Most of us would be familiar with the traditional idea of PR that involves networking with journalists and publications to get featured in print, radio and television.
With the surge of digital supremacy in the last decade, traditional PR publicists are beginning to focus on digital PR. The reason for this is simple; larger audience and better viewership.
According to SEO Sandwitch Blog, in 2019, digital advertising rose to a whopping 26% of that of 2018. This estimated India’s digital media market to be at ₹221 billion in worth.
Let us dig deep into digital PR and see how it could transform your business into a brand in ways you cannot imagine.
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR brings forth numerous digital marketing options that facilitate the promotion of your business.
You can try to be interviewed by online publications and increase your social media/online presence with the help of interactive features. This guarantees recognition and superiority over your competitors.
When Can You Resort to Digital PR?
Without promoting your business properly, you cannot expect a great ROI. Proper and smart promotion strategies will ensure that you reach the much-coveted top three positions on SERPs.
More often than not, many businesses fail due to failed methods of digital marketing. You may find that there is less traffic on your business website and fewer interactions on social media pages.
Here is where digital PR can come to your rescue.
It can provide high-quality backlinks from websites and publications. It garners customer reviews in bigger numbers. Five-star ratings on Google and Amazon are no distant dreams anymore!
Digital PR displays your business ads on the websites they visit and their social media accounts.
In turn, this magic of a promotional method increases your website’s search engine visibility and rankings.
If you run a local business, a comprehensively charted local SEO digital PR strategy will specifically help you feature in online publications that focus on the locality of your choice. Local newspaper websites, blogs, local customer reviews and local events of which you can be a part are all part of this.
You can start by publishing articles, working with influencers who are popular among your leads and nurturing contact with journalists. Social media is an integral part of PR. It ensures brand exposure like no other strategy.
So increasing brand awareness is part of your agenda, do not wait upon indulging in digital PR.
What are the Benefits of Digital PR?
You will need to set certain goals that help your business grow before you step into the digital marketing arena.
Once you do, you can conveniently channel your methods to pump in better traffic. Digital PR has direct and indirect impacts on business. Let us study a few of them.
1. Traffic Generation
Every marketer’s dream: better traffic! Using digital PR strategies, you can ensure that your brand name and website recurs online frequently. This will guarantee more visits to your website.
Simply put, digital PR can make sure that your brand name does not go unnoticed.
2. Verify Authority in Your Niche
The biggest thing to follow up in the digital marketing space is to be aware of competitors. You need to ensure that your content is top-notch and a few steps ahead of theirs.
High-quality articles on sites with better authority will promise you credibility in your niche. This in turn will improve customers’ trust in your brand.
3. Generation of New Leads & Sales
Without this benefit, no marketing strategy will be popular. Digital PR will increase the interest in your brand among your target audiences.
This means a better probability of sales. As more leads are led to your website, chances for sales increase.
4. Brand Image Improvement
You are only a few digital marketing strategies away from making your business into a popular brand. Digital PR can fill that gap.
As your name is reiterated to more people on more online platforms, a familiarity begins to be associated with your brand. This familiarity will ensure that your brand becomes a household name.
5. Better SEO
When you associate with high authority sites and link them to your website, your visibility obviously increases. Besides, it will benefit your SEO rankings for your keywords.
Better SEO rankings mean a better number of leads and amazing sales.
Now you would want to know what the different types of digital PR strategies are. Being aware of multiple such strategies will make sure that you can pick the ones that favour your industry the best.
Different Types of Digital PR
1. Publish Articles Online
Content marketing can play a big role in the digital PR campaigns. You need to curate content that is worthy of being shared and linked to. According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers invest in content marketing.
Do not compromise on quality. This will ensure commendable quality backlinks. If you need guidance on how to gain good-quality backlinks, take a look at this article by ROI Minds.
2. Earn Press Features with Newsworthy Content
Blogs, apps, online forums, social media, reviews, etc. have changed the way people process information. So, becoming ‘newsworthy’ is getting tougher by the minute.
Making the content you post and the events that you indulge in to ‘sensational stories’ will buzz in journalists and audiences. They can make your brand a known one.
Social media spaces can be utilized for this purpose.
3. Invest in Influencer Marketing
Influencers can have a huge impact on local audiences. They can act as your brand ambassadors, especially on platforms like Instagram.
Having influencers testify that they follow/use your products/services will increase the credibility of your brand amongst your trusty followers. According to Influencer, most popular brands have a steady influencer marketing strategy that is sure to garner great results.
What does this mean? Better sales, of course!
4. Affiliate Marketing
Associating with the right brands can work wonders for your business. You can earn customers by affiliate programs that pay commission to bloggers.
This performance-based strategy of marketing rewards these bloggers with a commission and in turn, they refer customers to your website.
Learn from Indian Affiliate Programs how affiliate marketing has grown into an industry of its own.
5. Offline Events to Garner Better Online Coverage
Sponsor offline events or blogger events that are sure to be featured on social media spaces and news articles.
This is a great method to ensure that your brand name reaches places. Better coverage can do you no harm, whatsoever.
How to Measure Digital PR?
One huge advantage that digital PR has over traditional PR is that it is easily measurable. Using Google Analytics and tools of the same kind, this data-driven marketing strategy can be tracked down.
You can easily measure the success of your digital PR strategies using tools like BuzzSumo and Google Analytics.
Incorporating Digital PR into your Digital Marketing Campaign
The most recommended method to collaborate both your digital marketing campaign and your digital PR strategies is to have the latter run along with an SEO campaign.
These two strategies complement each other mutually to lock in organic rankings and better traffic.
Social media campaign strategies like influencer marketing are also suggested to be beneficial for your PR.
Hope this information will help you get a detailed idea about digital PR. Now is a great time to start.
Get in touch with influencers, journalists and bloggers to build a steady network among yourselves. Send them press releases and get those much-coveted backlinks and social media mentions.
Study your target audience and categorize them based on demographics and preferences. A good understanding of your industry is vital for a steady digital marketing strategy.
Take time in determining your goals before you kick start your campaign. Revise and re-revise before you begin to invest your time, energy and money into it.
If performed with a well-charted methodology, digital PR can save your business.
We will be happy to answer your questions and doubts. Leave us a comment down below.
