To achieve strategy objectives for any business, such as building brand awareness and improving SEO performance, any online PR campaign and digital PR activity will contribute to the digital PR strategy. This article aims to help you get started.
Research
Nothing beats knowing your audience. Before you start building any digital PR strategy you need to hold the basic information on your target market. Use your competitors to do some market research and to grow your understanding of who your audience are. Research tools can help to provide strong insight into audience habits, buying habits, trusted brands used. Attest is a good market research tool for this. Also, Google Trends will allow you to search key terms and provides a score out of 100. Social Mention is also a recommended tool that helps pick out trends happening right now.
You want to know it all. From the content they love and are most engaged with. To the hashtags they most interact with and any themes of interest. By spending time retrieving this key info, you can build a strong digital PR strategy that’s going to work for your business.
Personas
The use of personas for your business can also aid your research. Personas are fictional characters created to represent target audiences. To make them more tangible to digital designers and marketers, these audience archetypes include illustrations and fictional names. Similar behaviours lead to goals that are shared by personas.
You’ll name them, add an icon, provide basic information such as age and location, what social channels they interact with the most, any influencers of interest, everything. Obviously, you can do so much more, but that should give you enough information to begin engaging users, raising awareness, and, ultimately, delivering content that is of value to them. It’s also a great idea to share this information with colleagues so everyone in your business has the marketing knowledge and a good understanding of what you are and who you are wanting to reach.
Content Deliver
Once you’ve taken the initial steps, you can look forward in your digital PR strategy to deliver the right kind of content to your audience. This will vary from how-to-guides to news articles and listicles. Podcasts, blogs, eBooks, memes. If you need help to focus your content strategy more, tools such a Semwatch can help. You want to drive measurable value through relevant, quality backlinks. However, you need to ensure that any PR activity has a clear objective and a place to exist – meaning you need to create content assets with value, i, e that are only accessible on your website.
Credibility
Having brand credibility takes time. Ideally, you’d always be working on this and sharing this ‘expert’ voice can be hugely official. We naturally trust those we believe and can hear are an expert in their field. Research key search terms important to your target market and build from there. A weekly newsletter or eBook could be a monthly feature allowing you to respond to topics that matter most to your clientele. Social media groups on Facebook and Twitter can work great for this. With lots of groups to follow based on certain subjects of interest.
You’ll also find you can increase your key contacts this way as journalists regularly reach out on social media. You need to be in the right place at the right time. It will also help with determining a contacts list and you’ll get the chances to be identified as a valuable contact within a specific field.
Google Analytics
We don’t always get things right first time. So, it’s important to use analytic tools such as Google Analytics to learn from recent activity and access whether you have achieved what was set out originally. Are you receiving referral traffic, what pages on your website are customers most interacting with, can you see more visibility on Google Console? Learning from any online activity in order to move forward with the best KPI’s for your business is crucial. Of course, assessing data has to be a continuous method as things change quickly online and with customer trends.
With digital PR strategies, you reach the right audience instead of just your existing audience. Building relationships with the right publications and creating content you know will resonate with your audience will help you establish yourself as an authoritative source.
For further helpful reads on digital marketing topics such as establishing priorities and for strategies on a budget, click here.
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