Are you looking to grow your business in the most effective and influential way possible? If you are, then you may be considering utilizing public relations (PR) or digital marketing to help you do this.
Many people are aware of these two techniques, but few understand how to use them together to successfully build their brands. Although both PR and digital marketing will help you develop your business, they are actually very different.
PR is a more traditional approach to growing a business, one that helps customers and prospects maintain positive brand awareness without selling anything, while digital marketing leverages online channels to market a company’s brand, products and/or services in an attempt to convert the company’s target audience.
In the ever-changing online marketing world, staying current with trends is crucial, where PR agencies with an effective PR and digital team, collaborate with clients to create multi-channel strategies that exceed goals.
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Often, businesses have two distinct departments, one for public relations and one for digital marketing. Each department allocates time, money and energy to its own budgets, goals and tasks.
Recently, however, we’ve seen businesses combine these departments for more effective performance and overall better results. If you’re not already doing it, this optimization is worth considering. Read on to learn more.
Public Relations vs. Digital Marketing Channels
Traditional public relations channels are:
- Newspapers
- General print publications
- Trade publications
- Broadcast media
Digital marketing channels include:
- Free and paid social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing
- Website development
- Video marketing
Cross-channel integration refers to using public relations and digital marketing channels together to increase overall marketing success.
Also read: 7 Top Digital Marketing Tools Worth Considering
What, Exactly, Is Digital Public Relations?
As the name implies, digital PR combines traditional public relations strategies with digital marketing for the purpose of growing a brand’s online presence.
Working with social media influencers, bloggers and journalists, and digital PR professionals help businesses:
- Improve brand awareness by securing quality website backlinks
- Write and distribute relevant blogs, podcasts and emails
- Gain online publicity and increase the number of social media mentions
- Increase website visibility and thus organic page rankings
- Reach their target markets and grow website traffic, sales and revenue
Also read: Top Digital Marketing ROI Stats
What, if anything, remains the same for public relations professionals?
Digital PR strategies maintain the relationship aspect of public relations.
The digital PR professional works hard to establish and nurture personal, mutually beneficial relationships with journalists and social media outlets and influencers to earn expanded coverage and get their messages out into the virtual world.
However, unlike a written press release that has a short life span and may reach only a niche audience, online publicity, reviews, and backlinks last a long time and the content is seen by thousands of people.
Also read: Top Digital Marketing Stats For 2021
What Does a Digital PR Strategy Look Like?
A digital public relations campaign improves a website’s SEO efforts by gaining additional online coverage.
It consists of some or all of the following tasks:
- Publishing press releases and articles to secure quality backlinks
- Placing product information and/or reviews online via influencers and bloggers
- Using social media to increase reach and exposure
Determining which of the methods you undertake depends on your goals:
- Are you seeking to drive traffic to your website?
- Expand your audience size to increase traffic and sales?
- Improve brand awareness, loyalty and trust through social media influencers?
- Gain respect and authority by adding backlinks to your website?
Also read: 7 Proven SaaS Link Building Strategies
Your goal or goals will lead you to the right target audience and publications, help you create relevant and compelling content and help you develop the most effective campaign strategy.
For instance, if you want to gain authority via backlinks, your strategy should focus on attracting the attention of editors and journalists to get articles, blogs, press releases, infographics or other unique content published.
If your goal is to grow brand awareness, then you should look into social media influencer marketing or participate in podcasts, as well as offline events that get media coverage.
Also read: Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing For Your Business
Integrating Public Relations with Digital Marketing
When combined, digital marketing and public relations more than complement one another — the results exceed those that either one alone can produce.
Piggyback on your current marketing campaign successes by combining PR techniques with digital marketing channels.
Digital PR and SEO
Backlinks indicate that your website content is valuable and authoritative, which positively impacts search engine results page (SERP) rankings and drives people to your website.
The key to getting backlinks is to create high-quality, keyword-rich content and actively promote it through PR outreach efforts focused on online placements.
The ability to track results through SEO analytics is a plus. Without accurate results, how will you know how successful your PR and digital marketing campaigns are? And if you don’t know how your campaigns are performing, how will you know what to do to improve them?
Also read: Local Digital Marketing Tips To Help Your Business Boost Its Regional Rankings
Digital PR and Social Media
Traditional channel publicity increases your brand’s credibility, while social media — paid advertising in particular — expands audience reach and coverage.
You can amplify your brand’s message by carrying over any mentions obtained through traditional PR channels to your social media platforms. Or use organic social media and influencer content to highlight and link to your PR placements.
Also read: Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing For Your Business
Posting articles, videos and stories on social media doesn’t mean that they will get noticed among the thousands of daily posts.
Paid ads let you reach an audience that may not otherwise see your content. A balance of organic and paid social media posts is your best bet when you want to build brand awareness and strengthen your message.
79% of brands that use influencer marketing prefer Instagram when it
comes to this digital PR tactic.
Also read: 5 Ways To Use Social Media To Help Small Business
Digital PR and PPC Marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing helps get your PR message to your intended audience. Creating content using relevant keywords helps your message or article get to the top of the search engine rankings.
Someone searching with one of your keywords is likely to see your placement before others. Combining PR with PPC is particularly beneficial for making your brand more visible, as well as getting out a message to try to counteract any negative attention you may have received.
Also read: 12 PPC Tips To Improve Campaign Performance
Digital PR, Email Marketing and Charity Work
PR and email marketing are like peanut butter and jelly. Email marketing allows you to attract your audiences’ attention and communicate with them on a more customized and personal level. In fact, it can do it better than many other marketing mediums!
One of the fundamentals of email marketing is not selling anything to your potential customer right away.
You can do this by sending your subscribers a ‘Welcome’ email after they sign up for your email list. A high quality welcome email can help you begin to develop a connection with your subscribers, and it’s a great way to set a positive first impression.
Continue to grow your relationship with your subscribers by developing a friendship with them. Send them emails asking how you can be of help to them. Be sure you use these emails to present your brand and explain what it does to make people’s lives better.
An excellent PR strategy for developing your brand is doing charity work. You can get your subscribers involved by sending them emails explaining the different ways they can contribute to your cause.
Put together a small fundraiser for your community and let your group of subscribers know how they can contribute. This could be through buying an entry pass to an event you’ve put together, volunteering, or donating money towards the charity.
Take this one step further by asking your subscribers to share your fundraising events over social media. Make it easier for them to do this by adding social media sharing icons within the email.
Also read: Email Marketing Stats To Kickstart Your Campaign in 2021
Digital PR and Content Marketing
The purpose of public relations has traditionally been to promote a company’s story, albeit via print and broadcast channels. Combining online content promotion with high quality digital marketing can result in better SEO rankings, which means that more people see the content.
PR professionals may ask editors, with whom they have a relationship, to publish their articles and other content online, or they can publish their content and articles on their own company’s website pages and blogs.
Digital marketing relies heavily on SEO strategy and content creation. Likewise, every public relations campaign needs a good story and creative writing to get the audience to connect with the message. Reinforce your content by using both digital marketing and PR methods.
88% of PR specialists say that digital storytelling is the future.
What types of topics should you write about? Obviously, you want your content to be relevant to your brand; however, content that is only loosely related to your products or services may interest your customers too.
Be sure to select newsworthy topics to increase the chance of getting read and shared. Creating content that is likely to interest editors of various publications helps you gain backlinks while reaching your target audience.
62% of journalists say relevance to the audience makes a company’s story more shareable.
Also read: 8 Ways To Repurpose Digital Content
How to Measure the Results of Digital PR Campaigns
Has your campaign resulted in the awareness, lead generation and/or sales it was intended to achieve? To understand your campaign’s success, you need to track a variety of metrics, such as:
· The effectiveness of your email messages and subject lines via open rates and response rates
· Awareness by counting the number of people who visit the online publications that carry your placements
· The success of your campaign strategy by number of online brand mentions, backlinks, and social media shares
· The cost-per-click, or the amount you pay for each click in a PPC campaign, which indicates the success or failure of a particular campaign
· Long-term ROI — based on the impact of your campaign on traffic, new leads, page rank and authority over time — determines the return on investment relative to the cost of the campaign
Specific tools you can use to measure the success of digital public relations campaigns include:
· Google Analytics measures the traffic that results from published articles, tracks the number of social media or influencer links, and learns which platforms directed the most traffic to your website. Google Analytics also analyzes consumer behavior such as conversions and purchases.
· Hootsuite, Sprout Social, BuzzSumo are among the social media monitoring tools used to track the number of times your social media articles and website content is shared.
· Backlinks obtained through digital PR improve website page rankings for key phrases. Keyword tracking tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, AccuRanker and Moz help you trace changes in keyword visibility, indicating whether your SEO efforts are increasing traffic and brand awareness.
· Backlink checkers, including SE Ranking, Sitechecker, Ahrefs and others, tell you if the number of backlinks to your website has increased. MozBar lets you check the domain authority of your website and those that link to it.
Also read: 4 Step Strategy to Performing Effective Market Research for Your SEO Campaign
Conclusion
The goals of public relations are to increase brand awareness, improve relationships with customers and prospects and manage the company’s reputation. Combined with digital marketing channels, PR also increases the brand’s presence online, which is where most of today’s business takes place.
Instead of working separately or even competing with one another, public relations and digital marketing professionals are beginning to work together to capitalize on the other’s strengths and achieve results that far exceed what either can accomplish alone.
Today’s competition is fierce, and marketing is challenging. If your company hasn’t yet begun to combine digital marketing with public relations efforts, now is the time to start!
Also read: How to Make Your Seo Campaign Stand Unique?
(This article has been written with inputs from Aaron Wittersheim, Chief Operating Officer at Straight North.)
