“What Is Digital PR?”
Is something I’m asked almost every other day by prospective clients and it’s a fair question. It is not something I can sum up in two or three sentences, so consider this blog post as my way of officially setting the record straight to current and future clients who are unsure as well as put an end to a few stereotypes.
Digital PR, founded on traditional PR and media relations strategy, is an evolution of public relations to adapt to a new digital marketplace. As commerce goes online, Digital PR is all about crafting and developing a company’s brand and looks at it’s online presence or reputation.
As well as building a company’s reputation, Digital PR looks at optimising your site’s SEO through effective outreach. Before, this was left strictly to the company’s IT department to optimise websites but now, Digital PR professionals take a keen interest in your site’s SEO and incorporate it as part of their PR campaigns.
Just Playing Social Media
Most people think Digital PR is all about social media; getting followers, likes or maybe having a celebrity retweet you. If this is what you think digital PR is all about, you’re wrong. It’s not about tweeting or posting or Facebooking, it’s all about building a relationship.
Building Relationships, is the motto of Digital PR and social media is a platform to build that relationship with your audience in a way unlike any other. Besides publishing content and sharing your brand, it’s a direct way for crisis management and immediately reacting to unnecessary problems.
As well as social media, Digital PR Agencies looks at developing content and outreaching it through bloggers, influential sites and media outlets; building that online presence.
Wating Money
In the ‘Mad Men’ era of PR and marketing, companies would invest a considerable amount of money in advertising space in newspapers or magazines, and for what? They could produce an amazing piece of content, an absolutely breathtaking ad, but could they prove it was generating conversions? Bringing in leads? Boosting sales?
At the time, analysing the effectiveness of any campaign relied on, for a large aspect, guess work. Usually done by interpreting sales figures but hardly a stone cold science.
In Digital PR, we’re getting close to taking the guesswork out of it.
Through extensive analytic tools (Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics & etc) we can physically map out the journey a customer makes, from how they find your content and how they access it to the pathway on your site to the sale. This detailed insight makes us accountable to our actions, when we invest in paid social media or advertising online, because we can show how each of that penny is spent and the growth in your ROI.
I’m Just a Small Business, I Don’t Need All This
A common theatre expression is, “There’s no such things as small parts, just small actors,”. While fairly insulting, it’s quite true and applies to businesses. Thinking just because you’re a small local firm, you don’t need to engage in the digital world is like choosing to be left behind.
Nine times out of ten, whenever a potential client is thinking of making a purchase, they will search about the subject on the internet and conduct their own research or browse a website to find it. Why can’t it be your content? Or your website? By thinking Digital PR is not for your business, you’re possibly turning away 90% of your customers at the door.
With E Commerce businesses closing the market on brick and mortar businesses, going digital could give you the edge to compete against larger firms.
I hope you have a better understanding of what Digital PR is and how it can benefit your business. If you’re interested in finding out how we can manage your Digital PR, get in touch.
