Public relations has always been about capturing attention, owning or participating in a public conversation, and shaping the narrative of your brand, industry, or company.<\/p>\n
Digital PR is the execution of public relations campaigns and tactics in today’s digital landscape.<\/p>\n
From P.T. Barnum to Ryan Holiday<\/a>, public relations professionals have used the tools and media at their disposal to get attention and drive interest in their brands.<\/p>\n In fact, in the landscape of marketing initiatives, I used to understand content marketing to be a function of public relations and communications. Rather than paying for ad placements or buying inventory, you simply create the\u00a0narrative using owned or earned media<\/a>.<\/p>\n The lines in the sand are to some extent washing away.<\/p>\n For example, organic and paid search optimization are sometimes grouped together in titles\u00a0like demand generation or SEM<\/a>.<\/p>\n Similarly, content marketing and PR often sit together in \u201ccommunications\u201d or \u201cbrand\u201d or sometimes also\u00a0\u201cdemand generation.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n How we define and delineate marketing channels isn\u2019t so clean anymore (just ask someone what \u201cgrowth marketer\u201d means).<\/p>\n But the goals of public relations have remained the same: capture favorable attention and\u00a0increase brand visibility<\/a>\u00a0through earned media.<\/p>\n The objectives remain largely the same in the digital context.<\/p>\n However, where\u00a0digital PR diverges from traditional PR<\/a>\u00a0is in the tactics and methods used and the way we set goals for and measure their performance.<\/p>\n A PR professional working at Edelman (an award-winning digital PR firm) in 1994 might have looked at the following metrics to track a campaign:<\/p>\n These don\u2019t differ widely from typical brand marketing metrics.<\/p>\n In Digital PR, however, your metrics might include the following:<\/p>\n When it comes to digital PR, backlinks seem to be the key metric.<\/p>\n I\u00a0once joked on a podcast with Jeremy Moser<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cdigital PR\u201d was simply the fancy euphemism for people who didn\u2019t think \u201clink building<\/a>\u201d sounded cool:<\/p>\n Equating Digital PR with link building is oversimplification. Just like\u00a0\u201cgrowth\u201d is related to traditional marketing<\/a>, but it\u2019s not just a fancy repackaging, digital PR is both something that already existed and something that should be treated with its own tools and mindset.<\/p>\n In relation to SEO and link building, digital PR tends to look at links as one input into the overall effectiveness of their campaigns, and the quality of the link and publication matters a lot.<\/p>\n The benefit of a link in digital PR is both its value for earned media (i.e. is the publication widely read and prestigious?) and its value for owned media (i.e. does this placement help us boost up our owned content in SEO and content?).<\/p>\n Not that link quality didn\u2019t matter to SEOs in the past, but they would rarely track referrals or define\u00a0specific target accounts for link placements.<\/a><\/p>\n Digital PR, to me, marries the tactical methodologies of link building and off-page SEO with the mindset of a public relations professional.<\/p>\n And yes, it sounds fancier to say \u201cdigital PR\u201d than any of the other phrases for this work\u2026<\/p>\n I promise, that\u2019s my last meme!<\/p>\n Digital PR is but one facet of PR as a whole, but it\u2019s almost always executed with an\u00a0SEO playbook<\/a>\u00a0and toolkit.<\/p>\n Therefore, it\u2019s not fair to say that digital PR is just plain old link building, nor is it the exact same thing as traditional PR before it.<\/p>\n Digital PR is a mix of SEO and PR, and the goals and KPIs of will reflect that differences.<\/p>\n Digital public relations campaigns tend to be similar to traditional PR, but are aimed more at digital assets like blogs and website traffic.<\/p>\n To get more concrete, though, what are the indicators of success in digital PR?<\/p>\n In my mind, you have three goal scopes:<\/p>\n While backlinks have always been tracked by SEOs, the criteria for placement is different with digital PR.<\/p>\n For instance, you may have a list of publications that you\u2019re sure your target customers read, and only seek to get placements in those publications. Or you may have a threshold for website authority or page authority score. Perhaps you even have a threshold for the estimated traffic to a given page, and you only count links above that traffic threshold.<\/p>\n Whatever your criteria, backlinks in digital PR rely heavily on the quality of said link. Not just any backlink will do (and\u00a0not all backlinks are of equal value<\/a>). With traditional backlinking, it\u2019s usually all about the quantity of backlinks.<\/p>\n You can track backlinks easily using a tool like Semrush.<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n Increasing referral traffic is another way to gauge the success of a digital PR program.<\/p>\n By using this metric, you\u2019re inherently including both links as a target as well as valuing links coming from higher traffic pages and websites. If you get a link on a page no one visits, you\u2019ll get no referral traffic from it.<\/p>\n You can track referral traffic in Google Analytics.<\/p>\n Finally,\u00a0SERP visibility<\/a>\u00a0is a new metric based on the Surround Sound SEO strategy. It looks at the search results page for a keyword holistically, estimating the potential visibility and traffic you could attain from your domain being included on every page that ranks for the keyword.<\/p>\n For example, if your company sells\u00a0email marketing software<\/a>, the keyword \u201cbest email marketing software\u201d is a high-intent search term that returns dozens of review sites and listicles on the SERPs.<\/p>\n If you can rank for this term, great. But if you can also get mentioned on every single page that ranks, you\u2019re highly likely to be considered for purchase.<\/p>\n Think of it this way. If you\u2019re searching for the best email platform, are you going to trust the email platform website to give you the unbiased information that you need to make a decision? Likely not. Instead, you\u2019ll look for third-party recommendations from other trusted sources.<\/p>\n You can track SERP Visibility in\u00a0Semrush\u2019s Surround Sound tool.<\/a><\/p>\n With those three metrics in mind, let\u2019s walk through actual digital PR campaign examples.<\/p>\n While there are many more, the most popular and effective campaigns in digital PR tend to be the following four:<\/p>\n I\u2019ll walk through each one and give a real-world example.<\/p>\n Trading up the chain<\/a>\u00a0is a concept brought to life by Ryan Holiday in his book\u00a0\u201cTrust Me I\u2019m Lying.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n It comes from an understanding of how modern media works and how stories get picked up, which might look something like this:<\/p>\n Essentially, you start out by seeding your content or story into low tier publications, forums, or low barrier to entry blogs. By generating enough buzz and interest at this level, you can leverage the fact that there is already a conversation occurring to pitch this to a more legitimate publication. You work the story up the chain until the media cycle moves onto its next story de jeur.<\/p>\n As for an example, Ryan Holiday himself walks through a handful in this presentation:<\/p>\nDigital PR vs Traditional PR vs Link Building<\/h2>\n
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3 KPIs for Digital Public Relations<\/h2>\n
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1. Backlinks<\/h3>\n
2. Referral Traffic<\/h3>\n
3. SERP Visibility<\/h3>\n
5 Digital PR Campaign Examples<\/h2>\n
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1. Trading up the chain<\/h3>\n
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