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The Complete Guide to Digital PR
With digitization taking shape all over the world, it has become crucial for every small and medium business to invest in Digital PR strategies. Industry-related blogs and articles have made the web so saturated that people are confused as to whom to trust for a particular product or a service.
In this scenario, many people are seen gravitating towards news sources for their queries and web searches. As news sources and publications have always maintained the credibility of serving people the right information, brands are now channelizing their digital strategies into traditional PR outreach.
It was in 2015 that Traditional PR was slowly being transformed to Digital PR, and today, it is forecasted to reach $130.5 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 10.50% during 2020-2025 [1].
Digital PR is a connection – a building – and it’s about creating a digital footprint for your brand by blending conspicuously or discreetly into your customers “digital experiences at various levels.
In short, digital PR builds a presence on the Internet and manages the online reputation of your brands and your company. Similar to traditional public relations, digital PR aims to raise awareness of your brand and create a glow of professionalism and success around it.
Digital PR is a subset of digital marketing, but everything here can be tracked and monitored. The key difference with digital PR is the ability to build relationships with bloggers and influencers who are key players in the digital space. PR highlights your digital marketing efforts across the different channels it has with different channels.
Digital marketing and digital PR are closely linked and offer the possibility of significantly improving each other’s success. When used together, they can increase the success of your brand.
There are numerous ways to integrate digital marketing and PR, from sharing online PR placements, social media, and paid ads, to working with SEO to ensure high-quality connections with them. Most digital PR strategies focus on publishing content and gaining backlinks to relevant blogs and websites.
Digital PR covers both advertising and direct marketing advertising and focuses on reputation management to generate positive media coverage and communication with stakeholders.
While digital PR is geared to creating a positive image of the brand, digital marketing is focused on sales and directly on sales. Digital marketing aims to reach current and potential customers, while digital PR is about maintaining a strong relationship with anyone interested in a brand or organization.
Traditional PR combines traditional components, uses press releases and distribution to launch new products and news content, with an emphasis on circulation, viewer ratings, and reader statistics, while delivering digital content in the customer’s field.
Digital PR has gone further, embracing technological advances and incorporating online publications to further increase brand awareness, and embracing the target group orientation of print publications. Today, it combines the ability to promote brands with the quantitative elements of digital SEO to influence PR strategies and tactics.
Determine your Target: When developing a PR approach, it’s essential to define your targets for what you need to acquire. For example, you would need to release a brand new service department of your commercial enterprise and create a buzz for it in the market. Or you would want to position your service or product as a leader in its category. Ensure that your targets are specific, measurable, achievable, practical, and timed (additionally referred to as SMART). It helps you have a clear motive in your PR approach and maximize the achievement of your PR campaigns.
Target Audience: Your audience are the individuals, companies and groups who make the major purchase decisions for your brand’s services or products. You can discover your audience via social media. You can connect with customers and influencers, study the strategy of your competitors and engage in conversations about your niche as well.
Use surveys and social media interaction to get to know the people who are interested in your brand and its message. Seventy – six percent ( 76 % ) of social media users expect companies to respond to comments about their brand on social media [2]. You can use this opportunity to engage with your target audience, or maybe, find out a new category that’s interested in your brand purpose and messaging. By defining your audience, you could tailor your communication to enhance the effectiveness of your PR campaigns.
Brand Messaging: Brand messaging is the core message you want to instill in the minds of your audience to remember. It is an essential part of a PR approach as it can shape your content strategy and communicate a sole message throughout the journey. Brand messaging can include written and spoken communication to deliver a particular message about your business.
An ideal brand messaging strategy is believable, smooth to understand, distinctive, credible, succinct, and power your agenda. It should say what makes you unique and why your brand should be trusted.
Tactics: Tactics are the campaigns that help you to acquire your PR goals. Let’s say you want to raise an awareness campaign for your new product launch, the tactic that suits your purpose may be a Media Release or a Social Media Campaign. You can create a series of posts on Social Media, engage your audience via games and contests or you can distribute the product-related content to different media publications.
A good place to start is to make a listing of the forms of content your audience reads, the activities they do and the way they spend their time online. This also assists in figuring out the type of tactics you want to use.
The time it well: It is often claimed that 50-90% of strategic initiatives fail if not timed well [3]. You may have strategized an awesome campaign for your product launch, but without a proper time frame, several mishaps can happen. You need to position time frames around every tactic to ensure they’re executed well. Also, have a crisis game plan ready to manage your brand from a bad reputation.
Every year offers various dates and moments perfect for fantastic PR opportunities. These include events and celebrations to anniversaries of a particular event and the peak season(s) of your industry.
Chances are that journalists in your industry will be working on stories related to these occasions and will be on the hunt for sources and comments to include in their articles.
You could take advantage of this and craft an article of your own, be it a press release or opinion piece, and offer it to journalists. The time factor plays a crucial role here in making your content relevant and stand out above the other pitches that reach the inbox of journalists. Idea is to understand the latest insights and marketing trends, and then work on them for creating unique PR ideas.
Your executive team is a gold mine for digital PR opportunities. They have the best knowledge of your company, its product or service, the sector it is in, and industry trends, and thus can help you formulate a high-performing campaign for digital PR success.
The ideas generated from collaborating with your executive team usually contain these five newsworthy elements:
An initial joint brainstorming session with the entire executive team, followed by individual follow-up sessions to flesh out certain ideas can help produce a series of great PR ideas and opportunities.
One of the biggest differences between digital PR and content marketing is the type of media that is focussed on: owned media vs earned media. Earned media is media coverage acquired through the likes of sharing, favorites, mentions, reposts, press releases, recommendations, etc.
Digital PR falls under this category. Owned media, on the other hand, is content you have control over, such as articles on your website, blog, and social media accounts. Both tactics play an important role in achieving your targets.
That said, there are certain aspects that are vastly different. Here’s what you must consider when creating content for your digital media strategy:
Journalists love original data and statistics collated from exclusive surveys. Not only do these numbers help to quantify an issue and put it into perspective, they also provide journalists with the material they can use in other pieces they may be working on related to the same topic.
By segmenting the survey geographically, you have many more statistics to work with as these can be separated by zone, combined to cover a larger area, etc. And by pitching to different media with data specific and relevant to each media’s scope, specialty, focus, and coverage, you are making the story much more newsworthy.
Traditional PR still has value in the modern business world, although many smart companies are now using digital PR tactics to broaden their audience reach. Effective digital PR can increase organic traffic to your site, build your brand reputation, and ultimately, drive sales and revenue. Try implementing the above strategies to enhance your digital PR strategy today.
If you need expert help in planning your digital PR campaigns, feel free to connect with KISS PR. Our team will guide you through and help you set up and implement a result-oriented PR strategy. To know more about our PR services, visit KISS PR for sending your digital press releases.
Also, check the KISS PR Private Label Press Release program.
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