What is Digital PR?
Digital PR combines traditional PR practices with data-led online marketing strategies. The aim of it is to help build a brand’s online presence in the hope of improving their exposure, brand awareness and online visibility.
With more than half the world’s population online, opportunities have moved from traditional PR campaigns, opening up for businesses to grow their online revenue. Here at Ricemedia, we like to help make this happen. This growth can be accessed through a number of methods such as creating a strong Digital PR campaign. So without further ado, let’s discuss how to create that all important campaign without breaking the bank!
What is a Digital PR Campaign?
A Digital PR campaign is simply getting your brand noticed both online and offline. The campaign will use tactics such as increasing online visibility, implementing SEO strategies, using social media to interact with consumers, creating backlinks and contacting journalists. It is crucial for your brand to publish the right content on a suitable platform. Monitoring tools such as Google Analytics can measure the success of your digital PR campaign. In this blog, we’ll go through the ways in which you can create a successful PR campaign on a budget, giving you some insider tips and tricks!
What are the most important things to look for in a successful Digital PR campaign?
1. Backlinks: Successful outreach to bloggers or journalists may result in writers creating links that direct visitors back to your website. This is an indicator of how effective your outreach efforts are. It also helps your SEO efforts since backlinks are one of Google’s top ranking factors.
2. Conversions from PR hits: Once you have received backlinks from publications, it is important to track whether people have visited your website. From this, you can assess whether this led to conversions from consumers (e.g. purchasing, redeeming offers, scheduling appointments etc.). You can check these events in Google Analytics via the ‘Behaviour Flow’. The Behaviour Flow will give you an indicator of visitor interactions, landing pages, pages they navigated to and the page at which they left the site.
3. Social Referrals: In Google Analytics refer to Acquisition > Social to see how effective your social and content strategies are in bringing leads to your website.
4. Media Mentions: This refers to the amount of times your campaign is mentioned online. The more mentions you have, the stronger campaign you have.
5. Website Traffic: To assess brand awareness, measuring website traffic is a good indicator of whether or not you have a successful campaign.
6. Quality of Mentions: Although in most cases the aim is to be noticed, it may also be important to assess the quality of mentions. Remember to ask yourself: Is it positive, neutral or negative? Is the brands name mentioned a lot in the copy?
How can I do a Digital PR Campaign on a budget?
A traditional PR campaign or Digital PR campaign doesn’t have to leave you out of pocket. Sometimes, it is possible to do more with less. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to make a significant impact with your brand. There are a number of extremely helpful tools that can assess the effectiveness of your campaign. Here is our list of FREE online PR tools to help you along the way:
- Google Analytics– Tracks and reports a website’s traffic, conversions and users overall interaction with the site.
- Google Alerts: Monitors the web for interesting new content from topics you want to track.
- Awario- Supports in growing online awareness, researching your market, engaging with customers, finding sales opportunities and reaching out to influencers.
- JournoRequests: Helps to get press coverage and delivers PR opportunities straight to your email.
- Followerwonk: Twitter analytics which helps to explore and grow your social graph: Who are your followers? Where are they located? When do they tweet?
- Muckrack: Allows you to easily search for journalists, monitor news and build reports.
- WooPitch: Provides you with targeted discovery of journalists, influencers and expert sources using the power of social networks.
- Google Trends: Helps you to explore what current topics the world is searching for.
- PR Hunters: This gives you free PR leads delivered straight to your inbox.
Finally, we want to share with you a few more tips which might help you to stick to your budget. You could:
- Repurpose and update successful campaigns and content.
- Offer a client for an interview.
- Use a client’s own data to create a press release.
- Create partnerships that share the cost.
- Ask customers to refer friends and family.
- Make use of the free tools.
- Ask customers for reviews.
As you can see, there are a number of savvy techniques you can employ to create a winning Digital PR Campaign on a budget. If you’d like some advice regarding your SEO, PPC or Digital PR Strategy, then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!
Need some inspiration? Check out our list of the best PR campaigns of 2018 so far!
