What is Digital PR? How Digital PR can help your brand grow
In 30 seconds:
Unsure what's meant by 'digital public relations'? Let us explain!
A great digital PR strategy will secure high quality backlinks to boost your website's SEO. Digital PR efforts can also improve your brand image, increase brand awareness, and build trust in brands' products or services, leading to more sales.
What's the difference between digital PR and traditional PR? And how do social media marketing and content marketing fit into the picture? We'll walk you through it.
Digital Public Relations (Digi PR) should be part of every brand’s digital marketing strategy. It's known as a method of growng the awareness (Fame) and visibility (Findability) of your brand using online channels. This includes online press, but can extend to other online publications as well as influencer marketing and social media channels, in addition to onsite content creation.
At Bottle, we optimise our Digital PR campaigns and strategies to help our clients meet Fame, Findability, and even Fulfilled goals. This means Digital PR can be flexible enough to meet different key performance indicators and help brands in a range of ways - whether that's transforming brand reputation, growing a brand's online presence, driving referral traffic, or improving lead generation.
Sound interesting? Let's dig in.
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR is a digital marketing tactic to raise brand awareness and visibility online. It's a little like traditional PR, but it's more measurable and targeted - and it overlaps with search engine optimsiation (SEO).
"Digital PR" is frequently taken to mean an evolution of PR that's directly for SEO.
What's meant by this? Well, SEO is how marketers make their websites appear at the top of Google results for the right search queries (known as 'keywords'), to help secure website traffic (known as 'organic search traffic') - and ultimately, customers. There are many factors at play in great SEO, but it boils down to this: you need to produce stellar onsite content, and then you need other great websites to link to you. This is what SEO marketers refer to as link building.
Digital PR, then, evolved in SEO marketing as a tactic to make link building irresistable. Rather than just emailing the owners of authoritative, relevant websites asking for a link, Digital PR is a way to make stories that journalists - or anyone with a storytelling mindset - want to pick up, and link to your website in the process.
At the same time, it can be a way to spread the word about your brand - getting a bit more creative and helping to spread key messages in memorable ways.
Because of this – Digital PR for SEO can often end up looking exactly like PR.
Why? Because PR was solving for the audience all along. Journos want to write relevant content that resonates with their audience. So, if you're creating great stories, you're making quality content.
To us at Bottle, we think Digital PR means everything that contributes to your digital footprint, both on your own website and everywhere else you are discussed, whether you controlled that message or not. There is an implicit focus on digital channels: the stories are enduring and findable beyond their publish date, and there are few brands whose audiences aren’t present and active online in some way. Plus it’s far more measurable than ever before.
What do we mean by ‘digital footprint’?
For individuals (i.e. you and me), your digital footprint is the trail of data you leave online. For brands, it's similar - but it's more about the influence your brand has. Understanding your brand's digital footprint, and optimising it, means you can grow your brand awareness and brand reputation - and your customer experience too.
This means that your brand's digital footprint can also extend its influence offline, shaping how customers perceive your brand IRL.
Digital PR enables brands to create a hard-working digital footprint.
PR is, and remains, the art of earning your way into the news agenda, to conversations and into the hearts and minds of your audience. Digital PR is omni-channel brand building on steroids. This means it can happen not only in earned media (i.e. press features), but social media platforms, forums, and specialist sites.
It could be a result of a campaign you’ve run, a new product you’ve launched or really excellent customer service you’ve delivered. Even what your CEO has been up to. All of these could spark a conversation about you. These conversations all culminate in what you’re “known for” by your audience and by extension, Google. As an entity – how positive, consistent and trustworthy do these brand mentions say you are?
This is the key: your reputation is how people talk about you when you’re not around. It’s not just what you say you are, but that our brand truths and narrative evident in every touchpoint of your business.
Is the meaning of Digital PR changing?
In a word: yes.
Bottle MD & Co-owner Natasha Hill put this question perfectly into focus in a recent LinkedIn post to the PR and marketing community:
The responses illustrate the divergent ways of thinking. For SEO marketers, "Digital PR" has traditionally meant editorial link building, but nowadays, Digital PR is much more far reaching.
At Bottle PR, we deliver the best of both. We use the best PR storytelling tactics to capture people's attention, and the best marketing tactics to boost your SEO, social and beyond. Overall, it can transform your entire digital footprint.
Digital PR tactics: What does Digital PR involve?
At Bottle, our digital PR strategies consist of content marketing, social media campaigns, influencer marketing, hero campaigns, and creative storytelling. We take time to understand your audience, so we can create engaging stories that provide the ultimate reason to shout about - and link back to - your site.
1. PR for earned media
Earning media coverage through great storytelling, a focus on audience and a great relationship with journalists are key strengths of PR. This means that it naturally lends itself well to link-building; and so a prominent strand of any brand’s SEO strategy (even if it took everyone a while to realise it).
Media fragmentation compels us to look beyond mainstream news outlets and onto specialist sites, niche verticals and interest-based publications. This informs where you need to tell your stories, the kinds of topics your audience care about and what they need to hear from you.
Our link building tactics prioritise relevant sites with high traffic, and /or high domain ratings. Relevant links from authoritative, specialist sites boost your organic rankings on search engines, while prominent links from well-known media sites are great for increasing brand awareness and even referral traffic (although both tactics help each other!)
2. Onsite content marketing
Content is king for a reason. Being generous with your knowledge builds trust, familiarity and demonstrates your expertise. It gives you a meaningful reason to get in front of your audience; something else to talk about other than yourself and your product; fuelling channels like social media and email. It can start conversations, and show your audience you know them. From an SEO perspective, it can increase the visibility of your website, help people find you for the first time and keep them interested.
Content is a critical component of your Digital PR strategy. It anchors all your storytelling. This could be a content hub, a blog, a or other digital resources. You maximise its potential by optimising the content for the way your audience searches, and syndicate through other channels.
At Bottle, we can create search engine-optimised content for your website that'll bring Googlers right to you. But we also go further: we create "Irresistably linkable" content that will have journalists chomping at the bit to send their readers to your website. This can be in-depth guides, or expert advice that offers something completely original. The flashiest of this is 10x content; content that's 10 times better than anything else on the subject. This includes high value experiences - such as interactive pages and original digital tools that attract links and keep people returning over and over.
3. Social media & influencer marketing
Social media channels, including influencers, are a great way to facilitate and amplify key messages, much like traditional PR. It's particularly effective for reaching younger demographics who might not consume traditional media.
Your social media accounts are a great way to showcase your brand narrative and humanise your brand. Social media allows brands to interact with their audience in real time, building relationships with their community online, which helps strengthen brand loyalty. If you can nurture trust, you'll find your own customers will help build your online PR!
Partnering with influencers lends additional credibility and relatable advocates to your brand. A well-chosen influencer can help you reach specific demographics, allowing for a more targeted PR campaign. And as social platforms are maturing as search engines, PR on social can help build your Findability too.
At Bottle, our in-house content creation team are whizzes at social media output, while our planning team can deliver a slick social and influencer strategy.
Measuring Digital PR
Unlike its analogue ancestor, Digital PR for earned media doesn't have a measurement problem – and there’s a blend of KPIs we can use to review its performance and how it trends over time. There are shorter term metrics you can use to understand more immediate outputs. Here are a few examples:
Number of pieces of coverage
Number of links to targeted areas of your site
The quality and relevance of those links
Views of your onsite content, time on site, pages per visit (all the Google analytics goodness).
Then, there are longer term metrics that tell us whether this activity is laddering up into the business metrics you probably really care about. These are indicators that the plan is working. If you have influenced your target audience, been steadily building your brand, people will seek you out, and they’ll show up in metrics like these:
Share of search or branded search: you are the brand of choice over your competitors. Well done you.
Keyword movements: how you're appearing in your customers' key search queries.
Organic web traffic: how often your site is served as a relevant result to people searching, and how often they visit your site.
Direct traffic: indicative of how many people already know who you are and are choosing to come straight to you.
Using a blend of the above metrics allows you to understand immediate outputs, as well as how they ladder up to your business objectives.
So Digital PR is the strategic cultivation of your digital footprint. It’s omni-channel brand building, growing visibility and authority in the eyes your audience and Google. whether that’s through onsite content, offsite storytelling (earned media, social) or how people are responding to and talking about you.
Optimised for humans.
Putting it all together: the broad strokes behind a great digital PR strategy
A great Digital PR agency will get under the skin of your audience, journalists, influencers and more to help craft stories that come alive.
Without something good to say, PR is just sending press releases into the void. Understanding your audience is therefore the first step to any PR plan, digital or otherwise. You need to get to know them as people. What matters most to them? What do they care about? What do you have to tell them that will genuinely help them, make their lives easier or make them look good?
If the messaging and creative aren’t good enough, it won’t work, and you’ve just spent thousands of pounds showing people a bad message, doing more harm than good.
Another hard truth: one tactic - be it earned media, onsite content, or social media marketing - needs to be supported by the others for optimum results. Take, for instance, link building: we can secure you the best links and coverage possible, but if your onsite content is a let-down, Google won't place you in the top results for your target keyword - so you won't feel all the SEO benefits of offsite Digital PR. Similarly, if you're driving a 'fulfilled' strategy with influencers (i.e. your Digital PR aims to drive sales), but you haven't set up your ecommerce strategy, your digital PR campaigns are unlikely to result in boosted conversions.
In order for PR to be effective, we need a story, new news, something to make your audience’s ears prick up… and make them want to tell someone else. Your product or business story can only take you so far, so what else do you have to say? A great message is the secret to Reach – and when someone else is sharing your content, campaign or brand experience, it’s that much more powerful.
Find out how our creative digital PR services can help improve your fame and findability.
FAQs
What's the difference between traditional PR and digital PR?
Traditional PR uses conventional media outlets such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television. It relies on press releases, press conferences, media kits and direct pitches to journalists. Digital PR, meanwhile, is similar but dials down print media, and focuses more on online platforms including digital publications, social media, blogs, and relevant websites. Press releases, media kits and pitches to journalists are still on the menu, but so are social media posts, influencer partnerships, email newsletters and content for your website.
Digital PR also encourages two-way communication. Brands can interact more closely with audiences, and feedback and engagement metrics are more easily monitored and analysed. Traditional PR measurement relies on metrics like media impressions and circulation numbers, but Digital PR has more ways to measure, including search visibility, website traffic, and engagement indicators. It can therefore provide more precise data on your campaign's performance and your audience's behaviour.
What is the main SEO benefit of Digital PR?
Digital PR campaigns can drive high quality backlinks to your brand online.
To optimise your website to help you surface in Google results for your target audience, you need to create quality content, but you also need quality backlinks. Offsite Digital PR campaigns can help you secure those links in earned media. "Natural link building" is what happens when you create excellent onsite content, and writers for digital publications want to link to you as an authority on your subject. If you can tell compelling stories to get additional press mentions, then you're doing even better.
The benefit of all this? improved visibility, increased traffic, and ultimately more conversions.
This isn't the only benefit though. As search engines' AI offerings mature, Digital PR's ability to drive online mentions - on social media, forums and more - can help tell Google more about your brand. This means that Digital PR helps your SEO in more ways than you'd expect - and it'll likely develop in the near future.
What channels are included in a digital PR campaign?
A Digital PR campaign uses a wide variety of content formats, including video, podcasts and blogs - as well as stellar press releases. It sits across various channels, and can be a mix of any (or all!) of the following:
Online news outlets and digital publications
Owned site content, including blogs and 10x content
Owned Social media platforms
Influencer marketing
Podcasts and webinars
Email newsletters
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Want to see a Digital PR campaign in action? Check out our Digital PR examples, where we've used storytelling to gain backlinks, maintain brand awareness, and driven clients' prominence in the digital space.