A solid public relations strategy is essential for building brand awareness, authority and credibility. And by leaning towards tried and tested digital PR tactics, you can break free from the limitations of traditional PR efforts.

Marketing your business to the right audiences and maintaining a positive brand image starts with a successful digital PR strategy – and also plays a key part in a site’s organic performance too.

Whether you’re making the digital switch from traditional PR, or you’re looking for tips on integrating this channel with your other marketing efforts, we’ve covered everything you need to know in our comprehensive guide to digital PR below.  

Quick links

• What is digital PR?
• How is digital PR used with SEO?
• Why is digital PR useful?
• Exploring different digital PR tactics
• Top tips for digital PR strategy ideation
• Best practices for an effective digital PR strategy

What is digital PR?

Digital PR is a way to reach audiences using online channels, including:

• Online publications
• Blogs
• Influencers
• Digital media

These channels might be used to share information and news, sparking discussions, discourse and chit chat that’s relevant to your brand and the products or services you offer.

The process itself is simple – your team creates content, like a press release or some expert commentary, and then pitches this to online publications – with the goal of a journalist then featuring your content and brand name on their site.

So, its primary purpose is to help brands build awareness and authority, but it can also boost the relevancy of your organic search strategy, improve credibility and allow you to measure site performance.

How does digital PR differ from traditional PR?

Digital PR focuses on online media, digital publishers and SEO outcomes. Because it relies on your online presence, it lets you reach wider audiences with your messaging, products, and services. Businesses also benefit from measurable results and data-driven insights.

Meanwhile, traditional PR doesn’t rely on a business’ online presence to drive brand awareness. Instead, it focuses on building offline relationships through more traditional advertising outlets, like TV, radio and billboards. It can be difficult to reach a wide audience with this channel, though, and gaining insights into your reach and impact can be just as tricky. After all, how do you gauge how many times people have looked at a physical ad of yours?

How is digital PR used with SEO?

Digital PR often goes hand-in-hand with content marketing and SEO efforts to give your organic search performance a boost. This is because it lets you to build links through high-authority sites, so your brand is receiving more mentions that improve E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

Successful digital PR campaigns can also boost organic visibility by making your content more discoverable, thanks to its ability to improve brand authority and ranking.

Why is digital PR useful?

Digital PR aligns with other areas in your digital marketing strategy and offers plenty of advantages over traditional PR, so investing in it as a channel is well worth it. Here’s why:

• Builds brand authority and trust: Since you’re curating a positive image of your brand through brand mentions in the right places on relevant topics,your target audience is more likely to trust you and see your brand as a thought leader in your sector.
• Reaches new audiences: More brand mentions lead to a wider reach and increased site traffic.
• Supports long term organic search growth: When your content is published or mentioned by high-authority online publications, you’re likely to see a boost in SEO ranking for relevant keywords. 
• Provides measurable ROI: Whatever metrics you’re tracking, whether that’s traffic, rankings or backlinks, your ROI is clear and easy to see.

Exploring different digital PR tactics

Many different digital PR and link acquisition tactics can be used, but choosing the right ones for your business is crucial. To do this, you should consider your target demographic and the media outlets you’d like to appear in.

Reactive tactics

Spotted a breaking news story or relevant talking point in the media? React to it with your own take on the topic, being sure to stay true to your brand values and messaging.

The faster you react, the better, since your content will be fresh and relevant in the current climate, so if you’re planning to test the effectiveness of reactive tactics, be prepared to pull your pitch together quickly. Building up a pre-prepared media list of online journalists and publications you can outreach to will be a vital part of your digital PR toolkit.

Data-driven campaigns 

While these campaigns can be more resource-intensive, creating content based on original research, data, or surveys can massively increase your chances of featuring in online publications.

Data-driven content can also be repurposed to create evergreen campaigns or for future pitches. For instance, let’s say you have a campaign focused on the best cities for a family staycation. This could be pitched throughout the school year to match up whenever the end of a term approaches. By squeezing out this extra value, you can gain backlinks and authority without needing to invest more time and effort in a new campaign.

Creative content and infographics

Uniqueness is one of your greatest assets in digital PR, so get creative with your campaigns. It might need a fair bit of planning, but it can pay off nicely when your content contains something that nobody else is offering.

Hero campaigns involving things like interactive maps, quizzes, videos, and infographics let your content stand out in pitches – plus they can be broken down into different formats depending on what works for the publications you’re targeting.

Expert commentary and thought leadership

Expert comments and thought leadership content are a fundamental part of digital PR too. These tactics position you as a leader in your industry or field, helping your brand gain credibility and build up useful relationships. Handily, this type of content needs less resource and can usually be turned around in very little time, giving you some quick wins in your digital PR strategy.

For content to have strong PR potential, it should be entertaining, informative and educational – and ideally be no longer than 600 words. Be sure to include key sector-focused insights or explanations of relevant topics too. It’s things like this which’ll make your content irresistible to journalists featuring a brand in an online article they’re covering.

Press releases 

Primarily used to communicate business updates, press releases can be used for many topics. From announcing new hires to product releases, they’re ideal for keeping your audience up to date with any changes that position your brand positively. It also allows your audience to gain fresh insights about your business they wouldn’t have known about otherwise, which helps build up that all-important trust.

Top tips for digital PR strategy ideation

With certain tactics being more effective for different businesses and audiences, here are some tips to support the ideation process for your digital PR strategy.

• Know your audience and what they want: What are your target audiences’ pain points? What do they want to know? What content would they find useful? Which publications would they read? Asking these questions will help you figure out exactly how to target your audience.  

• Research journalists’ and publishers’ needs: After you’ve curated a list of online publications you’d like to feature in, you’ll need to track down journalists and start building a relationship. Learn which campaign types they prefer, the outreach tactics that’ll get your content noticed, and the days or times they’re available.  
• Research and ideation: Stay up to date with industry trends, seasonal events and cultural moments, alongside looking at existing digital PR campaigns. You might spot a gap in data or information that your business could easily fill.
• Get inspired: There are lots of ways to spark inspiration for your digital PR strategy if you’re struggling. Whether you use tools like Google Trends for trend data, monitor journalist requests on social media tools to get a better idea of what they want to see, sign up for digital PR newsletters or host a team ideation session, ideas can come from all sorts of different avenues.

Best practices for an effective digital PR strategy

Creating a winning digital PR strategy is well within your reach – our tips and advice below can help you get started.

Set clear, measurable objectives

What do you want to gain from your digital PR efforts? Having a clear vision of the desired outcomes and the metrics you need to measure to track success will help you stay focused. For example, if the goal is improved brand authority and reach, you’ll mostly be focusing on metrics like backlinks and referral traffic.

You should also consider how your plan aligns with the overarching business objectives at this stage.

Know and target your audience

Campaigns and content created from your digital PR strategy should be tailored to your target audience. Because of this, it’s important to understand exactly who your audience is, from their interests and needs to the media they consume and the topics that’ll resonate with them. 

Create unique, high-value content

Online media outlets will only pick up unique, valuable content, so it’s not worth pitching anything generic that lacks an interesting angle. Your campaigns should offer something special for the reader, whether that’s reports, guides, visual content or data.

Timeliness and relevancy are crucial too, so you’ll need to pitch to journalists with exactly the right content at exactly the right time. This can make it tricky to get your content featured, but it should also spur you on to think of relevant, newsworthy ideas.

Build strong media relationships

While high-quality content can have a big impact on the success of your digital PR campaigns, your relationship with journalists is just as important. Journalists will usually receive hundreds, if not thousands, of pitches each day, so the more they trust you, the more likely you are to have your work featured by them.

One of the best ways to build this relationship is to consider how you can be mutually beneficial to one another. If you’re helping them by providing commentary on a topic they’re already covering, they might be more likely to reach out to you directly for comments and data in the future. As a bonus, some journalists write for multiple publications, which increases your chances of being published.

Align with SEO and content marketing strategies

Your digital PR should align with your content and SEO strategies. Aligning with your content activity will help bolster topical authority. Meanwhile, ensuring it gels well with your SEO strategy should make gaining backlinks from high authority sites easier, boosting rankings and performance too.

Your overarching business objectives also need to be considered. Are you focusing on a certain product or audience that aligns with your current business direction?

Download free strategy planner template

To help you create a cohesive strategy where all channels are focused on the same goals, we recommend downloading our free content strategy planner template. Covering digital PR and SEO, our template gives you everything you need to plan ahead for your business.

Measure success and learn

The digital nature of this type of PR means you can easily measure success with key metrics, such as backlinks, referral traffic, rankings and coverage quality. Create regular reports to keep track of your campaigns and help you gain insights on what works and what doesn’t. Ultimately, this will mean you can adapt your future strategies accordingly.

Digital PR is more than just press – it’s a driver of visibility, trust, and SEO growth. We recommend starting small, testing tactics and integrating your PR with a strong overall digital marketing strategy aimed at attracting new customers.