What You’ll Learn
- What is Digital PR?
- Digital PR vs. Traditional PR
- Benefits of a PR Strategy
- Digital PR Strategies that Actually Work
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR, or digital public relations, is the ability to harness the power of digital channels and online platforms to improve your brand’s reputation and build brand awareness. Through digital PR, brands can target different audiences, influencers, journalists, and potential consumers.
The goal of digital PR is to build up a brand’s backlink portfolio to increase its authority and exposure. There are various components of this strategy, including online media outreach, content creation, such as press releases or linkable assets, online reputation management, social media outreach and engagement, online crisis management, influencer engagement, and more.
Digital PR vs. Traditional PR: What Digital PR Isn’t
While digital PR and traditional PR do have some similarities, they are not the same thing. The goal of digital PR is to increase backlinks, generate UGC links, and organically boost a brand’s SEO and visibility results. On the other hand, traditional PR is focused entirely on brand awareness.
Traditional PR also focuses on a variety of offline media, such as printed magazines, television, and radio. Through these channels, traditional PR aims to craft a positive reputation for a brand or business.
Digital PR, however, focuses more on outlets such as social media, blogs, or other business websites. It aims to build up engagement and authority, which in turn, boosts a brand’s SEO strategy.
Example of Blog
Benefits of a Solid Digital PR Strategy
In addition to strengthening an SEO strategy and boosting your SERP ranking, a solid digital PR plan has quite a few benefits. Some of those benefits include:
- Page Rank Increases: When your brand awareness increases, Google’s crawlers start to recognize your brand’s authority. When this happens, your SERP rank rises.
- Referral Traffic: The more people who refer you or mention you on their site or social media, the more traffic you’ll get.
- Domain Authority: The more outside websites that trust you and your brand, the higher your domain authority will be. When other websites mention you or link back to your site, Google knows that they can trust your content.
Domain Authority
- Brand Awareness: Self-promotion is great, but it only goes so far. Raising your brand awareness through others is a great way to boost your authority but also to expose you to new audiences that you might not have had access to before.
- Social Engagements: Things like press releases, industry awards mentions on other sites, or links can easily be repurposed into social media content and used to increase your social engagements. Don’t miss the chance to engage with your audience–old and new–whenever a new piece of digital PR is posted!
When executed correctly, online PR could provide a huge ROI and increase your exposure like never before. The more exposure for your brand, the better your brand awareness. As your brand’s awareness increases, so does your authority and your SERP ranking.
Digital PR Strategies that Actually Work
As you can see, digital PR and SEO can go together perfectly. Let’s talk about some digital PR strategies that will help you achieve the exposure goals you have in mind.
1. Unlinked Brand Mentions
Unlinked brand mentions are a huge cornerstone of digital PR. Anyone can pay for backlinks or mentions, but not everyone has enough authority to capture organic mentions.
While they won’t give you the referral traffic that a hyperlink might, simply being worth mentioning by another brand can go a long way in terms of credibility and reputation. Increase your brand’s unlinked mentions through solid engagement with other brands, creators, influencers, journalists, and consumers.
2. Industry Studies
If you aren’t producing industry studies, take this as a sign to start! Journalists, bloggers, and other personalities love data-driven studies. Besides supplying concrete data to support your cause, they also demonstrate your brand’s ability to conduct research, analyze data, and report the results.
The data found in industry studies often lead to brand mentions–both linked and unlinked–in news stories, articles, social media infographics, and other content. Conducting and producing industry studies is a great way to get your name out there and into some of this written content.
SEO Industry Study 2023
3. Expert Quotes & Thought Leadership
You are an expert in your field, so tell people about it! Establish relationships with journalists, podcasters, bloggers, and influencers in your area of expertise so that when they need expert assistance, they will turn to you for it.
Building relationships through social media, offering to be on podcasts, or responding to HARO requests are all great ways to make yourself the go-to expert in your field. When others see you as an expert, it will consistently open you up to new opportunities and audiences.
Also, be sure to follow the news. If a story breaks that is related to your area of expertise, reach out to your contacts in the press to share your thoughts. They might use your quotes in their next story.
HARO Statistics
Digital PR & SEO: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven
If your SEO strategy has been struggling or you simply want to increase your exposure, it’s time to look into your digital PR strategy. Going beyond the print world of traditional PR, digital PR is an extremely effective way to connect with your current audience, new potential audiences, and other experts and brands in your industry.
If PR and SEO strategies are still making your head spin, reach out to the experts at Ignite Visibility. Our team has everything you need to create an online PR strategy that will get you the organic traffic and recognition you deserve!
