What is Digital PR and why is it a must for your business?

What is Digital PR and why is it a must for your business?

PR is often misunderstood by both individuals and companies, who do not necessarily understand what the benefits of public relations activities are and what they might be. Many people do not take PR seriously because of the impossibility of calculating its effectiveness. So the result is unclear to them. Besides, this is a relatively expensive activity, so people are afraid to spend a lot of money on activities which effectiveness for them is questionable.

Traditionally, public relations is the method of promoting your product, service, brand, or business, using mass communication techniques such as newspapers or magazines. 

Confirmation of this can be our case of the crypto app Good Crypto, to which we did a digital PR activity and in just 20 guest posts we increased the site’s domain rating by 70% that also led to the growth in Organic and Referral traffic, as well as Conversions and Conversion rates. We will tell you more about this case later to enable you to comprehend our custom-tailored strategy and its specifics. Well, for now, here are screenshots of the results of our first digital PR campaign for a crypto app.

Traditionally, public relations is the method of promoting your product, service, brand, or business, using mass communication techniques such as newspapers or magazines.

So let’s figure out what is digital PR and what is the secret of its effectiveness. 

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR is an activity, used to build your brand awareness through online methods. In many ways, this is similar to traditional PR, but it gives a possibility to reach a much wider audience that cannot be reached with offline methods. Besides, it is much easier to evaluate the results of digital PR activities than offline ones.

You may achieve this by building relationships with online journalists, bloggers, and influencers related to your business. The ultimate goal of this tactic is to attract media attention on various online platforms, including:

  • Social media
  • Blogs
  • News sites
  • Business networks

This enables companies to create super-targeted campaigns across a wide range of online environments to reach and influence their target audience. Therefore, returning to our case with the Good Crypto application, it was very important for us that the mention of our product was on thematic crypto sites. Here is an example of one of our guest posts on a site that is dedicated to crypto: 

This enables companies to create super-targeted campaigns across a wide range of online environments to reach and influence their target audience.

With the right resources, we were able to improve our app’s reputation, expand our presence, get extra traffic, and improve our site’s SEO.

What is the difference between traditional PR and digital PR?

To truly understand what digital PR is, let’s look at the difference between online PR and traditional PR.

Traditional PR is commonly used to describe strategies that embrace a brand in print, including newspapers and trade magazines, as well as traditional broadcast channels such as television and radio. Digital PR, by contrast, includes internet marketing strategies aimed at increasing brand presence and awareness.

Both traditional and digital PR cover brand awareness, reputation management, and advocacy, but the approaches to these aspects of traditional PR versus digital PR are likely to be different. Digital PR in the truest sense of the word is an advanced form of PR that uses proven PR strategies adapted to the digital world.

Digital PR companies are much easier to track, since now there are a lot of services on the Internet, for example, by adding a short link bit.ly, you can track the number of clicks on the site app.bitly.com, and by installing Google Analytics on the site, you can also track conversions and many other indicators.

Also, channels of Digital PR cover the younger generation more effectively as they focus on the main channels where young fellows gather information: Social Media, Blogs, Online Media, Youtube, etc.

Here is a deep summary of the main differences.

What is the difference between traditional PR and digital PR?

What are the benefits of digital PR?

The benefits of a strong digital PR campaign cannot be underestimated. All of the following benefits work together to help you grow your business and expand your brand’s online reach :

Improves search rankings

We know that Google punishes sites that get backlinks in questionable ways and rewards those who get them naturally. While it is up to our search lord to change the rules and algorithms at any time, you can only be sure that it always gives preference to sites that Google considers valuable and high-quality publishers. It has been confirmed in our link building infographic that 52% of marketers believe brand mentions impact organic search rankings.

Creates relevant links from trusted sources and sites

When reputable sites link to you as a source, people see you as a reliable source of valuable information – and so will Google. In 2018, 69% of individuals in the UK downloaded newspapers, online news, or magazines. Just imagine how many people around the world learn about your brand by opening a Forbes, for example, which gets approximately 5 million visits per day, or how many people are surfing through the Instagram page of Dwane Jonson (Rock), who has 198 million followers or Twitter of Elon Musk with his 38 million followers at this moment!
BTW, the population of the United Kingdom is 67,9 million as of the current date.

Boosts your brand reputation and personality

Just like any good content marketing. Viewers appreciate your willingness to invest in research and good storytelling. It is also proved that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.

You are probably wondering why?

The reason is that a good content marketer knows that content marketing can help their company achieve its goals (such as increasing brand awareness and generating leads) and at the same time nurture the leads. It works because when people read a real story or reflection, they can easily compare their situation with one described in a storytelling article made by some brand or its representative and then apply someone else’s experience to their context.  

Increases traffic

Since other sources with high domain authority and huge audiences link to your content, you will get more visitors to your site.

Below is an example of one of the first guest posts that we made for our case of the Good Crypto application, now it is in the TOP 100 of Google for 14 keywords in Ahrefs and is starting to gain traffic to our page. This article also has referring domains and backlinks that weren’t gathered by us. But they boost the link power of our guest post.

Since other sources with high domain authority and huge audiences link to your content, you will get more visitors to your site.

Cause a repost on social networks

Good stories encourage people to share them on social media. This boosts your brand’s online profile, encouraging even more traffic to flow to you.

Affects purchases

This is not the goal of a digital PR campaign, but it can be a welcome side effect. Some content naturally conveys key messages to potential customers.

We can give a good example from our experience when we gave new life to one of our articles on Branding Mistakes. We translated it into Russian and posted it on the well-known site VC.ru. And already an hour after publication on the resource, our website got ~150 referral unique visits, 14 leads to our Design E-book, while our CEO’s Telegram was torn from questions and orders!

Must-have elements for your Go To Market strategy for the US market
Free GTM ebook

Provides a real way to measure success

Digital marketing allows you to track almost every aspect of interaction success. It can help you determine what works and help you design more effective campaigns in the future. Tools like Google Analytics help you track the performance of your campaign.

Increases brand loyalty

Helping brands build good relationships with consumers through content. Cision based on research found that press releases are still the most trusted source of information for 54% of journalists in the UK.

It’s a cost-effective strategy

The success of the campaign doesn’t have to cost the entire planet. Do it right and the thing will pay off in web traffic and conversions. Aberdeen conducted a study and found that companies that put their primary focus on content marketing increased their website conversion rates by more than 5x. Conversions = money and content marketing does not require large investments – here’s the formula for success. And here are the results of our digital PR company in conversions from the blog page:

The success of the campaign doesn't have to cost the entire planet. Do it right and the thing will pay off in web traffic and conversions.
What are the benefits of digital PR?

Digital PR strategy

Digital PR strategy plans how the company will be served and imprinted in the minds of targeted audiences for wider reach, higher conversions, and higher sales. Typically, this plan includes ideas for increasing brand mentions and visits to the company’s website. Additionally, the strategy can include SEO audits, backlink analysis, and goal setting.

Here are the basics of a digital PR strategy:

The target anchor text


Anchor text is an interactive word or words that lead from an external website to a page on your website. Target anchor text is how you would ideally want external websites to link to your pages. For example, a “Marketing Agency” link will be more effective than “click here”.

The anchor link tells Google’s algorithms what your content is about. Google’s algorithms use your anchor choices to make sure you are not spamming, AND to understand the topics you link to in your copy.

Target URLs


Target URLs are web pages that you will be promoting as part of your strategy. These are the web pages that you would ideally like to drive more traffic to through organic search.

When you target URLs, you expect people from a specific audience to find the right place on your website, allowing you to target them with more personality.

List of media and Special offer


Bloggers, journalists, and influencers that you will reach out to. You should also come up with a special offer for bloggers to get interested in. According to Meltwater, journalists get on average 300 emails every morning. And while reading them, something should interest the influencer, so that he wants to present your product to his audience.

Outreach Script


A script template that the team can share with relevant bloggers, journalists, and influencers.

Free Template:

Hi [name],

My name is [your name] from [company]. I enjoy your {relevant content] and I am impressed by how well you’ve done with [their company name].

I’m reaching out to you because I have a product that I think your audience would appreciate. Would you be willing to test and review [product]?

I can provide a free sample for you to review and three extra ones that you can give away to your audience.

Please let me know if you are interested.

Thanks for your time,

{your name]

Content ideas


Topics of articles that will be positively received by external sites. These content ideas also need to be generated by the company.

According to DemandMetric, 78% of CMOs believe custom content is the future of marketing.
The Internet is constantly evolving, and the audience is developing along with it. As the buzz on social media reaches unbearable levels, businesses and CMOs also need to grow if they hope to outperform the rest.

Take the time to research your audience. If possible, use mailing list segmentation to indicate what each group of your subscribers and audiences wants. Visit other blogs, forums, and any other place where your potential customers can spend time and share with each other. What problems are they discussing? This is how custom content is born.

Then, challenge yourself to create custom content, which is a type of content that targets a specific group of people.

You might be asking what segmentation is and how to segment articles by the audience. Here’s the answer.

Audience segmentation is when you divide your audience into different groups based on different criteria such as demographics, interests, needs, or media usage. Digital marketers segment audiences as a key part of a targeted marketing strategy.

Audience segmentation is critical in the digital arena because consumers today have more options than ever before. Not only that, but they also make buying decisions faster than ever before. So the challenge for internet marketers is to figure out how to catch them on the right stage of their buying decision-making process  – for that they need to do whatever it takes to understand how their audience thinks and behaves.

If you’re wondering where to start when it comes to audience segmentation, here are a few key areas to think about.

Key social channels

Understanding how and where people consume your content can go a long way in how you market your products and services to another audience. He can tell you about what they prefer and how they communicate with their friends. There are also many ways to use your social targeting channels, so they go hand in hand when working on your strategy.

Psychographic segmentation / lifestyle

Sometimes people segment their audience according to certain traits, cultural values, or lifestyle. They can also be related to current events. This type of segmentation can be difficult to define because it is not always in the form of specific information, such as geographic segmentation or age, which are clear and specific datasets. It could be more about values, preferences, or lifestyle factors. Psychography requires marketers to dig a little deeper. To that end, things like Facebook polls and quizzes can work wonders.


Past buying behavior

You want to differentiate your previous customers from new ones as you will interact differently with different groups of people depending on the relationships you’ve already built. To this end, your segments can be differentiated based on purchasing patterns and even the types of products they buy. The key is to anticipate their future needs so that you can show them what they need even before they really know it.

So what’s next?

Targeting

Once you have segmented your audience into relevant groups, you then explore the best ways to focus on different groups and get their attention to marketing campaigns. You will build this based on their demographics, and their demographics and buyer personality will give you an idea of the types of things they value.

Once you’ve put in place effective messaging, you’ll want to understand how to target and retain both customers who are already engaged (through customer loyalty programs, for example) and how to reach customers who haven’t signed up. through to make a purchase.

Here are the basics of a digital PR strategy

How to Measure the Results of a Digital PR Campaign?

1. Recognition

As a result of a successful Digital PR campaign, the recognition of the promoted object increases. It might be a company, a professional expert, a website, a brand, a product, or a service.

This is reflected in an increase in the number of brand queries in search compared to the previous period, and the growth of visits to the site from bookmarks or through direct dialing of addresses.

Here is the rise of Good Crypto’s brand keyword search with the launch of our digital PR campaign company. 

As a result of a successful Digital PR campaign, the recognition of the promoted object increases. It might be a company, a professional expert, a website, a brand, a product, or a service.

2. Growth of visits to the site on requests of unformed needs

If the goal of a campaign is to increase the visibility of a new product or service as a way to solve a certain problem, then, the increase in visits to site pages for requests “How to do”, “How to deal with” will show the success of such a campaign.

Digital PR campaigns in such cases go well with the conversion of visitors to subscribers and a demand generation program through e-mail marketing.

3. Interaction

The advantage of “new media” is directness, speed, and interactivity, so it is important to monitor communication indicators: 

  • the number of site visitors from social networks or blogs, 
  • the number of social actions such as likes or shares, 
  • transitions from the site to the communities associated with the site in social networks, 
  • subscription to site accounts in social networks.

Communication on the site is also important – meaningful discussions in the comments, questions, and answers through the site.

4. Loyalty and other qualities of the site community

In general, website audience loyalty can be measured as the growth in the number of repeat visitors. In some topics, loyalty is reflected in bounce rates and length of time on the site.

If there is a newsletter on the site and a connection with the Digital PR campaign, you need to take into account the efficiency indicators.

Below you can see the number of active users after our PR campaign who still trust our crypto application for a month after the launch.

In general, website audience loyalty can be measured as the growth in the number of repeat visitors. In some topics, loyalty is reflected in bounce rates and length of time on the site.
How to Measure the Results of a Digital PR Campaign?

All of these metrics can be obtained using a professionally configured Google Analytics, for example.

Afterthought

Thus, Digital PR is a promising, important, and measurable marketing activity that successfully complements SEO promotion, contextual advertising, email marketing, and SMM.

It can be equally useful in niches with high competition, and cases with little-known or new products, brands, services, and for working with a new audience, and with an existing one.

Want a digital PR service? Our digital marketing agency RGray will help you with that. Just leave your request here, and we will contact you soon.