Digital Marketing with PR in 6 Steps

Introduction 

The process of influencing audiences has changed from media relations to public relations, thanks to social media marketing. In the past, both PR and advertising have been such a controlled conversation where there was message crafting involved. Today, the conversation has become more collaborated. Small businesses are lucky to have social tools like Facebook and Twitter to engage with their audiences, and they should participate in these communities to strengthen their digital presence.  

Digital marketing with PR is not just about “hits” - it’s about frequently distributing relevant content via the right channels to boost credibility and findability...

Frequency

How frequently is frequent? Every day. There shouldn’t be a day that goes by where you don’t put up a blog post, contribute to a publication, pitch a new idea to a blogger, showcase a new media hit in the mainstream media, analyze your website traffic, or attend an event and broadcast from a venue. Google loves to frequently visit your website and index the content you publish, and your customers love reading about what you share with them. You’re not engaging with your audience if you’re not pushing out something they can value.  

Relevance

How can you tell if your content is relevant? The community will tell you. Your results will tell you. Often times, bloggers will share or download content that they find most relevant. You can track to see if this is happening by using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics on your website. Things like raw website traffic, searched for keywords, links to your website, and viewed content can give you a pretty good idea of whether or not your content is relevant to your audience. Just remember, you’re trying to identify and ease the pain that your audience is experiencing. 

Content

What kind of content are we talking about? This isn’t rocket science. You know your industry, and if you know anything about sales, you know what kind of pain your customer is having. If you’re an HVAC company, you may want to provide a video on how to check and change your furnace filter. (It can be as simple as that, trust me.) You may also want to provide news publications with press releases about your business, or maybe a podcast with an interview from the owner. People and Google love articles, blogs, blog comments, tweets, and white-papers. Try to find some of the people ranking on the first page for valuable keywords that relate to your product or service. What kind of content do they have? How can you beat them?

Rightness

How do you determine the right channels? This is important. You should start by using Google Analytics or other blog tools to determine relevant publications with the most traffic and authority. You can also run a test on Open Site Explorer to see how much domain authority or page rank your publication might have. It’s important to harness all of the given tools, like Backtype, Tubemogul, and Tweetreach to see how far your word is spreading and whether or not it’s relevant to your users or prospects. 

Credibility

How important is credibility? Very. According to Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University, media prominence accounts for approximately a quarter of brand value and it underscores the importance of managing and growing brand value through PR efforts.

Findability

How do you ensure your content is found? Make SEO a factor in everything you do. Use PressReleaseGrader.com to grade your content before you submit it to online publications. Also, use appropriate and consistent titles and tags across all content posts. Keep the spiders busy and put a lot of content out there - Google loves social media because it’s always fresh and usually relevant.