Digital PR: What You’re Missing Out On & How to Fix It

PR is a communication strategy that builds a brand’s positive reputation with the public. Traditional PR involves building relationships with journalists and various media outlets to receive brand exposure. This tactic translates to digital PR, but the digital landscape also affords brands other ways to build their public presence outside of such relationships.

Digital PR encompasses SEO-related activities like link-building, which itself involves a number of different tactics. However, there’s more to the strategy than that. A common term in content marketing is “storytelling,” and this concept can be applied to digital PR as well. Your goals are to shape your audience’s understanding of who your brand is, what you have to offer, build positive relationships, boost website traffic, improve search rankings, and ultimately increase sales.

While digital PR is still an emerging part of digital marketing, there are various tactics that not everyone uses but should. It can be something that not only generates brand awareness but can affect your site’s overall search rankings. These are, or should be, both critical goals in your overall marketing strategy. Here are some ways to get into digital PR.

Become a Publisher

Whether you use a blog, a content hub, a podcast, or a YouTube channel to publish will depend on your business offerings and model. But it’s important to use one or more of the many available channels to share your expertise and to educate the public about your services or products. The former should be your focus while the latter can be supplemental; PR is, after all, about relationships, not straight marketing. If you’re helpful to your audience, they might turn to you next time they need something in your industry.

An easy entry into publishing online is LinkedIn—anyone with an account can publish long-form blog posts. You can use the platform to share content you publish elsewhere, but you can also use it as a standalone avenue to sharing articles with your professional network.

A few great examples of sites that publish content are Moz, Hubspot, Neil Patel, and Oh My Disney, among plenty of others. If even companies as reputable as Disney believe in publishing content, you will need to do the same if you want to compete.