How Digital PR Impacts Other Marketing Channels
In recent SEO, marketing and PR have become ever more closely intertwined. As Google and other search engines have prioritised social proof that a brand is (a) real, and (b) offering the goods or services it is claiming, the need to be featured in relevant publications and print and online media has increased exponentially.
As a result, digital PR impacts your search rankings and brand reputation more than ever. At Embryo, we consider digital PR to be the third pillar for online success alongside high-quality, often long-form content, and a technically proficient website.
Here, you’ll learn all about how digital PR has become intrinsically linked to successful digital campaigns – from its ability to give you high-quality links to the way it can put your brand in front of people that will want to buy from you.
I want to know more about Digital PR
We have a history of creating impactful campaigns that complement your wider digital architecture – whether it’s paid or organic. So, if you want to, or are ready to, invest in digital PR alongside, SEO, PPC, and/or paid social then get in touch with us by calling on 0161 327 2635 or emailing us at [email protected].
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Increasing Website Traffic and Sales through Creative Digital PR Campaigns.
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1.56 million
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Marketing and PR Go Hand in Hand
Marketing and public relations are like two peas in a pod – both utilise a wide range of tools and tactics to enhance your brand’s online communication strategy and create a strong public image. In a nutshell, no marketing activity would be complete without effective PR.
Digital PR is an online marketing strategy used to add brand value, increase online presence and boost industry standing. As opposed to traditional PR methods, digital PR has the potential to reach a wider, targeted audience and is a tactic used to increase SEO value by driving organic traffic to a website, or webpages, in order to improve the overall value of the site in addition to building brand authority and awareness.
Research and ideation are at the forefront of any effective digital PR strategy. Identifying relevant ideas, backed up with research – in the format of data findings, survey data, and expert opinions – allows PRs to identify if their idea is strong and timely enough to break through the noise.
The digital PR team here at Embryo engages with these methods to create the impact needed to establish brand awareness and achieve our client goals, while also telling the story behind the brand that is transported to a target audience through the media – because ultimately, customers are more likely to engage with a brand they can relate to and understand.
Communications power digital PR and we create compelling campaigns that not only put a spotlight on your brand and its services – gaining coverage and links – but also create trust with your target audience, establishing you as a valuable source of information.
Effective campaigns require high-quality content, with relevant and newsworthy hooks that will be of interest to both journalists and consumers, combined with a strong SEO keyword strategy to optimise the content further.
These campaigns are aimed to secure honest, trustworthy, backlinks across credible and high-ranking referring domains and boost traffic to a brand’s webpage, category pages and product pages. These earned links help to establish your brand as an industry leader across your sector in front of Google and audiences.
What Are The Differences Between Marketing and Digital PR?
Put simply, marketing focuses on selling products and services, whereas PR is aimed towards boosting brand awareness and creating a positive reputation in the public eye.
While PR is all about creating trust through creative campaigns that position a company in a particular way by managing and updating company messaging, as well as telling the story behind the brand, marketing strategies involve findings ways to deliver their services to people and driving sales.
Marketing teams are responsible for creating and managing advertising campaigns, with different strategies and daily goals for delivering value to a company. They use tactics such as content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing, while PR specialises in producing press releases, building relationships between the company and the media that are mutually beneficial and furthering authority and awareness in the sector.
While these services are not to get confused as one, PR and marketing can work collaboratively as part of a wider strategy, with both methods of communication effectively promoting a brand’s products or services. PR works to build beneficial relationships with consumers who could become potential customers. While the brand becomes more familiar and visible, companies can see conversion rates increase.
Trust is a fundamental expectation of customer experience and findings from Adobe’s new Future of Marketing Research Series, found that seven in ten customers will buy from brands they trust.
People are more conscious than ever of the brands they are shopping with and tend to research the business before making a purchase, with Gen Z at the forefront of this socially responsible consumer repositioning. A survey last year by DoSomething , a social impact consultancy, reported that 75 per cent of Gen Z respondents said they wanted to see that brands were ensuring employee and consumer safety. The survey found that “If [brands] are not authentic, Gen Z will be the first to raise a red flag.”
The main goal of public relations is to create this level of trust between the consumer, media and the brand itself, while effective marketing then engages consumers with your services and influences their purchasing decisions, creating sales and value for the company.
How Digital PR Can Help Your Marketing Goals
Digital PR is so much more than just a marketing function, when done right, it can help to boost all areas of your business. When digital PR and marketing departments work together, they are an unstoppable force – just look at us!
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SEO
Integrating Digital PR into a technical SEO strategy considers not only the audience but also a brand’s authority in the eyes of Google. It’s the perfect mix of boosting the overall health of a site and building trust with consumers and search engines in order to improve rankings, overall brand awareness and generate traffic.
Digital PR and SEO build links to increase search visibility for keywords organically. This combination of trustworthy link-building provides credibility to a business online. If google thinks your website says otherwise, it doesn’t reward, so it’s important to integrate context around your link that aligns with a brand’s identity through both marketing methods.
Keyword research is at the root of SEO as it ensures that there is a search demand for what you are writing about. Less demand means less traffic to your website – that’s why it’s important to include in all content and make sure that digital PR contributes to your off-site SEO efforts.
Keyword research is the process of discovering valuable search queries that your target customers type into search engines like Google to look for products, services, and information. Here at Embryo, our digital PR team works closely with SEO to include a keyword strategy in the content we write which is transported to the public through the media, to help a webpage rank highly for its target keyword, boosting relevant visitors to the site.
When it comes to gauging the success of a campaign, SEO can be used to measure success to keep track of how a PR campaign is performing. Part of our digital PR strategy at Embryo is to include relevant links to a webpage and target media publications with high domain authority that will not only add credibility to a brand but also generate relevant backlinks for our clients.
We can then see how well clients’ product or service pages are performing by referring to SEO indicators such as increased traffic to the site, referring pages and referring domains. There are multiple third-party tools that show this, such as Ahref and Moz.
You can find out more about how SEO can help your business growth here!
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Content
As previously mentioned, digital PR combined with a strong tech SEO strategy helps to build links. However, these links won’t drive higher organic rankings if the relevancy in which they are communicated is weak, and the overall health of a website can suffer if the content isn’t strong enough.
Content marketing helps to communicate brand authority and boost engagement, and combining this with your PR strategy gives your content greater potential to reach a wider audience. Whereas digital PR creates stories to be circulated across the media, content writers deliver relevant information that is transported to the public directly through a brand’s website. Both marketing methods work intrinsically to help build a brand’s identity and establish them as industry leaders through insightful and relevant content.
Content marketing can lay the foundation for Digital PR stories by creating optimised pages that are both compelling and attention-grabbing, that can be repurposed as PR campaigns. Whether it be testimonials on the site, company leader’s profiles, data or insights on a trending topic or service page, PR can distribute relevant content about a brand to further establish credibility and give you more exposure across different channels. Including links directly to a blog post or webpage also allows both journalists and readers to find out more about the companies or their products and services in further detail, as well as boosting your backlinks.
In turn, PRs can assist with content creation by sharing market insights and knowledge – particularly around trending topics that consumers are interested in reading about. A strong content strategy will answer users’ search queries as well as generating contextual backlinks. An informative and optimised website will help journalists see that you are a credible source of information to reference and link to in the articles.
You can find out more about the content marketing team at Embryo here.
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PPC
PPC, or pay-per-click, is a marketing strategy that gives businesses a competitive edge by bolstering visibility in a competitive ad space. Essentially, it aims to position a brand as the first point of call for internet users looking for products and services.
Advertisers pay for targeted visits to a site, or particular webpage, and bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored links when someone performs a search related to their business offering.
However, as a search-based marketing strategy, it is difficult to get to the top of a search engine results page if a product or service is brand new, as their search demand is not necessarily there already.
Through targeted outreach, digital PR can create demand and publicity for a business by educating the consumer about their services, ultimately creating search volumes and overall market interest that PPC can capture and then bid on to maximise results.
Digital PR can especially assist with a PPC campaign targeted at boosting rankings and visibility of a niche brand with a limited understanding of a product that consumers may not be aware of and can aid with ranking positions when utilising keyword research in online campaigns,
By educating both business owners and consumers and showcasing a business’ expertise in the sector, digital PR outreach gives leverage in a competitive marketplace and creates a trusted brand profile in the media, leading to increased searches and driving more leads.
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Social Media – Influencer Marketing
Influencers have such an online presence that more businesses are utilising influence marketing to endorse their brand. Online influencers have the power to create brand awareness by exposing their expansive audiences to new products and impacting their purchasing decisions. With carefully considered social media posts, they can create a positive brand image and boost conversion rates.
The roots of both digital PR and influencer marketing are both in telling a story and building trust. Collaborating with influential people with strong social media platforms and high engagement rates means that your brand can reach a potential audience of millions with influencers acting as honest and trusted brand ambassadors.
Integrating influencer marketing into your online PR strategy drives sentiment boosts sales and increases your own social media following. Influencers are an authoritative voice to tell a brand’s story and promote its products and services. It is essentially advertising, but with a greater potential ROI with the added bonus of leveraging the trusted relationships built with their followers.
PRs can work with relevant influencers to help create content that can be utilised across a range of online platforms. This collaboration essentially allows for multi-media campaigns to reach a targeted audience. From capturing images and video content with your products, or showcasing how your services and their benefits, this content can serve as assets that can also be outreached to the media through Digital PR.
As well as providing create social media and email marketing content, stories and images of popular influencers and celebrities engaging with your brand can create engaging news stories that generate a buzz around your brand in the press and also secure product placements in highly authoritative publications, establishing authority in your sector as the to ‘go to brand’.
Onboarding influencers for events is also a great way to further cultivate brand awareness and authority and creates an intersection between online and offline traditional PR methods. Influencers and celebrities attending the event promote the brand across their social platforms, while PR professionals can outreach content media outlets for further exposure.
When it comes to a product launch, promotion and collaboration, or simply wanting to position your brand in a certain way – influencers can create a narrative with positive messaging and content. The more exposure the better, and influencer marketing has a huge impact on the success of your marketing campaigns through ‘word-of mouth’ marketing, with the ability to reach a whole new audience quickly.
Boosting awareness of a brand will in turn increase search results and improve the overall site authority, as well as generate sales. As mentioned above, influencers contribute to a business’ PR by boosting a positive reputation and educating consumers about their services, which, in turn, drives traffic to their website through increased search volumes and directed links on their social platforms.
Digital PR and Links: A Potent Mix
Digital PR can accelerate link building substantially beyond traditional manual link building. While an SEO strategy will engage in manual outreach to site owners, the scale at which digital PR can build earned links is huge.
Digital PR campaigns can generate context-based backlinks which build trust and add relevancy to a brand, and product/service pages. PR teams include links in their press releases which allow publications to direct traffic to your site, boosting the referred-to pages, and improving brand authority.
For example, the digital PR team here at Embryo saw groundbreaking results from a recent reactive campaign for a consumer-focused client, which shared further insights about the products available across the brand’s website in line with then-current trending news topics.
This campaign secured 170 pieces of syndicated coverage, across regional, national, and consumer-focused publications, with a huge 2,656 backlinks from relevant, high-quality publications. This campaign not only greatly boosted the brand’s backlink profile, and reader exposure, but – because of the types of pages that these links were placed on – added great contextuality, too.
This campaign also boosted the brand’s credibility in their sector – which is a major goal of any digital PR campaign.
How DPR Impacts a Customer’s Journey through the Messy Middle
The ‘Messy Middle’, is a term given by Google to the modern-day consumer journey when making a purchase online.
The Messy Middle helps explain how each buying journey has an entry point ‘trigger’ and an exit point ‘purchase’ – the point when the customer has (eventually) made the decision to follow through with a transaction online.
However, this journey is not at all linear, and as the Messy Middle model points out, most purchasing decisions are further influenced by ‘exploration’ and ‘evaluation’, where a customer is considering and comparing several options and resources to help them decide what to buy.
Digital PR is arguably one of the most important marketing strategies which impact various stages of the messy middle. By creating compelling and engaging content that is transported to the public through multiple media platforms, digital PR campaigns can place your brand in front of a wide audience of potential customers.
Showcasing products and services to consumers across high-quality, regional, or niche publications is important as can boost brand awareness.
While a consumer is ‘exploring’ and ‘evaluating’ their options, they will look to online sources, such as blogs, social media, websites and news outlets to find out more information. Customers will jump between ‘exploring’ and ‘evaluating’ when trying to narrow down their options and find the best product or service to suit them.
Digital PR campaigns that exist in the media add credibility and further information about a brand or product that can help inform a customer’s decisions. Customers are also able to make purchases directly through the backlinks to service or product pages included in a news story.
PR Can Improve the Performance of Your Other Marketing Channels.
A multi-channel approach helps you interact with customers across their whole purchase journey. Get in touch to learn more.
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