a relationship with editors and journalists for backlinks.
- Start affiliate programs for paying commission to bloggers and encourage them to write for you & backlink your website pages.
- Share infographics.
How Digital PR can Build Your Brand?
Now, hopefully, Digital PR is clear to you. Digital PR can give a shape to the depth and personality of your brand.
As the internet is becoming the most trusted source of information for people across the world, Digital PR has emerged as one of the most lucrative strategies to get authenticity and awareness.
It is one of the most credible and genuine ways to convey your brand’s story to the target audience.
Now, as you are familiar with the term Digital PR, let us tell you in brief how Digital PR can help your business.
1. Improves SEO
When you are providing quality information to the audience, Google automatically chooses you over other websites. By Digital PR, you get backlinks and references from higher authority domains.
The more number of references, the more search engines will consider you a reliable source of information within your niche. As a result, your brand will rank higher in the search engine result pages and your brand will get more recognition.
2. Aids in Engaging Target Audience
The customer is the fuel to run your business. Without customers, your business cannot move forward to reach the great heights of success.
To get customers, defining your target audience is of utmost importance. You first need to know the people who fit into your buyer’s persona. After defining your target audience, the next step is to engage with them.
Digital PR is one of the keys to unlock the way toward awareness and engagement. You first need to make your brand familiar to your target audience and build trust through engagement.
After all this, your target audience will start into converting your customers and fuel your business.
3. Boosts Brand Awareness
The right Digital PR strategy can get you enough regional, industry-specific, and national coverage. You can grab a new pool of readers and potential customers when more number of people will read your content.
You will get backlinks through this content, which will increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. With the people visiting your website, you have more chances of converting them into your customer.
4. Increases Traffic on Website
You need to network with editors, journalists, and bloggers to get your content published and get backlinks. With the number of resources for your Digital PR, your content will reach more people. It may even be shared by many people on the internet.
The more backlinks to your website and the more times your content is shared, the more people may visit your website.
This process is like wildfire. All you need to do is put a small spark and your content may even go viral (if it is engaging, informative, and unique). The increasing reach of your content may give your brand more recognition and boost traffic on your website.
5. Helps in Selection of the Communication Channel
After the identification of your target audience, Digital PR helps in defining the best communication channels for your brand.
You first need to identify your audience and the platform that they use the most. After figuring out the right platforms, you need to test and define a few that work best for you.
You can use Digital PR to define the best communication channels. You can publish your content on different platforms and analyze the best performing platforms for your business.
Once you identify the best platforms, you can communicate with your audience more effectively and surge your business growth.
6. Builds Trust On Brand
When you are publishing SEO-friendly content on other platforms, you are providing information good for your business. You can even ask people to review your brand. Good reviews posted by existing customers can nurture your brand image.
Readers go through that content and portray a good image of your brand. If they are reading useful and good articles about your brand, then they will start trusting your brand.
Now, when a bunch of people trusts your brand, they may follow you on social media, visit your website, or subscribe to a newsletter. At this stage, more people know about your brand and you can even pitch them for becoming your customer.
7. Makes You Thought Leader
Content is king because it paints your image in the eyes of your audience. Create informative content to provide them value.
When you are providing information, it encourages engagement, which, in turn, exhibits you as an expert in the field. You can use Digital PR to publish articles that are innovative and talk about forward-thinking ideas.
Leveraging Digital PR, you can share your thoughts on traditional media, social media, or anywhere on the internet relevant to your business. When your content is going where it needs to, you can gain enough traction to become a thought leader in the industry.
8. Builds Brand Reputation
Digital PR has the potential to improve brand reputation and loyalty. All you need to do is experiment with creative and unique Digital PR campaigns.
Get your content featured incredible publications and always leverage SEO to get your content and brand name higher in Google’s search results.
When people will search your name on the internet, then your content will be visible to them on credible publications. This way you can develop a good reputation for your brand in the market.
More you can do to capture attention is to tell stories of your existing or new customers to your target audience. The advertisement for your good services and solutions will attract your target audience towards you and works better than a good sales message.
9. Generates Leads for Your Business
Digital PR helps you to create a good brand image in front of your target audience. When you are established as a trusted brand, people may come to you for getting your services or products.
The more good and informative articles people will read about your brand, the more chances are that they will visit your website.
As the number of people visiting your website increases, you will experience a significant surge in the number of leads generated.
A good SEO-integrated Digital PR Strategy makes you appear more in the searches and turns you into a reliable brand for your audience. The more they trust you, the more they do business with you.
Multilayer Strategy
All businesses are of different types and at different stages. Not every business can follow the same Digital PR strategy or throw all the resources and efforts into a single Digital PR campaign.
There are several tactics that can turn out lucrative for your business. You should make use of a multilayer strategy for your Digital PR approach so that your brand can benefit from more than one story.
Reactive Campaigns
Some businesses name reaction PR at the top of their Digital PR strategy list. What you do in reactive campaigns is reacting to the opportunities. Your opportunity can be within a business or the news, which can be beneficial for your PR.
Brands prefer Twitter for reactive PR as journalists generally look for expert’s perspectives for building up their stories. You can mostly see comment-seeking tweets with hashtags, such as journorequest or request.
Campaigns
If you want to use Digital PR to make people familiar with your service, then run a creative campaign. Make sure your campaign is backed by data and facts along with creativity.
Journalists won’t publish your content without proof for maintaining the reliability of their publication.
Some of your efforts may not result in something good sometimes, but if you are successful in finding a unique angle for your campaign, you are a clear winner.
Thought Leadership Outreach
Thought leadership is educating the consumers or professionals with your industry knowledge. For outreaching as a thought leader, Digital PR is very functional. You ideate a topic related to your expertise and outreach to the publications for the article.
Industry publications demand an informed and unique angle, so you need to take time and do brainstorming before proposing to publish.
To Sum Up
Nowadays, Digital PR has become an inseparable part of the digital marketing strategy. There is no second opinion that Digital PR helps in increasing brand awareness, improving search rankings, and boosting reputation. That’s why brands are investing enough resources in their Digital PR strategy.
Don’t forget to use a layered strategy for successful Digital PR strategies. No brainer that the right kind of strategy can drive your business in no time. All you need to do is to keep experimenting.
