potential for finding new customers.
Additionally, with over 1.5 billion sites
online, it is essential to be able to stand
out from the crowd.
The best form of digital PR strategy is
to build and empower a strong commu-
nity of online supporters. By doing so,
you can harness the collective influence
of your brand community to leap to your
defense should push come to shove.
An effective link-building strategy works
because search engines like Google
prioritize sites which demonstrate
authority. One of the critical indicators
that Google uses is the number of links
from reputable sites back to your site.
Link building involves outreach to
reputable online publications, blogs, and
other websites to place articles containing
backlinks to your site. including speaking at industry events and
pointing attendees back to your online
presence.
And quality is always more important
than quantity. It’s better to have 10 high-
quality links than 100 low-quality ones.
This strategy also helps to bring more
organic traffic to your site, and helps build
your audience, sales leads, and revenue. Executed effectively, this process can
successfully generate high quality content
that a business can publish on own site
and media. This, in turn, boosts credibility
for subsequent pitches to digital media
outlets.
Digital Public Relations
Outreach Public Relations Strategies
in the Digital Age
Of course, as with any type of PR, outreach
is central to digital public relations. Digital
public relations involves researching,
customizing, and then pitching content
to online publications, digital media,
and other websites. This sounds a lot like
traditional PR - and it is. What is the role of Public Relations (PR)
in the digital age? Should we merely
hustle for media coverage while producing
corporate annual reports? Well, the
answers to these questions may surprise
you.
It also involves content marketing, which
incorporates the owned media in the Paid,
Earned, Shared and Owned (PESO)
model of PR. For example, according
to Gini Dietrich, a lead blogger at Spin
Sucks, the number of B2B buyers who
read blog content before making a final
purchasing decision rose from 66 percent
in 2017 to 71 percent in 2018.
Additionally, 52 percent of buyers say
that if brands package relevant content
well, they will be more inclined to revisit
their sites since this can help them with
product research.
Here are 4 tactics to make your digital
PR outreach more effective (you’ll notice
many of these are adapted directly from
traditional PR toolkit): Compiling
relevant lists of digital media contacts,
and building strong relationships with
them over time; Researching sites’
editorial calendars and tailoring your
pitches accordingly; Issuing rich media
press releases, that work on desktop and
mobile screens; and Conducting offline
PR activities to support your digital PR,
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While media relations remains an anchor
for the PR professional, Dietrich suggests
that the digital components of the
communications mix will and has indeed
already taken on greater prominence. These
include content, email marketing, social
media, crisis and reputation management,
events, social advertising, and more. Some
of the strategies include:
#1 PR Professionals should
be Brand Storytellers
Unlike PR professionals of the past, digital
age publicists must tell their corporate
brand story without spin. Stalwarts
here include Zappos and their story of
delivering happiness, Virgin and their
larger-than-life founder Richard Branson,
and Red Bull’s unforgettable dive from
space featuring Felix Baumgartner.
Here, you can use the formula of fiction
writing to tell your story: Turn your story
from idea to concept. An example of an
idea is “The rise of healthy fruit-based
drinks” while a concept would be “How
Company ABC reinvented the concept of
breakfast drinks in 1955 by introducing the
smoothie”. Notice how the concept opens
the door to a more dramatic question.
Develop company characters. There are
five key elements here: passion (what your
audience care about), a protagonist (usually
you, your brand or your customer), the
antagonist (the villain or “problem” solved
by your brand), the revelation (twists in
the plot), and the transformation (how
things changed thereafter).
#2 Creating Shareable and
Searchable Content
To be a blockbuster on screens large and
small, your content needs to be valuable,
searchable and shareable.
Do the SEO dance with Google: When
creating content, consider how your target
audience would search for content online.
Be mindful of the following: Avoid
creating wholesale duplicate content
as Google may penalize your search
rankings; Use the right URLs, keywords,
title tags, meta-tags, and alt-texts (for
images), to optimize your content; Stay
away from content farms and robots, and
black hat practices like keyword stuffing or
submission to online directories with low
credibility; Look out for content scrapers
and content stealers, and determine if it’s
worth your while to take action against
them; and Understand how the different
updates to Google’s algorithm affects
search engine rankings.
Provide valuable content: The best
forms of content - be they blog posts,
articles, web copy, ebooks, white papers,
newsletters, videos, images, or case studies
- are those which provide value. They are
trustworthy, written by experts, free of
typos/spelling/grammar mistakes, reflect
original thinking, and helpful to customers
and prospects. By regularly sharing such
content, your website will rise in authority
on the specific topic and be rewarded by