As a new kid on the block, a startup owner needs to apply the best marketing practices in order to stand out and get an effective promotion. If you are a startup owner yourself, one of your main goals is to reach your target audience fast, and digital PR will be your tool to make that happen.
Digital PR has become a pivotal and highly valuable marketing tool which can help startups to differ from their competition. If this sparked your interest and you want to know why is digital PR such an essential, just keep reading.
What is Digital PR?
As it is explained by Media Vision, digital PR is a tactic used by brands to increase their online presence through building relationships with key content writers and online journalists to gain “press hits”, or citations, and high-quality backlinks.
When done properly, digital PR increases a brand’s reach and visibility and in turn has a positive effect on search engine visibility through effective onsite SEO, driving increased referral traffic.
Now, let us address the difference between traditional PR and digital PR:
Traditional PR focuses on offline visibility. Its tactics mostly revolve around the production of press releases, the organization of press conferences and events, etc.
Digital PR focuses on online visibility. It works with Google and other search engines to ensure that a client’s website ranks highly in online searches, generating high-quality links back to a client’s website from each piece of digital content, as well as optimizing the website itself. The ultimate goal is to increase a brand’s visibility online.
Driving Awareness
One of the undeniable benefits of digital PR is that it enables you to drive awareness to your brand and to access the target audience on as many online platforms as you wish.
From SEO to bloggers, digital marketing is making sure that your brand is getting increased visibility and that the key audience is targeted from every perspective. Digital PR amplifies the message across a wide range of audience.
Increasing online visibility will also give your audience an opportunity to share the content about a brand. Digital PR can make your customers become your marketers. That is, your customer base can do some brand awareness for you!
With the ever-rising popularity of online business, the brand can simply not get enough exposure offline as it can online.
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Access to Social Media
Social media has become an inevitable part of any marketing strategy. This is where the digital PR steps in and take over the wheel.
Social media enables digital agencies to build audiences around a brand or product. This results in increasing overall online visibility and gaining engagement with key audiences.
Digital PR has direct access to social media community engagement.
In addition, digital marketers can make the most out of social data. It will provide them with an understanding about the demographics and interests of target audiences, again informing the content that is produced.
For example, the graph below shows the different interests of Zazzle’s Facebook audience (light blue) and how they compare to the Facebook average (dark blue).
Source: Zazzle Media
Teaming up with influencers
Digital marketing has become codependent with influencers. Influencer marketing is one of the main tools for spreading the word across and raising brand awareness.
Influencer PR is where public relations and social media intersect. According to a report from marketing firm Collective Bias, 30% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product endorsed by a non-celebrity blogger than a celebrity.
Social media influencers carry a lot of credibility on social media. By engaging them in the PR strategy, they can become the best and most effective brand ambassadors and earn brand the credibility it deserves.
Digital PR executives can even aim to get an infographic placed on high-quality sites by using tools such as Keyhole. The tool analyzes posts on both Twitter and Instagram and gives top-line metrics such as posts, impressions, and reach. It also gives a more in-depth analysis such as demographics, the share of posts, geolocation, and an advanced influencer filtering table.
Source: Keyhole
By finding out who has the same interest in what your brand represents and is talking about that topic, digital PR representatives will stand a much better chance of getting the content placed.
Interacting with the audience
Traditional PR conveys information without much feedback. Their communication is a one-way street.
This is where digital PR has an advantage. Every online post is accessible for leaving comments which provides receiving an instant feedback.
You will have an immediate reaction which will direct your future moves since you will have an insight into what your audience responds to and which tactics still need some work.
It will also show you the reaction to the products or services that you offer and whether you need to improve some promotional tactics in order to get a better response from the audience.
Melissa Snow, a digital marketer and a PR specialist at RatedByStudents explain that by interacting with the audience, your brand will establish a certain relationship with them and earn the status of being approachable and caring for the audience’s needs and opinions.
Tracking the results
Digital PR uses different measurement tools to track the power of a digital placement and its progress.
Some of the tools used for the analysis are Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Google Analytics.
Google Analytics allows tracking how many users on a website are clicking a link to a particular website. This enables complete tracking of the users’ experience from first clicking the link within a placement through to the brand’s site and how they engage with the site.
Attaining this valuable information will impact the tactics moving forward by which initiatives should continue, discontinue, or be altered.
There is no better way to tailor the future marketing steps than by having insight into real values and results.
The bottom line
Investing in digital PR can make a huge difference in reaching the right audience and spreading brand awareness quickly and effectively. If you want to keep up with the latest ideas in marketing, digital PR is a crucial step.
Digital PR should follow closely with your SEO and digital marketing strategies for maximum effect. It can strengthen weaker landing pages and increase the site traffic. Exploit the benefits of digital PR and effectively raise a company’s profile within the corresponding industry sector.
Daniela McVicker is a writer and editor at TopWritersReview. She graduated from Durham University and has an MA in Psychological Science. Daniela also has experience in PR. Besides doing her work as an editor and writer, Daniela has been applying her knowledge of psychology and marketing in order to contribute some valuable insights to startup owners who want to find and apply best practices and innovative approaches to their promotion strategy.