The Need-to-knows About Digital PR
Digital PR is a strategically planned activity of using internet-based tools and methods to attain an increase in online presence and visibility.
With touchpoints like social media platforms, Google searches, blogs, podcasts and review sites several people discover and connect to new brands every day online. Thus, today PR professionals are not constrained to not just rely on traditional media platforms to convey messages, they engage in portraying their brand in digital channels their audience engages in. PR Practitioners depend on four sources to increase visibility, reach and impact on a wider audience, they are search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media and influencer marketing.
Read on to receive all the need-to-know about digital PR below:
Tradition PR vs. Digital PR
Traditionally, PR professionals depended on methods such as radio, print-based publications and other sources such as television to gain access to the public. The main goal was to get clients to be featured in newspapers, magazines and television shows relevant to their target audience.
With the increase in innovation and technology, several news channels and sources have risen. The audience began to prefer this as it provided them with numerous benefits compared to that of traditional PR. The new era of Digital PR has helped audiences have two-way communication at any time and any location – provided the ability to connect based on common interests, topics and other issues.
Digital PR and Small Businesses
Below are some reasons why small businesses in particular need to consider digital PR:
- Increase in SEO rankings: best backlinks help in improving potential overall rankings. A backlink is a search engine optimization tactic used by digital marketers to improve Google ranking on their webpage. The most relevant link would result in a better ranking for the website.
- Growing website traffic: The main principle behind PR is to gain more editorial coverage for the company. This leads to an increase in referrals and growth in website traffic.
- Brand building: A third-party platform can always help increase the audience reach for a company. Digital PR focuses on building the company’s brand through increasing online mentions for the company, attracting more to traffic to the website.
- Lead generation: Increase in website traffic leads to a potential increase in leads as well. Digital PR aids the increase in the growth of organic search traffic as well as referral traffic.
- Rise in sales: Building trust is a major focus of Digital PR campaigns. An increase in trust leads to higher sales, as customers tend to buy brands they trust.
Digital PR Tools and Metrics
The main purpose of using PR tools and metrics is to get accurate measures and to track the effectiveness of PR efforts. It is crucial to measure this connection with website ranking, the website traffic and sales.
Few important Digital PR metrics to track:
- Referral traffic from outreach
- The number of backlinks and do-follow links
- Sum of domain authority links
- Correlation between campaign launch and increase in:
- Organic growth
- Sales and social engagement
- Brand awareness
- Direct traffic
- Placements and rejections
- Mentions and impressions
- Variations in brand sentiment analysis
Digital PR Tools
In order to measure metrics, one has to use certain tools. They are:
Google Analytics– provides free tools to analyse data for a business for effective decision making. It helps in measuring referral, organic search traffic, leads and sales for your website.
Google Search Console – aids in measuring digital marketing KPIs like ranking position, clicks, impressions and brand name searched.
Google Reverse Image Search– helps in looking your visual content like images and infographics would appear online.
Moz– is a platform that helps in displaying domain rating, site audits and keyword research.
Mediatoolkit– helps to keep track of brand mentions, impressions, engagement, influencers and more.
Whatagraph– helps convert business marketing numbers to simple infographics reports. Whatagraph simplifies the process of reporting and analysis between automating data visualization.
SocialPlanner- is a content marketing and social media scheduling tool that helps brands discover, plan and public good engaging content. This can be used to identify content that leads to high user engagement, to schedule and to publish content in social media accounts
Statistics on Digital PR
The world of business is always changing or dynamic. Thus, it is key to evolve and adapt to know the key changes in the industry.
Top statistics in Digital PR:
Thus, one of the most crucial benefits of having a digital PR is brand awareness, without brand awareness, it is difficult for a business to succeed. Digital PR helps you reach your brand and content to the right audience and with this you have full control to what content people see and how they see it.
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