What is Digital PR? | Varn’s Approach
Getting traction online can be tricky without the right approach, but with a bit of creative thinking, generating interest online can be done for even the most seemingly ‘stuffy’ topics.
Digital PR is a powerful method to achieve this, but what does it entail and how can it benefit your business? In this blog, we’ll explore this increasingly popular marketing technique and practical strategies to help you achieve your business objectives.
A Digital PR strategy focuses on establishing a business’s authority and credibility by organically growing its online visibility and reach. It is very important when it comes to SEO as links are crucial to the algorithm for Google. Other metrics like social mentions and branded mentions are great for building your brand online. This can boost your business’s online process and growth, expanding your target audience.
Digital PR is one tactic used within the off-page SEO team at Varn and covers a wide range of tactics and strategies around research and competitor analysis, content creation and digital PR/link building.
Here we take a closer look at digital PR and why it is crucial if you weren’t your business to succeed online and your website to rank well in search engines.
What’s the difference between digital PR and traditional PR?
There are a few key differences between digital PR and traditional PR even though they are often two complimentary channels.
Digital PR is a term which typically applies to more online activities and covers, but is not limited to, the following:
- Online mentions
- Backlinks to your site (the big one for SEO)
- Wider SEO Metrics (Rankings, Traffic etc)
Traditional PR can often work as a stand-alone push and in many instances targets traditional media like print and television advertisements and placements. The ways that you measure success are also more apparent than with traditional PR.
Whereas a television campaign or print media advert may have reached a certain target demographic, tracking the actual numbers of people who saw it can be difficult and tracking the revenue impact is often even more challenging.
Whilst the tracking and right KPIs need to be set up in advance, measuring success is often easier with digital PR.
Brand mentions, social media interaction, backlinks and rankings are all easier to track and set key performance indicators against.
What is the process for digital PR?
Product Outreach
Outreach is not only designated for journalists; bloggers are also a great target when it comes to product reviews. A blog with a positive review on your product as well as a link, can increase traffic to your site and increase conversions.
Even if a journalist or blogger does not include a link to your website, gaining coverage from reputable sources achieves one of the main PR goals.
TIP: As a digital PR professional, building connections and forming trusted relationships with journalists, bloggers, and other businesses will be very beneficial as they will be willing to offer support and collaborate on campaigns for mutual benefit.
Proactive and Reactive Outreach: Offering Expert Insight
Another great tactic is offering insight as an expert in your field to relevant publications. This could take the form of a proactive or reactive approach.
Reactive approach: This approach is based on monitoring fresh news about a relevant topic and reaching out to journalists to comment on it. It is a great way to share helpful information with an audience and establish yourself within your field.
Proactive Approach: This involves reaching out to journalists with a new and interesting story pitch. This can be based on a rising trend or a unique angle, offering an original story supported by expert insight.
Create Thorough and Quality Content
This is where creativity comes into play; publishing eye-catching content is a strong way to widen your brand reach.
There are many ways to do this:
- Re-purpose existing content within your site, writing it from a different and intriguing angle.
- Write data-driven content – This involves conducting a research study, and digging for interesting or unexpected findings that would interest your target audience, other businesses, and journalists.
Regardless of what approach you take for your content writing, it is crucial to come up with campaigns that are engaging and relevant to your brand, pushing your brand message.
For example, if your business offered pre-made healthy meals, you could conduct a study that looks at the time and money it takes to buy groceries and cook at home every other day, and compare it to that of pre-made ready meals.
Once you have content to reach out with (be it survey data, products, commentary or infographics) it is time to put together the target publication list. We work with the client to understand their ideal placements and tie it in with data on sites that we know move the needle when it comes to SEO value.
Before we start with the outreach, we ensure we have a list of ideal target rankings that we want to improve. You need to drive the right keywords to the right pages, which is why developing a proper keyword map is crucial, this is typically done as part of the Technical SEO onboarding process in the form of an audit.
Once we have developed the list we work through it in our quality control process then start with the outreach. Leveraging a tool like Buzzstream is great as you can scale the outreach and gain better insights into how each campaign is performing.
After that comes the outreach, email scheduling software helps you greatly scale up the efforts, from that we can then get a more targeted plan together to get placements on sites depending on the individual publications content guidelines and tone of writing.
After the outreach, we report on the links attained and over time are able to measure the impact on rankings. If we are working on an ongoing campaign, then these reports are more regular and can help build up a better picture when it comes to the digital PR impact on SEO in terms of rankings.
Some of our digital PR case studies
Digital PR is a great way to create noise in your industry whilst also benefiting your SEO, at Varn our approach to digital PR is as transparent as it is effective. We always report on campaigns, and some get amazing results, others a slightly more muted, but we are always up front with performance.
Some of our favourite data-led content outreach case studies include the Timbersource Euros campaign push and the Festival Bag from Paper Bag Co. We also ran a campaign with Descartes (a company that covers everything from last mile delivery to route optimisation) to create a story around the most congested boroughs of London.
These are examples of three great digital PR tactics:
- Survey/data outreach
- Unique product outreach
- Data visualisation from third-party sources
The above tactics are great for getting a large hit of links from news relevant sites and also consistent links to support your SEO over the long run.
Get in touch to learn more
Digital PR is a growing industry and is a very important part of a strong ongoing SEO strategy. We have put together campaigns in the past which have driven great results for clients both in terms of coverage and impact on SEO. Our campaigns are set up with performance in mind, which is why we are trusted to deliver on our promises.
If you would like to learn more about digital PR and the benefits it could bring to your business then get in touch.
