Digital PR is trendy these days, and for good reason.
But before I dive into the benefits and why you might want to climb aboard the digital PR train, I’ll define it, first.
Digital PR is basically what it sounds like: Getting attention for your brand online.
What I’m going to talk about today is a little different from the traditional method of email blasting a press release, though.
I’m going to talk about whether you need press coverage about your brand, even when you don’t have a new product to advertise or a new feature to showcase.
Let’s get to it.
Do you need better backlinks?
While having a higher volume of backlinks is certainly beneficial, the quality of those backlinks matters, too.
What do I mean by quality?
Well, which sites are your backlinks coming from? The more authoritative they are, the better your site looks. If you could get a link from CNN or from my LiveJournal account from 2003, which would you choose?
Of course, it’s harder to get links from top news publications. And that’s where digital PR comes in.
There’s a caveat, though: What you’re pitching needs to be as amazing as the way you pitch it. The best-written pitch to a writer won’t work if what you’re pitching is lackluster.
If you have high-quality content, and you know how to pitch it to writers, you can set up a strategy that builds top-tier links over time.
Take our client, The Interview Guys, for example. They hired us to partner in this content marketing + digital PR endeavor. We create content projects for them every month and have a team of people responsible for pitching that content to the most appropriate writers.
We pitched it to well-known publications, and as a result, it was covered in CNBC, Market Watch, Reader’s Digest, and more. These are links with a domain authority above 90 that are extremely hard to acquire if not for this particular strategy.
So if you need to improve your backlink portfolio, definitely consider content + digital PR.
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Do you need more brand awareness?
Sometimes, you’re just looking to get your name out there. Maybe your competitors are household names, or maybe you’re new to the scene and trying to compete. Whatever the reason, if you’re not well-known, that can be keeping people from trusting you or even knowing you’re an option for them.
SEO-driven content is a great way to build brand awareness in this way, because you want your content to be high up in search engine results when people search for queries related to your business.
Digital PR is a great supplement to SEO work. If they’ve seen your brand name before, they’re probably more likely to click on it when they see it in the SERPs.
When you do the digital PR work like I described in the previous section, your brand is often mentioned early on in the news story since you’re the source of the information.
In the MarketWatch coverage, our client was mentioned in the “top of the fold” — meaning it’s in the first screen of text without scrolling. And it says exactly what kind of site they are. Hard to beat that.
Do you need to build brand authority?
Not only do you want your brand known, but you want it to be trusted. It’s ideal for people to associate your brand with expertise and research, and that’s hard to achieve. First and foremost, it requires a high-quality product or service and great customer service to accompany that.
But brand authority is also crucial in the marketing stage, because you want customers to choose your brand over someone else’s. Would you be more likely to buy an LG TV or a brand you’ve never heard of, all things being equal?
First you should make sure you have solid testimonials and reviews, so visitors to your site will know that others have used your products/services and are happy with the experience.
But that’s not always enough, or you’re having trouble getting people to trust your site enough in the first place to even land on a page that would feature testimonials/reviews.
Luckily, when you earn media coverage through digital PR about research your brand has done, you’re positioned in the stories very authoritatively.
Take, for example, the coverage I mentioned above on Reader’s Digest and CNBC.
Seeing these trusted news sources build entire articles around your brand’s content sets the ideal stage for building more authority. The CNBC writer thinks your content is interesting and worth sharing, which is one of the best authority signals you can get.
Conclusion
If you have one of these three goals on your mind but have been having trouble making it happen, digital PR can definitely be an effective approach. When well-known news sites talk about your brand on an ongoing basis, you can build links, authority, and awareness that can give our company the boost it needs over the competition.
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