👋 Zack Neary-Hayes is a freelance SEO consultant, currently taking on new clients 💪
Digital PR is a digital marketing tactic that blends traditional journalism and PR with SEO. Successful businesses use digital PR to generate interest around their brands online. It’s one of the best ways to whip up a buzz about a brand within the digital sphere, whilst also capturing backlinks that drive organic visibility.
Digital PR involves trying to win coverage for your business on authoritative websites and publications, ideally ones within your business' niche or broader general interest sites, such as news, general interest, and magazine websites.
This is achieved by creating interesting content that journalists may be interested in covering, and pitching them to secure coverage.
The key to all Digital PR campaigns is to understand your target audience - their likes and interests - as well as the publications and websites they regularly read.
Research is key to a successful campaign, and allows a focussed, targeted media list to be built. The end result is topically relevant links and brand signals which can power the wider visibility of your brand's website, as well as directly generating conversions and revenue from referral traffic.
Any content that secures digital PR coverage is likely to be shared across multiple channels, including social network, blogs, and forums.
By increasing the number of high quality web pages linking to yours, it can improve how trustworthy Google thinks your website is, which in turn, can lead to higher search visibility.
You'll gain valuable insights into what works and doesn't work when engaging with different types of publishers. You'll learn how to better engage with these individuals so that you can achieve repeatable success.
When people talk about your company online, this will help spread awareness of your brand, products, and services. In turn, this creates a healthy buzz surrounding your business.
If you're looking to establish yourself as an expert in your field, then securing press mentions from reputable sources can add weight to your message.
As a digital PR campaign gains traction, it's likely to be covered by a wide range of media outlets, exposing your brand to audiences that were previously out of reach.
This is where you come up with ideas for stories that could potentially get covered by influential publications. These might include features, interviews, case studies, reviews, opinion pieces, data journalism, resources, and essentially any other form of content that may resonate with the readership of our target publications.
Once you've got some great story ideas, you need to create compelling copy that resonates with editors. Content used for digital PR purposes has to be exceedingly high quality. Fluff that has been churned out in 30 minutes will not cut it. Content has to stand on is own merits and have a genuinely useful purpose or novel angle, otherwise it will be destined to lay dormant with no coverage.
The target outreach list for the campaign is researched and created. This involves finding journalists, website owners, bloggers, and authors who cover similar topics to those that we have covered within our content. The best way to contact them is researched and noted down, ready for when it's time to pitch them. For maximum impact, numerous segmented lists may be created, which allows a laser-focussed message to be sent to the right contacts at the right time.
This is the business end of the process where everything falls into place. Pitches need to resonate with those on our outreach lists, whilst also being simple to understand and easily actionable. Journalists are busy people, and if we want them to cover our story, it's our job to make sure that they can get all the details of the story as quickly as possible.
