The shift from print to digital marketing changed a lot of things about business, public relations included.
Learn how to create and implement a successful digital PR campaign that will have everyone talking about your business – in a good way!
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR is similar to traditional public relations, only it focuses on spreading your news on the web. Tactics used in a digital PR campaign include content marketing, social media communications, search engine optimization, and expert reviews and commentaries.
A digital PR campaign works to improve your internet presence and improve your brand awareness among your target audience. With the right strategy, your digital PR can drive organic traffic to your website. It’s also a great way to boost your search engine rankings and produce more qualified leads and higher revenue.
How to Build a Successful Digital PR Campaign
Building a successful digital PR campaign doesn’t happen overnight. It takes the right amount of strategy and knowledge to produce the results you want.
If you want a successful digital PR campaign, follow these steps.
Determine Your Goals and Target Audience
Like anything else in digital marketing, if you don’t have defined goals and a defined audience, your hard work won’t amount to much.
Before you start pushing out content, take a step back and review your goals. Digital PR campaigns can focus on many objectives, including brand awareness, sales, organic traffic, or building domain authority.
Determine what you want your digital PR campaign to accomplish and who you want it to accomplish those goals with before you start working on the content portion.
When looking at your target audience, you really want to nail down their demographics (their age, gender, education, location) and their firmographics (their employment and skillset). Are your audience members describing themselves in the same way that you’re thinking of them? If they aren’t, adjust your approach.
Do Your Research
Once you have your goals and audience defined, it’s time to do some research. Look at what is working for your competitors. Research news articles about them. Study their blogs and social media content. This is the best way to see what your target audience is relating to.
Look at your own content, too. What has your audience really resonated with in the past? What ideas have fallen flat? Looking at this data will give you some insight into where to take your digital PR campaign next.
You should also do some research into who is the most popular expert in your targeted field at the moment. Who will your audience listen to in your industry? This will be important when deciding who to approach for a working partnership.
This step of your digital PR campaign is going to be a lot of brainstorming before taking action. As your team thinks of new ideas on how to reach your target audience, be sure to write everything down. You never know what idea could spark a creative breakthrough.
Craft Your Pich & Build Your List
Once you have completed the research phase of your digital PR campaign, it’s time to put that research to work.
The goal of a digital PR campaign is for people to notice your business. Whether that person is a potential customer or an influencer or journalist who could amplify your message, you have to grab their attention–quickly.
Hit them with the perfect pitch. Use statistics, newsworthy stories, case studies, and timely collections. Highlight how your business solves its problems and why they should choose you over your competitor. Make sure you tie it into how it helps them. After all, no one likes someone who only talks about themselves!
Once you’ve crafted your idea into the perfect attention-grabber, start working on your list. Who do you want to attract with your digital PR campaign? Make a list of all people and audiences that you want this content to reach.
Outreach
Once you have perfected your pitch, it’s time to put it into action. Start executing your digital PR campaign! Whether it’s an email campaign, social media content, or a major news story about your brand, strong execution is key. You don’t want your digital PR campaign to look sloppy. That will achieve the complete opposite result than the one you’re looking for.
Hopefully, you’ll start seeing the results you’re looking for—whether it’s driving website traffic, boosting sales, or snagging quality backlinks. If this is happening, it means your digital PR campaign is working! If it isn’t, go back to the drawing board to reevaluate some things and try again.
How to Measure Your Digital PR Campaign
Measuring your results can be done in one of two ways: traditional metrics and integration and segmentation.
Traditional Metrics
It’s time to pull out those goals you’ve established at the beginning of this process. Use traditional metrics, such as website visits, conversion rates, number of mentions, potential reach, advertising value equivalency, or new backlinks, to see if your digital PR campaign is working.
Integrate & Segment for Further Insights
If you really want to focus on one particular audience or one particular product, be sure to segment your data. This will help you dig deeper into your insights to see what is resonating and what isn’t.
After reviewing your digital PR campaign results, it’s time to think about where you want to go next. Do you want to continue pushing toward these same goals, or are you ready to move on to other opportunities? The choice is yours, but your goals and objectives really dictate where your digital PR campaign goes next.
The Final Word on Digital PR Campaigns
Just like traditional PR, digital PR campaigns are extremely important to your brand. How your audience and the experts in your industry see your brand could make or break your business.
A strong strategy will push you to reach your big goals and make the conversions that you’re looking for. The opposite is true for a sloppy campaign. If you don’t have the correct content hitting the correct audience, you won’t achieve the goals you’re looking for.
Digital PR campaigns can be tricky. Don’t expect to strike gold with your first one. But with more research and strong execution, you’ll be crushing your objectives in no time.
