The world has changed a lot in the last two decade. In the 21st century, there has been a tremendous shift as businesses are now looking to make a digital transformation. Especially, social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., have more than a billion users with millions active every day. Now Businesses can use these platforms to get more traffic to their platforms, reach more people, sell their product and services to gain advantage from their competitors.
Public relations are defined as the controlled measures deliberately conveyed to release and spread the information among an organization or individual. And with digitization, these measures play a crucial role in promoting new products, launches, releases, or starting a new venture etc.
With this blog, we will define the Digital PR, its different types, importance, ideas, strategies, used cases, and tools to measure the efficiency of your campaign.
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR are the techniques, plan, and strategies used by businesses to enhance their online presence. With Digital PR, businesses promote itself on top online publications, websites, news platforms, and authentic customer reviews.
Overall the main aim of the Digital PR is to improve the brand identity using internal measures. These measures are different for every organization or individual needs, such as a singer would like to have more views on his youtube channel while a new book release would like to promote its Amazon book page. Though the aim is to improve the audience for both cases still as a professional, you have to apply different strategies to get desired results.
Digital PR agencies have a network of bloggers, influencers, journalists, and use online press releases for getting high-quality backlinks from top online platforms. This process also offers instant promotion, high-quality backlinks, social media mentions from top influencers, and also complement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to gain superior ranking with organic traffic.
The Need for Digital PR
In this digital age, the online medium is slowly dominating the communication medium. Paperback traditional methods have been transformed with new online measures such as ebook, kindle e-reader, PDF, etc. Similarly, users can get access to all the news and magazines online.
And with millions of active users every day on social media platforms, businesses need Digital PR to get customer attention towards their products. Especially for small and medium scale businesses, Digital PR empowers them to compete with large and corporates brands. So you can strategically plan even with a limited budget to gain significant promotion. Selection of precise strategies, implementation, and monitoring can play a crucial role in the success of your Digital PR campaign. Similarly, launching new products or services in new areas, Digital PR can help the brand reach more audience in a shorter duration.
Difference between Traditional PR and Digital PR
In traditional PR, the paper was the primary medium to reach the audience in the form of newspaper, magazines, pamphlets, and more. Now with digitization, the online medium has shown remarkable success in the last two decades to emerge as the leading way to reach more users. Especially, when catering to global audiences, Digital PR has added importance. That allows businesses from one region to promote their product or services in any new areas to further enhance their market audience.
In traditional PR, articles and blogs published in prints, newspaper, and niche publications were the promotion methods. Now with Digital PR, businesses use online blogs, mentions in articles, online profiling, and guest posts. Radio, media, and television advertisements in traditional PR have now changed into Audio & Video podcasts, Social media shares, influencers, and Group sharing with Digital PR.
Types of Digital PR
There are different types of Digital PR campaigns that you can run to gain significant results from a market audience.
Unlinked mentions have a specific mention of your business and do not give a link and still give a valuable brand promotion to your name.
Press Releases are special announcements for opening a new store, adding new features or even introducing extra service from your organization.
Influencer Marketing from social media handles has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years. Here individual profiles with a very higher number of followers provide access to a more targeted audience. Similarly, you can use Brand Collaboration in Facebook to give you access to a quite enormous specific audience and help you market products to their followers.
Guests Posts currently are the most popular ways to get higher authority links for your platform.
Directory Integration, for adding your website name into a particular directory that matches your niche.
Ideas, Strategies and planning for Digital PR Campaign
Every business has specific audiences, marketing, and needs precise planning to get desired results. Digital marketers study business perspective from all sides to come up with a strategic Digital PR campaign. Here are the main components, ideas, and concepts that can put your campaign to bring a more targeted audience and higher ROI.
Anchor target links in mainstream publishing sites from high authority sites. Anchored links are among the best practices for SEO and complement the link building process for the platform.
Target URLs are the main pages used in the Digital PR campaign.
Building rich infographics to gain more attraction, followers, and, enhance online reach.
Arranging press meets and publishing press releases to gain more attention from media
Connecting with bloggers, editors, journalists, and high authority sites to penetrate the market.
Create more engaging content: Building highly engaging content will give more value to readers and bring more trust to your platform.
Profile submission on sites such as Wikipedia etc. can add more value to brand identity. Similarly, LinkedIn and Quora also have a specific audience that you can target more specific niche for your product or services.
Affiliates and Drop-shipping are also getting a lot of attention for improving the reach for business to newer influencers, bloggers, and more.
Importance of Digital PR
Digital PR can significantly add more market value to your brand and help you establish a more reliable brand in the customer’s view. Here are the main added benefits of Digital PR
SEO: Digital PR adds more trusted and valuable link from top priority sites. Thus, creating strong backlinks for the original platform complementing your SEO process.
Traffic: High PR sites brings a lot of traffic to get public hype for the information, services or launch of a new product such as a new mobile phone.
Brand Reputation: Digital PR leverages 3rd party sites for gaining a brand reputation for your platform. More mentions you get from the PR, better results you gain for the brand.
Lead Generation: With improved SEO keywords ranking and improved traffic, chances for getting leads from live users also increases.
Enhances Sales: With Digital PR, you will gain more leads, more conversion, and sales are bound to happen.
Overall Digital PR brings a lot of improvements for businesses and helps them to convey the right message to the online audience.
Digital PR used Cases
We have worked with hundreds of businesses to help them establish themselves in competitive markets.
Bakery Course Digital PR campaign
Run by a highly acclaimed chef Balendra Singh, Institute of Bakery and Pastry Art (IBPA) is a renowned institute for bakery courses with national and international certification. Chef Balendra articles were published were different new sites along with special mentions for the institute name. We also introduced blogs and articles on specific niche sites along with directory submission to boost the institute market value. The marketing team also got involved in top quora questions and answers, online promotional ads with display and video ads to personalize the experience for the online audience.
After three months we saw a huge ranking boost in organic SEO. Most of the keywords were now ranking on the first page on the SERP. Even Google Map saw significant mentions for keywords and build a strong reputation for the brand.
Community Learning
At PIMS, a digital marketing learning institute in Noida, we introduced several community learning techniques. Using live sharing, online discussion, panels along with the Facebook group and quora group activities allowed to gain access to a significant audience. This way, we introduced our learning sessions to the live audiences, connect in real-time discussions, and explore marketing perspectives from a different side of the audience. Thus creating more confidence and trust with the audience to popularise institute and gain more admissions every batch.
How to check the success of Digital PR campaign?
One of the essential benefits associated with Digital PR campaigns is their ability to check the efficacy of their implementation. Here are the main Digital PR tools you can use for measuring the success of your digital PR campaigns.
Google Analytics to check the website traffic from all the resources i.e, organic, referral, social, and others.
Google Search Console to find organic ratio clicks, Google Discover ratio, impressions, position ranking for relevant keywords, and helps you track brand name searches. You might see a significant rise in organic results when the paid campaign runs in parallel.
With Digital PR, you will see a significant boost in your Social Media post reach, sharing, and comments from your dedicated customers. You can also customize the plan, target more specific audiences, and track conversion to bring more profits from social media handles.
Improvised leads and sales: Most of the business run their Digital PR campaigns intending to generate revenues. Here businesses need an extra step to transform.
More Sophisticated to get you started with a Digital PR campaign
Ahrefs provides comprehensive information about Domain Rating (DR) to track backlink analysis, discover unlinked mentions, and more valuable information about
With Majestic, you can check the external website for trust factor (TF) and citation factor (CF – link juice) for promotion.
Help a reporter out (HARO) suggest new ideas and possibilities for new upcoming stories.
Tineye is a quite useful reverse image search tool based on computer vision technology and can alert you in keeping unique elements for your campaign.
Buzzsumo tool, to discover new content curation ideas, sharing frequency, and using influencers.
LinkedIn gives you access to millions of professionals working in the industry.
Gmail to convey messages with bloggers, journalists, influencers and related personalities.
Conclusion
With all businesses running online, Digital PR has now become the standard for brands promotion. Ideally suited for small, medium, large, and even corporates, business today understand the value of Digital PR for investing long term.
Especially when the brand launches its new products and new markets, Digital PR can pave the path for tremendous success. Similarly, for new and emerging businesses, Digital PR can act as a catalyst to grow vertically and reach more target audience.
Though traditional PR still exists in several verticals, Digital PR is gaining vital grounds in many industries to become the dominant way for marketing. Many news and magazine publication has adopted an online version only. Showing a trend that is more like to continue in the future as businesses transform from brick and mortar stores to digital stores.
Digital PR is now powering businesses to penetrate national and international markets. With the technological revolution, new methods of marketing will emerge and will bring more optimized ways to segregate audiences for higher results.