We get asked a lot to explain digital PR, so hopefully this post will help you. Digital PR is an online marketing strategy that businesses/organisations use to increase their online presence. Digital marketing agencies network with influencers, bloggers, and journalists and send online press releases or content to attract social media mentions, high-quality backlinks, and improve SEO.
Are you wondering how digital PR can improve your business? It is a key element in the marketing communications mix for any business owner/manager who wants to see his/her website ranking well in organic positions for your relevant keywords.
How Does Digital PR Work?
Digital PR entails gaining high-quality backlinks from online publications and websites and honest customer reviews. Digital PR features your business on the websites that your target audience read to help you reach them. It also targets the social media accounts they love and the podcasts that they listen to. Ultimately, Digital PR affects rankings, search engine visibility and online credibility.
Traditional PR vs. Digital PR
Traditional PR does still exist! It used to (many years ago) involve publicists who networked with journalists over the phone and chatted with them at events to get their customers into print publications and newspapers. The focus of traditional PR was print-based publications, radio, and TV.
However, print media is not what it used to be and online media is overtaking TV and traditional print publications rapidly. Given the growth in online marketing, most PRs have now moved their online focus to digital PR.
No SEO campaign will rank top in Google searches in the absence of Digital PR. Part of what online marketing experts and digital PR agencies call ‘off-site SEO’ encompasses digital PR. If you are working with an SEO or online marketing agency, you have to ensure that high-end digital PR is part of your SEO efforts.
Digital PR strategies
Digital PR strategies predominantly focus on securing backlinks from relevant blogs and websites and publishing articles. It entails nurturing relationships with journalists/bloggers/influencers to help you get mentions in the press. There are so many ways that you can do this, including:
- Publish articles online to receive high-end backlinks
- Blogger outreach to get mentions and backlinks on appropriate blogs
- Network with editors and journalists to get backlinks
- Influencer marketing to receive mentions on highly influential social media accounts
- Publish newsworthy content and press releases to earn press features
- Syndicating and sharing infographics
- Offsite blogger event or press event which aim to gain online coverage
Benefits of digital PR to Your Business
Digital PR has so many benefits, including:
Improve rankings: To publish on high authority sites and get links for your website, your ranking with improve for the target keywords. When you rank highly in Google, you should get more traffic coming to your website.
Boost your website traffic: As more people continue to read about your brand and share your content on social media platforms, the more individuals you will have visiting your website. It spreads like wildfire and all you need is to light it up.
Build brand trust: Digital PR teams focus on ensuring that customers only seeing good things once they type your brand name to the search engine. When you secure positive impartial reviews and create engaging content, you will be able to nurture the image of your brand over time. High-quality and useful SEO friendly articles signal to the search engines that you are a credible source of information. You will have bloggers review your products and services and this will increase the level of trust in your brand.
Generate leads: The best digital PR strategy will put your products in front of an interested and relevant audience. As more people continue to click through your website and read about your products, you will be able to generate more leads.
Increase sales: All digital PR agencies worth their salt know that businesses should make sales and report ROI from their marketing investment. The best digital PR campaigns will generate leads and high-quality content on your website. It will channel the leads through the conversion funnel and then transform them into paying customers.
An example of a digital PR
To understand better what Digital PR is, it is a good idea to look at an example. Think of working with a performance management software brand that offers software for HR teams. They may have a simple but effective site already running and wish to build a brand name before officially launching the software.
The person running the business could have already done some research. Therefore, he understands the trends and the software is set to blow its competitors out of the market. However, the business could still be small and new and very few people have heard about it.
With this in mind, you can begin by building a list of magazines, websites, and blogs that are highly read by HR professionals. The next step is to reach out to editors that host articles on the new trends in the industry of performance management.
You can place content with small but influential websites in the niche. From here, you can pitch to the big boys in the industry and look for publications where your content will really begin to get some traction. You can send editor links to the other published articles to send a clear word that the business understands its stuff and will provide content that is incredibly valuable to the bigger markets.
Conclusion
You will find so many people reading the articles and driving traffic into your website. Therefore, digital PR is a great way to drive relevant traffic to your business website and convert into sales.
Read more about our digital PR services here.
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