TRAFFIC
EFFECTIVE DIGITAL PR STRATEGIES IN HARD-TO-MARKET INDUSTRIES
Digital PR strategist Will Hobson from Branded3 provides some advice on how to gain high-authority links from multiple domains in hard-to-market areas such as betting.
I THINK IT’ S SAFE to say it’ s getting harder to build links in any industry; however, it’ s becoming even more difficult in hard-to-market areas such as betting.
I am going to be exploring the different strategies we should employ in these markets, to gain high authority links from multiple domains. I will also be touching on a few campaigns we have worked on.
The first rule of thumb in these industries is to stop spamming; there’ s no need to use these tactics. These may have short-term gains, but in the end, you will be penalised.
What do I mean by spamming? Well, it can mean multiple things, but in this instance, it can be broken down into using low-quality sites or sponsored posts. People often use the excuse that this is the only way to build links in the industry, but I think that’ s a lazy excuse.
What should we be talking about? When we start to look at our digital PR strategies, we often make sure we don’ t mention the products our clients may offer.
This is relevant across most industries – anything too product focused does not tend to be received too well by a journalist, and can be seen as advertorial. So how do we combat this and remain relevant to the brand? The solution to this is to take a step outside your brand ideologies and look at what can be part of the wider picture in your campaigns.
A perfect example of this would be a betting client, as they offer odds on anything from sports to the latest reality TV competitions. We can focus on these subject areas.
This allows us to create a strategy on these subjects without focusing on any of our product bases. If we focus on the wider conversations around our brands, we are more likely to be able to engage with target audience as well as the media publications we seek for SEO gain.
Audience research To fully inform our campaigns, we like to understand our target audience to ensure we have the right people seeing and engaging with our work. We use a variety of social listening tools and software to discover what people are talking about what type of content will be best for us to target them with.
Below, you can find just a few tools I use when creating my strategies and how I use them:
Social listening Crimson Hexagon and other well-known tools are great for us to understand what a brand’ s target audience is talking about, and how we can tap into those conversations online with our campaigns.
It’ s also useful for discovering what our brand’ s audience may be also interested in, so we can target these conversations too. This tool then allows us to create strategies that look at the wider conversation.
YouGov Profiler Another great tool is the YouGov profiler, which is a media planning and audience segmentation tool.
Data is collected from 190,000 UK YouGov members, and it’ s really useful for finding out who your audience is, what your customers are interested in, and the locations and conversations you need to be tapping into online.
This gives you a really good idea of the kinds of publications to target, how to gain more relevant traffic to the site.
BuzzSumo Another tool I often use is BuzzSumo. This allows you to find the most shared content for any topic or domain, as well as social influencers.
You’ re also able to see the social channels that are more relevant to you and your competitors. This can help form our strategies in terms of what content output we have for our campaigns.
Once we have defined our audience through research, we can start to see what form our campaign should take in order to target them effectively.
36 iGB Affiliate Issue 63 JUN / JUL 2017