PR Strategies That Support Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

Integrating a PR strategy into your digital marketing campaign is essential if you want to grow your online presence and develop your business.

Traditional PR methods are falling out of date and having to be modified to keep up with the digital world. At the end of the day, digital is the way forward. 

For most businesses, this is hard to accept, and embracing such a substantial change is even harder to comprehend. However, once the strategies are put in place and a full commitment to digital has been made, the results will be worth it.

Maybe you have already gone digital and now looking to up your marketing campaign but don’t know how. Well, this article is also for you and will provide a detailed insight into some key PR strategies you should adopt moving forward.

What is a PR strategy?

Before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s important to fully understand what a PR strategy is and the concept surrounding it.

It’s very simple, a PR strategy is something that provides the necessary structure to plan and deliver a given activity. An amazing PR strategy will give clear direction for the task at hand, in order for a goal to be achieved.

A PR strategy could include technological support, human resources, and pretty much anything that aids the process leading to the completion of your business objectives. 

In this case, the activity is your digital marketing campaign, and a PR strategy will allow it to excel and generate excellent results – hopefully!

It all comes down to running smooth Public Relations.

Create a user-friendly website 

A slow and unengaging website is going to scare off customers before you know it. I for one know I wouldn’t wait for more than a few seconds for a website to load.

It is so important to create a website that your customers can easily interact with because it’s one of the main systems that you use to communicate with them. 

Whether you’re processing an order, solving customer queries via live chat, the majority of your interaction is done through your website.

The reason businesses value customer interaction so much is because of the constructive feedback it produces. A standard website has at least one contact tab to allow customers to get in touch.

Extend your customer reach on social media 

Utilizing your PR strategy with your social media will allow you to reach more new customers online, and continue your relationship with existing customers.

Like most things, this is done best when consistency is involved. When trying to achieve anything on social media, consistency is a key driver of success, without it your customers will become bored and forget about you.

Try to create a steady posting schedule, and when you do post, engage with your customers on a public level through your posts, but also directly through DMs. 

Maintaining your customer relationships is hard, and they are often neglected for long periods of time, so don’t’ forget to engage with them yourself.

Maintain your reputation online

(Wordtracker)

Negative reviews are inevitable when you run a digital marketing campaign, they are pretty impossible to avoid – but not all hope is lost.

The way you respond to your negative reviews is the important part. Communicating respectfully and professionally is what can mend a damaged customer relationship, and provide confidence to a future customer that reads the review.

Although you definitely don’t want negative reviews, if you respond to them correctly, there’s no reason why you can’t drive more sales and extend your customer base.

How do you measure the success of your PR efforts?

As I’m sure you can imagine, the success of digital PR methods is not measured in the same way traditional methods once were. There’s no longer any physical distribution or readership figures.

A digital PR strategy is measured in a very similar way to a digital marketing campaign, with analytics and metrics (data). These are all collected and analyzed using various online tools.

Here are some of our favorite tools for measuring digital PR strategy success:

1) Google Analytics

A great feature that Google Analytics has is called ‘referral traffic’, which tracks site visits that came from outside sources (anything other than Google search). If you attempt to extend your customer reach with social media, and influencers support your brand, you will be able to track the location customers came from.

2) Moz’s Link Explorer

Moz’s Link Explorer gives you a detailed insight into the number of backlinks a website has. If you are conducting some competitor analysis or checking your own website for backlinks, it can be done for free in seconds. 

Not only that but your domain authority can be checked using the MozBar, another product from Moz. This tells you how well Moz expects you to rank in the search results. The higher, the better!

Conclusion

Investing in digital PR strategies and moving on from traditional methods will complement your digital marketing campaign tremendously.

Not only are the strategies above simple and extremely easy to implement, but you will also enjoy putting them to work. Every step of the way you are going to be engaging with customers online, fulfilling their needs, and making them happy – what better way to start building your brand.

In order for the strategies above to be successful, they have to be managed. Using digital tools like Google Analytics, Moz’s Link Explorer and MozBar will keep you in the loop with your PR efforts.