Digital PR Agency
Digital PR is instrumental in building brand awareness, whether through a social media mention or an article feature. Short for digital public relations, a digital PR agency is at the core of any marketing strategy that aims to win audience attention.
A digital PR strategy – executed successfully – allows your business to get mentions in highly regarded online publications. A larger volume of online mentions will help to increase your brand’s exposure and grow a healthy backlink profile to boost the authority of your website, as well as your general reputation, allowing you to reach a broader target audience of prospective customers.
Here at Manchester-based, award-winning digital marketing agency Embryo, we see digital PR as much more than an extension of an SEO campaign…
While generating high-quality backlinks is gold dust for your website, key for it to climb Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), digital PR is essential for relationship-building, increased outreach efforts, driving audience engagement and establishing your brand’s credibility.
Embryo Has a Dedicated, Data-led PR Team Who Can Ensure Your Brand Gets In Front of the People That Matter.
From industry publications to national newspapers, our public relations experts know how to deliver.
Embryo were amazing to work with and delivered some incredible results for the brand. The team are so easy to work with and couldn’t do enough for us!
What Is Digital PR (And How Does It Improve Your Rankings)?
In a nutshell, digital PR is all about generating as much noise as possible about your brand – transforming online coverage into knowledge, trust, increased traffic, and sales. This is achieved through effective communication and using creative campaigns to capture the attention of a wider audience.
Much like you or me, Google trusts and promotes brands with a large online presence. In other words, the more mentions and links on high-authority websites your brand has – think legitimate online news sources or social media platforms – the more likely your website is to be favoured by Google.
If Google deems your brand to be trustworthy and talked about, your website will rank higher on the search engine results pages. This means improved rankings and greater brand visibility. A win-win.
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What Does Digital PR Involve?
Communication, communication, communication.
Digital PR is a marketing strategy that uses a range of tactics to shout about your brand and why it’s loved. The most common digital PR tactics include:
- Online press releases
- Influencer marketing
- Blogger events
- Published articles
- Guest posting
- And so on
Fundamentally, digital PR strategists will network – either remotely or through in-person events. They’ll use their connections and contacts, made up of journalists, bloggers, media outlets, and social media influencers, to get your brand the attention it deserves.
A digital PR strategist’s network can be leveraged to secure editorial coverage of newsworthy and quality content. With that being said, ensuring your brand’s content is both reflective of your desired image and topical enough to achieve a ‘newsworthy’ status in the fast-paced online arena can be challenging.
From internet-breaking selfies and quirky memes to collection launches and impactful stories, the type of content involved in a PR campaign can take many forms. Surveys and statistics are another great way to bring your brand’s story to life and establish authority.
It’s all about starting an online conversation about your brand and reaching your target audience through the websites they engage with, social media accounts they follow, and podcasts they listen to on their way to work.
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The Goal of Digital PR
There are many benefits to digital PR, from growth in organic traffic and an improvement in search rankings to an increased conversion rate. However, the ultimate goal is to increase the visibility of your brand, widen your target audience, and build trust.
Improving your brand’s reputation, building a positive image, and establishing yourself as the expert within a specific sector will help to solidify a foundation in the constantly evolving world of the internet.
Brands That Trust Our Digital PR Strategies
Digital PR vs Traditional PR
While there are several differences between digital and traditional forms of PR, they share the same core objective of building brand awareness and engaging a relevant audience.
Digital PR campaigns use online methods and are considered part of a wider online marketing strategy, working hand in hand with search engine optimisation (SEO), lead generation, influencer marketing, and email marketing. In the realms of social media and blogging, digital PR takes a more subtle approach by creating relatable content and stories that situate and promote your brand within your target audience’s daily life.
Traditional PR takes a more direct approach with a key focus on print. It utilises the authoritative voice of conventional media channels such as magazines, television, and billboards. Picture leaflets through your letterbox or your Sunday morning newspaper.
Deciding whether digital or traditional PR is best for your brand will, of course, depend on what you’re seeking to achieve – for example, the scale of exposure you’re aiming for.
Depending on the nature and goal of your campaign, as well as which type of audience you are targeting, will tell you which PR type will give you the best leverage. And, sure, there’s always the option for both.
Combined, both PR types can create an effective strategy and achieve greater results. Reaching both online and offline audiences to double prospective customers and drive visibility at a larger scale are just some of the benefits of including PR in your overall marketing strategy.
Where Digital PR Started…
The 1990s: the era of Friends, double denim, and the introduction of the world wide web. With the rise of the internet came the emergence of an online audience and Google, leading to the evolution of PR campaigns from more tangible forms of marketing – such as magazines – to the internet.
With the average person spending almost 7 hours a day online, brand presence and attention now equate to visibility via online search. This provides greater scope for increased audience interaction, with the opportunity for immediate and ongoing feedback. The introduction of additional functions, such as liking or sharing content, further contributes to the expansion of this network and offers the potential for new prospects.
Establishing meaningful connections with your audience while becoming increasingly reactive in a continually evolving online space is transforming the way in which digital PR is understood and executed.
How Digital PR Can Work for SEO
Digital PR and SEO are like two peas in a pod.
As one of Manchester’s leading SEO agencies, we know that when these marketing channels work together they can offer huge benefits. In the simplest sense, they aim to achieve the same thing – to increase a brand’s online visibility through the creation and promotion of quality content.
In fact, by helping to build links, improve brand authority, and increase domain authority and website traffic, digital PR is essential to SEO. Ultimately both will help to establish brand trust. If you are creating and promoting content that people are engaging with, it will signal to search engines that your website is a credible source of information. It’s a win-win!
During the strategy phase, SEO can also provide valuable audience insight and an understanding of user intent. This will help to inform the type of content we produce, ensuring it appeals to your target customers, as well as the outreach we perform.
Digital PR as a Link Building Tactic
Yes, the aim of digital PR is to increase your brand’s online presence and boost industry standing. However, SEO insight also plays a big role. The outreach involved in each digital PR campaign helps to improve your backlink profile, building a network of quality, relevant links from established and trustworthy sources.
But, what do we mean by ‘outreach’? You may be wondering…
Outreach is simply the steps that digital PR strategists take to get news about your business out there. It’s where they pitch information about your brand to journalists and media outlets to get press coverage for the story you’re looking to promote.
At Embryo, when it comes to link building, we always want to ensure that the links earned during a digital PR campaign are fully optimised – from the keywords in the anchor text to the link URLs. Our SEO team works closely with our digital PR team, offering guidance and expertise in order to achieve maximum performance.
Benefits of Earning Links with Digital PR
There are several benefits from earning links with digital PR and, as SEO fanatics, we could talk about them all day.
Essentially, link building correlates with authority building and establishes a firm online presence for your brand.
- This creates an opportunity to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Build trust, particularly if those links have come from top-tier publications
- Increase social engagement
- Drive traffic
Digital PR Gives Your Brand the Acclaim and Recognition It Deserves.
Our team are on hand to create amazing PR campaigns that give you backlinks to your site as well as brand awareness. To learn more, get in touch today.
I SAW IT FIRST
Increasing Website Traffic and Sales through Creative Digital PR Campaigns.
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53
Pieces of coverage
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1.56 million
Estimated coverage views
How Does Digital PR Fit into an Online Marketing Campaign?
A measurable and tangible strategy that can cover a wide range of goals, digital PR is a powerful marketing tool for any business. Compared to traditional PR, it offers the opportunity to reach a broader, online audience, creating and promoting high-quality content with a much longer lifespan than a conventional newspaper or magazine.
Online marketing campaigns are all about maintaining effective relationships with and attracting the attention of a target audience. Done well, digital PR is one of the most effective methods of communication. Every stage of the process, from identifying the target customers and publications to the creation of content, is tailored towards sending the right message to the right people in the right way.
As well as boosting SEO efforts, digital PR goes hand in hand with other forms of online marketing, such as your brand’s social media activity and content marketing efforts. It is one of the most vital components in a wider digital marketing strategy and overall picture of your brand’s online presence, visibility and performance.
Isn’t Digital PR Just for B2C or Fun Brands?
One of the most common assumptions about digital PR is that it’s exclusively reserved for B2C or ‘fun’ brands. A load of nonsense in our books!
All businesses, whether B2C or B2B, can benefit from including digital PR in their online marketing strategy. However large or small your business is and whatever your USP, getting your voice out there will help to reach your target customers and share your brand message.
While digital PR is great for reaching audiences on a national level, innovative and impactful campaigns can also be created for local businesses. In this instance, your priority is to focus on local and regional press to earn valuable coverage, build your local profile and appeal to attract local customers to your business.
At Embryo, we understand that businesses come in all shapes and sizes and we will work with you to create a tailored digital PR campaign that ticks all your boxes. Our digital PR team has had tremendous success working across different industries, maintaining relationships with an ever-growing network of journalists to help get stories in leading online publications.
See us in action with the impressive results we achieved for I SAW IT FIRST.
Digital PR Campaigns: What to Expect
While outreach is seen as the final and arguably most important phase, several other stages go into delivering a successful digital PR campaign.
Generally speaking, a digital PR campaign can be broken down into four stages.
1 Stage 1: Research
The research phase involves defining your goals and key KPIs, reviewing your target customers and identifying your target publications. At this stage, it’s also important to brainstorm what type of content you are going to create and promote.
2 Stage 2: Action and Planning
The action and planning phase is all about designing your strategy, creating quality content that will appeal to your audience and finalising your targeted media list.
3 Stage 3: Communication and Relationship Building
The communication and relationship-building phase, also known as outreach, is the implementation of your strategy and promotion of your content. Circulating your story will initiate an ongoing conversation and start to build customer trust, as long as your channels of communication are relevant to your target audience.
And it doesn’t stop there.
4 Stage 4: Evaluation
Once your story has gained traction, it’s important to analyse the effectiveness of the campaign, referring back to your main KPIs as a baseline. This valuable data can be used as a guide to determine your ROI and to inform future amends.
Evaluation should be an ongoing process as your brand’s online presence continues to expand.
What Are Good Digital PR KPIs?
What’s a marketing campaign without a measurement for success?
During any digital PR process, there will be a critical reporting period to review the campaign as a whole, highlight what worked well and evaluate any improvements that need to be actioned.
As a results-led agency that focuses on delivering visible and measurable results, we love a good KPI (Key Performance Indicator). As a baseline, KPIs highlight what business objectives are being met over time and help to inform future strategies. The KPIs selected for any marketing campaign should always be applied to key promotional objectives.
So, what KPIs do we use to track a digital PR campaign’s performance?
- Number of pieces of coverage per month
- Domain authority of the publications we secure coverage in
- Contextuality of how the brand is mentioned/positioned
- Links and brand mentions
- Readership of an article we are featured in
- The relationship we build with journalists from our outreach
While securing coverage is ultimately what indicates the success of a campaign at a surface level, numerous external factors can impact this. We, therefore, consider a wide range of measurements to gain a more holistic picture, including the number of people our content is reaching and the domain rating of the publications we secure coverage in.
A Newsworthy Digital PR Strategy: The Embryo Approach
With years of experience producing effective and impactful campaigns, we have our digital PR process nailed. Having worked with businesses of all sizes and from a variety of different sectors, we’ll build a strategy that suits you.
By following a seamless method informed by our award-winning marketing expertise, we ensure all factors have been considered and your campaign is set up for success.
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1. Set Your Goal
Of course, setting your goal(s) is an important first step as it provides a clear way for us to measure performance.
There are several goals that you can look to achieve through the implementation of digital PR campaigns, and these will ultimately depend on the scale of your business, along with your objectives and requirements.
Are you a bigger business looking to improve your credibility with noticeable and news-baiting coverage in authoritative sources? Maybe you’re hoping to increase website visits or create a network of backlinks to boost your website’s SEO and performance.
Or, perhaps you already have a strong brand presence within a particular market and are wanting to increase your sales, while continuing to build brand awareness and trust?
If you are unsure about which goal is relevant to you, we have a wealth of experience and expertise to help you make the best decision for your business.
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2. Review Your Target Customers
Reaching the correct audience is key to ensuring a successful digital PR campaign. It is therefore essential to have a good understanding of your current and potential target customers, allowing us to tailor your digital PR strategy and style of messaging to their wants, needs and impulses.
We gather valuable, data-driven insights from tools such as Google Analytics to gain a detailed view and start to build specific audience personas.
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3. Content Ideation and Research
Once we have an understanding of your goals and target customers, it’s time to get creative and start planning out your specific campaign. Here at Embryo, we love a good brainstorming session. During the ideation and research stage, the nature of your business, the topic(s) you want to address, and your target audience will all play a significant role in determining which type of content is the best to tick all your boxes.
Before settling on a particular topic, there are certain rules you should follow. Although your topic should be relevant to your business and the products or service you are offering, it needs to be broad enough to offer a range of content opportunities and increase chances of coverage. It should also be newsworthy and topical enough to gain traction.
Market awareness is another factor that we take into consideration when planning your digital PR strategy. Having a view of how much interest there is in a particular topic will help to inform the content. It’s also handy to keep an eye on your competitors to understand and build on what’s working well, but don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
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4. Identify Target Publications
Our next step is to create a list of digital media outlets to publish your content, focusing on which are likely to make a difference to your campaign. We work closely with you to understand which publications are important to you.
It is critical to align your target publications, platforms, bloggers or influencers with your target customers, as this will determine the level of engagement achieved. For instance, does your audience relate to influencers and have a presence on social media platforms, or are they more likely to interact with online news outlets?
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5. Design the Strategy
It’s time to talk tactics.
There are numerous digital PR routes to go down and it’s important to centre your strategy around the current stage of your business, your branding, your messaging and the goals of your campaign.
For example, reactive PR is a popular tactic and involves creating relevant content that responds to a specific trend or news item of the moment. On the flip side, proactive PR is all about looking towards future events or seasonal holidays and planning your campaign accordingly.
Our job is to put together a water-tight strategy and roadmap that consistently meets all your criteria for success. This will consist of the type of outreach required, how we can best perform this outreach, the target audience, and the channels we will need to utilise.
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6. Content Creation
Content is the bread and butter of digital PR and the key to a successful campaign – get the tone, format, and messaging right, and you’re onto a winner!
The aim is to create engaging, quality content that stands out. It should appeal to your customers and stop them from their daily scrolling, triggering a reaction such as a website visit or a sale.
Content for digital PR comes in all different forms, including articles, interviews, case studies, press mentions, social media posts, infographics, etc.
Our team of innovative and forward-thinking creatives will work with you to create world-class content that packs a punch.
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7. Outreach and Dominate
Once we’ve created a tailored digital PR strategy and the content is good to go, our team will begin to outreach! We’ve built an extensive list of contacts, covering everything from local and regional publications to national newspapers, online news sites to influencers and bloggers.
And it doesn’t stop there.
With every results-driven story we take to the media (be it local or large), our network is constantly expanding as we establish new relationships and look for more outreach opportunities.
This outreach process is generally a single identifiable period to gain the coverage that our show-stopping content deserves. However, evergreen content is a powerful tool in the digital PR kit and can be outreached over and over again to continuously gain momentum and deliver results.
Communication is our number-one priority and we pride ourselves on exceptional customer service. We will keep you in the loop at every step of your digital PR journey so you are the first to know about any developments and are never kept in the dark.
By far the best agency I have ever worked with! Every single member of the team is a pleasure to deal with. They're absolutely brilliant at what they do! Highly recommended.