Like any business, one of your main priorities for success will be to promote your brand and engage your audience. While much of this promotion involved traditional public relations in the past, the rise of digital marketing and social media has dramatically changed the way we spruik our businesses.

Online marketing is now essential to get your brand in front of your target audience, and a digital public relations strategy is a must have for small and large businesses alike.

What is digital PR?

Much like traditional PR, its digital counterpart is all about boosting the presence, image and identity of a brand – it’s just that the way it achieves this is a little different. While traditional PR primarily focusses on print, TV and radio, digital PR looks to generate an online presence by targeting websites, online publications and social media accounts for quality backlinks.

Digital PR can take on many forms:

• submitting online press releases
• publishing online content
• working with bloggers
• engaging social media influencers
• sponsoring an event
• reclaiming links
• interviews
• reviews

Regardless of the strategy used, the idea is to build a strong reputation and strengthen your authority in your niche. When done right, you’ll broaden your reach and engage your target audience by appearing on the websites, publications and social accounts they visit most.

Benefits

Ultimately the goal is to increase your leads and sales. To do that, digital PR provides a number of benefits:

• increases visibility
• builds trust
• boosts traffic
• improves rankings

Of course, success is never guaranteed and you only get out how much you put in.

To build a solid campaign, PR should be combined with a range of other complementary strategies, such as content marketing, social media, influencer marketing and SEO.

PR and SEO

Any digital PR work you complete has the potential to improve the rankings of your website – if it is done correctly. For this reason, digital PR will often form part of a larger offsite SEO strategy that works to ensure the credibility, authority and relevance of your business is being strengthened by your PR.

SEO informs your PR strategy by assessing factors such as website authority, backlinks and keywords. It will also help you to not only understand your audience but your competitors too. For example, you’ll need to decide if targeting the same keywords and links as your competitors is worth it or whether there are different avenues to try.

Tracking success

Thanks to an abundance of online tools it’s incredibly easy to track you strategy’s progress and success by looking at data for backlinks, keyword visibility, social media shares and where your traffic is coming from. This in-depth data will help you adjust your strategy as necessary to improve results.