How Can I Use Digital Marketing to Better My Brand’s PR Strategy – see here

When a brand needs it, PR is their best friend. When they aren’t in a crisis and public relations aren’t at the top of your list of things to think about, PR is non-existent for a lot of websites, businesses, and brands.

Public relations isn’t meant to be tapped into once every 6-12 months. PR is used continuously to freshen up a brand’s image, create positive conversations in the marketplace, present new products or services in a certain light, and position your brand for success.

At the heart of solid PR is digital marketing. There is no better way to reach an audience than through online channels, a la social media, email, video, and directly on your website. If these channels are underdeveloped or non-existent, there’s a problem.

How to improve a brand’s PR is by doing simple day-to-day digital marketing tasks, prioritizing increasing awareness and maintaining reputation. Here is a little more on precisely what this entails.

Is PR And Digital Marketing the Same Thing?

PR and digital marketing are not the same. They are similar but distinctly different.

PR strictly focuses on improving and creating awareness around a brand’s reputation.

Digital marketing might have this same goal, or it might not. Marketing is all about promotions, products, services, personalities, a brand as a whole, a brand-supported initiative, or something similar.

Functioning together, PR and digital marketing are a powerful combination that maximizes the impact of elements of web design, search engine optimization, content writing, influencer use, social media, email, and audience-building.

What is Digital Marketing’s Best PR Advantage?

Anything you do digitally has a data-trace of some kind. This data accumulates. Then you have insights into how social media followers are behaving, where you’re getting clicks on your websites, and what’s selling and what isn’t.

This is digital marketing’s best advantage. Analytics can monitor if a strategy is working.

A skilled PR and digital marketing expert will use this information to target sub-populations, fine-tune messaging, reframe existing content, and create new content with blogs, articles, infographics, images, and videos.

In digital marketing, you are constantly getting feedback and you can monitor the online conversation. This is best demonstrated with social media where comments, likes, and shares are continually visible. Searching out a hashtag or term can yield pages of results, a document of what’s being discussed on a specific subject.

What Is Digital Marketing PR?

Digital marketing PR is a hyper-motivated form of public relations done digitally. Years ago, publicists would work to get attention from TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and more. Traditional press releases reigned supreme. Rebranding was done at that time offline.

Today, we live in a digital world. PR has gone digital. With that, PR doesn’t rely necessarily on connecting with major media channels a la television, radio, etc. Every brand has a built-in audience. They can do their PR, primarily through social media.

You can speak directly to your audience via social channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others.

At a base level, maintaining social media channels and a regularly updated website gives you ways to craft a brand image over the long-term. Should there ever be a panic, an incident, or something requiring an emergency PR response, you already have your audience gathered together on social media and releasing a message in response to a PR crisis becomes easy.

What is the Goal of Digital Marketing PR?

Any sort of long-term PR strategy does two things – creates awareness and answers ‘what’.

For example, you can do a lot to make people aware that you exist. That’s almost the easy part. Then there’s informing those people of what you do, who you are, and what you’re about.

You tell people more about your brand through text, images, video, logo graphics, and tone.

The better you communicate who you are, the more likely users will come to identify with your brand. That’s what creates an audience. Brands in every category – from the corporate world to entertainment – use this to generate attention, clicks, audience, and sales.

What Are Some Digital PR Strategies to Use In A Crisis?

A basic digital PR crisis response involves key elements and potentially additional strategies. Here is a little of what you can look at to get ready for if/when there is a need to activate a PR strategy quickly.

• Prepare a pre-formatted online press release with key information filled in.
• Create a basic digital marketing strategy that you update at least once a month with posts. That is, one blog per month, a schedule of social media postings, and an email campaign.
• Build relationships with relevant online publications. Seek out bloggers and online journalists. When you need them, they’ll be more willing to help if they can.
• Reach out to influencers relevant to your brand. Influencers have large audiences, promising high engagement and allowing you to quickly get the word out about your brand.
• Publish high-value content with internal linking to promote your website. Promote the content you publish by sharing it on social media, posting it on your website’s front page, and tagging it in emails when appropriate.
• Monitor online reviews of your business and its products or services. A lot of negative reviews could generate bad PR even if you aren’t aware of it. If that’s you, work to address those bad reviews.

How Do I Use Social Media For PR?

Social media is often presented as your main tool in digital PR. It is thought there’s a right way and wrong way to use it.

In the right, you can connect directly to customers and release statements without any media distortion. You can also monitor competitors, getting their inspiration or judging their strategies.

Social media lets you get the word out on blogs, articles, images, infographics, and marketing videos. The key to social media marketing is providing value and information sans agenda. It’s inappropriate to sell, sell, sell on social media. It’s not the place for it. Users are there to connect and converse. For that to happen around your brand, you must provide value in every post.

Be subtle and persuasive in what you post and what you’re selling rather than having it be direct promotions.

How Do I Know My PR Strategy is Working?

You can measure your PR strategy by metrics, including web traffic, generated leads, sales, and social media conversation.

• Website traffic. The more your brand is mentioned online positively, the more frequently users will click on you. If you see website traffic getting a bump, your PR marketing is working.

• Social media conversation. On social media, fit every comment into a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ category. Measure before and after your PR strategy. You know your PR is working if the tone has moved more positive.

• More leads and sales. As you use PR, it will ideally get you in front of more of your target audience. This should create more leads. It is then up to the rest of your digital marketing and web design to turn those leads into conversions, ultimately resulting in more sales.

• Organic SEO clicks. As you publish more content, if it’s keyword-optimized and receives the attention you think it will with users, you may see Local SEO ranking improve and more organic SEO clicks come through.

As experts in digital marketing and PR, Unlimited Exposure has the time, tools, and resources to manage your brand online. After we establish a clear vision on where you see your brand, Unlimited Exposure will help you get from ‘here’ to ‘there’. Build a strong reputation. Create awareness. Motivate users to connect, interact, and buy from you. This is how you successfully grow your business. It’s part-PR and part-marketing, all the while offering value to your customers. This drives traffic and in turn, sales.