Historically, traditional public relations have always been very effective at attracting customers’ attention. However, with the rise of the internet and social media, this has slightly changed, as customers seem to be more engaging on brand-promotional content when taken through modern online channels such as social media, influencers, and digital media too.
On the other hand, traditional PR is the marketing discipline which deals with building companies recognition by getting featured in press, publications or television, it is currently still widely used in marketing. The Hostel PR campaign Even Divas are Believers with Mariah Carey or lawyer.com campaign with Lindsay Lohan are recent examples of how powerful PR could be, however, we are concerned in this post about the effectiveness and procedures of digital PR for companies. Let’s take a look at what brands are doing and what it involves.
Many brands including giants such as Chanel and Louise Vuitton are using influencers, social media and SEO as an effective way to frequently launch PR campaigns and have been successful with them as brands are made to easily reach the potential client’s search thereby enhancing sales. If that’s the case, then we need to understand how exactly to leverage digital PR for enhanced productivity.
What is digital PR?
Digital PR can simply be defined as the online marketing field employed mostly by companies to boost their online presence via influencers, digital media press releases, and social media. Digital PR marketers connect bloggers, marketing influencers and journalists, as well as they carefully distribute online press releases in order to attract quality network social media mentions, backlinks and for SEO visibility for companies.
Digital PR is relatively new however it is not very distant from regular PR. Currently, the role of Digital PR isn’t far-fetched, as discussed earlier, they help gain high-quality mentions and backlinks from sites and increase the overall online visibility of brands and companies. It helps with targeting potential customers by mentioning your business on the sites they are browsing and on social media accounts they constantly use.
Digital PR key process and channels
A digital PR professional usually will employ different tactics and strategies to increase a client´s online visibility. Below are the processes that are most widely in media relations channel:
Content Marketing
Both content and PR teams usually join hands to come about with a winning strategy that’ll guarantees that the brand reaches its marketing objectives by ensuring they generate a good amount of quality attention for the brand. Usually, digital PR agencies either assist, create or amend sometimes with content creation, content management, and distribution thereby spreading the wings of its marketing campaign.
Search Engine Optimization
Many online PR efforts are directed to increase SERP rankings. Digital PR specialists seized as many opportunities as possible to join forces with the SEO teams and ensure that every promoted content is optimized for the relevant keywords so that customers could easily find it while searching and also maximize every press mention opportunity to drive more traffic to the client´s website.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the most effective channels that brands use for online communications and publications, along with influencers. Digital PR team explores social media beyond being a channel for uploading content and use it to reach out to customers quicker and more effectively and showcase their products on influencers´ channels and their own ones. Needless to say, social media is a great channel to improve companies´ image.
Online Media Relations
Digital PR employs media connections to create or generate mentions, press releases, customer reviews, and sponsored content as well. All these efforts will, in return, enhance online brand awareness. That way, even new visitors are easily attracted to the site. Nowadays, public relations specialists make use of diverse channels to deliver all of those results and they generate integrated PR campaigns that help disperse content throughout multiple online channels.
Data Analysis
As a marketing consultant, data is the most powerful tool I use. And data analysis helps me understand the effectiveness of any marketing campaign by inspecting, cleansing, modeling data to discover important statistical information. From identifying top searched topics to reviewing the latest distribution channels, the use of data help to understand and optimize any digital PR efforts.
Media and Influencer Outreach
Digital PR marketers connect with those that could help make their content be in front of the target viewers to discover guest post or develop relationships with influencers, magazines and other media to share their content on their social media channels or sites
Mentions Management
Digital PR agents also monitor every media mentions and instigate in relevant discussions so as to make sure of a cordial relationship with customers and maintain a good company reputation.
Online Visibility Monitoring
Apart from mention management, they also monitor how well their contents are viewed thereby determining the success of their works. That way, they can plan better future campaigns.
Digital PR tools
Based on digital PR functions we discussed earlier, let’s move onto the tools professional digital PR use to deliver successful campaigns:
Analyzing Competitor Strategies
Tools like Buzzsumo helps to identify the most popular content topics and what the best performing post is on your competitors’’ site as well as discover what makes them so engaging.
SEMrush will help you put competitor’s brand mentions under watch, discover the trending keywords and review their backlink profile as well.
Connecting with Media Sources
You can’t do without employing either journalists or bloggers to deliver your work perfectly. But they need you just as much as you need them Tools like Help a Reporter Out (HARO), Source Battle or Journo Request help you track source requests and pitch your brand to the most searched requests straightforwardly.
Identifying the Most Viable Strategies or Campaign Ideas
Tools like SEMrush can also help you know the number of people visiting the site, the source and location of the visitors.
Pitching
For effective pitching, Prowly will help you have a smooth process on this, from sending customized outreach emails to reviewing the progress.
Measuring results
There are nowadays many modern tools to analyze and monitor in real time the results of digital marketing campaigns. Besides, they can express digital PR’s ROI and leverage it for performance improvement.
Conclusion
Digital PR isn’t a one size fit-it-all. Although it does increase online awareness, presence, and brand loyalty and it can actually deliver great results to companies and entrepreneurs, to achieve good results, consistency is key, monitoring the performance of your campaigns and improving them repeatedly until perfection is advisable.
I hope after all this you’ve got a deeper insight on how to leverage the power of digital PR for improving the visibility of your website and increase your companies presence.
