Digital PR agency

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

4. Identify target publications

Our next step is to create a list of digital media outlets to publish your content, focusing on those that 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?

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.

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.

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.