Brand image and awareness are vital elements to a business’s success. Public relations can establish and enhance these, contributing greatly to marketing campaigns and general market value.
Today, a good digital PR strategy is more crucial than ever. Based on BrightLocal’s review, 97% of consumers find local businesses online, with the majority checking reviews on Google and other social media platforms to evaluate whether or not they should purchase from them. Additionally, research from Weber Shandwick shows that a company’s reputation can account for 63% of its market value.
In this article, you’ll discover how to optimize your digital PR strategy using your main business objectives.
What is the importance of a digital PR strategy?
Optimizing a digital PR strategy maximizes how well your business is perceived online. This optimization process ensures that your public relations activities align with your overall marketing goals, effectively engage your target audience, and efficiently use resources to achieve the best possible outcomes.
The key objectives of digital PR
Strategic communication is the name of the digital PR game. A digital PR campaign utilizes online channels to enhance brand presence and reputation to achieve marketing and communication goals.
The key objectives of optimizing a digital PR strategy include:
- Aligning campaigns with business goals
- Enhancing a brand image and presence online through high-quality backlinks
- Boosting engagements with the brand in online platforms
- Dissemination and promotion of informative press releases and branded content
- Building strong relationships with journalists and influencers for future partnerships and brand mentions
Digital PR vs digital marketing
While digital PR can impact marketing, it has two different intents. Digital PR aims to connect with target audiences by building the brand image, awareness, and credibility, while marketing is focused on getting sales.
Let’s take a closer look at their differences.
Digital PR
Digital public relations focuses on building brand reputation and visibility online.
Strategies often employed involve PR link building and cultivating a strong relationship with journalists, influencers, and potential publishers. This is done primarily to secure press release distribution and potential guest post opportunities.
A bulk of digital PR efforts prioritize SEO for good reason. With digital PR, producing valuable content and acquiring quality backlinks signals authority to search engines. In effect, the brand website surfaces higher in search pages, giving it better visibility.
Digital marketing
Digital marketing is concerned with promoting a brand and its products or services in order to drive sales, leads, and conversions.
Marketing tactics involve search engine marketing (SEM) and marketing efforts on other channels like social media, email, and other paid efforts. Directly engaging with customers helps encourage them to take a desired action.
Measurements of digital marketing success include website traffic, conversion rates, leads, and campaign ROI.
Aligning PR and marketing efforts
Despite the differences of digital PR and marketing, these efforts can complement each other.
When marketing and digital PR strategies are aligned, digital PR can boost awareness and authority that can improve the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. Likewise, marketing can help expand content reach and foster a positive brand reputation for PR.
7 Ways to optimize your digital PR strategy
A successful digital PR strategy takes proactive steps to build brand visibility and value. Optimizing your PR strategy is one way you can get a head start by combining creativity, strategic planning, and regular analysis.
Let’s dive into how you can optimize your digital PR strategies.
1. Develop highly informative press releases
Press releases are useful for two main reasons: generating leads and gaining high-quality backlinks to your own website.
When you craft press releases, it’s important to adhere to journalistic standards. This means keeping it informative, factual, and concise. Your audience should be able to get a good idea of your brand from a glance.
As you get into the nitty gritty of your press release content, it’s imperative to provide details that satisfy the big 5 Ws of journalism. Who? What? Where? When? Why? Providing context that is able to answer these five questions will help keep your article engaging and digestible for anyone who comes across your content.
Additionally, brand mentions and any information mentioned about your product, service, or initiative that relates to your audience’s interest are helpful for increasing the number of quality backlinks to your site.
2. Connect with the right publishers
The right publishers can help you successfully establish your brand reputation and credibility.
Reaching out to publishers such as journalists, bloggers, and influencers, who align with your business goals, can greatly impact the kind of audience you attract. Once you connect with them, you can build strong relationships that can ensure you have media outlets and publications ready for press releases, guest blogs, and brand mentions later down the line.
One way to go about this is utilizing outreach tools that allows you to find journalists. One of our most used platforms for this is HARO.
In our partnership with Messente, we worked on enhancing their online visibility with digital PR. By logging onto HARO we can see journalists looking for insights on related fields. We provide relevant information and in turn receive authoritative backlinks.
See below how a quote from Messente’s CEO provided expertise in money and business management.
3. Stay responsive and updated on competition and trends
Keeping a pulse on your competitors and current trends can help you position your messaging to stay relevant against brands with similar products or services.
Once you’ve identified your main competitors, you can keep regular tabs on their operations. When you’re ready, narrow down what kind of information you’re after when monitoring your competitors. You can use these findings to improve and outdo competitors in your own campaign.
Some factors you can consider when conducting competitor monitoring:
- PR strategies
- Partner media outlets
- Content formatting
There are many digital PR tools that can help with competitor research. For instance, SEMrush offers a range of tools and features designed to help with digital PR.
4. Build shareable content
Riding on trends is one thing, but creating shareable content that genuinely resonates with your target audiences across channels like media outlets and social media platforms can boost your brand’s website traffic.
When you create content it’s important to find creative ways to repurpose it. What might be a single article can be expanded into multiple formats that are easily shareable. Here are some content types you can explore for a single topic.
- Infographics to compliment your articles
- Supplementary blog posts expounding on similar topics
- LinkedIn articles to reach a professional audience
- Graphics and short-form videos that illustrate your topic
5. Monitor media coverage and socials
Monitoring media and socials can inform give you insight on trends and your target audience’s perception of your brand.
There are many ways you can pull these findings. Here are some methods that can help you stay informed on your brand’s reputation.
- Google Alerts for keywords related to your industry, brand, and competitors
- Google Trends to check for search query popularity
- Social media listening with tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social
- Influencer insights from influencer marketing to see how audiences respond to your content
- Content curation platforms like Buzzsumo to see the most shared content online
6. Keep your call to action clear
Clear communication can make a world of difference in how your audience perceives you and your brand message.
Once you’ve engaged your target audience, a simple word or phrase can guide them to take the next step. The next step can vary, depending on your campaign’s goals. It can be to visit your website, sign up for your newsletter, share the content, or read another relevant article.
Here are some clear examples of short and clear CTAs you can include in visual assets like graphics or videos. The beauty of a single word or phrase like “Download” and “Share it” makes fluent and non-fluent English speakers easily understand what to do. They can suggest the next action to take without being absolute.
Providing a value proposition is another way to utilize CTAs. This is especially useful if you’re embedding it into your article as a takeaway when they take action. For example, “Send us a message and learn how you can improve your SEO in 30 days.”
7. Streamline your campaigns
Lastly, unify your campaigns before kicking off individually.
Share data across your team as insights from your PR campaign can align your digital PR efforts with marketing strategies, and other crucial initiatives to lead your business to success. You may be surprised to learn how other teams can utilize findings from your digital PR campaign.
The benefits of doubling down on your digital PR initiatives
As technology continues to advance and the majority of the population consumes content digitally, doubling down on digital PR efforts can make a significant impact. Not only can it amplify your brand’s online presence, but it can boost your credibility and overall engagement.
Here’s a closer look at the many benefits of optimizing your digital PR strategy.
Increased online visibility and reach
An optimized digital PR strategy can significantly enhance your brand’s visibility across various online platforms. This includes social media, blogs, podcasts, and digital publications, collectively reaching a vast, diverse audience. A stronger presence in these spaces means more people learn about your brand, products, or services.
Improved brand reputation and trust
Digital PR strategies often involve mentioning or featuring in reputable online publications and sites. These endorsements can boost your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of consumers. The moment potential customers see that your brand associated with trusted names, it can positively influence their decision to choose your brand over others.
Enhanced SEO and web traffic
Digital PR efforts that result in high-quality backlinks from reputable sites bolster your SEO and drive direct traffic to your website. Search engines view these backlinks as indicators of your site’s authority and relevance, potentially improving your rankings in search results. Higher rankings mean more visibility and more organic traffic for your website.
Better targeted engagements
Effective digital PR strategies involve crafting compelling content that resonates with your target audience. This can lead to increased engagement on social media and other platforms. Engaging with your audience meaningfully can build community, loyalty, and a sense of connection to your brand.
A competitive advantage with market insight
Digital PR allows you to monitor public perception and gain insights into market trends and consumer behavior. By understanding what resonates with your audience and monitoring competitors’ PR efforts, you can refine your strategies to stay ahead of the game.
Cost-efficient expenses
Digital PR can be more cost-effective than traditional advertising, especially for small businesses or startups. Leveraging digital platforms and networks can yield substantial returns in terms of brand exposure and customer engagement without the hefty price tag of traditional media buys.
Building a well-loved brand
Digital PR can impact consumers’ perception of your brand and their decision to choose you over competitors. Optimizing your PR strategy can allow you to stay one step ahead, ready to reach and engage with a bigger audience.
You can take it a step further by considering in how digital PR and marketing can work together. The right digital PR strategy can boost brand visibility and positively impact your marketing campaigns and your overall business growth, too.
Ethical SEO values building brand reputation to compliment the growth of businesses. Want to learn how to leverage digital PR for your brand? Send us a message.
