“Digital PR campaigns combine the creative element of content marketing and traditional PR, supplemented by the data brought about from careful Search Engine Optimisation and target audience analysis to create engaging campaigns with demonstrable ROI.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re an accountancy firm, a travel agent or a clothing retailer, there’s a digital PR campaign that’s right for you.

What is digital PR strategy?

Digital PR strategy is an overarching plan, which any online PR campaigns or digital PR activity undertaken will contribute to, in order to achieve the strategy objectives, such as brand building and improving SEO performance.

So now that we know what the hell it is, it’s time to start thinking about how to put it into practice. Here’s how to create a digital PR strategy…

How do you create a digital PR strategy?

1. Get to know your audience with personas

For any PR person, getting great media exposure for a client is one of the most gratifying parts of our jobs. However, the pivotal element of any effective PR strategy is knowing your audience.

Before you get started on the first step, be sure you have:

• At least a basic understanding of your ideal target audience
• Completed some competitor research to help you understand who they are (we recommend trying Sparktoro – it delivers great insights into your competitors’ audiences)

So, with your target audience info at hand, the first thing to do is start mapping out:

• Where they go for their news?
• Where they go for the content they love?
• What you think their pain-points are?
• What interests them (this spans everything from Netflix to food)?
• Do they listen to any podcasts in-particular?
• What hashtags they most engage with?
• What themes and topics most interest them?

By analysing where your customer is and why, you can ensure you remain front and centre, sharing your expert views on trending topics and staying relevant.

One of the best ways of really getting under the skin of your target audience is creating personas. It’s something we do for all of our clients at No Brainer and they enable us to get to know your audience on an almost personal level – even allowing us to map out what their daily life is like, so we can intersect a clients brand at the right moments of their day.

Now you have lots of information and detail, let’s start thinking about how you can shape that into a document! Here’s a guideline structure for creating your target personas for Digital PR:

• Give them a name – they’re people after all!
• Add a picture of them (a stock image or icon will work!)
• Basic demographic information i.e. age range, gender etc.
• The competitors they interact with (so you can monitor them)
• The topics they care about – you can create alerts for this on BuzzSumo and even use Google Alerts to help identify newsjacking opportunities
• Outline their pain-points (that you can help resolve better than anyone else)
• The media/news sites they visit most frequently – there’s a good starter for ten on your media list!
• Are there any other digital touchpoints they love? Think Podcasts, YouTube etc.
• Are there any influencers they follow, or even celebrities – that’ll also help you scope your broadcast opportunities
• How do they speak? What language do they use? Is it concise and business-like, or are they bubbling with personality? That’ll help you craft the right tone of voice for each of your channels to best engage with them
• Which channels are they most active on? Is it Instagram, Facebook or maybe Pinterest? You’ll then be able to focus on the right channels for your audience!
• Which devices are they most likely to use?

There’s so much more you can do, but that should give you enough information to really start driving engagement, awareness and, ultimately, content that delivers measurable results. But, by transforming that info into a tangible document, you’ll have something you can share with your team – and also to treat as a bit of a bible for your overall marketing activity to make sure things are kept on track for every channel e.g. SEO as well as PR activity. Understanding the wider context of online PR in digital marketing for your business can help benefit all of the marketing channels you use.

2. Create the right content based on your insights

Through your personas, you’ll soon have a pretty good idea of what sort of content will most interest future customers, which can then be incorporated into your digital public relations strategy.

Tools such as SEMrush, BuzzSumo and ExplodingTopics.com will help you unlock key topics of interest to refine a relevant content strategy. You can then start thinking about the right types of content, for example:

• Articles and helpful guides
• Listicles
• Infographics and data-driven visualisations
• Gamification
• Videos and GIFs
• Podcasts

Whatever route you choose, data will remain at the centre of your campaign; the fun part comes in how you choose to communicate this to your audience. There are plenty of options, but a good place to start is by asking yourself “would I give a s**t about this?”. If the answer is no, we’d recommend you head back to the drawing board! 

A fundamental part of digital PR is driving measurable value through quality, relevant backlinks. But it’s important to ensure you’re creating content assets that only “live” on your website – so whatever digital PR campaign you’re doing, has a clear objective and place to go.

Besides creating great content on your website, social media is also an integral part of any Digital PR campaign and can be used to amplify engagement around your chosen topic. Social posts on the platforms your target audience loves can quickly increase reach around specific content, ensuring the right people are reading and reacting to your content.

Even better, if your content sparks debate, divide’s opinion or makes people want to share their view, all of this will help expand reach and spread the word of your brand or products and services.

Top tip: Overlay your content with the topics and themes you know your audience loves for the best levels of engagement. This is your opportunity to be reactive and get creative! Seen an image that’s gone viral? Or a news article that will have a direct impact on your customer base? Respond creatively and see how your audience reacts and engages with your content. Draw inspiration from brands outside of your industry too – if something works well, maybe you can evolve that!

3. Creating your media list and a pitch that journalists can’t refuse

Now we all know there would be no media without the media so identifying who you want to cover your story is vital. This is where Digital PR and traditional PR really come together to make great things happen.

We know that many journalists receive hundreds of emails in their inbox every day, so it’s important to ensure that they read yours and are immediately interested in what you have to say.

• Research your journalists – don’t just send any old crap as this can be damaging to future relationships. Check what they’ve written about previously and make sure that your story is relevant to them.
• Make it personal – reference an article of theirs that you have read or enjoyed or even an article that your story could complement or act as a follow up to. You have to show them why covering this is beneficial to them and their readership.
• Grab their attention – this covers everything from the subject line of your email through to the headline of the article; different outlets write differently, so don’t go for a one size fits all approach. Research into how they talk to their audience and do your best to emulate this.
• Make content they can’t refuse – your research and wonderful content that sits on your website should fundamentally entice the journalist. Attach teaser imagery to your pitch email that they can include, but be very clear on the benefits to their audience if they visit your website. For example, an infographic is great to give to a journalist, but if your website hosts a fully interactive version with loads more detail to it (like a personality quiz) – then they’ll likely include a link because it’s something their audience would expect to see. That’s a win.

Lastly, don’t be put off if you don’t have success the first time! If you’re confident in your story and know that it will spark conversation, be persistent and keep revisiting your approach.

4. Continue building your credibility and brand awareness

Authenticity and trust are essential for consumers (it’s also a search engine ranking signal!), which is why it’s vital to continually work on building this with your audience. Through strategic analysis and audience profiling, your digital PR and content strategy will ensure you’re working with news outlets that you know your audience trusts.

Think about what makes your brand an authority; what are the subject areas where you have expert commentators? Are you passionate about a particular topic that you could take ownership of?

Being subject matter experts in your industry will help drive media coverage in relevant outlets as well as important backlinks, you’ll boost your share of voice on key topics while simultaneously establishing yourself as an industry-leading expert, which all helps in building confidence and credibility in your brand.

Digital PR holds you accountable for consistently building on and improving your overall brand awareness. You’ll keep your finger on the pulse of the topics your audience is reading about, reacting and responding and building up credibility.

Twitter is a great resource to keep your finger on the pulse and get yourself out there. Journalists will often put out a rallying call for subject matter experts, specifying topics they’re looking for a comment on – so get following!

5. Measure your success by setting clear objectives and KPIs

Objectives, KPIs and goals are a huge part of implementing a great digital PR campaign. Everyone needs to know what they are aiming for and also have a clear understanding of what ‘good’ looks like.

Do you want to raise general brand awareness? Increase sales of a specific product? Or maybe your focus is on bringing people to your website. Is your digital PR part of a wider strategy to support ecommerce SEO for example?

How do you measure digital PR success?

No matter your overall objective, it’s important to measure success to help you learn from previous experience and continually evolve your strategy. The objectives and PR activity will help decide the best metrics and KPIs to use, these might include:

Checking your Google Analytics, it will show you how and from where your web traffic is coming, how long they’re staying and what pages they’re visiting most. Has your coverage provided any referral traffic?

For example, if your goal is an increase in brand awareness, an uplift in web traffic, visitors to your social media pages and followers will also provide a decent indication of how well your campaign has performed. A sustained increase in brand search visibility shown in Google Search Console can also correlate with digital PR activity and indicate how well a campaign has performed on that front.

Check your online coverage for any new links from authoritative websites. Does this correlate with any ranking changes, traffic increases or more visibility shown in Search Console?

Were there any social media elements to your campaign that can show how many people you’ve reached or engaged with on these platforms?

Track any links used in the campaign using UTM parameters. What have users who have visited the site via these links done? Have they engaged with your site in any meaningful way?

Whatever your objective, make sure you know how you’re going to measure your success before you launch any online PR campaign so that you can make the most of your activity and take important learnings into the next phase of your strategy!

Key takeaways 

Digital PR strategies unlock bigger and better opportunities for your brand, ensuring you’re reaching the right audience rather than your existing customer base. Don’t fall into the trap of producing content that will only relate to your ‘ideal’ customer, because the likelihood is that your customers are always evolving – which is why continually assessing data and implementing learnings based on this is vital.

By sharing your expert views with the right journalists at the right titles, you can work on providing them with demonstrable value (imagine positioning yourself as a knowledgeable resource for them). In giving them on-site assets that they have no choice but to link to, you’ll be helping to make sure your brand is in front of the right people.

By truly getting to know your audience, creating content you know will resonate well with them and building links in the right publications, you’ll be well on your way to firmly establishing yourself as a credible source of information.

The post 5 steps to create a digital PR strategy appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

There are plenty of tactical ways to drive results for your brand, but none of them are even half as effective in achieving your goals and KPIs like a data-driven, search-first, digital PR strategy.

What is digital PR?

Considering when I tell a lot of people I work in PR, and they think I mean advertising, it’s fair to say that those of us who work in PR have a hard enough time explaining the various strands of what we do, so I’ll do my best to keep this brief…

Digital PR is not simply ‘link building’, and PR professionals, SEO experts and marketers are generally working hard to debunk this myth. The reality is that it’s so much more than this!

In a nutshell, digital PR brings together the strands of traditional PR with the more technical aspect of SEO, but all built on data, resulting in measurable and impactful campaigns.

Our Creative Intelligence© model perhaps describes this approach best:

“Digital PR campaigns combine the creative element of content marketing and traditional PR, supplemented by the data brought about from careful Search Engine Optimisation and target audience analysis to create engaging campaigns with demonstrable ROI.”

What makes a good digital PR campaign?

Digital PR can have several different objectives and no two campaigns are the same, but in my view a good digital PR campaign is one which produces the maximum benefit for the brand across as many digital channels as possible, to give a great return on investment.

Examples of digital PR in practice

Before I go any further, it might be helpful to put digital PR into some terms we can all understand, because right now it may well still sound like just another bullshit marketing term.

Park Dean Resorts: Every Country’s Favourite Disney Plus Film: Revealed

Park Dean Resorts worked on a campaign mapping out Every Country’s Favourite Disney Plus Film. They recognised a trending topic and responded.

With the new launch Disney+ coinciding with the first lockdown and so many of us staying indoors watching films, streaming sites were certainly a hot topic in many households. The clever people at Park Dean identified this; reviewed the data; linked it to their services and the rest was history.

The theory was simple; they took to Google to find out which Disney films had the highest search volume in different countries, then transformed this into a handy infographic giving the Disney lowdown by location.

Diving deeper into the data (try saying that after a few drinks!), Park Dean also listed the UK’s top 10 Disney films (with Avatar somehow claiming top spot?!). This resulted in significant media coverage and was a brilliant brand building activity.

So, let’s take a look at how they did it…

1. Methodology

They used Google Ad Words to secure the data needed to back up their claims.

2. Sharing the data

They created a map (and accompanying series of infographics showing the data in more detail) to present their findings in an appealing, eye-catching way – this is an asset that any journalist would be hard pressed to pass up on sharing!

3. Media outreach

They shared the story with outlets that their potential customers might read. You may not have Inside the Magic or Travel + Leisure bookmarked, but you can guarantee anyone booking a holiday to Disney World would likely visit their sites.

4. The results

From taking a little look at Google trends, the results from this campaign speak for themselves. With the travel company’s Disney data being issued in June, we can see a significant spike in searches of ‘Park Dean Resorts’ during this timeframe, and importantly quality backlinks that drive growth in their own ranking power – a decent result for a travel company in the middle of a pandemic, I think we can all agree.

Why is digital PR important?

Now that we’ve seen a campaign in action, it’s easy to see why digital PR is important (and effective), but if you’re still not convinced, please read on…

Online PR marketing is fast becoming an integral part of delivering successful communications campaigns for brands and businesses, helping to bolster overarching SEO strategies to build legitimacy and authority whilst building your brand awareness.

How can digital PR improve a brand’s presence?

When done in the right way, digital PR will:

• Gain quality links back to your website, helping drive your performance on search engines (plus more referral traffic!)
• Building brand awareness, and;
  • Amplify your share of voice around the topics that mean the most both to your business and your audience.
  • Drive genuine interest and engagement with your customer base, all the while building trust and credibility with those who matter most.
• Increase awareness around your products and services – driving leads and sales alongside an ecommerce SEO strategy!

Referring back to the point about links, as we said before – it’s not all about link building. However, without getting too technical (best to leave that to our Head of SEO and Insights, Laura), implementing an integrated Digital PR strategy will absolutely contribute to how well you perform organically on search engines like Google or Bing.

Through relevant backlinks, digital coverage will drive pre-qualified website traffic, helping to ensure that your website is appearing for the right keywords that are most relevant to your business.

What comes under digital PR?

Digital PR covers a wide range of different types of activity and marketing objectives, including:

• Brand building
• National and regional media coverage
• Product or service launches
• News generation
• Events and stunts
• Newsjacking
• Content marketing
• Link building

How does digital PR fit into the marketing mix?

Working out the role of digital PR in the marketing strategy for your specific brand or organisation is a key part of helping you to maximise both your results and return on investment.

The advantages of public relations in the digital realm can be multiple. Are you utilising it to help with your SEO as well as for increasing online brand awareness, for getting your products or services seen by the right people or for helping manage your online reputation? If not, you definitely could be!

What are the benefits of digital PR?

Digital PR is an effective way of raising brand awareness and driving traffic to your website. It is also a cost-effective and speedy way of getting your brand out there…provided you’re quick enough off the mark that is! Digital PR also works hand in hand with other marketing channels, like SEO.

By knowing the various keywords you want to be ranking for, you can then begin to monitor trending topics and phrases, profiling your audience and identifying opportunities to do something creative that will bring your audience to you.

Rather than a typical sales ploy, digital PR marketing allows you to communicate with your audience on a more genuine level, sharing insight into topics you know interest them (achieved through data, of course). This also extends to your media relations, as you’re offering the journalist a real asset that they know will in turn drive people to read their articles – a win-win for both parties. The benefits of PR are multi-faceted when incorporated effectively into your wider marketing plan.

If you’re really lucky, your campaign could even go viral, catapulting your name into the web, resulting in plenty of website visits and new interest in your product, brand or services. We’ll be sharing further insights into Digital PR (including some of our own tips), so keep your eyes peeled

Whether you’re an accountancy firm, a start-up or a large consumer brand, there’s always room to get creative with the data that’s at your fingertips with an online PR campaign.

If you’re determined to catapult your brand into the spotlight, generate leads, convert or influence sales or maybe get big news outlets talking about your business or product, then digital PR could be what your business is missing.

There are plenty of tactical ways to drive results for your brand, but none of them are even half as effective in achieving your goals and KPIs like a data-driven, search-first, digital PR strategy.

The post Why your business needs digital PR appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

In PR, earning media coverage is the bread and butter of what we do, and it is an essential part of any integrated communications and marketing strategy.

But the reality is, when it comes to earning coverage, it isn’t enough to simply throw a press release together, send it out to a couple of journalists and keep your fingers crossed that the story lands – if only it was that easy!

Having a couple of handy tips in your back pocket to ensure your news gets covered can make all the difference. Here are just five simple ways to earn media coverage…

1. Consider your story, asking yourself: who’d want to read this?

Although you might be confident that your story is absolutely newsworthy, you may need to put yourself in the shoes of the journalist who will be receiving it. What’s the real news line? What’s going to entice people to read this article? Would you read it yourself?

They say you have seven seconds to make a good impression when you meet someone new, and the same approach should be taken when pitching to journalists. Start with the most attractive, newsworthy element of your story to pique their interest.

I speak to journalists on a daily basis and in my experience, if the subject line doesn’t grab their attention, then you have little chance of them opening your email to find out more.

2. Tailor-made media lists

 As an agency, researching key journalists and building bespoke media lists for every new story is an approach we pride ourselves on – and one we find highly effective.

Although it may seem time-consuming, making the effort to research which journalists will find your story relevant will save you a lot of headaches in the future and will help you in building positive relationships with key journalists too.

You wouldn’t want to put all your efforts into writing a great press release, only to receive emails from journalists telling you it isn’t their patch! A scattergun approach is very unlikely to get you results.

3. Maintain your relationships with key contacts

 As PR professionals, building relationships with journalists is a vital part of what we do. Making connections and maintaining positive relationships with key journalists will have a massive impact on the coverage you’re able to gain in the future.

Checking in with journalists when you notice a relevant story and offering your organisations expertise can streamline the PR/journalist relationship and will help position your company and spokespeople as the go-to on their specialist subject. Don’t forget to follow and engage with them on social!

4. Consider the SEO strategy

PR, like the rest of the world, is moving at a rapid pace towards a more digital approach. Google rankings matter now more than ever before, and brands want to be on the first page of Google searches wherever possible.

Taking the time to research the relevant keywords and search terms and building them into your content will help with searchability, and as a result articles have a better chance of reaching the desired audience. Keep this consistent across all content you write; not just press releases, but social media and web copy too.

Digital PR also provides a fantastic opportunity to earn high quality links to your website. Backlinks from high authority sites, such as media outlets, are a signal to search engines that your site is a trusted source. Therefore, high quality backlinks will generally increase your websites authority and as a result, will improve its search engine ranking.

5. Be persistent

Statistics show that PR professionals outnumber journalists five to one nowadays, so just imagine how many press releases drop into the average journalist’s inbox. Understandably, your story might get missed, so it’s never a bad idea to follow up if you think your release has true news value.

It’s also worth noting that your story might not land right the first time, but don’t be disheartened – the worst thing you can do is pass it off as a bad lot. Back yourself, and your story, and gently remind journalists of your angle. Sometimes, the news angle you’ve presented might not work, but be accommodating and offer to adapt the story to suit what they’re looking for.

Whatever your industry, there are outlets and journalists out there looking to draw on your expertise, share your news and help tell your story. The hard part is knowing how to forge valuable relationships with them, and that’s where our bespoke PR advice can make all the difference.

If you’d like to chat to one of the team about how we could help tell your story, get in touch via team@nobraineragency.co.uk

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