Digital public relations, PR for short, is essentially the same as conventional PR, but uses modern and high-footfall platforms and channels to boost brand awareness and target communications to reach key consumer demographics.
While there is confusion about how digital PR compares to traditional PR, the reality is that all the principles of PR are consistent, whichever medium you’re using. However, your knowledge of online channels, audience interactions, and precision targeting can make a significant difference in the results your digital PR campaigns achieve.
To fully harness the opportunity of digital PR and maximize brand reach and recognition, it’s essential to understand other fundamental digital marketing skills, such as content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and potentially influencer marketing, to create the right mix.
Done right, digital PR can be incredibly powerful and help businesses manage reputational damage, establish rapport directly with their audiences, and create communities and social hubs where brands aren’t seen as faceless corporations but as active participants in the conversation.
How Do Digital PR and Traditional Public Relations Compare?
Traditional PR has long been used within marketing. PR professionals, marketers and spokespeople liaise with journalists, reporters, and media representatives to secure features in publications such as magazines, trade journals, and newspapers.
Over the years, the role of a publicist has become more prominent. PR executives today don’t just secure media placements or manage advertising but work closely with broadcasters and publishers to foster a reputation through the media and announce news or address critiques in a positive way.
While radio, TV, and print media remain visible, they also represent a smaller fraction of the number of outlets and content sources modern audiences rely on. This means brands need to pivot to ensure the same PR activities continue but address younger and engaged readerships using online platforms rather than conventional mediums.
There are also complexities within the world of digital PR, with differences between more granular aspects such as earned and paid media, lead gen PR, and community partnerships. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll stick with the overall purpose of digital PR – while noting that some brands in niche sectors hire PR specialists with specific areas of expertise!
The takeaway is that digital PR aims to increase the presence and recognition of a brand across a myriad of digital platforms, using social media and content sharing to catalyze growth, and to ensure brand mentions and features are highly visible across a variety of online publications and channels.
What Do Jobs in Digital PR Involve?
Today, there are hundreds of digital channels that marketers and businesses might use to connect with their target audiences. While PR specialists might focus on social media marketing and SEO to enhance their digital profiles, the basic principles remain as relevant as ever.
A digital PR specialist might, for instance:
- Create press releases for online publication
- Liaise with bloggers, vloggers, influencers and journalists
- Arrange reviews, interviews, and product features in digital publications
- Optimize digital press releases using links and search terms to improve reach
- Build on outreach marketing through influencers to augment brand recognition
- Publish supplementary digital content to support high-traffic backlinks
All these skills and strategies are the bread and butter of experienced marketers, and if you can learn all the ins and outs of social media marketing, brand collaborations, and digital brand positioning, the abilities inherent in conventional PR are easily transferable.
The trick is to remember that PR isn’t about sales, promotions, advertising, or campaigns. Instead, the priority is to foster a positive perception of the brand, sharing values and stories, brand propositions, and exciting developments with a strong, clear, and unique tone of voice viewers will like and engage with.
While much of the digital landscape is accessible at a click, it’s also vital that digital PR experts build those dialogues and relationships with high-profile bloggers, reviewers, and influencers in the online space to ensure their posts and content are widely seen and have an impact on the brand profile.
Is it Worth Learning How to Manage Digital PR Campaigns?
Regardless of your current role, qualifications, or level of seniority, digital PR is going nowhere, and it’s very much worth investing time and effort to learn how to pivot and repurpose content for this young and fast-growing subsector.
Focused and targeted digital PR campaigns can be fundamental to developing a digital identity that builds on brand awareness you may have grown over years of conventional PR, and the benefits can be compelling:
- Drawing greater numbers of website visitors through online brand mentions, links, and reviews.
- Improving your SEO profile and visibility, using authoritative sites to publish links and product information that will help you climb the search engine rankings.
- Establishing strong credibility as an authority in your sector, using non-sales-focused quality content to ensure your content is trusted and seen as sector-leading.
- Better trust in your brand, where target viewers learn more about who you are and what you stand for, without being subjected solely to hard-sale content or promotions.
- Higher leads and conversion metrics, with greater brand mentions and visitors leading to more earned links, negating the need for paid promotional links and ensuring your core audience is more likely to learn about you, like what they see, and take action to engage.
The nature of digital PR means that brands can easily monitor response data and success rates without the complexities of traditional print media, where it would be impossible to accurately quantify the number of impressions or the proportion of the audience who had responded.
Digital PR can also be highly cost-effective, without the cost per impression or click associated with PPC advertising campaigns. Instead, brands use well-crafted press releases and strategic online placements to ensure they gain maximum traction without the spend.
Using Existing Content and Brand Assets Within Digital PR
The quality of your content is key within digital PR since the gold standard is to produce highly shareable content, generating naturally higher audiences and developing your position as a brand authority with a positive reputation.
Marketers can often repurpose and reformat content to be suitable for digital PR purposes, perhaps taking an initial blog and transforming it through:
- Adding videos, graphics, and infographics.
- Reformatting the content for secondary press, trade publications, and guest blog articles.
- Reiterating messaging through social media or a networking channel like LinkedIn.
Using every piece of content to maximum value can avoid any unnecessarily high marketing costs. It can also ensure the tone, style, and themes of your communications and messaging are consistent across all channels, adding value and ensuring your brand personality is evident and approachable.
Digital PR Within Social Media Marketing
Social media plays a big role in digital PR, where businesses use varied platforms and channels to connect with their target audience, research competitor strategies, and look for opportunities to stand out or capture emerging trends.
Promoting content via social media, whether PR pieces restructured for the platform or using conversational video and short-form content to initiate a conversation, can result in greater content sharing and followers.
Regardless of the platform, PR remains all about building a sense of trust and familiarity and concentrating on brand reputation. So, any PR-focused post should build on these objectives and steer clear of sales-oriented content that can feel pushy or less appealing to new viewers.
Digital marketers working within the PR space use their social media PR content carefully by:
- Using selected keywords and hashtags to improve reach.
- Mixing between live posts and Q&A sessions or other user-participation content and videos or graphic content – depending on the styles of post most popular on the platform.
- Inviting co-hosts, influencers, brand partners, or collaborators to join them, perhaps when presenting a webinar or live digital event, to broaden the number of potential attendees.
- Connecting with viewers and other businesses, responding to reviews, comments and mentions and building a community with common aims or values.
All this work builds a platform on which other more promotional or advertising-based content can flourish, with an engaged, actively involved audience who know what the brand is about and perceive it as a business they like.
Four Steps to Creating a Successful Digital PR Project
Whether you’re already working within digital marketing or PR and want to add a few new skills to your resume or are a junior marketer keen to specialize in digital PR, knowing how to construct a campaign and the factors that will influence your approach is essential.
We suggest following these steps to ensure your digital PR is precision-focused:
- Analyze the target viewer or audience to gain detailed insights into their preferences, average ages, locations, other brands they follow or engage with, and the types of content and themes they are more likely to respond to.
- Create quantifiable targets and aims based on the outcomes you’d most like to achieve, whether that’s a larger social media following, a reduction in negative brand perceptions, a bigger market share, or higher visitor numbers to your site.
- Research influencers and partners who appeal to a similar audience, looking at journalists, influencers, bloggers, channels, industry experts, and reporters who may have a mutually beneficial reason to engage in a relationship with your brand.
- Assess varied content types to ensure your PR remains appealing, exciting, and immersive. That may depend on the platforms your audience uses, the style and tone of your brand, and what you are trying to achieve, but high-quality, useful, and attractive content is always the goal.
Finally, it’s important to implement a way to measure the outcomes of your digital PR campaign. Rather than waiting for a campaign to conclude, you can use ongoing tracking to see where you have the capacity to improve and make tweaks along the way to optimize returns.
The techniques you use to monitor digital PR activity will vary but could include tracking click-throughs, follows, and social shares, monitoring sales volumes or revenues or using polls and audience surveys to measure brand perceptions and positive sentiments.
Getting Started as a Digital PR Specialist
If you’re looking for your first job within digital PR or want to take the next step on the digital marketing career ladder, Digital Marketing Jobs is the best place to start. You can browse the top marketing vacancies ranging from full-time in-house PR roles to flexible freelance contracts and put all you’ve learned about digital PR to the test.
Our jobs board is regularly updated, so if you are still looking for the perfect role, be sure to upload your resume or keep checking back to ensure you’re the first to respond when the ideal digital PR vacancy becomes available!
Ready to start your digital PR career? Browse PR jobs →
