What is Digital PR?
In the modern world, there are so many ways to get your voice heard as a business, making where and how to focus your efforts more challenging than ever.
An effective digital PR strategy is crucial to ensuring your message is clear, consistent and effective. Whether with or without a PR agency, you’re probably doing elements of digital PR already without even thinking about it, such is its importance.
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR uses the same ideas and techniques as traditional public relations strategies but adapts them to the modern technology-led landscape.
PR is as old as business itself. For hundreds of years, businesses and PR agencies have utilised media – newspapers, radio, TV etc. – to promote positive messages about themselves, their clients and their causes.
Digital PR continues much of the work that has been done for generations – namely, getting your business’ name out there in a positive light – but using modern digital outlets such as social media, influencers, online news providers and more.
Examples of Digital PR
In most cases, a digital PR campaign will revolve around promoting a product, service or event. However, digital PR can also be about crisis management, which often requires a different approach.
Regardless of the reason for a digital PR campaign, there are some common threads that are regularly seen as part of most operations.
Social Media
Social media is such a big part of our daily lives. For businesses wanting to speak with their audience, it’s an unmissable aspect of any digital campaign.
Whether it’s training a marketing team to ensure a consistent voice throughout their content or creating a social media campaign to draw attention to an upcoming launch, effective use of social media can ensure more of your target audience is excited by and engaged with what you’re doing.
Online Influencers
The reach and power of online influencers – often individual content creators with a loyal and engaged following – continues to increase every year. Whether they’re social media stars, YouTube creatives or much-loved bloggers, these people have a unique ability to speak with your business’ audience.
A good digital PR campaign will often involve reaching out to influencers in search of favourable coverage of your brand or products, depending on the nature of the campaign.
Research Projects
A digital PR campaign usually revolves around creating a clear and specific image of your business or brand. Whether you’re trying to reach a new demographic or change your existing audience’s perceptions, this often involves creating an emotional narrative that shifts people’s focus.
Many digital PR campaigns will use detailed, story-driven research projects to help promote this new message to your audience. This research will usually lead to the production of engaging digital content that can be shared on social media and by other media outlets, helping to establish your business as a leading voice on an issue that matters to you and your audience.
What techniques are used in each digital PR campaign will vary depending on your business and its objectives.
Our work launching the first Exeter Sustainability Awards involved building an online presence from scratch utilising many of the techniques above, including social media and our contacts in regional and national media. On the other hand, our campaign to promote the building sector for Building Greater Exeter centred on targeting thought-provoking video content at our intended audience across social media channels.
The Benefits of Digital PR
As mentioned above, digital PR campaigns can be used to achieve a whole range of objectives, both in the digital and physical world. Here are some common areas where digital PR is used.
Brand Exposure
One of the biggest ways digital PR is used is to improve the recognition and popularity of a brand.
Well-engineered digital PR campaigns will put your name in front of your audience in a positive light, whether that’s through social media campaigns, online news coverage or influencer collaborations.
When done well, digital PR will often lead to more people recognising your brand and can even shift how people perceive you, perfect for businesses looking to launch new products or services.
More Followers & Customers
Ultimately, the main objective of any PR or marketing campaign is usually an increase in potential audience. That could mean more social media followers or more customers or attendees through your doors.
Digital PR campaigns are a great way to create buzz around your brand and ensure that your target audience is engaged by whatever you’re doing. Despite being digital-focused, these campaigns can often drive real-world actions, making digital PR suitable for all manner of business ventures.
Improved Website Performance
Digital PR can often have a positive impact on the performance of a website. Whether it’s improving a site’s SEO or getting the word out through social media, digital PR is very effective at increasing website traffic, which opens up more opportunities for conversion.
Note that it is common for digital PR campaigns to be tailored around achieving one or two objectives as opposed to lots of different ones – this approach helps to keep PR messages clear and focused for audiences. It’s also possible to have multiple digital PR campaigns running at the same time, each focused on different targets.
Is Digital PR Right for Your Business?
Digital PR is such a crucial part of the modern business world that many businesses are already doing, just not calling it as such.
That being said, there’s a difference between digital PR being done by one person once a week and digital PR being conducted by a trained, dedicated agency. Often, the results will speak for themselves – just check out our case studies!
If you have a big launch coming up and want to ensure your PR campaign fires on all cylinders, it pays to speak to a specialist team like One Voice Media. With decades of experience across all areas of digital marketing, our PR agency in Devon is on hand and ready to help you achieve your business goals.