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Digital PR Services

Get your message out to the world and reap the link rewards!

You may have heard the term ‘Digital PR’ being thrown around in the marketing world, but what exactly does it mean? It seems to be something that everyone knows is valuable, but they’re not exactly sure why or how it works. Find out all about our Digital PR services below.

What is Digital PR?

Let’s rewind a little bit – we all know that SEO is key for getting your site in front of people. SEO goes hand in hand with having a good ‘domain authority’. Domain authority is determined by programmes that us SEO geeks use and is measured between 0-100, 0 being a brand new site and 100 being extremely well known (think the likes of Google, YouTube, Apple, etc. which all have a DR of 100).

Domain authority is built by getting a number of authoritative websites (think well known and successful blogs/online magazines in your industry) to link back to you. Essentially, search engines will say: ‘the big guys are linking to this site, this business knows what they’re talking about!’ which increases your domain authority. Because search engines are seeing you as an authoritative industry figure, you’ll appear higher up when people type in keywords related to your industry.

Digital PR works similarly to content marketing in that it increases trust in your brand or company and also the credibility on how your brand is perceived. A huge benefit of this is that all the activity can be tracked, and you will begin to see positive stats for conversion rates and ROI.

It’s essentially all about getting these valuable links through to your site. Links can be gained in a number of ways, but typically digital PR follows one of these formats:

  • Thought leadership pieces: think ‘A week in the life of a CEO’ or ‘exclusive interview with the Founder of…’
  • Interesting data relating to your industry: this typically takes the form of either an infographic or an interactive map. We really like this example from ADT, which is a map showing you the crime in your area over the past 3, 6 or 12 months. This may cause people to panic and want to protect their home with alarms – which, guess what, is exactly what they sell! The campaign got 63 links from a variety of sites, many of which had domain ratings of over 70.
  • Fun content: quizzes consistently work well as people love learning things about themselves. A great example is Brain MD’s ‘Discover your Brain Type’ quiz, which informs people of their brain type and then sends them a product recommendation that they sell to improve your brain health. Genius, because then they have their email for marketing automation too!
  • Newsjacking: say for example you operate in the retail industry, and suddenly a big news piece breaks about new statistics on the death of the high street. This is the perfect opportunity to newsjack – you’re directly affected by this news, so PRs will reach out to journos with a comment from yourselves that they might want to inject into the piece to provide another perspective!
  • Providing comments: similar to the above point, journalists often explicitly seek comments from leaders in different industries through different request systems (e.g. Help A Reporter Out), or even just on Twitter. Our Digital PR Execs are always on the ball, making sure we’re the first to provide a highly relevant comment and exactly what the journalist is looking for.

Getting the content together is only half the battle. The rest of the work goes into building relationships with key content writers, influencers, bloggers and journalists in order to get your campaign in front of the right people.

What is the difference between traditional PR and Digital PR?

It’s wrongly assumed that traditional and digital PR are effectively the same thing, however the two are very different.

Traditional PR looks for high circulation, readership and viewer ratings in order to determine who to approach. Which would make sense, given that you want to get your content in front of many people as possible – the problem is, it’s much harder to track the success of traditional PR than it is to track digital PR.

This is because digital PR doesn’t exclusively focus on circulation – instead, it looks at the wider picture. The factors above are important, but domain authority and non-paid opportunities are also taken into consideration. Where digital PR also differs is that it is much more easily tracked and measured, therefore you can really see it working! We can report on stats such as click through rates, the amount of referral traffic to your site, increases to your domain authority and more.

Why is digital PR important?

When was the last time you picked up a magazine to look up a business? Yellow Pages are a thing of the past – digital is the future. Making sure your business is on page one of the search engine results page (SERP) when people are searching for your services is absolutely essential. Having a high authority site will help with this. You want to be where your customers are – get yourself in front of them by building your domain rating!

Another reason that digital PR is important is that it has the potential to introduce readers of these publications to your site. Perhaps these people have never heard of your brand, or even considered using your services, but if they click through to your site and like what they see, you could have more and more leads pouring in by the day.

What makes a successful PR campaign?

You could obtain ten pieces of coverage from lower authority sites, or you could get one really good ‘PR hit’ from a well-known name, which could have more of an impact than the other ten put together. But what really makes for a successful campaign?

For the campaign to be seen as a success, it would need to be a hit within a website that has a high domain rating which includes a natural link to your site using relevant brand anchor text (e.g. if you’re a business broker, the best anchor text would be something like ‘to get help with selling your business…’). The key to this is ensuring that the reader is only ever directed to something that they are expecting to see.

The top three factors we look at when deciding who to pitch to are as follows:

  • Is it relevant to your site?
  • Is there an excellent level of trust between the site and their readers?
  • Do they have a high social media following?

How content is pitched to journos is extremely important, as this will determine how it is received!

How will Digital PR fit into my marketing strategy?

In an ideal world, digital PR should go hand in hand with your SEO and digital marketing strategy in order to have maximum effect and the best impact for your business online. Digital PR has the power to strengthen weaker landing pages and increase overall site traffic, even if it doesn’t directly go hand in hand with your marketing objective.

We would always recommend that it is used in conjunction with SEO as you can really take advantage of key search term trends and then maximise coverage on what people are already searching for.

Tao Digital has a vast amount of experience within digital PR strategy and traditional PR strategy. Get your business in the best places both online and offline, let us help you to create the right PR relationships. Contact us today via hello@taodigital.org or 01204 920 092 to find out how we can help you.