Ruby McKenzie
Digital PR is an effective, proven strategy to improve your credibility, reach new audiences who will resonate with your brand, and build a solid reputation through associations with respected news outlets and reviewers who act as your advocates.
One of the common misunderstandings is that while sales and marketing are closely linked cousins, PR is one step removed from the process and doesn’t feed directly into sales revenues and profitability, and it’s incorrect.
Effective digital PR centres on features and backlinks from top-tier publications and is a beneficial way to influence every aspect of your customer interactions and multiply the results you achieve from your marketing efforts.
Why Is Digital PR Important for Sales Growth?
The main point is this: customers make buying decisions based on countless variables. Not least, they have to like you to choose you over the competition – and at the very least, trust that your business is authentic.
With almost anything available to buy online, authenticity is a substantial factor because a business a customer has never heard of will start on the back foot. Today’s consumers are very conscious of the risk of scam companies.
People love stories, and when you embark on a PR campaign, you define a hook, a USP, or something special about your business that makes it worth knowing about.
PR isn’t hard sales, nor does it have to be sales-focused. Instead, it tells the story of your brand, explains who you are, addresses questions, provides useful information or adds context to the products or services you sell.
Think of digital PR as the foundation upon which you build your marketing promotions and sales ads. Without that baseline credibility, awareness and visibility, sales pitches are a shot in the dark, whereas PR sets you up for success from day one.
The Connections Between Marketing, Advertising and PR
Digital PR integrates perfectly with technical sales disciplines such as SEO, which is why you need a comprehensive approach to pick up on all the key pointers you should incorporate within your PR pieces.
The most popular options for PR placements include channels where companies can achieve:
- Link building for SEO purposes
- Influencer marketing outreach
- Content marketing for targeted audiences
- Social media engagement
SEO is a driving force behind all your sales and PR techniques. The SEO quality of your web content determines where you appear on search engine results pages and, therefore, how many prospects find your company when they search for a product, or a service they need.
Online PR is particularly good at improving SEO results because when you publish a feature on a news site, digital trade magazine or e-newsletter, your featured backlink is circulated to potentially millions of readers.
Not only is that an excellent way to enhance web traffic, but the backlink itself is beneficial because it shows Google that you are an authoritative company.
Valid backlinks indicate that a website is worth crawling, and – consequently – you get higher up those all-important search results pages.
Larger publications can have readerships thousands of times larger than your email database, so it’s a simple way to increase your visitors exponentially while doing a big favour for your SEO metrics.
This aspect of digital PR demonstrates how it slots into sales and marketing. Together, they form a cohesive approach to present your business, value proposition, and customer offer while putting in the groundwork to provide ongoing visibility boosts.
Sales Benefits of Professional Digital PR Services
Online tracking means you can maintain oversight of exactly how each PR campaign has performed, quantify the results, and choose which campaigns to replicate, scrap, or tweak as you learn what works best and what perhaps doesn’t.
So, theory aside, which parts of your business performance can digital PR actively affect?
Lead Gen
Lead generation can be tricky for newer or early-stage businesses without the audience or exposure to attract new customers or compete in terms of brand awareness with more established competitors.
Digital PR helps to improve brand exposure by getting you in front of big, engaged audiences by publishing press releases, thought pieces or announcements through media outlets and channels.
A reader who sees your company mentioned in a trusted publication is significantly more likely to be interested in your services, visit your site, follow a CTA or engage with your social media feeds.
SEO Rankings
As we’ve explained, SEO rankings are one of the important factors in designing a digital PR campaign. A few well-placed features with relevant backlinks can significantly impact your search engine results page position.
The higher you are in SERPS, the more visitors see you, the more web visits you get, and the higher your sales will climb.
Unique website visitors are another important SEO metric, and not only mean you get a better chance of securing a sale or converting a prospect, but go further to authenticate the value of your site to search engine bots.
Brand Trust Factors
Because PR isn’t necessarily about the hard sell, you have an opportunity to be creative in the pieces you publish and how they add value to the reader.
Quality articles that challenge the status quo, examine a trend, provide a case study or industry statistics, or deliver an entertainment factor help build trust and further enhance your credibility in the digital business space.
BrandNews the Digital PR Experts
If you’ve maxed out your advertising budget and spent months crafting a great marketing campaign only to achieve less-than-optimal results, it’s likely that digital PR was a missing link!
BrandNews are specialists in digital PR for growing businesses looking to compete in the online world and maximise their brand awareness, visibility, and reputation management. Incorporate digital PR into your marketing toolbox and how selecting the right approaches can transform your lead gen, web traffic and SEO performance.
