DIGITAL PR & MARKETING – WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Digital PR, the younger, trendier sibling to traditional public relations, isn’t just a buzzword used by marketing professionals to seem relevant. At TIDAL, it’s our bread and butter. And since we are indeed hip and relevant marketing pros, who better to explain the finer workings of digital public relations?

What Is Digital PR, Really?

Old-school PR methods involved schmoozing journalists and broadcasters to feature, quote, or promote your client, or publish crisis management pieces to preserve reputations. However, with everyone and their grandmother now online, these traditional media forms are slowly becoming obsolete. People primarily consume news and pop culture on the internet, draw inspiration from influencers, and share their views on social media—they even do their shopping online. Digital PR meets the public where they are, using all available online channels to communicate directly with the audience, build relationships, and shape behaviours.

While digital marketing is focused on driving sales and leads, PR aims to build your online presence, boost brand awareness, and foster trust. It’s the soft and cosy customer relations branch of the operation. Sparking conversations, encouraging shares, comments, and likes – it’s all about engagement and connecting with your audience. And by establishing your company as a reliable, reputable authority in your field, those sales and leads might just see a welcome uptick as well!

The Benefits

By getting your brand featured in blogs, podcasts, and videos, you’ll be getting your name out there and increasing brand awareness. This kind of coverage is more organic than traditional media, so helps build trust in and loyalty to your brand that little bit more effectively. Search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies can help get your site and products ranking highly on Google’s search engine results page (SERPs) for relevant keywords, so people searching for whatever it is you’re offering are likely to click on your links first. Reputation counts for a whole lot in this world, and mentions by influencers or online reviews offer a powerful seal of approval. Trust in your brand and relevance in your industry is further boosted by building backlink networks with other sites referring back to your posts.

The upsides don’t stop there. The 24/7 nature of working online means your campaigns can be updated in real-time, allowing you to engage in conversation with your prospective client base, modify your campaigns, and live-stream events. Leveraging pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns can provide customers with whatever they’re looking for as soon as they search for it. And digital PR campaigns can be surprisingly cost-effective. Just provide an influencer with a sample of your product and there you have yourself a glowing review seen by all their followers (assuming your stuff is any good, of course!).

Tracking the results of your digital PR campaign is incredibly easy, and armed with this information you can tweak your approach to strategies that work. Utilising tools like Google Analytics lets you watch key performance indicators (KPIs) like click-through rates, lead conversions, views, brand awareness, and SEO results, giving valuable insight into your successes and failures. Armed with this info, you can quickly become unstoppable! So how exactly to reap these rewards, you ask?

The Specifics

1.Content Creation

Some might say this is the heart and soul of digital PR. Content marketing is all about creating valuable articles, infographics, videos, and even memes that provide insight and entertainment while pointing back to what your company has to offer. It needs to be worthy of engaging with, something that people will want to share, discuss, reference, and even link back to. This content is what will boost visibility and get you featured on Google’s results pages- if it’s any good.

2. Outreach

You have to get that excellent content in front of people’s faces, it’s no use if no one sees it. SEO strategies are one aspect, like making sure each piece is crammed full of relevant keywords and phrases with accurate metadata, but it’s not enough on its own. Reaching out to website owners, bloggers, journalists, influencers- everyone with an audience that might be interested in your content- is key. If your output is high-quality (and you offer enough incentive, naturally) it’ll be beneficial for them to share it with their followers, too, and slowly your reputation begins to grow.

3. Link Building

Building up a healthy backlink network is incredibly important to get your site ranking highly with search engines. These links from other sites referring back to your website serve as a seal of approval, reassuring the Google gods that you are in fact trustworthy and an authority in your field. The more backlinks from high-quality sites, the better your ranking on the SERPs. Again, valuable posts and content that is of genuine use to your potential audience are key to facilitating effective link-building efforts. No one is going to want to link back to your site if your content sucks.

4. Engagement and Social Media Presence

Website mentions are just one facet of raising your online presence, but for building awareness, engagement, loyalty, and trust, social media is where it’s at. Shared articles, influencer posts and reviews, hashtag campaigns, viral TikTok videos- people power is king, and social media is where reputations are made. Here you can directly engage with your audience, too, chatting and commenting and winning them round in real time.

5. Analytics

All those metrics and KPIs we mentioned before? You’ll want to be tracking and analysing them to gauge exactly what effect your digital PR efforts are having. It’s not the most glamorous part of the job, but once you’ve crunched those numbers you can see where you need to make improvements, and which elements of your campaign are delivering results. Only when you’re armed with this information can you refine your approach, finessing your strategy until you realise all your marketing dreams. 

So, that just about covers it. Simple, right? Like PR of old, just online, and more chatty and familiar. Of course, you’ll be competing against every other company that has realised that digital public relations might help boost their sales and company reputation. And if only creating eye-catching, share-worthy content that stands out in a saturated marketplace were that easy! And it really is a lot of number crunching… Why not take it easy and leave it to the specialists- just drop us a line, sit back, and let us do the hard work for you. It is our bread and butter, after all.