Digital PR is all the rage right now, but it isn’t exactly a new idea. It’s an aspect of digital marketing that uses tactics similar to traditional PR—but with the angle of enhancing a company’s online presence. 

Br8kthru is taking the intimidation out of the buzzworthy digital PR topic by dissecting the practice and its place within a similar realm, digital marketing. 

What Is Digital PR?

Digital PR is a promotional strategy to share your company’s content with its audiences with the goal of growing your online presence. It combines SEO, media relations, and influencer outreach to earn placement in online publications and enhance an organization’s online visibility, including website traffic, domain authority, keyword rankings, and backlinks.

What Digital PR Is Not

Digital media relations is a distinct practice that’s separate from a few related strategies.

Digital PR ≠ Link Building

Conducting public relations through digital media is not strictly link building, especially not in the traditional sense many SEOs know. Outreach through a digital public relations strategy places emphasis on the quality of relevant links from reputable publishers, as opposed to a link building strategy that gains a high quantity of links regardless of where they’re from.

Digital PR ≠ Brand Placement

Online public relations is not brand placement in the sense of traditional press releases and news pickup. Brand placement can be an added benefit, though. The digital aspect places the focus on enhancing online presence—rendering traditional media pickup in print publications irrelevant in the eyes of search engines.

Digital PR ≠ Digital Marketing

Digital public relations is not digital marketing in itself, but rather a tool in the digital marketing toolbox. Digital marketing is an all-encompassing term that can include everything from UX/UI and paid media to content marketing, social media, automation and more. 

As a part of digital marketing, online public relations campaigns typically include many more components than simply outreach and backlinks. The most successful campaigns are multifaceted with creative ideation, web updates, social media and content creation. Rise at Seven does a great job of explaining the aspects of successful digital PR campaigns that work together to earn results for clients.

How to Set Up a Digital Media Relations Campaign for Success

Digital PR campaigns that have a stable core start with foundational elements such as a creative idea, a solid website foundation and defined metrics for success. When we execute an online PR strategy, these fundamental pieces work alongside promotional activities to create a flywheel of online growth. 

1. A Creative Idea

How can you transform your company, product or service into a newsworthy topic that your audience wants? For example, Br8kthru assisted with the promotion of a major manufacturer’s interactive color experience that turned brain waves into hex code hues on a monolith screen. The company manufactures coatings, which could be considered mundane, but they turned their passion for color into a marketable experience.

2. A Solid Website Foundation

#Sorrynotsorry, but a build-your-own Wix site isn’t going to cut it. With digital public relations, we’re talking site speed, technical SEO, user experience, and analytics working together to nurture users once they click through to your website. A solid site structure and content strategy are essential components to successfully executing an online PR campaign.

3. An Agreed-Upon Metric for Success

Metrics for success to measure the efficacy of digital brand building include traffic to your website, domain authority, number of backlinks, and number of mentions. Configuring Google Analytics and UTM parameters are essential for tracking the performance of digital PR efforts.

Digital PR is taking the limelight lately as an in-demand online marketing strategy. Don’t let the buzz intimidate you—this is a strategy savvy digital marketers have been using all along! Call it media relations, social media, content marketing, or online PR, we are all talking about growing an online presence with strategic, targeted, white-hat methods.

Ready to talk about how digital PR can work for your company? Let’s chat.