Public Relations is a vital tool that businesses of all sizes use to communicate stories about their brand to a particular target audience. When you think about the words “public relations”, traditional publications such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio may first come to mind. However, over the last decade, Digital PR has gained traction and now tends to offer more value than its traditional counterpart.
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR sows the seeds for business success and enables brands to grow a strong brand reputation. It can help develop brand awareness as well as generate sales from new and existing customers.
The added beauty of Digital PR is that it acts as an SEO tactic, something which traditional public relations is unable to compete with. This means Digital PR can produce longevity for brands online and so can be more cost-effective than traditional methods.
Benefits of using Digital PR in Business
Using Digital PR as part of your overall communications strategy offers a wide range of benefits, especially when the publication in question includes a backlink to your website.
PRing your business online has many advantages, including:
- Has the potential to increase your website rankings
- Drives traffic, resulting in additional sales
- Ability to speak to your target audience on a wider scale (e.g. locally, regionally, nationally, or even internationally)
- Increases customer trust
- Easier to measure the success of a Digital PR campaign compared to traditional media relations
Different types of Digital PR
There are several different forms of online public relations, these include:
- Writing and circulating media releases (also known as press releases) to different online publications
- Collaborating with bloggers and vloggers, for example, inviting them to events or sending them products to review
- Creating bespoke blog content for third party websites
- Working on influencer marketing campaigns, including encouraging them to provide shout outs for your business
Case Study Overview
As a small PR agency based in York, North Yorkshire, we have been fortunate to work with several independent businesses and charities by overseeing their Digital PR campaigns.
Personally, I adore working on Digital PR projects and get such a buzz working with brands to nurture and develop measured PR success.
One of our biggest successes was working with a small deli business that wanted to use online media relations to boost their direct website sales by 10% in three months.
We used the quirks within their business to sell stories to the media. We were consequently able to secure over 40 articles in regional and national digital publications across the UK. This brought many advantages to the small business, especially in terms of sales which continued to increase over the next 12 months. Evaluating the data, it became apparent that their sale growth increased by over 30% which is a great result.
The nature of digital communications is that it offers longevity, meaning a business is more likely to appear in a search engine if they perform regular Digital PR. So, we now work with this small deli business twice a year to help cultivate its digital presence.
How Little Seed Group can help
There is an abundance of ways that we can help businesses and charities to grow brand awareness.
Our first and commonly used service is a retainer PR contract where we deliver a carefully crafted Digital PR campaign over a period of months. Click here to get in touch with us to discuss a retainer contract.
Our second option is a project-based contract where we perform an online media relations campaign at a particular time of year. Click here to get in touch with us to discuss a project.
Lastly, we offer an e-learning course on how to write your own media releases (commonly known as press releases) for those looking to craft and circulate their own online communication literature. Click here to enrol on our e-learning course.
Digital PR when used correctly can be a great asset to any business or charity. The main ingredients for success are:
- a strong and straight to the point story
- a well-researched strategy of how to correctly approach journalists
- editors and producers as well as a media release that includes some key SEO content.
We hope you found this blog post useful. If you want to learn how Digital PR could help your brand then get in touch with us to book a complimentary 20 minute appointment.
