Combining Digital Marketing and Public Relations For Success

Have you been wondering about the effectiveness of your company’s marketing strategies? In our ever-changing technical landscape, marketing techniques continue to become integrated. Digital media has become an essential tactic. Many businesses have found success combining public relations and digital marketing strategies.

In this article, we will show you how to combine the best of both the digital and traditional marketing world, so you can remain competitive and continue to grow your business.

Why Merge Public Relations and Digital Marketing?

In this day and age, your brand’s story is a critical asset. It should be conveyed on every possible marketing platform. With the help of public relations, the media’s representation of that story can play a big role in influencing public opinion of your organization.

When it comes to credibility, editorial platforms win hands down. This is because the content they provide is endorsed by a journalist or other third party. However, you can’t always control what a journalist will write about you. This is where digital marketing comes in.

Traditional PR deals with channels such as the printed press, niche print publications, TV, and radio. Digital PR, on the other hand, involves press relations conducted via digital channels like websites, blogs, social media, and influencer collaborations.

By making use of both PR strategies, you become your audience’s direct news source regarding your organization through blogs, articles, or press releases.

With social media, you can speak directly to your audience. As such, you can develop solid connections and credible relationships. By cutting out the third party, you are essentially bypassing the middleman. This is what makes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram so vital for connecting with your audience.

PR and digital marketing are closely related as they both involve connecting and building relationships with your audience. Digital marketing enables you to reach more prospective customers and reinforce your brand image.

So, by combining PR and digital marketing, you can both enhance your visibility while strengthening your audience’s view of your brand.

Combining Your PR and Digital Marketing Strategies

Content Marketing and PR

The whole idea behind content marketing is to create high-quality, engaging blog posts. These should touch on relevant topics or common issues and offer practical insight. But, before publishing all your blogs on your own website, consider pitching them as guest content to other websites.

This will not only allow you to create great content for other influential websites, but it gives you access to a whole other audience. As the post will link back to your site, it will direct interested leads to you where they will learn more about your brand.

Guest posting also gives you a leg up in terms of building lasting relationships with other businesses. As everyone always says, it isn’t always what you know but who you know that counts!

Each guest post that provides a link back to your website will increase your brand awareness. These inbound links from reputable sites also contribute to your website’s overall SEO. In turn, this improves your visibility in search engines so that you can reach more people.

Email Marketing and PR

Email marketing allows you to create a great impression and grab your audience’s attention by engaging them in a personalized way. Few other digital channels offer this same kind of instant communication with a brand’s following.

Your welcome email, for instance, should be sent to new subscribers as soon as they sign up to your mailing list. If done correctly, this email can make sure that you establish an immediate connection with your subscribers. When joining email marketing techniques with social media tools, you can get double the exposure.

For example, if you are planning on helping out your local community, you can announce your company’s event by sending emails to your subscribers. At the same time, you can also place social media sharing icons in prominent areas of your email. This can not only help to widen your reach with little to no effort on your part but allows you to leverage all the tools at your disposal.

Connect With Influencers

Traditional PR relies more on journalists for providing them with positive media coverage. However, the digital era allows us to take charge of our own story and company image. This means that you can use traditional journalists as well as marketing experts and influencers to get your name out there.

By taking the time to connect with influencers within your niche, you can offer your followers different perspectives on all your products and services. This can benefit both your company and your influencers.

Influencers also offer an easy way to:

• target new audiences,
• increase your brand awareness, and
• increase traffic to your website.

In Conclusion

Digital marketing techniques and traditional PR strategies work really well together. If combined correctly, they can lead to a boost in brand awareness and increased traffic to your website.