In today’s world where technology thrives and globalisation has made the world a lot smaller, campaigns within our industry always have different requirements. Whilst some may take a more traditional PR approach, others will require a digital route. A combination of the two, however, will always yield the best results.
Before we begin, it’s important to highlight that in almost every traditional campaign, there will also be digital activity to some degree. In the most basic sense, every story is communicated nowadays digitally in some capacity whether it’s as simple as an email or a blog. It’s become apparent that although PR campaigns tend to have some digital aspects as part of a wider campaign, we have in fact always been doing some form of Digital PR, limited as it may be, for quite some time.
TV, radio and print will always be central and integral to PR and communications, but digital PR will increase awareness of the brand using online methods, with more opportunities to reach a broader audience. A comprehensive digital PR plan will further optimise your campaign through strategies such as search engine optimisation (SEO), influencer marketing and social media, for example. Two important benefits that we’ll look at today are brand presence and campaign reach.
Brand presence
Brand presence has always been a core pillar in public relations whilst perception of your brand can manifest in various ways. Digital PR offers more alternative outlets to promote your brand compared to traditional methods plus there tends to be larger readership or circulation than print.
Concerns over brand presence tend to stem from how quickly your brand is thought of when a similar product or service is mentioned, or what the overall thoughts are when your brand is cited – the goal is to ensure its front of mind when spoken about and at the top of the search engine when someone searches online. As your brand awareness continues to grow, this further benefits the business and its other objectives.
From a traditional perspective improving brand presence previously involved increasing the likeliness of your company, service or product and being recognised by its target audience. This is what we would describe as physical recognition – witnessing a stunt or experiential experience or simply coming across a campaign in a newspaper, for example, thus being informed of the company’s activity and mission through the campaign’s communication itself.
We all know the benefits that come with a good physical brand presence but an online presence, combined appropriately with a traditional approach, can truly skyrocket a brand’s awareness.
Increasing brand presence through Digital PR is similar to the traditional definition except one of the main aims is to get Google, and every other search engine, to recognise your brand too, and see it as relevant and concise data. When you search for anything on the internet you are provided with a plethora of results ranging from completely unrelated information to exactly what you need, so you need to increase the position of your brand to ensure you are on the first page of their search.
In a perfect world, your brand will be the top result on any Google search that pertains to what you offer. A good Digital PR plan will help increase your brand’s position (or rank) as much as possible.
Ensure you are focusing more on research, data and creativity to create content and assets to place your brand on websites with the highest domain authorities, meaning your brand will be seen on websites which are classed as the most visited. Through methods such as keyword research, content is created with the mission to make it as optimal as possible, targeting titles and platforms where we can optimise reach and value.
If you combine the two methods effectively by ensuring the traditional aspects of the campaign are as optimised as possible and work for both online and print outlets, and all content designed for digital use is kept in line with the brand’s overall messaging, then it’s a recipe for success.
Campaign reach
Campaign reach is another important factor that will benefit from a comprehensive PR plan consisting of both traditional and digital aspects. Nowadays most, if not all, titles will have an online platform and various social media channels, all of which are used by media titles to convey news stories. Using digital PR, you can utilise this extended reach to bring your audience towards your own site.
Through traditional PR methods such as media landscape research or news monitoring, you can identify the top titles and journalists, who not only write about the topics and sectors related to your brand, but also discover the journalists who are most likely to include a link directing readers back to your brand by including a backlink.
When you combine this with traditional PR methods, you completely maximise the potential reach for any campaign, brand or both. All forms of communication must include a link to the relevant brand or product so when it is picked up by your target publication, all readers have quick and easy access to your brand simply by a click.
Link reclamation is the main method to achieve this. When reviewing the coverage of a campaign are you including whether a URL link was included in the article? If not, you should start now. Even if your brand has achieved online coverage and previously been included, we recommend reaching back out to the publication to ensure that they add a link to your site. This means that before begin a new digital-focussed campaign, you can quickly further improve on what has already been achieved.
As we all know, the bigger the publication, the bigger its reach will be. This means that having a backlink to your site in a publication with a reach of two million, for example, will make a much bigger impact than being in that same publication without a link. This is a key benefit as it optimises the reach of any publication, adding a new element to the process.
Can digital and traditional methods of PR work hand-in-hand?
The quick answer is yes. There are many ways to explain how Digital PR and traditional PR methods can work so well together however they will essentially fall into the subject matters of ‘brand presence’ and ‘campaign reach’. Regardless of the platform or the type of media your brand is mentioned in, online or in physical form, all mentions contribute to your brand presence and every method is designed to secure coverage and attention to increase brand presence.
Likewise, whether it is a website with a high domain authority or a niche title made for a specific demographic, both traditional and digital PR exists to utilise the publication’s audience and bring further awareness to the brand, just in different ways, focusing on different elements.
Combining Digital PR with your traditional PR adds a whole new element to your campaign. When you combine the two you cover all aspects of communication, both in the traditional sense with media coverage and placements and in the digital sense in terms of online authority and search engine ranking.