Blog Post How and Why to Integrate Digital Marketing & Public Relations
There is an old saying: “Advertising is what you pay for, publicity is what you pray for.” In the Traditional era, a company’s marketing team and PR used to work parallel to each other. The PR team focused on media relations like getting the names, identities, and personalities of your client’s presence on platforms like television, radio, etc. On the other hand, the marketing team spent their time building connection and trust between clients’ products with consumers. They both had different goals and were aware of each other’s role in the organization yet never crossing over. However, with the evolution of the digital era, the world has taken a 360-degree turn and it has become apparent that integrating Digital marketing and Public relations made a lot of sense. Now the organization needs to do the hard work of adapting to the new digital trends and it can only be possible by aligning the PR with Marketing efforts with a digital-first approach.
What is Digital Public Relations
Backlinks. Link Building. Domain Authority. Sounds new to you? Digital PR professionals have these terms at the tip of their fingers. They live and breathe links. Such is the state of the Public industry today. Let’s face the reality! A single email with an eye-catching subject line and authentic content has the power to earn top-tier coverage, hundreds of backlinks, and thousands of social media shares and tweets. This is the power of Digital Public Relations.
In short, Digital Public Relations is the strategy used to increase the awareness of the online presence of the brand and broadly spread the word about the reputation of the company. Static information can be transferred into conversations and companies can communicate directly to their target audience just about any time of the day. Google search engine has become the “new normal” for finding information about a particular brand but to make the most impact, digital PR relies on numerous strategies like Search engine Optimisation (SEO), content marketing, influence outreach, and Social Media.
The key to a successful Digital Public relations strategy is to establish mutually beneficial relationships with digital influencers/ journalists through deliberate and personal correspondence. Such connections last longer and the digital PR professionals can continue to work with their contact to share their information indefinitely.
How to align Digital Marketing with Public Relations
What are you doing in 2021 to maximize your Digital Public Relations? If you have not thought of it yet, here are some of the strategies you can follow to create a solid online reputation:
- Content Marketing & SEO: The go-to strategy is to create high quality content and before you publish the content your website, consider pitching it as a guest post to other websites. Each guest post that links back to your website, increase awareness of your brand and helps you generate inbound links that ultimately leads to boost in SEO. The more high-quality inbound/backlinks clicks to your website, the better your Search Engine Results Page ( SERP).
- Reach out to Influencers as Journalists: Traditional journalists are thing of the past. Professional Public Relations are reaching instead reaching out to Influencers. These social stars influencers along with their fan following on various social media platforms help in boosting the brand’s worth.
- Press Releases: Audience love to explore the web in search of new stories or media print so by pushing out a compelling press release, you can easily generate new leads and drive high traffic. One important thing to keep in mind is to include your website link in your press release copy so that target audience can head directly to your website by clicking on that link. Major benefit in doing a press release is that it is very cost effective and you would be able to attract the influential investors who can provide sponsorship.
Why Digital PR is important
Digital Public Relations focuses on an organization that wants to scale their business, reach the target audience and make huge sales using a digital marketing agency’s services. Let’s look at the few advantages Digital Public Relations offer:
- Exposure of the brand to more targeted audience: Being well positioned in the online media results in increased brand awareness and in turn the company is able to easily reach more potential customers.
- Reaching out to more people through social sharing: Digital PR take the help of media people, customers and influencers to share the information and content with their own audience. Online media coverage is shared in large numbers on social media platforms and provide the opportunity to tap into and leverage the following of other influential social media accounts.
- Digital PR enhances company’s credibility: Having a strong online presence enhances your credibility by improving both quality as well as quantity of leads generated for the business.
- Improvement in Search Engine rankings and increased traffic: Links in the articles or blogs that are shared on social media make it easier for people to travel directly to your website. From there, one can easily track activity and re-target visitors with future campaigns.
Conclusion
Like Digital Marketing, Public Relations has gone Digital too. Digital PR is storytellers before anything else. If they have an interesting way to tell a story that is backed with the right PR strategy and data and if they are following the current market trends, then half of the battle is won. The other half is all about pitching it.
Pitch
Digital Public Relations is a strategically planned activity of using internet-based methods, tools, and channels to achieve a wide online presence and visibility. PR experts turn to some major cornerstones of digital media relations to reach and impact much broader audiences such as Search engine optimization, content marketing, social media, and influencer marketing. Digital Marketing and PR go hand-in-hand which will help in securing better organic rankings, improve traffic, and building effective relationships with their potential customers.
