Creating a digital PR strategy
A digital PR strategy defines the purpose of your marketing activity online. It drives what you do and how. If it’s off-kilter with your business’s commercial objectives, it’s very easy to misdirect your efforts.
It’s all about purpose
To nail a strategy down requires some honest soul-searching as a business in order to get it right. Increasing organic search visibility will always be the major objective, but other goals will vary.
For example, needing to build brand awareness among a specific audience, or in a new market, or to specifically build up your image as a bank of expertise. On the other hand, it could be that you want to change perceptions of your business, product or service.
Know your opponents
Business is competitive, no matter what the industry or sector. You need to know who to beat and, more importantly, how they got there.
This is why it’s crucial to understand other businesses’ own digital PR approaches and assess what’s working well for them. This helps build a picture of the opportunities in various media sectors, and guides your strategy.
Defining the audience is key
Defining the audience you need to target is a crucial part of focussing the essence of your strategy. To nail this down, you need to be familiar with your audience personas. They will help you understand the challenges and burning questions these people face, the publications they go to for answers and advice, and how they like to digest that information.
Those publications form one element of your target audience — they are where you need to be visible. Therefore, your marketing activity needs to be geared towards appealing to the journalists who write for them. Your stories and activity need to include insightful information and genuinely useful knowledge, from which readers in that industry can benefit.
Your competitor research feeds this definition stage heavily, as observing what those businesses are doing, where they achieve coverage and what gets the most engagement is valuable information for you. It’s also important for finding out where the information gaps are — the questions or concerns that haven’t yet been clearly answered by your competitors. This is where your greatest opportunities lie.
Appeal to people, not bullet points
It’s important to be mindful of the need for your digital PR activities to be seen by humans, rather than automated software, so keep its attraction wide but in line with your market’s interests. For B2B campaigns, your marketing needs to appeal not only to key decision makers, but also to their customers.
This helps give a campaign greater resonance in the media because all businesses, and increasingly consumers, have an interest in the journey the products they buy have taken. Also, consider that decision makers of one market are consumers of another.
As a result, your strategy should reflect the fact that your digital PR needs to strike a chord with several audiences at once, and to remind you of that every time you create a new asset.
Watch your language
An often overlooked step by many businesses is the importance of a brand’s tone of voice.
This is informed by the audience personas, and should be geared to appeal to such people in a natural way. It should also, of course, be appropriate to your business sector. Nobody wants to be sold insurance in a tone more suited to a bar, nor be introduced to a streetwear fashion retailer by a voice from a legal team.
It’s important to check that your marketing and brand strategies support this. Ensure that the whole business — particularly at director level — knows how language should be used, which words should be avoided, and the key messages to include for each product or service.
A yard or a metre?
To be sure that your strategy is working, results need to be measured. Although a traditionally tricky thing to do for marketing, digital PR is a lot easier to judge thanks to data.
While there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach, and activity should be gauged by its specific value to you, everything has a common overall purpose. Our work will increase your site’s number of links from authoritative domains, in turn boosting your referral traffic.
The effects of digital PR and technical SEO are cumulative rather than instant, and take time to manifest. How quickly that happens is down to external factors such as the audience, the market and Google itself. With consistent work, though, your organic visibility should increase, in turn boosting visitors to key areas of the site.
Whichever benchmarks are used, aligning them against your strategy makes sure we know you’re progressing and whether our initial judgements were correct. If not, we then know to change the approach, and how.
Useful? Visit our digital PR agency page or continue reading the following articles to learn more about digital PR: