Digital PR Agency
PR is often thought of as crisis management. You can imagine large public relations teams spilling their coffees and talking frantically on the phone because somebody in the comms team has posted a dodgy tweet, or a high-profile client needs to be more careful of where they’re photographed.
In reality (ours, anyway), PR is an ongoing part of every brand’s marketing plans – and, personally, we much prefer highlighting the positives about your company.
Digital PR combines all the benefits of building genuine brand authority – and therefore, a reputation – with clear tracking and measurement, SEO potential and improved shareability.
The digital elements of your PR activity become shareable on social media, with the potential of a much wider reach (cutting an article out of a magazine and passing it around your friends does not have quite the same impact as sharing a story on social media!). Plus, taking it digital means that it can all be tracked. Marvellous.
Digital PR and SEO
Digital PR is an activity that naturally fits with SEO – but only if you know what you’re doing.
When publications share your articles, there’s the potential for backlinks. Better yet, a mention on a media outlet will almost always provide you with some SEO favour. Building backlinks from authoritative sources (including media outlets) from around the web tells Google that you’re an organisation to be trusted, you know your stuff.
All of a sudden, you’re much more appealing to Google and therefore more likely to be served up as a top search result to any user looking into your product or service.
Many organisations now include digital PR as a part of their SEO strategy because it’s a no brainer. But it’s this combo will always be most effective when you have both of these services coming from under the same roof. If you get your SEO agency to look after this for you, they’ll ensure that the right anchor text is used every time, the backlinks acquired are ‘clean’ and that a publication is actually worth your time.
Digital PR case study
When a client approached us during a quiet period for their business, we had to find a way of increasing income forecasts for an organisation that is largely seasonal. As an events venue, seasonality was a real concern.
Targets weren’t being met and the brand need to increase awareness across a much wider audience than they were already capturing. Our approach to this? Have a bit of fun with it, duh.
We created a BuzzFeed style quiz that tapped into the curiosity of our target markets – everybody wants to know what they’re really like, how other people see them, what their dominant traits are or which lunch meal they’d be – and then turned it into a social media campaign.
Next, we got it picked up by key industry press and the result was four months of increased revenue and web traffic. Thanks, that’ll be lovely.
Why choose Patch as your digital PR agency
The most important element of digital PR is relationships. Senior members of our team have been in their industries for decades (sorry, guys) and they’ve built up a lot of relationships in that time. Our PR department pay their bills with the relationships they’ve built over their careers.
We know who to contact, with what, and when.
Alongside them is our SEO department, on-hand to help ensure that we’re targeting authoritative publications in the right way, getting ‘dofollow’ links from them when we can, and avoiding those toxic backlinks. And our copywriters – well – you’re still reading, aren’t you?