Digital PR
Good digital PR is anything that positively influences a brand’s social media or organic search profiles, or any positive online media coverage. With this in mind, we generally work with the following 3 principal KPIs.
Community Growth
- Have we increased our client’s target audience community size? Likes/Fans/Followers etc
- Are we driving traffic from social channels to our client’s website?
- Have we created new brand advocates?
- Are posts about our client being shared by the relevant social communities?
SEO
- How is our client ranking for keywords?
- Have we managed to increase traffic from search engines to our client’s website?
- Is increased organic traffic resulting in more leads?
- How many links have we built, via the activity we’ve undertaken?
Online article placement (including reviews):
- Have we got our client more positive coverage than their competitors?
- Have we secured our client coverage in identified online media targets?
- Have our client’s key messages been pulled through into media coverage?
- Have we secured good reviews on sites that rank highly for keywords the target audience will be searching for?
- Have we seen an increase in referral traffic from online article placement?
Understanding Digital PR
What is the difference between Digital PR and Traditional PR?
Increased Brand Awareness
Traditional PR uses high circulation, readership, and viewer ratings to determine who to approach when selling in content to media houses and publishers. Even traditional PR’s who claim to ‘do digital’ still use this method. Like so many marketing terms it’s born from marketing tactics evolving and agencies trying to keep up. In particular, old school PR agencies realising the print media landscape is much smaller, and launching ‘digital PR’ pages on their websites in response. Typically these summarise their social media expertise. Social media = digital PR box ticked. But it’s so much more than that.
Digital PR doesn’t exclusively focus on the number of followers on social media sites and readers before approaching them. It also focuses on evaluating domain authority and non-paid opportunities for link citations. The success of Digital PR is, as a result, much more measurable than Traditional PR.
How do we fit Digital PR into your marketing strategy?
For maximum effect, digital PR should closely follow your overall digital marketing strategies and when done correctly can strengthen weaker landing pages and increase the site traffic of slower-moving products and services. When used with solid SEO and social media marketing strategies, Digital PR can take advantage of key search term trends and maximise coverage on what people are already searching for on the Internet. This holistic approach to digital marketing garners the maximum ROI as it essentially ‘covers all the bases’ and ensures the overall plan works effectively, even when one particular channel or message is technically underperforming.
The measures of success
One of the great aspects of all digital marketing activities is that the results are measureable. With Digital PR we’re looking for metrics like share of voice, backlinks from press portals and mentions across social media platforms. We work with a huge range of different clients and all of them have different needs and ultimately different success metrics. A large multi-national client might be looking for hundreds of mentions across global news agency websites, whereas a start up might be relying on just one or two mentions on a site like Wired and very active social media channels to ensure success and ultimately growth.
We are experienced in using Cision/Trendkite for share of voice measurement and we use our own social listening tools to track engagement and mentions across socials channels.