The 3 key ingredients for digital PR

By: Sophie Moore | Senior Digital Planner

Digital PR can seem like a heavy treacle pudding you don’t have the appetite for, but it’s actually made up of a delicious line-up of 3 simple ingredients - audience need, onsite content and offsite stories.  

When developing the strategy for brands, we rigorously explore the audience and test how we can meet their needs. Pinpointing where audience demand can be met by the brand’s authentic authority via a supply of highly relevant content, through the journey of offsite (earned) and onsite (owned) storytelling.

Simply follow these steps to enjoy this light and refreshing smorgasbord of content marketing strategies, and fill up on the power of digital PR, and how it can propel your brand’s search visibility. 

The Ingredients: 

• Audience need– insight to inform your storytelling strategy 

• Onsite content – led by audience demand 

• Offsite stories – led by media demand 

The Method: 

Step 1: Insight into audience need 

The start of mouth-wateringly good storytelling should not solely be based on keyword volumes. Instead, it should identify who your audience is and what they’re interested in reading, consuming and purchasing on a day-to-day basis. You need to get into THEIR world, and find ways to connect them to YOUR world, whilst remembering that it’s highly unlikely you’re going to resonate with them by shoving content that only ever features your product, down their ‘I’m-not-so-hungry-for-that’ throats. It’s about finding the storytelling ideas that your audiences’ brains crave. 

With access to a wealth of insight tools online there’s never been more data available to learn about different audiences and what they’re drawn to. A few of our favourites include: 

• Google Trends to gauge interest over time for a specific topic (free to use) 

• Answer the Public for search listening and the questions people are asking (free to use) 

• Brandwatch for social listening and competitor analysis 

• SEM Rush for topic research and keyword analysis 

This creative intelligence will help you identify and validate (probably less than) a handful of very clear topics to talk about. 

But one last thing before you put fingers to keyboard & start drafting - do a quick competitor analysis to see what they’re talking about. Have a look at the content they publish and cross-reference it with the insights you’ve found.  

Step 2: Onsite Content (owned) 

This is the phase where you put into practice making your website search engine friendly so you can start to climb up the rankings and increase your brand visibility.  

Google, the king of search engines, processes over 3.5 billion searches a day. So, the content you host on your site needs to be so valuable that it’s not only beneficial to searchers, but it gives journalists a reason to link to your site. Both factors contribute to your website’s SEO value, adding findability strength, to your brand. 

Take the topics discovered through the audience need identification process outlined above and place your findings in one of the following categories. It should give you a better idea about how the piece of content you’re writing can actually provide value and serve your audience:

1. Help content – answering the questions people are searching for on Google in a useful and informative way. This could be in ‘X’ number of top tips or an easy-to-follow guide. 

2. Hub content – tasty content that gives your audiences a reason to then explore your brand further, regularly coming back for more. Think long form articles and white papers within a content hub (i.e. not the product / ecommerce pages). 

3. Hero content – engage your audience with unexpected content that gets them thinking, or better yet makes them smile. This is what helps them remember you. Consider using a new immersive technology, a video or an experiential campaign (done virtually). 

Before anything is thrown into the big online pot for all to see, you must optimise your content. Here’s a handy checklist… 

• Check your keywords have been sprinkled into your copy, but don’t force it 

• Add in a few relevant backlinks 

• Use an online writing assistant as your editor (SEM Rush have a good one) 

• Use a mixture of content formats – long text is not only dull, but it’s not as rich in Google’s eyes. So, images, video, infographics will bring life to it. 

Step 3: Offsite Story (earned) 

Links continue to be the cherry on the cake for ranking factors in the eyes of Google. But securing goodies with the high DA (domain authority) sites is increasingly becoming no piece of cake. The content you share outside of your brand channels needs to really appeal to the media through high quality editorial that will keep their readers reading, and your brand noticed and talked about.   Just like you, journalists have a similar goal: improving SEO and their publication’s brand. Providing content that helps them move closer to that goal will certainly increase your chances of gaining not just coverage, but those all-important links. 

Be sure to review your topics and your content headlines. Have a think about the media verticals you might want to target and the needs or challenges their readers might have. You’re not always going to have national news-worthy stories to tell (otherwise this job would be far too easy), so think about smaller audience groups and focus your PR outreach efforts in that direction. 

For the competitive spirit in you, run a backlink gap analysis and see which media are featuring your competitors for similar subjects. Add journos from these titles and try and steal a bit of your foes march. 

Offsite stories come in many formats; news announcements, press releases, thought-leadership features, data stories and case studies. So, consider which option would sell your written content best. And then, get those wonderfully talented creatives in your office to bring that story to life through stills, animations, videos. 

Much like smashingly good onsite content, PR is a raising agent for SEO. It increases search visibility in 3 key ways: 

1. It increases brand awareness 

2. It grows and maintains the positions of generic keywords 

3. It grows the number of keyword variations you’re found through 

4. It reduces your reliance on PPC 

5. It is long-lasting, durable content that can be found time and time again (if done well, and kept fresh) 

So, why do these digital PR strategies come as a trio? Because it’s only when working together, meeting the audience needs with an online storytelling journey, that they optimise your SEO goals. An increase in search positions equals an increase in organic traffic, which means a lot more happy, satiated customers.

Get in contact today to find out how our digital PR services can improve your brand's fame and findability.