5 Effective Ways to Leverage Digital PR to Boost Organic Presence

Digital PR uses online tools and techniques to deliver higher brand perception to your audience. To do this, it is important to acquire high-quality backlinks or mentions from websites, social media, podcasts, videos, or any other online publication is required.

The goal of digital PR is to help your business get a broader reach to your desired audience by allowing them to see you on various online platforms they frequent. In fact, a study from uSERP, a digital PR agency, shows that 84.39% SEOs think that building backlinks greatly impacts brand authority.

Ultimately, Digital PR positively impacts a business's SERP ranking, authority, traffic, and ROI. 

The different elements of digital public relations

For businesses, a well-crafted digital PR strategy should include all these or some of the following elements:

• Getting your business featured in high-authority online publications pertaining to your industry

• Getting your business featured in high-authority online publications pertaining to your industry

• Getting your business featured in high-authority online publications pertaining to your industry

• Getting your business featured in high-authority online publications pertaining to your industry

• Getting your business featured in high-authority online publications pertaining to your industry

To know how to ace digital PR, you must understand how it differs from traditional PR.

The difference between traditional & digital PR

Traditional PR media is mainly newspapers, radio, and TV, and to get good PR through these media requires elaborate networking and goodwill of editors and journalists.

Digitization of media has allowed for a free and natural flow of information.

A popular newspaper, the Independent, founded in 1986, has been forced to shut its circulation and shifted to whole online distribution in 2016.

Traditional PR media like TV and Radio are getting overshadowed by the rampant world of online multimedia. 

Here's a chart for your perusal showing the decline of newspaper readership in the UK from 2000 to 2018, as tweeted by Sky News Editor and The Times Columnist Ed Conway: 

Now that we know how essential it is to have good digital PR let's discuss the five most effective ways to get it.

Five ways to boost organic presence with digital PR

Here are the five most effective measures to implement in your digital PR strategy:

1. Working on syndicated content to boost organic reach

Knowing how to leverage the power of content for digital public relations is crucial. Getting the desired outreach is not directly proportional to creating exclusive content. You have to go beyond it.

Content syndication is an act that will help you go beyond the traditional ways of leveraging content to reach out to a bigger audience.

There are two ways businesses can use content syndication to boost their organic presence online. 

• Firstly, create newsworthy content that many agencies and individuals would pick up, share, and often retweet. Here's how to produce newsworthy articles.

• Secondly, pick up newsworthy articles from your industry and publish them to your platform with due credits. 

Content syndication benefits all involved parties. The original backlinked source enjoys free promotion, and the first publisher gets credited with broad recognition from multiple syndicates, while the parties syndicating have valuable hands-on content for free.

Here's an example of how syndicated content ends with a backlink to the original source:

Here are some software to help you find high authority websites with a large audience in your industry

• Alexa's audience overlap tool
• Outbrain
• Taboola

2. Using content to gain high brand authority (quickly)

We all know it is tough to survive in the hyper-competitive digital world. Sure having a great product and customer service is imperative, but you still need to find a way to stand out to your customers amongst the competitors. 

You do this by gaining brand authority.

So, what is brand authority? 

Brand authority means how much the customers trust your products and services and consider you a subject-matter expert.

Some global brands with high authority are Nike, Dominos, Patek Philippe, Vero Moda, Apple, and others. You do not have to be a kingpin of the industry as these examples are to ascertain good brand authority. Any brand people trust in terms of quality, and experience is said to have good brand authority. 

How can content help you gain quick brand authority?

To quickly gain brand authority is to piggyback on the brand authority of others. You do this through content. Create data-driven, high-quality articles, and reach out to high-authority websites to publish, giving you the rightful credits. 

These high-authority websites could be news websites, famous bloggers, or any online forum with a considerable following. These sites are always looking for good content for their loyal readers. 

Here are some examples:

• HARO

• Cission Communications Cloud 

• Meltwater media intelligence platform

• Muck Rack 

When websites with a trustworthy and authoritative voice give your business a platform to speak, your business can gain colossal brand recognition overnight. When you publish on such sites frequently and maintain excellent product quality, you're all set to gain people's trust quickly. 

3. Collaboration with Influencers and getting social proof

In the abovementioned point, you used a high-authority entity's platform to promote your business. Another effective way to gain great digital PR is to let these high-authority figures promote you to their vast and loyal audience. 

Influencers, micro or mega, have a more engaged and active audience than all the newspapers in the world combined. It is the reason why it has become a common practice to reach out to these influencers. Shoutout by influencers gives brands social proof.

What's social proof?

Social proof in digital marketing refers to any evidence from product users, brand ambassadors, or influencers that assures the quality of your product and service as you promise.

So when you loop in social media influencers to promote your brand, it would give your product solid social proof. 

Here's an example of how influencers can add to your social proof:

In this post, fashion and travel influencer Red Rhinestone, promotes a gaming app. So this is the social proof to the 2961 people who have liked this post and many more viewers that "bestfriends" is a good app to spend time with friends.

Businesses can choose influencers based on their business type and budget. Some tools can assist you in finding the right influencers for your business. Here are some of them: 

• Awario

• Followerwonk

• Klear

4. Create data-driven social media campaigns for better PR 

Social media is one of the most potent ways to have an excellent digital presence and public relations. Social media should be the first element of every digital PR strategy. 

What social media platforms bring to businesses could never be a possibility without the help of traditional PR. Social media allows for accessible windows of real-time interactions between businesses and people. 

Communication has become two-way, and businesses can now earn the attention of their target audience. You can now closely see the sentiments of people towards your product, quite literally. Check out sentiment analysis and other social media metrics to help you create effective social media campaigns. (add a link to the social media metrics blog)

Strategic social media campaigns driven by insights and information about people's tastes and needs can help you easily persuade people to buy your products without direct selling. 

Since everyone is on social media, your social media account is the first place people will look up to your business. Being active on social media allows you to influence people as often as possible and whenever you want.

Netflix has made it's way closer to people's hearts through social media. Here's a peek into the winning social media strategy of the entertainment giant!

Let's go to the fifth point now…

5. Organize networking events to be the "talk of the town"

Forbes reported that 78 percent of startups say networking is crucial to their entrepreneurial endeavors. 

With networking, you're working from the grass-root level; this will strengthen the foundation of your digital PR strategy. 

You might think that having networking events for good "digital" PR is counter-intuitive. 

That's far from true. 

Networking events are a considerable payoff for creating a great digital presence for you and, eventually, a bigger organic boost.

These events are very industry-specific. Since you are organizing an event, it will obviously be relevant to your industry. When you have several influential people, bloggers, and people who are merely enthusiastic about your industry, you are indirectly creating a whirlwind of opportunities to get good digital press for your business.

Apart from the overall business growth that comes with networking. Here are the ways networking events can help your brand with an explosion of digital presence:

• Bloggers blogging about an event hosted by your brand 

• Influencers checking in and uploading loads of content on their social media handles of the event 

• News websites picking up on some stories from the event

• You get insights into the nitty-gritty of the business and your competitors.

All in all, networking events can make your brand and business the talk of the town for days to come, giving you a massive influx of online visitors and numerous backlinks and mentions. 

Conclusion

Now, you know the five most effective ways to boost your organic presence through digital PR. You should also be able to scale the growth by checking the number of visitors and backlinks you get. Tools like Google's URL builder and Moz's Link Explorer will gauge the volume of your organic searches. With this data, you can repurpose and optimize different digital PR strategy elements for better results.