Are you or your team considering running your first ever digital PR campaign? Or are you struggling to persuade your stakeholders to approve a digital PR project due to a lack of understanding? Well, I’ve shared five key benefits of incorporating a digital PR strategy into your marketing plans.
Each one will help you educate internal teams on its importance, especially if you’re wanting to improve your website rankings, increase traffic and stay ahead of the competition…
DIGITAL PR HELPS TO DRIVE REFERRAL TRAFFIC
By running a digital PR strategy, you’ll be able to land backlinks to your website from relevant, top-tier media outlets.
When you land backlinks on authoritative sites, which are relevant to your audience and brand, you will be sending people to your site who could potentially become your next customer. And this helps persuade your marketing and sales teams, as well as backlinks from reputable sites. Plus, it shows Google that your website is trustworthy!
IT IMPROVES YOUR WEBSITES RANKINGS
Another important benefit of digital PR is being able to show Google that your website is trustworthy, and a reliable source for your sector. How? By having your content featured on relevant, authoritative media outlets that link back to your website.
The more high-quality, relevant backlinks you secure back to your site, the more likely your site will appear higher in search rankings. You shouldn’t, however, just focus on digital PR to help your rankings, as there are other factors you’ll need to consider. For instance, your on-site strategy and updating your content regularly, ensuring it’s optimised for SEO. You can find more of our content tips here.
IT GENERATES SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
The UK was home to 53 million active social media users as of January 2021, so it’s likely your target audience spend some of their time scrolling through different channels.
Digital PR assets, such as key stats and infographics, make great shareable content for social media. Do some digging into your audience and the content they engage with. Once you have this information, share relevant content. By doing so, you’ll drive engagement, start conversations, and hopefully encourage them to head to your website for more information.
IT ADDS CREDIBILITY TO YOUR BRAND AND SPOKESPEOPLE
With the right strategy, you should be landing links on the big media outlet sites. So, it’s only normal to want to blow one’s own trumpet, right?
Once you’ve started building your backlink profile, you could consider having an ‘as featured in’ section on your website, showcasing the top-tier outlets you’ve been featured in. This is particularly good for those working in industries where trust is vital, such as the financial, health, or property sector.
Examples include a page with logos of the publications. Or, if you have a ‘meet the team’ or ‘our experts’ page on-site and their commentary has been featured in articles, then consider adding these placements on their page too. This helps showcase authority because it’s displaying your spokespeople whose expertise is considered authentic. Not to mention, it helps raise trust about your brand!
SUCCESS IS MEASURABLE
Most business leaders just want to know about the numbers. Whether that’s how many new sales or leads you’ve had, how rankings have increased, or how you’re performing compared to competitors.
Luckily with digital PR, you can track almost every aspect of how successful your strategy is. This can be done by using tools such as ahrefs and Buzzsumo to track backlink numbers. You can also use Google Analytics to determine click-through rates and conversions, and Searchmetrics for insight on visibility.
With all this insight at your fingertips, you can feed the successes through to your internal teams, using the understanding of what your audience responds well to. This will help better your strategies going forward.
Hopefully, the insight I’ve provided has given you the basic information you need regarding digital PR and its benefits. However, there are numerous types of content to consider as part of your PR strategy, from planned campaigns to proactive and reactive. To find out more about this, head here.
