Are you interested in a job in digital PR but have no idea how to get your foot in the door?
Then this guide is for you
In a nutshell, digital PR is all about increasing brand awareness and engagement through online channels such as websites, blogs, social media, and online news. This is done by creating relevant and newsworthy content that is then sent out to the media.
For digital PRs, the main goal is to achieve high-quality backlinks from these campaigns which helps signal to Google that your website is reputable, and ideally improves their rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
At the moment, there are many agencies hiring for digital PRs…
Like any other job, you should do basic preparation including researching the organisation, reviewing the job description, going over your CV and tailoring it to the company and role, and prepping your questions and answers. If your interview is in-person, then it’s also wise to plan your route there and back in advance as well as deciding what to wear.
It can be tricky to prep for interview questions as you really don’t know what you’re going to be asked. However, it’s always worth having some answers at the ready in case a question does come up, which should help you to feel more confident going in.
Here are some example questions an interviewer might ask:
At the moment, there are many agencies hiring for digital PRs…
To help get your head around some of the different industry tools you might come across, we want to give some insights into the most popular and useful tools* that we typically use day in, day out as digital PRs.
Buzzstream is an outreach platform that you can use to launch and monitor your campaigns. No longer do you have to manually send each individual email, instead, you can build and upload media lists to the platform, create and edit different templates to get them distributed with ease.
Vuelio is a key tool when building media lists and during outreach because it is essentially a contact database where you can find all sorts of media contacts from around the world. This is particularly useful when the journalist’s email isn’t within their recent articles or in their Twitter bio.
A great tool for reactive PR is ResponseSource which is an email subscription service that helps to connect experts, PRs, and journalists who need help or information. Not only can you respond to requests to get your client’s name out there, but PRs can also use this tool to send out their own requests for campaign support, for instance, expert commentary.
You can use Google Trends to research and analyse search trends of a given term or keyword over a period of time. In PR, this can be used as its own data source (something we’ll touch on in more detail later), or to add relevance to an existing piece.
One well-known piece of software is Ahrefs which classes itself as an all-in-one SEO toolset, and here at c3 this is used across a few of our different teams including PR. Some of the tools you can find on Ahrefs include their site explorer, content explorer, keywords explorer, rank tracker, and link intersect.
Moz is another tool that allows you to gain SEO insights such as page authority, domain authority, site rankings, keyword research, and auditing. There is also a free google chrome extension you can get called MozBar which is useful as it provides a quick overview of some of these metrics.
Keyword.io is a free keyword research tool that helps you find autocomplete keyword suggestions from various sources including Google, Amazon, and YouTube. This is a versatile tool that can be used across various digital marketing teams, including PR.
Working in digital PR means you always need to keep up to date with what is going on in the news including what topics are currently trending, Buzzsumo lets you do just that, and you can filter or search a certain category. This tool is pretty versatile and can be used for ideation, finding results, and competitor analysis, amongst other things.
We’re pretty sure you’ll have heard of Google Analytics before as it provides all sorts of SEO and marketing insights and can even help you find results for your campaigns. Google Analytics is free to use but the client will have to give you access to their account in order to analyse the website traffic.
HypeAuditor is an AI-power analytics and discovery tool which allows you to manage and monitor influencer marketing campaigns. You can also use it to gather useful data and metrics about influencers from across various social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch.
Linkfluence is a social listening tool that can help PRs to take a deep dive into consumer insights via a live feed of global social data. Some ways PRs can use Linkfluence include monitoring brand reputation, finding results, understanding competitors and data collection.
AnswerThePublic is a keyword and search listening tool and, in short, it provides automated autocomplete results. All you need to do is ask a question related to whatever topic you’re interested in and then you’ll be able to see what Google would predict you to ask based on the most common searches.
It’s no secret that the digital PR community is huge on Twitter, and you’ll always see people shouting out one another and just generally being super supportive.
Of course, if you’re new to the world of digital PR you don’t have to worry about being super active online but there are some great accounts and hashtags to follow for all sorts of tips and tricks.
Below are a few of our personal favourites:
Of course, these are just a few examples and there are so many other great people and industry leaders out there offering invaluable advice.
One of the best parts about working in PR is how creative it is but campaign ideation isn’t always planning.
In order to spark inspiration, sometimes all it takes is looking at other sites for inspiration. If you’ve recently joined the industry and aren’t sure where to start, here are a few of our favourites:
The Grapevine is a monthly newsletter set up by Iona Townsley (@IonaJTownsley), a creative at NeoMam Studios. Each month Iona sends out an email which rounds up all the PR campaigns that she can find for a particular month, even sorting them into categories such as travel, lifestyle, and food to name a few.
Another news outlet that is worth looking at if you’re new to the industry is PR Week as it covers all aspects of the PR and communications industry. The only caveat with this one is that some things are hidden behind a paywall, although you can register for free and access a limited number of articles a month.
The Drum is a media and news outlet sharing the latest industry news and insights on marketing and media industries from around the world. This includes stories, job search resources, event listings, and features.
Famous Campaigns is an independent blog that covers all sorts of PR and marketing stunts and campaigns. On the blog you can find posts that cover the different stunts and campaigns, split out by sector, explaining them in a bit more detail.
Mark Porter (@markcporter) the head of marketing at Screaming Frog runs Content, Curated which is a monthly newsletter looking at his top picks for campaigns that month. In his posts, Mark gives a quick overview of his selected campaigns and why he likes them as well as some other honourable mentions, PR stunts, must-read marketing articles, and a must-follow marketer. You can either sign up for the Content, Curated email newsletter or head over to the blog.
Root Digital, a digital marketing agency, has its very own The BEST Digital PR & Link Building Campaigns list of what they deem the best digital PR and link building campaigns which you can go to for campaign inspiration. You can even go as far as filtering the campaigns by format (e.g., competition, interactive, and map), industry (e.g., automotive, beauty, and hone), market (e.g., UK and US), and year. Plus, they also tell you how many links each campaign secured.
Now you know where to find campaign inspiration it’s time to put that to use during an ideation session.
Productive brainstorms are crucial in PR as this is where the campaign ideas come from and are the base of future work.
Of course, you’ll be attending brainstorms for your own clients but it’s likely that you’ll support those for clients too. It can be hard to think of innovative ideas all the time so if you ever find yourself in a bit of a rut these are our ideation tips and tricks:
Typically, you’ll receive a brief prior to the brainstorm which will include key information such as an overview, previous campaigns, industry news, competitor insights, inspiration, and some initial ideas so other people can see where to start.
Not everybody thinks the same way, so the same approach won’t work for everyone, and that’s fine. There are all sorts of ideation styles including brainwriting, figure storming, round the room, and change of scenery.
This can be easy to do when you work on multiple clients and are constantly having to come up with new and exciting ideas. However, one of the most important things to bear in mind when heading into a brainstorm is relevancy and the purpose behind whatever campaign you’re suggesting – constantly question yourself and ask ‘why’.
And last but not least, no idea is a bad idea. Sometimes we might randomly think of the wackiest things but there’s always something to take from it. Even if it’s not a developed concept you can still put it forward and potentially spark something from somebody else. After all, PR is all about creativity and standing out.
Helpful data sources really are the bread and butter of our PR work, especially as they form the basis of our campaigns.
Below we’ve listed just some of the data sources we tend to use here at c3, although you will need to check the terms before using them as some require attribution and/or permission first:
Being able to combine PR and SEO will see you achieve better results and supports a wider strategy.
Below are some important pieces of SEO knowledge to have if you’re going to be working in PR:
A major part of PR is link-building and getting quality links can have a big impact on SEO, so it’s important to know the difference between each type and their value.
Followed links are seen to be the most ‘valuable’ as they pass link equity and help boost the page rank of the linked-to site which in turn see them go higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
No-follow links are slightly different, and you can spot them as they have a rel=”nofollow” tag and are invisible meaning it doesn’t pass link equity, but that’s not to say they don’t hold value, depending on what your clients’ goals are.
There is also content syndication, which is when a journalist, in particular someone who writes for an umbrella media business, publishes the same content over multiple news websites. While Google is not a fan of duplicate content, syndication won’t negatively impact SEO, but it also only tends to count as one link so doesn’t help massively either.
Domain rating (DR) is a metric created by Ahrefs that shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. They determine strength by comparing the given site to others in their database on a 100-point ‘logarithmic’ scale with higher numbers being stronger.
Domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score used to see how likely a website is to rank on SERPs, aka how authoritative it is. DA scoring was developed by Moz and you can use their website, or the handy chrome extension MozBar, to find this out. The scoring is ranked from one to 100, with higher scores correlating to being more likely to rank and is based on multiple factors such as linking root domains and total number of links.
If you’re not sure what referral traffic means, essentially it is any time that someone clicks on a link to go to a website from another source. This is pretty much the core of digital PR strategy where you create and outreach content with the aim of getting a link on another site that someone else might click.
Ultimately, good digital PR will result in a diverse backlink profile including links from authoritative websites with a high DA which should see your site move up in the rankings, improve visibility, and lead to more clicks and conversions.
Depending upon which clients you work with and the types of campaigns you can do, the main areas you’ll probably end up composing briefs for are brainstorms, design and development, content, and potentially video.
Here at C3, we really believe in the power of teams working together. To do so effectively, your brief needs to convey your campaign and client’s message.
Some tips for writing a comprehensive brief include:
Share it within enough time. Every business or team will work to their own timeframes, and it’s important to ensure that you’re meeting those, so that those who will be digesting the brief have time to ask questions and prepare.
A press release is your way of communicating your campaign to the media, which will then be transformed into a story to share with the public.
Not only is your press release your ticket to sharing your asset and securing results, but it’s also your opportunity to build credibility for your client and highlight that they are the experts in their field.
Given that it’s so important to get your press release right and grab the reader’s attention we’ve come up with some top tips:
Don’t forget to add additional value with insight from your client, after all, that’s what is going to make your campaign stand out.
Newsjacking, aka reactive PR, means reacting to current events and the ever-changing news agenda allowing you to position your client as an expert in their field. It’s also a great way to build extra links.
There are two main types of newsjacking in PR which are using press releases (either new or old) along with expert commentary.
Getting the most out of your newsjacking is crucial, here are some of our top tips on what to do, and what not to do:
When you spot an upcoming opportunity, it’s always worth seeing if you have any previous campaigns you can use or quickly reangle first. For example, maybe you have a campaign on the UK’s favourite pets that you can quickly edit to reflect National Pet Month. However, if not then you might consider quickly creating an entirely new release. An example of this might be revealing the most popular houseplants in light of Houseplant Week.
Expert comments are probably the most common form of newsjacking and, in theory, take less time. There are different sorts of comments, for instance, you could be talking about a breaking news story or reacting to a planned event or release like car registrations and house price indexes. These tend to be more unplanned than using press releases, so you need to be ready to get a comment out to the media fast.
It might seem obvious, but you should be monitoring your campaign constantly and unfortunately, there are occasions when things don’t always go to plan.
Perhaps you’ve launched and followed up but you’re still not seeing an open rate that you’re happy with or haven’t had any feedback… now is the time to act!
But what do you do? Here are some of our tips on how to save a failing campaign:
If you’re working on something that isn’t yet in outreach but you’re having difficulty with the data or making it newsworthy enough, don’t be afraid to switch it out for something you have more confidence in.
Outreach is a key skill to master early on in your digital PR career, and this involves building relationships with journalists and earning yourself a reputation as a reliable and helpful PR at the earliest opportunity.
There are several different publications you can target during outreach, with the most common sectors being:
Here are some of other top tips for getting the most out of outreach:
The thrill of launching a campaign never goes away and we still find ourselves looking for results right after the campaign is live and launched, but where are the best places to check?
If you can’t see anything straight away, don’t panic, sometimes you just need to dig a little bit deeper.
Try these tips and see if you can spot something you missed the first time around:
Google Analytics is another great way to find links, but you’ll need to have access to your client’s Google profile in order to do so. All you need to do is navigate to All Traffic and then select Referrals, and Source which will allow you to check all the linking domains.
There you have it, a full digital PR starter pack, to help you feel confident when applying to your next role in PR even if you don’t have any previous experience.
As you can see, digital PR isn’t just about building links, it encompasses so much more than that and holds a lot of value for your clients. It plays a key role in increasing brand awareness and if you can establish a solid workstream alongside SEO and content then it can be game changing!
Here at c3 we’re constantly growing so if you’re ready to start a career in digital PR then head over to our careers page, or you can find even more digital marketing advice on our blog.
Let’s get started
Keeping on top of digital PR trends can be tricky, especially in such a dynamic industry as marketing. Still, there are moments throughout each season when digital and traditional PRs truly put on their thinking caps to create campaigns that will land well in the media, and Christmas is the ultimate, trickiest, season of all for media coverage.
If you work in PR, you know coming up with an idea for a Christmas PR campaign is never easy. Designing a campaign perfect enough to get snapped up from the slush pile and published with a link is what most PRs want for Christmas, but there are ways to increase the chance of success.
Have you run a digital PR campaign in the past around Christmas that performed well? Or perhaps it underperformed, and the campaign ended up being a flop? It can be hard to understand what makes a campaign stand out to journalists and what doesn’t, but taking learnings from it is important. Some things you can do are:
Do you need some campaign inspiration? Why not check out the previous PR campaigns we’ve run at connective3?
PRs know that different strategies are required for different sectors. It isn’t easy to create a one-size-fits-all strategy for multiple markets. Instead, break down your understanding of each sector and do market research to better inform your strategies.
Luckily, there are some tell-tale signs of what will be trending during Christmas for the retail sector. With the competition being impossibly hard, big brands such as John Lewis and M&S will be trying to secure themselves coverage early, ahead of the crowd.
John Lewis has already revealed their Christmas decorations for this year, with the themes being Rainbow Time Capsule, Winter Fairytale, Polar Planet, Beyond Christmas, Royal Fairytale and Christmas Cottage. John Lewis has already secured coverage, particularly for their ‘Christmas shop’ and ‘Christmas tree decorations’. Taking a reactive approach and jumping on trends the big brands set can benefit your strategy in the lead-up to Christmas.
Thinking about the core Christmas values such as kindness, generosity and spending time with your family can also be a good way of starting your ideation. Can you flip anything on its head, and create a new story?
Publishing Christmas content early can also help brands in the run-up to Christmas as their content has had time to make an impact on the SERPs and Google has had time to index, validate, and push the content.
Source: John Lewis
For travel brands interested in running a Christmas campaign, being influenced and inspired by other sectors can prove beneficial. An example of this is travel brands being inspired by the retail brand John Lewis, and their Christmas Cottage theme, an indication that this is a theme that might become trendy in the months leading up to Christmas.
Keeping yourself up to date on recent reports and articles, such as Conde Nast Traveller’s ‘The best Christmas holiday destinations for 2024‘, can help you better understand what is trending from a news perspective.
It’s also smart to keep yourself updated on reports. PWC, for example, has released a full report on Christmas consumerism and what shoppers want. Reports like these can help you predict what consumers want, and how they will be getting it. These kinds of statistics can inform your upcoming ideations and campaigns.
Source: Unsplash.com
Coming up with a great campaign can be tricky in the finance and insurance sectors. It’s important to evaluate previous campaigns and the media landscapes around Christmas in the years before to determine what is the best approach for your insurance or finance brand.
You might want to consider keeping a loose tie to the two sectors with the influence of lifestyle topics, such as parenting, weddings, or big lifestyle decisions, like purchasing a house or a car.
Think; are there common denominators causing arguments in families over Christmas? Can you survey parents to see if they spend more, or less on gifts for their children and partners than before? Does Christmas influence people to buy more? Are there ways to ensure you have the best Christmas with your family, without feeling external pressures?
Regardless of which sector you work in, it’s important to be fluid in your approach depending on the emerging trends. Keeping yourself up to date on big industry news from market leaders and checking out what’s previously worked can help form your Christmas campaign and secure great coverage.
If you’re interested in seeing how the PR team at c3 works, please visit our digital PR page or head over to LinkedIn to keep yourself updated on industry news from our team.
Digital public relations, often shortened to digital PR, is all about showcasing your expertise, trust, and authority to Google by creating relevant news, stories, and information that the media will cover which in turn, improves your online presence and visibility.
But exactly what makes it such a crucial part of your overall strategy? Well, we’re here to tell you why your brand should be investing in digital PR and help answer any potential questions you may have!
In this guide, we will be covering:
Digital PR is a digital marketing strategy that utilises many tools and tactics to prove to your audience and Google that your brand is authoritative and trustworthy.
While it tends to be mostly associated with ‘link building’, digital PR is so much more than that. Yes, sending outreach and gaining links to improve a website’s authority still plays a role, but that’s just one part of a bigger strategy.
If implemented correctly, Digital PR is an effective way to boost your brand awareness, social engagement, online presence and so much more.
Below are some examples of the types of tactics that digital PR specialists use:
Digital PR vs traditional PR
To sum it up, traditional and digital PR strategies are both all about improving and sustaining a brand’s reputation.
However, when it comes to specific strategies, traditional PR often focuses on crisis and reputation management and promotes brand awareness through stories or events that gain social media, print, and online coverage, as well as other disciplines that will showcase brands in a positive light.
Meanwhile, digital PR strategies are informed by SEO recommendations and goals, with the focus being on gaining online coverage (links) from relevant, authoritative sources. This, in turn, increases online brand awareness and supports further SEO goals such as bringing traffic to a website, improving visibility, and ultimately, driving leads and conversions.
Maybe you’re wondering how digital PR could benefit you and your business? Well, when used effectively, some of the benefits of digital PR to your brand can include:
Backlinks, which are inbound links coming from another website, are an important ranking factor for search engines like Google. Therefore, the more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your brand’s website, the more likely it is that you’re going to rank higher for relevant search terms. We’ll touch more on how digital supports SEO in the next section.
Securing positive media coverage will help to position your brand as an authority. Not only that but getting your name out there and mentioned in a variety of sources will raise brand awareness and ultimately build trust with potential customers.
Securing positive media coverage will help to position your brand as an authority. Not only that but getting your name out there and mentioned in a variety of sources will raise brand awareness and ultimately build trust with potential customers.
So, as you can see, if you’re a brand hoping to grow your online presence, you should be running digital PR activity as part of your organic and marketing strategies.
In fact, according to a recent blog post, various experts in the industry believe that link building is the third most important ranking factor when it comes to SEO. Back in 2021, Google’s very own John Mueller also acknowledged the importance of this when he said, “[digital PR is] just as critical as tech SEO, probably more so in many cases.”
Building links is like acquiring social proof, with digital PR helping to boost wider SEO performance. But why is this?
Well, when search engines crawl a website, having strong, authoritative backlinks pointing to your domain is a great signal that you’re trustworthy and know what you’re talking about. It’s also one of the factors that allows you to rank higher on Google when people search for relevant terms associated with your brand.
Other key benefits that PR can have on SEO performance include increased site visibility, traffic, leads, and improved keyword rankings. Through digital PR tactics, you’re also able to feature your internal experts and products, which boosts brand awareness, loyalty, and credibility.
So, whilst both on-site SEO and PR are separate practices, the benefits of marrying the two together is obvious! For more information, be sure to check out our blog on why PR and SEO are better connected.
Here at connective3, our digital PR experts have extensive experience creating and executing digital PR strategies for a range of brands across different sectors. Working collaboratively with the organic team, we’ve delivered results that have driven clear business growth.
If you’re interested in even more examples of digital PR that have proven results, be sure to check out our case studies.
So, whilst both on-site SEO and PR are separate practices, the benefits of marrying the two together is obvious! For more information, be sure to check out our blog on why PR and SEO are better connected.
The entire digital marketing industry is ever-changing thanks to new trends and tools emerging, so it’s only natural that the world of digital PR is also going to evolve and change over time.
But what exactly does this mean for your business?
Given the ever-changing digital marketing landscape, it’s obvious that the world of digital PR is going to continue to evolve and change over time. But what exactly does this mean for you and your business?
Below are some thoughts we’ve gathered from our expert PR team here at connective3.
A lot of brands that have specific products to push or want to get in front of their audience will run more large-scale, creative campaigns/stunts that’ll deliver both offline and online results that support PR, organic, and social. However, to cut through, these tactics will need to be relevant, have a strong key message, and entice audiences to take action.
If you’re curious about how we bring creative campaigns to life, we’ve got a whole case study on launching an Avon fragrance with the help of our c360 services.
Reactive PR will continue to increase in popularity, especially for sectors with quicker news cycles such as finance, travel, and fashion. This strategy continues to build impressive results, and we’ve seen huge successes across our c3 newsroom team for this.
Brands need to utilise their internal expertise on these strategies to showcase themselves as authoritative leaders in order to build trust among their audience. The content you produce also needs to be helpful; answering the questions we know audiences are seeking advice on.
This is especially important considering Google’s ‘Helpful Content Update’ which aims to promote informational content with the user in mind rather than that which has been written to rank well in the SERPs. There has actually been a number of updates to the algorithm that claim to boost helpful information and reduce the appearance of low-quality or unoriginal content.
As the world of digital PR becomes more competitive, it only makes sense that more and more brands are running PR strategies. However, this does mean that finding niche ways to build results to support overall SEO objectives has never been more crucial.
From link reclamation and partnerships to broken backlinks and employer news, there are a number of ways to achieve this, and we expect that there’s going to be a huge focus on this type of technical link building in the future. If you’re wanting to get ahead but not sure where to start, we’ve got a whole guide to technical link reclamation that goes through some of the different tactics you might want to employ.
The biggest factor which remains is relevancy. Basically, you need to ensure that all your PR content is relevant to your brand and audience/interests, relevant to keywords you want to rank for, and relevant to your target media and the general news agenda.
PR strategies should be guided by organic insights, so it’s important that you speak with your SEO teams to determine where you should be directing your backlinks on your site to have the biggest growth impact.
If you’re interested in finding out more about what our team get up to, and how we can enhance your brand’s online presence and reputation, be sure to check out all of the digital PR services we offer.
How to build a PR strategy for your brand
Let’s get started
Maybe you’re sold on digital PR but not sure where to start when it comes to formulating your strategy? We understand that you’ll want to get it right, which is why we’ve pulled together information on potential digital PR tactics you might want to use and steps for getting started.
In this blog, we will be discussing:
Content marketing campaigns are perhaps the most common digital PR tactic, and can include attention-grabbing stunts, interesting surveys, fun interactives, data-led studies, and more.
Regardless of the campaign framework, the end goal is always the same – creating content that is interesting to both the media and potential customers.
When ideating for content marketing campaigns, the thing that should be at the forefront of your mind is whether it will provide value to your brand’s audience. After all, they’re the people you want visiting your website, interacting with your brand, and eventually converting.
Then there’s reactive PR, which, as you might have guessed from the name, involves keeping up with current news and trends so that you can quickly jump on any opportunities that could be relevant to your brand.
The main difference here is that you can’t really plan ahead for reactive PR. Basically, in order to secure coverage, you need to respond fast and be one of the first to get in there before the media (and people) move on to the next thing of interest.
With the rise of social media, TikTok in particular, this has become an even more popular PR tactic. In fact, we’ve got our own dedicated newsroom team at connective3 so that we can ensure an ‘always on’ and ‘always there’ approach for our clients.
Whether it’s getting your products mentioned in gift guides and roundups, generating excitement around a new launch, or having your products reviewed in the media, there are various ways to create buzz through the use of product PR.
In short, product PR is a great tactic if you’re wanting to place attention on your brand’s products or an upcoming launch.
If you’ve got internal business news that you want to showcase or that might be of interest, there doesn’t always need to be another existing story in order to secure coverage.
From new openings and big hires to charity initiatives and more, internal business news is information that can be shared with the trade media to promote your brand and establish authority.
Technical link reclamation is another PR tactic that can help with building links but isn’t quite the same type of outreach. Instead, this is the process of trying to reclaim both lost and broken links or transforming existing brand mentions into links. We’ve actually got a whole guide to technical link reclamation if you’re interested in looking into this further.
To start, you need to nail down your goals and aims. This could include promoting a new product launch, increasing traffic and visibility of a particular section on the site, increasing brand awareness, and more.
Given that your PR tactics should appeal to your brand’s target audience, you need to identify who they are, including their age range, interests, and other information. From here, you can then decide what media they consume that you should be targeting.
Once you know your audience, it’s time to combine this with organic insights to inform a strategy that will be effective. This includes information on any target keywords, particular areas of the site that need focusing on, and how your competitors are performing.
To ensure your ideas are relevant, you should bring all key channels together to brainstorm ideas that will meet your goals and objectives. On top of that, you should be taking your target audience, their preferences, and the media landscape into consideration as well.
In some cases, you may have accompanying on-site content for your PR campaign which will be referenced in the press release. It’s important that this blog is also in line with your overall goal and organic insights, including internal linking opportunities and target keywords.
Before you start any outreach, it’s important to decide on a strategy which details how you’re going to make your campaign work harder. This also includes compiling an overall media list, coming up with a range of hooks and angles for different media niches, and figuring out when you’re going to outreach these angles.
Once a PR campaign is over, sit down with your team to discuss learnings for the future. This way, you can identify what worked, as well as what could be improved next time. We’ll delve further into the importance of setting KPIs and how to measure success in the following sections.
To start, you need to nail down your goals and aims. This could include promoting a new product launch, increasing traffic and visibility of a particular section on the site, increasing brand awareness, and more.
Given that your PR tactics should appeal to your brand’s target audience, you need to identify who they are, including their age range, interests, and other information. From here, you can then decide what media they consume that you should be targeting.
Once you know your audience, it’s time to combine this with organic insights to inform a strategy that will be effective. This includes information on any target keywords, particular areas of the site that need focusing on, and how your competitors are performing.
To ensure your ideas are relevant, you should bring all key channels together to brainstorm ideas that will meet your goals and objectives. On top of that, you should be taking your target audience, their preferences, and the media landscape into consideration as well.
In some cases, you may have accompanying on-site content for your PR campaign which will be referenced in the press release. It’s important that this blog is also in line with your overall goal and organic insights, including internal linking opportunities and target keywords.
Before you start any outreach, it’s important to decide on a strategy which details how you’re going to make your campaign work harder. This also includes compiling an overall media list, coming up with a range of hooks and angles for different media niches, and figuring out when you’re going to outreach these angles.
Once a PR campaign is over, sit down with your team to discuss learnings for the future. This way, you can identify what worked, as well as what could be improved next time. We’ll delve further into the importance of setting KPIs and how to measure success in the following sections.
As with any type of marketing activity, setting KPIs (aka ‘key performance indicators’) for your digital PR campaigns is crucial, as it is essentially how you value your success and see the actual impact of your work. Having KPIs in place will also help you stay focused on the main goal and allows you to report back on the performance of your campaigns with data that actually matters.
When it comes to setting these KPIs, this will depend on your overall goals and what you want to achieve to drive business performance. It’s important to bear in mind that one brand’s idea of success might look different to another, and this will then impact your KPIs and how you measure success.
Of course, when it comes to digital PR, you should be setting KPIs in relation to backlinks such as average DA, whether the links are from a new, relevant domain, etc. However, aside from backlinks, other important KPIs include:
Here at connective3, our PR strategists work closely with our organic team to map out the PR results we expect to receive over time. Measuring the success of your digital PR efforts isn’t just about link numbers on a sheet. It goes beyond this, including:
On top of that, you’ve also got other vanity metrics like reach, awareness, positive brand sentiment, and social engagement.
Good results for digital PR don’t necessarily equate to tonnes of links. Other factors, such as the relevancy and authority of the domain that provides a backlink, are just as, if not more, important when it comes to boosting organic rankings.
Ultimately, even though the number and quality of your backlinks do matter to search engines like Google, focusing on link building alone won’t lead to a boost in organic rankings. If your brand’s site is struggling technically, producing poor content, and the majority of their backlink profile is coming from sites of little relevancy, you’re not going to see the results you want. All of these different elements share the same goal and need to work together harmoniously in order to achieve true success.
Essentially, ‘quality over quantity’ couldn’t be any more accurate than when looking at the impact of your digital PR work. Taking this back to what we said right at the start, this is exactly why digital PR is so much more than just ‘link building’.
If you want to find out more about what our team get up to and how we can enhance your brand’s online presence and reputation, be sure to check out all of the digital PR services we offer.
What is digital PR & how can you use it to your advantage?
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Even if you’re new to SEO, you no doubt know just how much goes into building a solid SEO foundation for any website.
You need good content, a user-friendly interface, top keyword research, informative digital PR, and much, much more. All of which come together to make something Google wants to rank.
With all these vital pillars requiring a lot of careful time and consideration to grow and mould, the humble backlink might seem rather minor in comparison in relation to how something ranks in Google. But, as you’ll soon see, there’s much more to backlinks than simply offering a way for Google to reach a new site.
That being said, if you only have minimal SEO knowledge, you probably don’t know what a backlink is, never mind understanding why backlinks are important. Fortunately, backlinks are simple and easy to understand, despite their importance, as we’ll cover in this guide.
So, strap your SEO cap on and get a pen ready, we’re going to explain exactly what backlinks are, why backlinks are important for SEO, and how you can start link building today to get your content ranking on Google!
In today’s constantly changing online world, the quality, relevance, and authenticity of online content is more important than ever. These three things are necessary for any content to rank, and they’re what make backlinks a viable and important strategy for driving organic content.
So, just what is a backlink?
Simply put, a backlink is where the URL for a particular piece of content or website is included as a hyperlink on a website that isn’t yours. As links are fundamental to navigating the web, this lets users find your content outside of your website thanks to a link that sends them back to you, hence the name backlink.
There are plenty of different types of backlinks out there that you can use, but in most cases, they’re created organically by journalists, influencers, bloggers, and anyone else who finds your content useful and interesting and wants to share it with others.
Making use of backlinks is necessary to compete in any industry with an online presence and have been a cornerstone of the Google algorithm since the 90s. And with that in mind, let’s take a closer look at how backlinks work in relation to SEO.
If you’ve read our beginner’s guide to how search engines work, you’ll know that the primary way search engines find and store new information to be ranked is by crawling the web using links around and between websites.
Links take users to different pages, so by following the links on a page, Google can assess where a link goes, how good the information on this new page is, and whether or not it’s worth storing to be ranked in later search results.
But it’s not just content that Google considers when assessing pages. It also accounts for the number of links pointing to your page from other websites, if the sites providing the links are of good quality themselves, and if they give your page authority. All of these blend together to help you rank higher on the results page.
Essentially, backlinking means that Google isn’t just finding you through your own content, but from different sources, making it easier to find you, rank your content, and ultimately build your brand; and all it takes is a simple hyperlink from one caring soul on the internet.
Now that you know what a backlink is, it’s time to turn to the question, “why is link building important for SEO?”.
Put bluntly, backlinks are one of the key ways you can drive that all-important search engine traffic to your site. Especially organic traffic. Without link building, it will take your content much longer to establish the kind of authority that makes Google want to rank it higher in search results.
Consistent and good-quality links show users that your content is valuable and worth their time, enhancing your brand and building trust between you and them. They show off your expertise and can eventually make you a leading figure in a particular niche or industry.
And, of course, they mean Google can crawl to your site from others, making you more prevalent in its crawls and getting your page indexed properly. In other words, an important page not being backlinked is hurting you more than you might think.
So, how important are backlinks? Very!
While gaining as many quality backlinks as possible is a big necessity for SEO, when it comes to actually getting links, the process is not as clear-cut as you might think.
In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for people to buy and trade links, or simply create a single page filled with links to your site, in a bid to fool Google into believing their content was of authoritative quality when it really wasn’t.
Nowadays, Google is far too smart to be fooled by such methods, either ignoring poor links or penalising your ranking for being over-optimised. Instead, to get links today, you need to focus on creating quality content that is relevant to users and worthy of being considered ranked by Google.
When it comes to getting links, more often than not, you’ll need to wait for them to build up naturally on their own or ask for links from those who might find your content interesting.
These two types of link-building strategies are known as passive and active link building, and we’re going to run through what they involve so you can start using them straight away in your work.
The first type of link building focuses on accruing links naturally over time. These are links that you don’t ask for and will usually make up the vast majority of links you gain. They tend to be generated over time thanks to good content that people want to share.
This content can be something you’ve created specifically for your brand or as a replacement for content that no longer exists, allowing you to solve the problem associated with broken links and displaying your content as the piece that Google wants to refer to most.
We’ve said it multiple times before, but we’re going to say it again one more time to knock it home. Creating and spreading good quality content is the number one way to get yourself noticed by Google, and like a symbiotic relationship, earns you backlinks.
For more info on how to create quality SEO content, be sure to read our beginner’s guide on writing SEO content.
Active link building is much more direct, as the name suggests, and involves building relationships with other people in your industry, so you eventually get organic links. This means asking for links from people who would find your content interesting.
These links could be from journalists, bloggers, influencers, etc… who might be interested in your content and willing to link to it in their own work. Of course, your content must be deemed link-worthy to actually get links to begin with. This is the most direct way to get links and tends to be a key part of digital PR strategy.
Digital PR actually looks at combining passive and active link building together to create linkable assets for publications that might be interested in your content. This obviously has to be something relevant that publications want to link to, though, rather than something wholly irrelevant to them.
The content used in digital PR can be anything from a data-driven study to a detailed long-form guide, and the addition of good infographics or visuals alongside these never hurt either.
With a good piece of PR content directed toward those that’ll find it useful, people will want to cite it as a source, making it easier to ask them for links when they discuss the topic your content focuses on because they’re already interested in it.
Of course, you don’t have to only appeal directly to people when making new content. If you find previous content you’ve made being referenced elsewhere without a link, it never hurts to reach out and ask for a link to be put in seen as they’re already mentioning you.
You can even do this if you find people using your own image. Instead of asking them to take it down, you can ask them to link you instead, allowing you to benefit from their use.
Last, but by no means least, you can carry out something called link gap analysis, where you reach out to sites already citing your competitors and ask them to cite you as well.
You will, of course, need a good reason for them to cite you, but if they have linked to multiple different people in your industry already, then the odds of them linking you are high.
One other active link-building strategy you can pursue is outreach. This isn’t so much asking for links as promoting something someone else has already done by linking them from your website content. This puts you on their radar, and in theory, will result in you getting a link back.
This is a good strategy to employ when reaching out to influencers and can help you build long relationships for links in the future through mutual trust and good content. You get an advocate for your business through influencers, journalists, and writers, more of whom might contact you asking for your help in the future.
Ultimately, links tend to come naturally as a by-product of not trying to get links; it’s a bit of an oxymoron situation. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do more to speed the process along.
Things like good content, an exceptional PR campaign, or a new product launch are all designed to promote something else rather than gather links, which in turn actually generates backlinks.
One very important thing to note when looking at backlinks is that not all links are as valuable as others. The only links you ever want to be associated with are those of good quality from reputable sites, not any link under the metaphorical sun.
Too many ‘toxic’ links will ultimately devalue your content in the eyes of Google, meaning it will rank you lower on the results page. This might seem unfair, as these links are outside of your control, which is why Google has implemented a method to get around them known as disavowing.
When you find sites that have links to your content but aren’t sites you want linking to you, you can use the Google Search Console to tell Google not to consider these links when ranking your page.
Backlinks are a prevalent and important part of SEO, one of which you hopefully now have a much greater understanding of. Of course, this is still a surface-level exploration of the topic, and there’s much more to learn about backlinks and their role in SEO, content, and digital PR.
And if you found this guide useful, be sure to check out some of the other guides here on the c3 blog, including our beginner’s guide to working in PR and our detailed article on what is content writing?
To learn even more about what we do here at c3, including the various services we offer and any current roles we have available, don’t forget to get in touch with our team. Together, we’ll help you start your digital agency journey or take your business to the next level.
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A dynamic media landscape and the rise of AI can prove difficult to manoeuvre, especially for brands or in-house teams without previous experience.
However, a changing media landscape does not necessarily change how campaigns are created.
Beginners need to know the foundations of PR campaigns to deliver great results consistently.
If you’re looking to create newsworthy concepts to build backlinks or raise further brand awareness for your business, this blog will look at the building blocks of digital PR campaigns to achieve great coverage and stellar backlinks.
The first step of any campaign is to find an original, but relevant idea. For this, you should come together as a team and throw ideas at each other, looking at what’s currently getting picked up in the media and how a story can stay true to your brand’s ethos and guidelines.
Key factors to consider for idea generation include your target audience’s interests and needs, vital media niches you want to reach with the campaign, what the competition is doing and whether you have the authority to comment on certain topics you’re thinking of exploring as part of the campaign.
For help on how to run brainstorms, you can read our helpful blog.
Depending on your campaign, you might have to collect secondary data to back up your messaging. For example, if you’re a travel brand you might want to scope out the best areas for fine dining across the world. For this, you would need to source relevant data, such as restaurant reviews and accessibility. Untrustworthy data should be avoided at all costs, as this can harm your story and your reputation, too. If you’re using secondary data you must also ensure you have approval to use the data for media purposes too.
Some of our favourite data sources that we used to form campaigns include Statista, YouGov, ONS, FOI requests, consumer polls, social listening and general search trends.
You can also source experts within the field you’re covering to add further authority to your campaign including influencers and other experts depending on the topic you’re exploring. At connective3, to elevate our campaigns we often collaborate with influencers, professors and psychologists to name a few.
Once all data has been collated and triple-checked by you or the team, it’s time for design and copy. Now, not all campaigns require design and supporting onsite copy, especially if you’re planning to link to an already live section on your site such as a specific product page, but if you want to host content on your blog with supporting visuals, here are our tips.
Some examples of design you could use are:
Content that sits onsite should also host more than just the data from your press release. Here, you can include more from your research or perhaps some supporting tips to make sure you’re offering journalists other link opportunities. Plus, this will allow you to jump on reactive stories in the future with the data you’ve gathered and hosted onsite.
While the content for the onsite blog and the design are being created, you can write the press release for your campaign. A crucial point of every release is to find the perfect hook that’ll catch the journalist’s attention immediately. It needs to be relevant, and newsworthy and cover important information including the who, what, why and when.
Relevancy is key when creating a media list and we always opt for quality over quantity. Your list should contain all relevant journalists to your story. You can find relevant journalists by using Google or other search engines by adding relevant keywords to see who has covered what in the past. Be sure to also look at your target publications and make sure the relevant journalists are also added to your list. Software such as Vuelio and Roxana can help you find relevant publications and journalists’ contact information.
Sometimes, your campaign can be ready to launch when suddenly breaking news erupts. Or perhaps you’ve launched your first angle and it’s just not bringing in the results you had hoped. So, first and foremost, you need to be prepared from the start. That’s why we always recommend having a thorough outreach plan in place. What angle are you launching first and why? Do you have different angles to approach different media niches with (you should)? What angles will you explore if the first doesn’t deliver? Or, if you’re aware of a potential situation that could impact the news agenda, do you have any supporting data or expert commentary from your campaign that can be elevated to use as a reactive opportunity should this happen? Always plan for the “what if”.
Once all your assets are live, you can start your outreach process. A tailored approach to relevant journalists is key. Look at what the journalists have written before and mention why you’re sending it their way. Do they cover wellness-led stories; Inform them your story fits their topics!
While no links can ever be guaranteed, there are ways you can increase the chances of coverage. At connective3, we look at what’s being covered in the news and adapt our subject lines and pitches to different journalists. Creating multiple angles to your story will also help you reach out to more journalists. However, don’t fall into the trap of bombarding journalists at once, you must take a tailored approach.
If you’re using software such as BuzzStream to help your outreach, look at the opening rates; is it low, or high? How many times do journalists open your emails, is it one, or perhaps five or six times? Reading the data from your initial outreach can help you adapt your press release for the future.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of what a digital PR campaign consists of. There are many key components and threads of information to keep track of, but with excellent time management and a strong team, you can create the most interesting digital PR campaign, and adapt it to the media landscape.
Want to learn more? Read more about the digital PR team and their work on our site.
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Are you looking to start a new career in Public Relations and wondering where to begin with figuring out what you want out of it, and potentially even what PR is?
We’ve put together this comprehensive guide to working in PR.
Starting with what the different forms of PR work are and what PR work looks like in c3, then taking a look at the different roles there are in PR, what tools PR teams use, and finally, how you can go about getting yourself a role in a PR team.
Public Relations, or PR, comes down to promoting a brand and protecting its reputation. You shape their outer image and push campaigns to the public that promote their tone of voice, their values, and their products. They push these campaigns through traditional and virtual media, like newspapers, radio, television, and social media, as well as blogs and vlogs.
PR uses these outlets as it allows brands to build relationships with their audiences and client base, as trusted news outlets tend to be viewed by the public as credible sources, giving your clients a trusted base on which to promote themselves.
Behind these campaigns goes a lot of work; research of trends, keywords, and strategy, as well as writing campaigns, pushing these out to carefully crafted lists of journalists and the members of the media industry, and then following up on these campaigns and monitoring them for results to present to your clients.
Public relations work can come in three forms – in-house, agency or freelance. In-house PR will involve working for one client and promoting their work, as well as working on the protective side of things too. Agency work, similar to freelance work, will involve working for multiple clients and managing multiple campaigns at once.
Agency work will see you working alongside a wider team of professionals, possibly data teams, social media teams and content teams to come up with your content, while freelancers likely have to balance multiple roles and responsibilities at once.
Whichever form of PR you fall under, there are a variety of roles that you could undertake, and different scales of progression that you could work towards.
There are different avenues you can follow within the umbrella category of PR roles – social media specific, traditional media-specific, content creation and management. We also have an international PR team that deals with clients across Europe and America, as we are lucky enough to have many team members who are multilingual, with team members who can speak German, Norwegian, Italian, and Spanish, to name a few, and you can find out more about this in the international section of our website.
Within c3, our digital PR team has a set structure of progression that goes:
PR Executive > Senior PR Executive > PR Strategist > Senior PR Strategist > Head of PR
Here’s a breakdown of each of those roles and their different responsibilities to give you a clear overview of what would be expected of you at each level.
Starting out, either as a graduate or as a new member of the PR community, you’ll likely start as a PR Executive or in a similar Junior PR role. The responsibilities for this role include:
Stepping up to the next level is the Senior PR Executive role – this role has a lot of the same responsibilities as the junior role, but over time you’ll have honed your craft and will be able to interact more with clients and help to lead campaigns that you come up with. Our Senior Digital PR Executive position requires:
The step up from PR Executives to PR Strategists is significant – the role changes from a focus on writing campaigns to a focus on the strategy for your clients and more technical work involving creative strategy. The role includes responsibilities such as:
There is another significant step up from PR Strategist to Senior PR Strategist – this involves running your own team of people and managing clients on your own. Alongside the usual responsibilities of campaign creation, you’ll also be expected to report on your campaign results and work much more closely with clients as a senior member of the PR team.
One of the top positions at c3 is the role of Head of PR. This role as the head of a department involves a lot more people management and spreading yourself over more campaigns in a supportive role rather than dedicating your time to one or two clients.
We’ve got a lot of information in those job descriptions that might not make all that much sense – after all, to the uninitiated, what does campaign reporting or campaign ideation even mean? Here’s a breakdown of the process that our PR team go through with each of our clients:
Coming up with campaign ideas is one of the most exciting and creative parts of PR work. This process normally involves a lot of collaboration both across the PR team and even other teams in your business to come up with ideas that will work for your current clients and potential future clients. Once you have a long list of ideas to work from, you can handpick the ideas that are most applicable and begin the research phase.
This part of the process is when you take your chosen idea and begin to find data to make your campaign interesting and newsworthy. This could involve reaching out to data collectors or even conducting your own research to get this data. Once you have all of the information you will need for your campaign, you can create your campaign assets, including any written or designed content. Now your campaign is ready to be sent out into the world!
Finding exactly the right publications and journalists who will be interested in your campaign is a really important step in this process – after all, if no one picks up your campaign then the results will be poor! Researching journalists and publications before you reach out will be invaluable, as you’ll make sure it lands in exactly the right inbox for it to take off. You will begin sending out your campaigns and keeping in touch with journalists to encourage them to share your campaign.
Once your campaign has gone out into the world, you’ll have to keep track of which publications share it, how many views it’s getting and whether the campaign has had any impact on your client’s business. Reporting these results back to the client (or your management team) is important, as it will let them know how well you’re doing.
It’s important to remember that previous campaigns are never really finished – it’s always possible to revive an older campaign if it becomes newsworthy again, or if you can find a way to reangle it to make it work with current trends.
To get great results on your PR campaigns and to ensure that the work process we’ve just gone through can go as smoothly as possible, we use a variety of online and downloadable tools. Here are some insights to help you get familiar with some of the different industry tools you’ll come across. There are several tools you can use depending on where you work, but most of them work in the same way.
We’ve separated them into three categories; campaign tools help you to manage and run campaigns, media tools help you to connect with journalists for the outreach of your campaigns, and SEO/trend tools help you to research different ideas for campaigns you could create in the future.
With Buzzstream, you can launch and monitor outreach campaigns. The platform allows you to upload media lists, create and edit templates, and quickly send emails without having to manually send them one at a time.
You can manage and monitor influencer marketing campaigns using Hypeauditor, an AI-powered analytics and discovery tool. Additionally, you can use it to gather data and metrics about influencers across various social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch.
Among the best tools for reactive PR is ResponseSource, a sort of email subscription service that connects experts, PR professionals, and journalists. PRs can use this tool to send out their own requests for campaign support, such as expert commentary, besides responding to requests to promote their clients.
Using Vuelio is essential for building media lists and for outreach since it is essentially a public database of all sorts of media contacts from all over the world. You’ll especially benefit from this if you cannot find the journalist’s email on their website or in their Twitter bio.
The Google Trends tool allows you to examine and analyse search trends over a period of time for a particular term or keyword. PR pros can use this as their source of data or boost the relevance of an existing piece.
Ahrefs, which is considered an all-in-one SEO toolkit, is a popular piece of software that we use across a variety of teams at C3. The tools available on Ahrefs include a site explorer, content explorer, keyword explorer, rank tracker, and link intersect.
With Keyword.io, you can find autocomplete keyword suggestions for popular search engines like Google, Amazon, and YouTube. There is no doubt that this tool is incredibly versatile, as it can be used by a variety of teams in digital marketing, including PR teams.
While a degree in PR or media relations is a great way to prepare yourself for a role in PR and make yourself a great candidate for PR roles, it’s not the only way you can get into a role in PR! Here are some ways you can work towards a career in PR, and have some great examples to show in your CV when you do apply for any PR jobs:
A career in PR is a great starting point for creative people with a vision to create projects that they want to shout about loud and proud – if you think that PR could be the right career for you, start working on your progression today!
For more information on what it’s like working in PR, make sure you check out our PR starter pack.
If you’d like to speak to any of our PR team about anything we’ve covered in our guide, you can get in touch with us to chat some more. You can also find all of the roles that we are currently looking for in the careers section of our website.
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