How Digital PR can help you move the needle

Digital PR campaigns can lead to increasing your website links count. However, getting links just to increase the number of websites pointing to you will not have a massive impact on your ROAS. The process to deliver digital PR campaigns with tangible results is complex and requires interaction among different teams on both sides, agencies and clients. From my experience developing holistic SEO strategies for numerous projects in different industries, countries and languages, I have learned that successful campaigns are always compliant with the following premises.

Define clear goals for your campaign

Building links just to increase DR is a thing from the past, modern digital pr campaigns are driven by business goals. The format of the campaign and the assets created to support it, need to be in line with something your business needs to achieve in the next 12 months. It can be improving awareness for a specific business area, driving customer to know about your newest business line through a free tool, anything you can think of needs to be backed by a solid business goal. This will help to measure the campaign’s success and, more importantly, make the best use of your SEO budget. A link generation campaign that brings traffic from websites where your customers spend time, is undoubtedly something that will bring more revenue than a random expert comment in a newspaper.

Bring the right teams into the planning process

By bringing the right team members from both sides (client & agency) to the table initially, campaign implementation becomes much easier thanks to integrating the multiple creative units involved. Especially in PR campaigns created with the idea of complementing other actions such as PPC and Social campaigns to keep users in our funnel, coordination at every touchpoint is critical. This can only be achieved if a clear structure with a defined collaboration protocol is available. In big teams where multiple roles from different companies are involved, each person needs to know their responsibilities and assigned tasks.  

Use a data-driven process for targeting publications and influencers

Coming down to the process of finding relevant websites and publications that might find your content and media pieces useful for their audience, involves holistically combining technology with the human factor. Rather than focus the whole process on existing databases, you should define the interests of your current audience and see if does matches the type of buying personas you are after. This requires a deep understanding of the client business and goals to prospect websites and influencers properly. Technology will help you find potential prospects, and there are many software and solutions to do this. However, only if the target user definition was properly completed in the previous step, you will end with a valuable list of potential prospects. Once you have this list, the work is not completed yet though, it’s necessary to analyse those websites and publications, to make sure our target audience is actually present and consuming content from such sources. Again, different services can support you on this task, pointing you in the right direction through information regarding the types of users visiting those websites.

Always measure results and be honest

Campaign results should be measured during and after delivery, by doing so you will be able to detect potential tactical changes. Companies usually appreciate honesty and proactivity even if your campaign is not performing as expected. Tracking response to outreach will let you activate correcting actions before it is too late. After campaign reporting should include not only the number of links and mentions achieved, but the impact of those in the company’s bottom-line, traffic and conversions generated by those are usually a good indicator.

If you are looking to run a Digital PR campaign to improve your results from Organic Search, our Digital PR experts can give you free initial advice.