The integration of Public Relations (PR) into your digital marketing campaign is extremely important these days. Here are three areas of digital marketing that can directly benefit from an integrated digital public relations effort.
Benefit #1: SEO
QUALITY BACKLINKS: Google now penalizes sites that gain backlinks in shady ways and rewards those that gain them naturally. Digital PR can generate very high-quality backlinks for a site by securing online placements. A link to your site on a high-traffic blog or news site not only will drive direct traffic to your site, but also serves as a feather in your SEO cap in Google’s eyes.
OPTIMIZED PRESS RELEASES:
By using a digital wire service like Marketwire
or PR Newswire, you not only reach the journalists you need to for traditional
pick-ups, you also benefit from having
your release included on a highly-optimized site that will
be picked up by the major search engines, including Google News. This also creates a great backlink!
Benefit #2: Content Generation
ADDITIONAL CONTENT: Having your content team work closely with your PR team will give them access to additional content for your blog and social media channels. Just about anything that is announced through traditional PR can be made into some sort of blog or social post if a content manager can dress it up creatively.
OFFLINE STORY IDEAS: Having PR familiar with what your thought leaders are saying may give them an additional angle or topic that they otherwise wouldn’t have seen.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP POSITIONING: Getting your company’s thought leaders placed on well-read blogs in a guest posting capacity gives you awesome brand exposure. The blog is likely to publicize your post to their social networks and email subscriber list, and of course, a guest post also gives you yet another quality, PR-generated backlink for your SEO efforts.
DIGITAL ELBOW RUBBING: Securing an industry influencer for a guest post on your blog puts you in the same conversation as the influencer, which builds authority for your brand. Influencer guest posts also open up your brand to their personal networks as they are likely to publicize their own piece.
Benefit #3: Social Media
CROSS-CHANNEL MESSAGING: Creating a digital editorial calendar is critical to keeping your company’s messaging consistent across the multiple channels that you distribute content through. By combining information for your blogging, PR, email and social efforts, you will have a comprehensive plan that ensures your content is spread among all of your major channels.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT: Social community managers can give a PR team an important heads up on issues that may be bubbling to the surface and will need to be addressed through crisis management. Social media offer real-time feedback, so any downward trends in public sentiment about your brand can be detected early on from social channels and then addressed proactively on the PR side.
