What Is Digital PR And Why Do You Need It?

Sick and tired of producing amazing content that no one ever seems to see or share? Here at award-winning digital marketing agency Embryo, we love a creative content marketing campaign, so we know that it can be hugely frustrating – maybe you just finished a big project that you think is the kind of thing that news publications would pick up, but no one does. Well, a digital PR campaign that gets you in front of your target audience might be the avenue you need to take to broaden your outreach and improve your visibility, earning links, traffic and shares.

But what exactly is digital PR? Understandably, a lot of people get a little bit confused about the relationship between digital PR, link building, and traditional PR. Digital PR is SEO and link building, but it’s not just that. Digital PR is also taking traditional PR tactics and moving them online for better digital connectivity, but it’s not just that either. Understanding exactly what digital PR entails and what results it can achieve isn’t always straightforward.

A quick Google of ‘What is Digital PR?’ probably isn’t going to make things much clearer. A lot of definitions you’ll find online are a little vague, basically claiming that digital PR generally lies somewhere between link building and traditional PR, without really being either, but achieving both.

This isn’t necessarily far from the truth – digital PR is all about improving your platform and increasing your coverage, all while tapping into your greater SEO potential by converting that coverage into links and traffic. Let’s take a more in-depth look at exactly what digital PR is, how it works, and what it can do for your business.

Digital PR: An Overview

When you deconstruct digital PR down to its nuts and bolts, it’s essentially about two things: improving your connectivity, and making the most of what you’ve got. Outreach is a vital part of business development, and a successful digital PR campaign can connect you with the most important voices in your industry and the bloggers and journalists with a target audience you want to tap into. Then, digital PR is about using this network to boost the content you produce to its maximum potential, maximising its coverage and turning that new reach into impactful links. Digital PR is about:

• Building relationships – A link between you and another website symbolises a relationship, and you should always treat it as such. The way we approach a digital PR strategy at Embryo is to focus on building a connection between you and potential clients, partners, suppliers, and more. Combined with producing quality, shareable content, the links will follow. As a digital PR agency and SEO-focused Manchester digital marketing agency, Embryo has relationships with relevant bloggers, influencers and journalists that allow us to better deliver our digital PR services.

• Positioning you as an industry leader – One of the secrets to success in Google visibility and user trust is authority. Being able to establish yourself and your business as a leader in your field will naturally attract coverage, traffic and business. In competitive sectors the thing keeping you from hitting number one in the SERPs can be the difference between your and your competitors’ authority value. With effective digital PR that generates backlinks from high authority websites, we can push you into the centre of your field, winning traffic and visibility.

• Turning your coverage into links – Improved coverage and news publications sharing your content is fantastic, but we’re a Manchester SEO-focused agency here at Embryo, and that means that we’re always looking for an opportunity to convert your coverage into added SEO value. We firmly believe in approaching our outreach and link building with SEO as a second thought – we’ve seen too many agencies and businesses send out template emails en masse and struggle to get anywhere. That’s why we always treat our outreach as business development first – but that doesn’t mean we’re not on the hunt for opportunities to turn these into impactful backlinks that affect your Google visibility.

• Maximising your potential – At its core, digital PR is about making the most of what you’ve got. By building a strong foundation of connections in your industry and in the news, you can use this to squeeze every bit of value possible from the creative content you create. This might mean turning a blog post into an eye-catching infographic for bloggers and influencers to pick up, or turning a company update into an attractive press release to send out to journalists. An effective digital PR campaign is going to be about both making the most of the content you’ve got while finding ways to produce shareable and eye-catching new digital content too.

What Does A Digital PR Campaign Entail?

Successful digital PR means using every possible avenue for online promotion available to you. Traditional PR and digital PR differ in the fact that digital PR will look beyond print and other traditional opportunities in order to focus on finding new ways to interact with the target audience through digital means. A digital PR agency will utilise traditional PR tactics with the intention of focusing on digital content marketing, improved social media exposure, and increased SEO benefits by focusing on securing online coverage through high-authority mentions and backlinks.

Targeting relevant blogs, industry, news, and other relevant online publications allows us to secure the highest quality links and encourage your target audience to visit you online. Digital PR specialists will always cultivate relationships with journalists and bloggers in order to provide clients with the best platform with which to push their content. But there are a lot of different tactics and strategies that play a part in a comprehensive digital PR strategy, including:

• Preparing and publishing press releases alongside newsworthy digital content in order to earn organic press mentions.
• Blogger outreach and influencer marketing to grow a social media presence and tap into your target audience.
• Securing and optimising relevant links back to your website.
• Networking with journalists and editors in order to open up more opportunities to grow backlinks.
• Syndicating, publishing and sharing newsworthy and shareable digital content such as infographics, blogs, and more.

What Can Digital PR Do For You?

Successful digital PR campaigns can bring a lot of direct and indirect benefits to a business, improving both brand awareness, website traffic, press coverage, and more. Getting your brand name out there and mentioned by major publications and national newspapers can be an absolute game-changer. Setting expectations and goals isn’t always easy when putting together a digital PR strategy, but it’s always good to have an idea of what you want to achieve and how to track your success. Some of the benefits your digital PR campaign might bring include:

1. Increased website traffic – As your brand mentions increase in number, more and more people will be discovering your business through online platforms. By extending reach through social media and major online publications, and more people sharing your content, the more people will visit your website.
2. Building authority and trust – Publishing authoritative and high-value articles that get attention from other high-authority websites will help to establish you as a leader in your sector. The more other bloggers and websites trust your content, the more Google and your users will trust your content too. Digital PR experts will also strive to cultivate an online brand that builds trust through positive reviews, informative content, and a professional brand image.
3. Boost SEO performance – Earning impactful backlinks through having your content published on high authority sites not only directs organic traffic, but also works to improve Google visibility and SEO rankings for targeted keywords. Improved SERP rankings, in turn, leads to even more organic traffic results, leads and conversions.
4. Generate more leads and more sales – A strategic digital PR campaign is all about putting you, your business, and your product in front of a targeted, relevant and interested audience. This naturally produces more leads and enquiries from the new audience visiting your website which, in turn, leads to more sales. Good digital PR agencies know that clients need to see ROI, so campaigns are always built around producing visible results.

Get In Touch

Want to find out more about how Embryo delivers impactful and creative digital PR campaigns for our clients? Get in touch with the team here today to discover how we do things a bit differently and how we can produce the results you’re looking for.