Whether you’re looking to study, kick start a career in marketing or want to refresh your existing skills, this beginner’s guide to digital PR covers everything from basic knowledge to knowing how to build a successful digital PR campaign.
What is digital PR?
Digital Public Relations is a strategy used to boost awareness and visibility of your brand using online platforms. Digital PR is similar to traditional PR but it offers the possibility to reach more people in a measurable and calculated way. Digital PR is the evolution of link-building and traditional PR methods, often used for SEO KPIs and improving a website’s organic performance.
This modern marketing technique is an essential process for gathering authority online by focusing on building brand mentions, links from highly relevant publications and contributing external content and campaigns.
The difference between digital PR and traditional PR
When you first think of PR, your mind will probably wander to newspapers and TV advertisements. Traditional PR involves networking with journalists to get featured in print publications. The goal of a publicist who specialises in traditional PR is to connect contacts and get content promoted or quoted in media (e.g. newspapers, magazines, radio, and television). Using a similar approach but for digital devices, digital PR provides opportunities in areas such as online interviews, improving an online presence and utilising platforms such as social media to drive growth and brand recognition.
What does digital PR involve?
A good digital PR campaign will combine the best of traditional PR with a focus on more modern solutions including content marketing, SEO, and social media. A digital PR specialist uses a variety of tactics to improve the presence of a company or client. Some of these tactics include:
- Creating and sending out press releases
- Building relationships with online journalists and bloggers
- Organising reviews and interviews
- Optimise links in press releases and content
- Use influencer marketing and blogger outreach
- Publishing high-quality content
What’s included in a digital PR campaign?
Creating a digital PR campaign will come with a range of different objectives and ideas depending on company goals and demographics. However, they all involve the same basic steps and processes.
- Understanding your audience: Before kickstarting your campaign, use methods such as surveys and social media analytics to understand and assess your audience. Understanding their interests and actions online will help you choose the right techniques and platforms going forward.
- Set realistic goals: Take time to understand your goals and KPIs, using these to set and analyse goals along the way.
- Building key relationships: Both internal and external relationships matter greatly for digital PR. Building connections with influencers, bloggers, journalists and other marketers is key.
- Plan your content: Once all the primary research is complete, brainstorming all your ideas will give you a treasure trove of ideas to run with.
- Measure and analyse your success: Some key feedback to track would be the number of clicks, links, social shared, leads and ROI.
What are the benefits of digital PR?
With the main objective to be to raise brand awareness and build connections, here are several other benefits that digital PR can offer:
- Boosting website traffic through external links and mentions
- Improved SEO and search ranking scores
- Establish authority online and amongst competitors
- Generate earned links
- Generate leads and sales
- Improve brand image and gain the trust of customers
- Track growth and success
- Cost-effective and flexible
- Build authentic relationships and improve industry communication
“Digital PRs should ensure they take time to understand how new tools such as AI actually work before integrating them into their day-to-day. I see a lot of people relying on tools like ChatGPT for copywriting. This simply won’t fly with journalists and they’re very likely to go as far as to reject the content. They’re becoming increasingly cautious of AI-generated content – and for good reason! PR is all about communication; getting a message out there and ensuring it’s understood by the right people. If you take the human element away your message won’t hit with the impact required to fulfill your end goals. AI is a great tool for research and idea generation but whether you’re practising ‘traditional’ or digital PR, approaching your communication in a human way will allow you to tap in and find the angles and stories that the media are really looking for. Digital PR is as much about sharing the right messages as any other form of comms (I’d argue some people forget that), and links, improved SEO and Domain Authority don’t mean much if the brand association isn’t spot on.”
Leigh-Ann Hewer, Account Director for Carnsight Communications
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