Digital PR: A Practical Guide to Building Online Visibility

Digital PR helps businesses build awareness, credibility, and visibility through online publications, industry websites, journalists, creators, and other relevant sources.

Unlike traditional PR, digital PR operates in an online environment where coverage can also contribute to search visibility, referral traffic, brand awareness, and the wider digital presence of a business.

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR is the practice of using online media, publications, journalists, creators, and relevant websites to build awareness and credibility for a brand.

A Digital PR campaign can involve creating newsworthy stories, developing useful research, responding to relevant media opportunities, and building relationships with people who can share or reference a brand's expertise.

The focus is on creating information or stories that are genuinely useful and relevant to the intended audience.

Why does Digital PR matter?

People discover brands through many different channels, including search engines, online publications, industry websites, social platforms, and recommendations.

Digital PR can help businesses increase their presence across these channels by getting their expertise, stories, research, and perspectives in front of relevant audiences.

Coverage from relevant and credible sources can also provide opportunities for referral traffic, brand mentions, relationships, and links to useful resources.

What are the main areas of Digital PR?

Digital PR can include several connected activities that work together to build online visibility and credibility.

Media relations generally focuses on:

• Building relationships with relevant journalists
• Identifying relevant media opportunities
• Providing useful expert commentary
• Responding to journalist requests
• Developing long-term media relationships

Digital campaigns can include:

• Original research and data
• Industry insights and reports
• Expert-led content
• Newsworthy stories
• Visual or interactive content
• Relevant online outreach

These activities can support broader marketing and SEO activity when they are connected to clear business and audience objectives.

What makes a Digital PR story newsworthy?

A successful Digital PR story needs a reason for someone outside the business to care about it.

Useful starting points can include new research, interesting data, emerging trends, expert opinions, original insights, or stories connected to current conversations.

Before developing a campaign, consider whether the idea provides something genuinely useful, interesting, timely, or relevant to the audience you want to reach.

What should a Digital PR strategy consider?

There is no single format that guarantees media coverage. Instead, consider the relevance of the story, the audience, the available evidence, and how easily the idea can be communicated.

1. Understand the audience

Start by understanding who you want the campaign to reach.

• Who are the relevant audiences?
• Which publications do they read?
• What topics interest them?
• What questions or problems are they trying to understand?
• Which journalists or creators cover these subjects?

Understanding the audience helps ensure that the campaign is built around relevant interests rather than simply promoting the business.

2. Find a strong story

Look for an idea that has a clear reason to be discussed or shared. Original research, useful data, expert insight, and relevant trends can provide strong foundations for a campaign.

The story should be understandable quickly and should provide something useful to the audience.

3. Create useful supporting content

Develop supporting assets that make the story easy to understand and reference.

Depending on the campaign, this could include research findings, charts, expert commentary, reports, visual assets, or a dedicated landing page.

4. Build relevant relationships

Digital PR is not only about sending pitches. Building genuine relationships with relevant journalists, publications, creators, and industry contacts can make future communication more useful and relevant.

Focus on providing useful information and commentary rather than contacting people only when you have something to promote.

5. Measure the results

Review what the campaign achieved against its original objectives.

Depending on the campaign, useful measures can include relevant coverage, brand mentions, referral traffic, links, audience reach, and engagement.

A practical way to approach Digital PR

A useful starting point is to understand the audience, identify a relevant story, create supporting information, and connect with the right people.

Research → Create → Pitch → Build → Review

Research

Research the audience, publications, journalists, topics, trends, and conversations that are relevant to the campaign.

Create

Develop a useful and credible story supported by relevant data, evidence, research, or expert insight.

Pitch

Present the story clearly to relevant journalists or publications, focusing on why the information is useful or interesting to their audience.

Build

Build relationships with relevant media contacts and look for opportunities to provide useful expertise beyond individual campaigns.

Review

Review coverage, mentions, traffic, links, and other relevant outcomes to understand what worked and what could be improved.

This approach creates a repeatable process for developing Digital PR activity around useful stories and relevant audiences.

Digital PR and SEO

Digital PR and SEO can support each other as part of a wider digital strategy. PR can help increase awareness of a brand and create opportunities for relevant coverage and links, while SEO helps make the brand's own website and content easier to discover.

The two activities should not be treated as identical. Digital PR focuses on relationships, stories, and external visibility, while SEO focuses on organic search visibility and the website experience.

The opportunity is to think beyond “How do we get coverage?” and also ask:

“Does this story provide something genuinely useful or interesting for the audience we want to reach?”

Key takeaway

Digital PR is about more than sending press releases. A strong approach combines relevant stories, useful information, audience understanding, media relationships, and clear objectives.

The focus should be on creating stories that are relevant, useful, credible, timely, and interesting.

For partners, this creates an opportunity to help clients identify stories and expertise that can strengthen their online visibility and connect them with relevant audiences.

Want to explore this further?

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