What is Digital PR? (and How It Can Improve Your Ranking)

Key Takeaways

now the thing I'm gonna say here I'm gonna be really honest with you this stuff takes time and it does take work if you're a busy marketing manager struggling to get through your to-do list as it is and you're thinking great let's do some digital PR I can probably fit that in if you're gonna do half an hour of digital PR per week that's not gonna touch the sides this is something where you need to dedicate time and energy to on a consistent basis thinking about doing some digital PR but not really where to start want to get seen everywhere and talked about everywhere that you go and I don't mean like those horrendous photos and the Christmas party where you were well stay tuned my name is Tim I'm from exposure ninja and we've run digital PR campaigns for dozens of businesses even ones that way more boring than yours and in this video I'm gonna be showing you exactly how to do explaining what digital PR is and how your business can take advantage the main difference between traditional PR and digital PR is that traditional PR is usually targeting traditional media so things like newspapers and magazines whereas digital PR is targeting the internet everyone's favorite the bad thing about newspapers and magazines aside from the fact that fewer and fewer people are spending time reading them is that they're made of paper and that gets stuck in a dolphin's blowhole digital PR on the other hand as well as being generally cheaper faster and more accessible for SMEs doesn't rely on paper which means it's super sustainable and sealife loves it because there are loads of different digital publications out there there's so many opportunities for SMEs to get coverage using visual PR so let's look at some of the main categories of digital PR that we'll be covering in today's video there are really three main types of people that you're gonna be targeting in your digital PR the first type is journalists so this is gonna be people that write in newspaper sites and magazine sites the second type is bloggers so people that run a blog and the third type is influencers usually going to be promoting you on their social channels of course there's a bit of crossover between each of these groups because some journalists are gonna write for other publications and might have their own blogs bloggers are gonna have social channels and these influencers are also gonna have blogs some of the time as well but really those are the three main categories of person that you're going to be going after now the exact targeting that's best for your business is gonna depend on what you're selling so really you want to look at which type of person holds the most influence over your audience and we'll talk a little bit about going after target publications when we talk about the process that you're gonna use to get digital PR in just a minute okay so let's look at some examples and as we go through these examples I want to talk about some of the different benefits that you can get from running a digital PR campaign now the first benefit is introduction so if your target audience isn't aware of you and you want to raise that awareness and get some visibility in front of them digital PR is a great way of being introduced in the first place one example of a client where we've used this Trippier as a way of getting introduced to a market is this business here so we're working with them and they're our children's toy company we've helped completely explode their sales in the first few months and we've used digital PR to do this by targeting bloggers that have a parent audience so targeting mummy and daddy bloggers basically what we've done is we've sent product out to them and when you have a look at some of the blog posts and the social posts that have gone out you'll see people commenting things like wow this looks like a great product what a great idea I'd love to get this for my son or daughter and this is people that weren't previously aware of the product who now know it the best part is though rather than just running an ad to those people we're actually appearing in front of them because we've been presented by someone that they already trust so by going through an influencer or through a blogger who already has credibility and weight with that audience it's a great way of shortcutting straight into their consciousness because their guard isn't up like if we were running out the next benefit is social proof if your target audience sees you reoww and they become familiar with seeing you everywhere there's a certain weight and credibility that that gives you and one of our clients is an expert in HR and runs a software company called clear review which is in HR and we've been running digital PR for them for years Stuart Hearn is the founder and CEO we get lots of coverage for Stuart and all sorts of publications because this tells the audience that hey this guy is a real authority he's got lots of credibility in this space and it's been really effective for them both are helping to drive visibility and awareness of Stuart in the business but also for helping their ranking the third benefit which I can't resist talking about being a complete SEO geek is that getting coverage in these sorts of publications can really really help your website's ranking one company that we've worked with on an extensive digital PR campaign worked in the PPI space and we got them coverage across loads of different news publications by running studies and surveys which the news publications found really interesting and that's a great way of picking up some visibility by conducting your own study you'll notice if you read a newspaper or magazines so much of the news actually comes from businesses that have paid a company like exposure ninja to conduct a study or a survey and then that's the thing that newspaper covers so it can be a great way of getting something newsworthy to actually get some attention for the business at the same time so one survey that we ran for this client it had over 250 different websites covering the story which really helped their ranking we took their lead volume from around 30 per day to as high as 400 plus leads per day through improving their ranking using this sort of digital PR so it can be a fantastic way of getting mentions and links for your business okay Tim great we understand this trip you up how does it work how do we actually start doing this well there are five different phases phase number one is a little bit boring it's the planning phase no planning's not boring apparently no apparently planning is really fun the planning phase the first step is you need to work out which publications you need to be seen in so this is going back to your target audience six questions to ask to understand your target audience and finding out which websites which social channels which newspaper sites which blogs do your audience spend their time on because those are really the ones that we want to get seen in we want to get seen where your audience is already spending your time another great thing that you can do is Google your competitors names and see which sites are mentioning them also Google your competitors SEOs name and see where they're being featured as well because that can give us a bit of an indication about any sites that might be up for running an interview or a feature piece on someone from your business the next step is to come up with some ideas for an angle that you can use in your PR outreach it's not enough to just message people saying hey we've launched a new website because nobody cares it's not enough to say hey we've just launched new products because nobody cares you need to give them an angle which is actually gonna be interesting to their target audience if I'm running a magazine I'm not going to be spending my money printing articles about your new product unless it is genuinely interesting so come up with something newsworthy imagine that you're an editor or a journalist for that publication or that you're a blogger what would you want to write about because if you can pitch them on that you're much more likely to get in without them having to do loads of work to kind of figure out an angle for you step number next is outreach outreach is really important you're gonna find the best person at this publication or the contact details of the influencer and you're gonna reach out to them with your idea what's important here is to get the right balance between being personal so sending them a personal message and being concise because these people are all really busy they don't need to read your life story they don't care about your life to be perfectly honest and they don't need to read about how you've been following them for 25 years and you think that they walk on water it doesn't come across genuine so instead includes some information about why you like their website or white it'd be a really good fit for you and then cut straight to the chase and tell them we've got this great idea we'd love to collaborate and get some content on your site the deal is that these people are busy and they're used to getting these sorts of emails so you don't need to beat around the bush or feel embarrassed that you're pitching but at the same time you don't just want to send some generic template thing that sounds like it's come from pitch box or something it needs to be tailored in order to actually resonate with that person and not get ignored the next step is to follow up you're not gonna get a yes the first time you're almost never gonna get a yes the first time you're gonna need to be fairly persistent here now there's a difference between persistent and annoying yes but we need to keep in mind that the people receiving these emails are extremely busy they get a lot of this sort of thing they might be approaching a deadline when you send your first email so they're just not really in that frame of mind so you need to gently follow up to remind them and appear at the top of their inbox I interviewed one of our most prolific digital PR ninjas Sam on the exposure ninja podcast recently linked in the description and asked her about how important the follow-up was and she said is everything you really need to be chasing these people because they very rarely give you a yes the first time and by the way this is where most amateur digital PR fall down they do a bit they lose interest something else comes up and then they forget to do any follow-up and the whole thing is complete waste of time the final step is the monitor and track when we're doing a digital PR campaign for time we keep track of every one that we've done outreach to we keep track of every one that we've spoken to and we keep track of every one that's published the content at the end the reason that we do this firstly we want to look at the commonalities between who's posting stuff because that can help shape our outreach in future and the second thing is we want to keep the relationships with those people because we might want to go back to them in future obviously we have an advantage being an agency and that we've done this across hundreds of clients over years so we've got a good base of contacts and we've got a good base of publications that we've worked with but even if you're just starting out it's a really good idea to start building your contact list so that you can talk to them in future just because someone says no this time doesn't next time you go out to them with a different article idea they might say yes how do you measure digital PR success well there's a few different ways of doing it and your measurement will really depend on your goals but assuming that your goals are more sales that's really one of the best things to measure how many sales are you getting now sales can come from lots of different places don't forget so we'll give people a tracking link when we get some article published on their website and that means that we can track all of the traffic that comes through that link inside Google Analytics and we have a lot of UTM code which shows us that has come from that outreach you can of course measure the referral traffic that's coming through Google Analytics to see how many people are clicking through the links in the articles you can of course measure your inbound links to link Explorer and then the final thing to track would be ranking now a lot of PR companies will use things like impressions or potential reach or things like this now to me these are essentially BS metrics because if you get an article published on Yahoo they'll tell you that that article has like a potential reach of 200 million because 200 million people use Yahoo every year or whatever the number is now actually that's kind of a vanity metric the reality is that number of people didn't see the article and there's not really any way of tracking how many people saw the article so we like to measure things that are actually relating to your website so how much traffic are you getting how many sales are you getting on what's happening with your ranking over time those are things that you can really take to the bank okay finally how does digital PR fit in with your overall marketing strategy now the thing I'm gonna say here I'm going to be really honest with you this stuff takes time and it does take work if you're a busy marketing manager struggling to get through your to-do list as it is and you're thinking great let's do some digital PR I can probably fit that in it's really important to be honest with yourself if you're gonna do half an hour of digital PR per week that's not gonna touch the side this is something where you need to dedicate time and energy to on a consistent basis to give you a frame of reference the very smallest campaigns that will run digital PR on a like 40 hours a month we have larger clients on 160 hours plus per month so this is something where there's a lot of time and energy going in from experience did PR professionals into getting this sort of visibility now I don't want to put you off from doing this on a DIY basis you absolutely can I've done it myself you really can get results for your business but it's important to be completely honest with yourself about how much time you're gonna need to invest to do this and also to be realistic once you get your first couple of articles your business isn't gonna explode like the volcano in Pompeii it's gonna be something where you're gonna build up momentum particularly for things like improving ranking you're gonna consistently see your ranking improve as you get more visibility so I hope you found this useful and I hope that that's whetted your appetite for a bit of good old digital PR or good new digital PR if you need help with your digital PL and don't forget exposure ninja has a large and experienced team of digital PR experts ready to help you the first thing that you need to do is go to exposure ninja comm and request a free website and marketing review just tell us a bit about your goals and we'll put together a plan with some suggestions on how to achieve them and they may well include digital PR so go and do that is fantastic resource and is pretty much the best thing in the entire world and you should definitely do it right now I hope you enjoyed this video don't forget to give it a like smash that subscribe button until you're down to your elbows and they're just bloody stumps and the whole look forward to seeing you in the next video