As a digital marketer, you’re looking at your social media and digital marketing, measuring your engagement and returns. You examine your SEO to determine how you’re ranking on search engines and ways to bring better results with and without ads. Now, let’s bring these two disciplines, digital marketing, and SEO, together to bring your online business to the next level. It’s time to look at digital PR.
What Is Digital PR?
Sometimes referred to as online PR, digital PR is a subsect of content marketing designed to help build your brand. It is your online public relations (the PR portion of digital PR). A typical digital PR strategy involves,
Creating and publishing articles and press releases
Building relationships with bloggers and influencers to feature products and provide reviews
Creating an affiliate marketing strategy
Building and nurturing relationships with journalists and content writing contacts to secure press
Building your brand through social media exposure
Building trust in your brand through honest online reviews
A good digital PR strategy will help you grow your business while confronting and challenging any negative information about your company or brand.
How Does Digital PR Increase SEO?
Let’s look at Netflix. Recently, Netflix has been in the news for its economic woes. If you Google Netflix, you can see instantly what digital PR does for their SEO. Your first result is, as expected, their website. The organic result, however, is their Twitter account. Netflix has an aggressive social media strategy on Twitter where they promote major shows, retweet their affiliates and fans, and occasionally respond to other posts. Their aggressive PR means that in order to find the news they’d rather you not see (outside of their platforms) you have to click on other tabs.
Because social media has become interlinked with our online experiences, a strong social media presence helps to build a strong SEO for your company. Digital PR helps you keep control of your messaging and direct consumers where you want them to go for information about you.
How to Create a Digital PR Strategy
Now that you know what digital PR is and the impact it can have on your brand, let’s look at how to create a winning digital PR strategy.
Set a Goal
The goal is at the center of your SEO, digital marketing, and your digital PR strategy. Determine what your goals are for your digital PR and how these goals intersect with your SEO goals. Some examples include,
Building trust with consumers
Driving new traffic to your website
Encouraging customer reviews
Building relationships with social media influencers
Creating brand recognition outside of your original consumer base
Review Your Consumer Targeting
Any digital strategy needs a target audience, and digital PR is no different. Outline your target markets, including new markets you want to expand into. When you create your outline, include any pain points and opportunities.
Create Ideas and Do Research
Before you can create content for your digital PR strategy, you need ideas to build from. Remember, you’re not building the content. You’re laying the guidelines that will guide future content. It’s best to have at least a few ideas that you can build from. Some examples include sharing industry-related articles and news, sharing your blogs and articles, sharing consumer testimonials, and the list goes on.
Once you have some ideas, do your research. This includes data analysis on competitors. It also includes researching what kind of content you will be able to offer. For example, if you want to share industry news, you want to make sure you have sources to share that are not direct competitors.
Identify Target Publications and Create a Press List
Remember, one aspect of a digital PR strategy is creating articles and press releases. While this will include your own website blog, for an effective digital PR strategy, you need to go one step further. Reach out to publications where you can share your expertise for your industry in the form of guest blogs or articles.
Meanwhile, reach out to the news desks for publications, both ones you hope to team with and others, so you have a list of press contacts to notify about your press releases.
Identify and Build Relationships with Affiliates
Affiliates are a key part of your digital PR strategy. These are businesses that you work within a public-facing way. For example, a home design company’s affiliates will include the furniture and carpentry brands they carry. Affiliates bring your brand to their customers, helping to build recognition and trust.
Design Your Strategy
We already talked about what goes into a typical digital PR strategy above. Your specific strategy will be based on these but adjusted according to your goals and the other steps you’ve taken to this point.
Create Your Content
Once you have your strategy mapped out, it’s time to begin creating your content.
Take your ideas and flesh them out into something that you can post regularly. This is where you will settle on a regular schedule, determine your posting template for posting consistency and branding, and really get into the heart of your digital PR strategy.
Promote Your Digital PR Content
While your digital PR strategy is in place to advertise your business, you need to promote your strategy to make your efforts go viral. To promote your strategy,
Reach out to affiliates to share content
Partner with online influencers
Utilize social media ads
Are You Looking for a Digital PR Strategy?
From planning to implementation and beyond, I can help you create a winning digital PR strategy that will work with your SEO efforts and strengthen your brand. Contact me for more information and move your digital marketing to the next level.