What Is Digital PR and How Can It Impact My Business?

Digital public relations (PR) serve as a steering wheel for businesses, maneuvering the public perception of their brands in the digital space. It is the art of sparking intrigue around your product or service through a captivating narrative that resonates with your audience.

But more than creating a buzz around your brand, digital PR also fosters a connection, turning passive observers into highly curious prospects you’ll likely win over and convert.

So, what is digital PR, and how exactly does it contribute to the success of your overarching content marketing strategy along with your brand? We answer all these questions and more in this blog:

• What Is Digital PR?
• The Benefits of Having a Digital PR Strategy
• Should You Partner With a Third-Party Digital PR Agency?
• 3 Key Metrics To Measure the Success of Digital PR Strategies

What Is Digital PR?

Digital PR (Public Relations) involves strategically utilizing online channels to enhance your brand’s image and cultivate a favorable public perception.

It encompasses managing communication and reputation, especially during crises, across diverse digital platforms. This approach ensures effective brand representation, fostering an environment of trust and credibility.

Before, traditional PR strategies primarily focused on print media, broadcasts and live events. But since everyone and everything have practically gone ‘digital,’ businesses have increasingly turned to digital PR to tap into online channels, including social media, search engines and digital publications. Traditional PR, though effective in reaching a broad spectrum audience, lacks the targeted reach and measurability that digital PR offers.

However, the effectiveness of either approach depends on the specific goals of the PR campaign, the target audience and the nature of the organization.

Combining both traditional and digital PR strategies often yields the most comprehensive and successful outcomes.

Up next: Why you need a digital PR plan in your overall content marketing strategy

The Benefits of Having a Digital PR Strategy

I love some of the things I see from digital PR, it’s a shame it often gets bucketed with the spammy kind of link building. It’s just as critical as tech SEO, probably more so in many cases.”

– John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst at Google

There’s no better person to champion digital PR than Google’s John Mueller. In his statement, you not only get the importance of such a strategy but also two more insights, or perhaps warnings.

First, you should stick to whitehat link building tools and strategies and refrain from being spammy with your digital PR strategy.

Second, you should value digital PR strategies just as much as other aspects of search engine optimization (SEO).

A digital PR strategy empowers your brand to:

• Increase brand awareness and recognition. Digital PR efforts don’t just increase brand awareness. When your business gets featured in reputable digital press release publications, it conveys to potential customers that you are a credible brand.

• Better search rankings. Digital PR is among the top whitehat link building tools. When high-quality websites link back to a business’s website, it signals to search engines that the business is an authoritative source of information. Your improved search ranking grants you further visibility.

• Engage and nurture the market. Digital PR can also be used to engage with customers and build relationships. By sharing interesting and informative content, businesses can attract prospects while nurturing present customers.

• Drive traffic to your website. Digital PR not only enables you to spread favorable information about your brand and its offerings. It also allows you to strategically place backlinks to your website, creating better traffic.

Since every purchase starts with a moment of curiosity — and digital PR is all about sparking interest in your brand — your digital PR strategy ultimately leads to profitability.

Many businesses, especially small to medium ones, partner with a professional content marketing strategist or a full-service digital marketing agency to assist with their digital PR plan.

Up next: Why it’s better to work with a digital PR firm specializing in content marketing services

Should You Partner With a Third-Party Digital PR Agency?

If you have the capability to work with a digital PR agency, then by all means, do so. More than having the expertise that can get you actual results, a digital PR agency also has relationships with journalists and influencers. Such relationships further reduce downtime before your content marketing strategy comes to life through digital press releases.

However, it’s understandable if hiring a digital PR firm is not an option for you. You can ask your in-house content marketing strategist to learn about digital PR. This approach will take time and, in some cases, might be costlier in the long run due to the trial-and-error phase.

3 Key Metrics To Measure the Success of Digital PR Strategies

As with any rewarding venture, executing a digital PR plan requires patience and consistency. It demands your best, and in this case, that means investing in high-quality content.

Digital PR focuses on assets like blogs and website traffic. So, to measure the success of your digital PR efforts, consider the following:

Backlinks

Quality matters, and not all backlinks are equal. Consider your target customers and seek placements in publications they read. Set thresholds for website authority, page authority score or estimated traffic to count links.

Digital PR doesn’t focus solely on traditional link building but also generates high-authority passive links that accumulate over time. Creating shareable content, such as statistics and case studies, attracts high-domain authority sites to link to you, making your own content more valuable.

Share of Search or SERP Visibility

While your website can only secure a single spot in a search engine results page (SERP) for a non-branded search term, your brand can appear on multiple pages that rank for further relevant non-branded keywords through mentions. Share of search is a comprehensive metric that calculates your brand’s visibility online, from your own site to external ones.

To understand such a metric, consider this scenario: after a successful digital PR campaign, your brand appears in four out of the top 20 search results for a non-branded keyword, giving you a 20% ‘share of search.’

Now, let’s say you hired a content marketing services expert to push your brand to appear in eight out of the top 20 results. You then hold an impressive 40% share. Owning a higher percentage of share of search increases the likelihood of being considered by your prospects.

Conversions

Conversions are an essential metric in digital marketing and can be measured through varying methods. But the first step is identifying what constitutes a conversion for you. This could be anything from a completed purchase, a newsletter subscription, or a filled-out contact form. Once you’ve established your conversion criteria, leverage tools such as Google Analytics to track conversions on your website.

With digital PR, you want to pay attention to conversions from your referral traffic. Referral traffic is a segment of website traffic that comes from direct links on other websites (where you have press releases), as opposed to arriving from search engines or directly entering your website.

Digging into your referral traffic and how it translates to conversions allows you to inform your future digital PR strategies, knowing what works and what doesn’t.

Thrive’s Full-Service Digital Marketing Agency: Digital PR Strategists With a Proven Track Record

As said, a well-crafted digital PR strategy empowers your brand to promote awareness and recognition, enhance search rankings, connect with your market and drive high-intent traffic to your website. By sparking interest in your brand, digital PR ultimately paves the way for profitability.

If you’re ready to explore what digital PR can do for your business, Thrive can help. We employ whitehat link building tools and have empowered our clients to gain backlinks to reputable websites.

Talk to a digital PR strategist — increase brand awareness and drive more conversions.