Digital PR merges public relations with SEO, aiming to boost a brand’s online presence. It involves sharing valuable information, and incorporating keywords for Google ranking.
This strategy enhances visibility and credibility, gaining high-quality backlinks in the Digital PR process.
This article explains what digital PR is, why it is an important part of your overall SEO and public relations campaign, and how StudioHawk can help you implement attention grabbing digital PR Strategies.
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR boosts online brand recognition by sharing your story via press releases and publicity, aiming to secure high-value backlinks to your site.
It’s a strategic approach to enhance visibility and credibility, making your content a valuable resource for others.
This method effectively supports SEO efforts, driving organic traffic to your website.
Digital PR, once seen merely as a marketing strategy, is now a key SEO tool.
Common types of digital PR can include:
- Creative Campaigns – These are typically larger campaigns that use creative angles to attract brand attention and often are designed to lead to virality. These can include assets like games, billboard, or in-person elements like redesigning Airbnbs to a specific brand colour.
- Guest posts on other websites– this involves writing good content for a website related to yours or posting articles about topics you want traction for. You can get a writing credit and a backlink to your website.
- Reactive Campaigns – With reactives, you need to be able to jump straight on the latest breaking news or trends that are happening at the time. This can be anything from a breaking news story, a seasonal holiday, or a product release.
- Data-Led Campaigns – These campaign types use a variety of data sources to provide unique information to journalists that they can base a story around. This can use anything from a site’s own data, survey data, studies, social media statistics and more.
- Expert Commentary – Sometimes, journalists require expert sources to provide more depth to a story or to provide balance. This can also relate to reactive campaigns or be sourced from journalist requests on platforms like HARO, X, or Qwoted.
Linked vs. Unlinked Mentions
Digital PR can produce both linked and unlinked mentions.
A linked mention provides a link back to the website that has provided the quote, data or information that has produced the story. This offers strong SEO value building the site’s authority and diversifying a site’s backlink profile.
An unlinked mention on the other hand, often referred to as ‘coverage’, is not as powerful for SEO, but still offers some positive brand awareness.
There is argument that unlinked brand mentions also provide strong signals to Google of relevance and semantic connections.
A link is a link, coverage for your brand is great regardless and has indirect impacts on your SEO performance long term.
Digital PR vs. Traditional PR
Let’s take a closer look at how traditional PR and digital PR differ, and why they’re both important in today’s brand-building efforts.
It’s like comparing two different tools in your marketing toolbox, each with unique strengths.
Traditional PR:
- Focus: Aims at boosting brand awareness through media relations, press releases, and event sponsorships.
- Strategies: Involves engaging with journalists, organising press events, and sponsoring activities that can bring attention to the brand.
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Success is measured by the amount of positive media coverage, reputation enhancement, and audience reach.
- Mediums: Primarily relies on print, broadcast, and direct media channels.
Traditional PR is like the art of storytelling, where you use various platforms to weave narratives about your brand, hoping to capture the audience’s imagination and foster a positive image.
Digital PR:
- Focus: Concentrates on using online content to earn backlinks, which improves search engine visibility and supports SEO efforts.
- Strategies: Involves creating compelling and relevant content like data-driven studies, infographics, or interactive tools that websites want to link to.
- KPIs: Success in digital PR is often measured by the quality and quantity of backlinks earned and the impact on SEO ranking metrics.
- Mediums: Utilises online platforms, including blogs, social media, and digital news outlets.
Digital PR is like building digital bridges to your website.
By creating content that others find valuable enough to link to, you’re not just telling a story; you’re making it easier for people to find and share your narrative online.
Combining the Best of Both Worlds:
While traditional PR excels in creating broad awareness and establishing a brand’s reputation, digital PR extends these efforts into the online realm, offering tangible SEO benefits and direct pathways to your website.
The blend of both approaches allows brands to tell compelling stories that not only resonate with audiences but also enhance online visibility and authority.
Digital PR and SEO
Let’s explore why digital PR has become such a hit in the SEO world.
Essentially, it’s a super effective way to gather backlinks, which are like digital thumbs-ups from other websites to yours.
Imagine you have an amazing story to share and a webpage that people can link back to.
By crafting a press release and sending it to the right crowd, you could see a flood of these digital thumbs-ups heading your way, alongside a wave of new visitors to your site.
Why is Digital PR important to your business?
There are many positive factors to implementing it:
- Backlinks: A well-pitched press release can lead to lots of websites linking back to yours. Think of each backlink as a vote of confidence in your content, telling search engines, “Hey, this is worth checking out!” on a high-authority website
- Boost in Web Traffic: With all these backlinks, more people can find and visit your website. It’s like opening several doors for guests to enter your digital house.
- Increased Brand Authority: Google loves websites that others link to. The more backlinks you have from highly authoritative sites, the more Google sees your site as trustworthy. It’s like getting a good reputation and enhancing your brand.
- More Customers and Higher Conversion Rates: With more people visiting your website, and your site appearing more credible, you’re setting the stage to turn those visitors into customers. It’s about not just getting attention but getting the right kind of attention that leads to action.
Digital PR is more than just getting your name out there.
It’s about crafting a compelling story and using it to connect with the right audience in a way that boosts your website’s authority and traffic.
Different kinds of Digital PR Campaigns
There are different kinds of digital PR campaigns:
Existing data campaign
This is a campaign where you have content and data, and you want it shared with the world.
Guest posting could include this kind of campaign, rewriting and refreshing an article for a new audience, or writing fresh content for products and services you already have, to generate backlinks.
What is good about an existing data campaign is the heavy lifting has already been done. You have data and content to share already, and it is now just a process of running a digital PR campaign to make people aware of it.
Survey campaign
A survey campaign is an effort to feel the pulse of your target market. You have a product or service to solve a problem, and you want to know if your target audience would use you if they had such a problem.
The answers you find from such a survey campaign can help make changes to your solution, and it can give you some robust data and subscribers for your list.
Often this PR campaign has free samples or gifts, to encourage people to try a product or service and to commit to the survey afterward.
Map campaign
Map campaigns are where you generate data and then use that data in conjunction with a map. Overlaying your data and results with a map is great for local SEO and for ways to show off how effective your marketing and your brand are at a local level. This effectiveness can be raised to a city, state, or country level, depending on your target audience.
This is good digital PR because journalists like a good story with some facts to back it up. If they can also talk about localised stories, then they can get a readership at a local level.
How often have you seen stories where a particular suburb has the highest rate of fish and chip consumption? Or the highest housing prices? How about the best plumbers by state? You can make a safe bet that the journalist didn’t research the story themselves but used a digital PR campaign.
The next great thing about doing some localised digital PR, and a map campaign, are the backlinks you get from these journalists and other articles which reference your work. Providing good data and a good story will get you good brand exposure and some quality backlinks.
How to Do Digital PR
How can you plot, plan and execute an awesome digital PR Plan?
There are four main phases to a good digital PR campaign.
1. Ideation phase
Ideation is a fancy word for coming up with ideas.
You need some ideas to work with, which match the topic you have and the channels you can work with.
Some great techniques to come up with ideas include:
- Brainstorming– a group of people in a room, your creative team, your SEO team, the client, throwing random ideas up on a whiteboard. Nothing is off-limits until you sit back and review. It’s good to have one person herding the cats, if you will, so discussions don’t get too out of control.
- Worst Idea– What’s the worst that could happen? This helps people realise that some ideas are good because what’s the worse that could happen? A lot of fun too. Sometimes, the worse that can happen could be exactly what you want. Think of those late-night infomercials, where something bad happens, and they provide the solution.
- Mind Mapping– is a visual technique for introverted people or those who are averse to adding to an open conversation. Take 5 minutes to write down solutions to the problem. At the end of the time limit, someone at the front adds these solutions to the main problem. You build upon each solution outwards, linking ideas together.
- Sketching– for visual people, or artists, sometimes drawing solutions can help. Combine this with a storyboard, and you could map out a great idea into a campaign easily. You don’t have to be a great artist. Stick figures work fine.
Don’t be afraid to mix up ideas and research other ways to get ideas from people. Make it fun as well.
If you work on something you enjoy, the work tends to be so much better.
Choose a topic that is relevant to your business
What does your market want from you?
How-to guides and videos?
News and current affairs?
Ways you can use your product and services which are different?
The better you know your target audience, and your prized customers, the better you will be able to serve their content needs.
On the flip side, you can also introduce something entirely new for them, which you know they’ll like and appreciate.
Check to see if similar campaigns have been done recently
Competitor research is a fantastic source for this SEO tactic.
You need to see if something similar has been done by competitors in your market or in a new market you are trying to break into.
This research is good for two main reasons:
- If a competitor has done an excellent job, you can emulate what they did but do it better. You already have an idea of how successful the campaign can be. Do a better job, give better incentives, get better results – or even as simple as giving more up-to-date data.
- If a competitor tried something that didn’t work, you know pretty well that it is not a good idea, and you shouldn’t go down that path.
It’s also a good idea to check if a campaign has been done recently as people have good memories. If your customers see your campaign and think- didn’t so and do that last month? The impact won’t be as significant.
However, if they remember something similar from the year before, they can feel nostalgic and want to get involved again.
Top Tip – Look at the news every morning and afternoon to get a good understanding of the news cycle, and make sure to review various publications from magazines to news sites. This will give you a wider spread of potential ideas based on target audiences reading these publications and will also help to give you an understanding of the types of things that people are publishing, reading and interested in.
2. Create the Narrative
A good campaign has a narrative, a story structure that a customer can latch onto or they can relate to. Through this narrative, you bring the customers along a journey to salvation, and solution, through your products and services.
Create custom designs for your campaign!
This is the part where you get the crayons out. This is when you get to have fun with words slogans, and catchphrases.
- What keywords do you have that can be a part of the catchphrases, the narrative you’re telling?
- What colours are you going to use to identify the campaign? Will they be your brand colours or new colours for the campaign?
- Do you need a designer to come in and make designs, or can you come up with something yourself?
- Are the designs going to be memorable?
It could be argued that the creative process is the most enjoyable part of any marketing or PR campaign. Again, have fun with this stage. If you have fun, then others will have fun and enjoy it too.
Top Tip – Relevance is always key, so make sure that despite your campaign being wildly creative, it is relevant to the brand that is pitching it.
3. Build an outreach strategy and list
This is the stage you look at what journalists are after, what the news cycles are looking like, where you can land your story.
Not every news outlet or journalist will be a good fit for your digital PR campaign, so don’t try to send it to everyone. The more you know your networks, the better you will be at this stage.
If you send out irrelevant press releases to journalists, then they may blacklist you which could ruin your chances for the future.
Do your research, have a database of outlets, and what their wants and needs are.
It’s also a good idea to develop relationships with journals and journalists.
This can make it easier for future digital PR outreach to get out to the public while giving you more leverage to convert mentions to links.
Top Tip – You need to make sure that your emails are not going to be blacklisted when sending out bulk media lists. Using a VPN or emailing system designed to send out bulk emails can help to avoid this to stop your emails from not being sent or landing in spam.
4. Pitching phase
Now it is time to pitch your idea to the journalists, to the public. You’ve got the campaign ready to go.
You have linkable assets, such as an image, interview opportunities, graphics, and data, all ready to be shared.
It is a good idea to have all your ducks in a row by the time you send the press release out. If you get a quick response from a journalist, you need to be ready with all the details to run with your story. Do not leave them waiting for you to get back to them. The news cycle can spin pretty quickly.
Top Tip – Not all journalists will give you a link immediately and may only include an unlinked mention within the piece. Don’t be afraid to reapproach that journalist to try to get that mention converted to a link.
Digital PR tools
Tools that you can use to boost your digital PR are third-party options. Here are some of the better digital PR tools out there for you to try:
- Business Wire– This is a website that has a reach of over 162 countries and over 100,000 media outlets, to which you can release a press release. You need to sign up to see the pricing, but considering the reach this website has and the reputation it has for worldwide journalism and news outlets, it is one of the most important tools in your digital PR toolkit.
- BuzzStream– This is a great platform for research, pitching, making contacts, getting backlinks, and more. It has a free trial offer, and the basic rate is $24 per month.BuzzStream is very easy to use and very user-friendly. It has automatic list building, social metrics, contact information from websites, and some great automation rules.
- BuzzSumo– Not only can you get access to influencers and marketers and content discovery, but this tool also allows you to monitor backlinks that occur thanks to your digital PR. Set up a Slack integration and get alerts whenever you, or your competition, acquire backlinks from campaigns. This can allow you to do a better content job than your competitors and possibly win those backlinks for yourself.
- Cision – This is one of the largest media databases in the world and can provide you with the information you need and the platform to be able to find journalists and send out press releases to them.
- MuckRack – This platform can be used to find journalists, send out press releases, monitor the news and can even be used as a reporting tool.
- Prowly – They define themselves as the all-in-one platform for PR, and can help with finding relevant media contacts, pitching and building reports.
As well as these third-party sites, we also recommend using LinkedIn for relationship and network building.
Finding journalists and editors there and building rapport with them is a great idea.
You can publish articles under your profile and also send out press releases to your new connections. If you already have an active reader base, this could convince those editors to take on your material, as you’d have a guaranteed readership.
Example of Digital PR Campaigns
This a fascinating case study on how Lifespan Fitness, an Australian leader in fitness equipment, boosted its SEO campaign through digital PR (DPR).
This example beautifully illustrates the power of digital strategies in enhancing brand visibility and link diversity.
Campaign Background:
Lifespan Fitness, known for its top-notch gym and sports equipment, aimed to broaden its SEO efforts by adding more variety to its backlink profile.
The goal was to not only support their existing SEO strategy but also to introduce them to the benefits of digital PR for future marketing endeavors.
Strategy:
The plan was multifaceted:
- To leverage current fitness trends, especially from popular platforms like TikTok, to create compelling content.
- To target high-authority and relevant global publications for link acquisition.
- To employ a mix of branded and inner page links to optimize SEO value.
- A digital PR trategy involved a combination of reactive, data-led, and expert commentary approaches to pull in authoritative links to their site.
Execution:
- Ideation: The team tapped into TikTok to identify emerging fitness trends, selecting those with the highest engagement and potential for widespread interest.
- Data Collection: Using tools like Semrush as well as TikTok’s internal data, they analyzed search volumes for these trends and view data, pinpointing the most popular ones based on global monthly search metrics.
- Press Release: They crafted tailored press releases for various niches, ensuring the content matched the interests of targeted journalists. These were reworked based on location – AU, UK and US – to ensure that they were hyper relevant.
- Media List Building & Outreach: The team curated a media list targeting both global and national publications, using personalized outreach to secure coverage.
Results:
- High-Quality Links: Achieved a top link DR (Domain Rating) of 90, with an average DR of 65 across 14 links acquired from a single campaign.
- Extensive Coverage: Secured coverage in major outlets like Nine News, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and the Daily Telegraph, enhancing brand exposure significantly.
This digital PR case study demonstrates the effectiveness of digital PR in augmenting SEO efforts.
By smartly integrating data-driven content with digital outreach, Lifespan Fitness not only diversified its link profile but also expanded its brand visibility globally.
Final Word
As you can see, digital PR is a valuable tool to have in your SEO tool kit.
Not only can it increase the reach of your brand and your values, but it can also bring loads of traffic back to your website. This feeds the bottom line, and it helps raise your page’s ranking.
StudioHawk, a multi-award-winning agency, can get you big wins through digital PR.
Check out our digital PR services and get in touch with the team to find out how we can get you and your brand noticed on the world stage or in your backyard!
