The Benefits of Digital PR
Digital PR is a must-have marketing technique for businesses in an increasingly competitive digital world.
The aim of public relations is to increase your brand credibility and build trust with current and potential customers.
Digital PR is focused on the online element of this, and it has a lot of great benefits for businesses wanting visibility in the places where customers are searching for the products and services that they sell.
In this blog, we’d like to take you through digital PR in depth and discuss how it could help your business expand its customer base and get ahead of the competition.
What is digital PR?
Digital PR is the use of targeted online communication platforms to boost brand visibility and manage and grow a business’ reputation digitally.
This method of marketing involves a lot of content creation to put together interesting and newsworthy articles about your business.
Digital PR experts will speak with journalists from your target media to negotiate coverage and aim to get a link to your website included when it’s published online.
The hope is that your efforts will win earned media exposure across as many online platforms as possible, such as news pages, blogs and social media.
How do I use digital PR for my business?
Digital PR is most effective when you build long-lasting relationships with journalists, bloggers, and social media influencers who are highly relevant to your business.
It’s important to make sure it’s a two-way relationship by providing content that’s beneficial to their audience in return for gaining coverage.
This will allow for a brand to grow by:
- achieving high-quality backlinks from the online publications or websites that share your content and link to your website
- increasing the number of people that are talking about you online
- increasing the frequency of honest reviews for your product and services
Another important element of digital PR is to be reactive to opportunities and respond quickly to journalists looking for comments on a topic that relates to your business or expertise.
Equally, it’s important to be proactive by researching and monitoring trending topics that you can provide an article, expertise or facts and figures for.
Why should I be using digital PR?
In case you hadn’t guessed it, most of your customers are online and so should you be!
Every day, billions of people go online and search – using search engines, social media, review sites, blogs etc.
Utilising digital channels is an amazing way to help you to reach new customers by focusing on what your target market is searching for.
There are billions of pages of information available that answer potential customer’s search queries. Best cocktail bars near me? Eco-friendly alternative products? Gifts for Mother’s Day? Utilising digital PR gives your product or service the chance to appear to new customers conducting these searches.
The other advantage of growing your brand awareness through digital PR is that the more valuable articles you have posted on relevant publications with a link, the more positively it will impact your website’s ranking on search engines.
Last but not least, it’s an amazing resource for building a reputation for your business by increasing the amount of positive chatter around the internet about you. Customers look to publications, influencers and websites that they trust for recommendations and it’s so important to make sure that you are seen.
Online or offline PR?
PR has the power to make or break your business, and although the platforms have changed, the key principles remain the same.
We use digital PR to generate links from high-quality websites, but the benefits also extend to other media, with strong articles ending up in printed publications read by tens of thousands of people, which extends its reach far beyond one channel.
Combining multiple channels always yields better results thanks to that extended reach and increased number of touchpoints with your customers.
Raising brand awareness for your business offline is still important to maintain and improve your reputation across all your channels of communication that are important to your customers.
PR is PR, no matter the platform. What’s most important is that you’re targeting where your audience is present and receptive.
Great examples of digital PR
New research by Leipzig.Travel, the official tourist website for Leipzig, has uncovered how much musicians Bach, Handel, or Chopin would have earned if music streaming had existed in their era. The tourism company cleverly targeted sites like Classic FM by combining the musical history of Leipzig and modern-day pop stars.
Putting together credible facts and figures that relate to your business is a great way to get an article published on more news sites and blogs.
Aunt Bessie’s and Guide Dogs UK
Another great digital PR tactic is to create limited edition or collaborative products that are more likely to attract media attention.
A recent example of this is the Aunt Bessie and Guide Dogs UK collaboration on a Yorkshire pudding shaped bed for dogs. The idea was so unusual that it attracted widespread media attention online and lots of high-quality links for the Guide Dogs UK shop. On a separate note, it also benefited Aunt Bessie’s reputation as they’re being associated with a fun product and talked about for supporting a charity.
How do I get started?
The first stop is to review the marketing objectives for your business, the current position of your brand and the areas in which you want to drive growth. How do customers currently view your business? What do you want the business to be known for? Have there been any bad articles or bad reviews that have damaged your reputation?
As with all effective marketing techniques, digital PR requires time and expertise to get the right results. Using a digital marketing specialist is key and this is something that PR, marketing, and digital agencies like us can assist you with.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can help you with your digital PR strategy, contact us
for a friendly chat about your needs.
MO
