It’s essential that both your PR & digital marketing team are on the same page. Their relationship is integral to the success of your business & here’s why.
A symbiotic relationship between PR and SEO, really?
What is the relationship between PR and digital marketing exactly? Very often, the two are viewed as being totally separate, mainly due to a lack of awareness of how each can benefit the other.
In this post we explore how forward-thinking SEO and PR consultants and agencies can work together and enhance both their campaigns for the good of the client.
Two very different skills, approaches and platforms with the ultimate end-goal – improved results and revenue for the client.
Let’s look at some specific examples:
Online advertising working alongside PR
The digital age has been embraced by business and corporations as they look to stay ahead of their competition. With the use of modern advertising techniques and audience targeting, digital marketers can increase reach beyond traditional channels as well as enhancing the user experience and, ultimately, generating increased revenue. A client seeing improved revenue from their digital assets is a happy client and one more likely to be receptive to some more creative PR campaign ideas.
The accurate targeting of audiences means less ad spend wastage, greater ROI and of course improved revenue for the client. Which client doesn’t want that?
Social media and social signals
Social media has now become a common platform for brands to expand their PR campaigns and many PR agencies do this very well. But social media is more than enhancing an ATL message or experimenting with some new-fangled pizza ordering campaign.
Social media and brand mentions contribute to an enhanced overall presence on the web and the complex algorithms of the search engines are paying closer attention to the major social networks in an effort to ensure their audiences receive the most relevant results.
Where does PR come in? The messaging and content for social is hugely important and needs to be combined with the efforts of the digital marketing agency to ensure the social work is aligned with the on-site optimisation goals.
PR can assist in areas where digital marketing agencies struggle
Digital placements. Now this sounds simple, and to a PR agency a digital placement is low-hanging fruit, not really something to add to the activity or success board, however, for an SEO these targets represent months of hard research, graft and outreach. Google places a great deal of importance in its ranking algorithm on how many websites link back to your site; they translate this as a ‘vote in favour’ of your site and increase your rankings accordingly. With digital marketing relying heavily on legitimately generated links, SEOs know that links from relevant websites can be the difference that helps to achieve a page one ranking.
Although most digital agencies are resourceful professionals, not all are fully equipped with the correct outreach and relationship building skills of their professional PR counterparts.
Digital agencies needing to emulate PR outreach
As mentioned above, SEOs often struggle to emulate the success of PR outreach themselves and the success rate of raw link/PR outreach is usually quite low for digital marketers.
Working alongside PR agencies improves the success for SEO campaigns and ultimately elevates the ROI for the client – the PR team gains exposure for the client on the web, which usually ends up in a link back to the site thus aiding the SEO effort and further increasing publicity.
Start your digital marketing campaign now
The digital sector certainly can’t be ignored if you’re a business owner. With over 3 billion searches a day on Google, including digital marketing as an integral part of your campaign is essential to business development and growth.
Examples include the provision of detailed statistical analysis of the impact of a PR campaign on your website’s traffic and conversions, to setting up and managing highly targeted paid advertising on the search engines or social networks to support a PR campaign.
With the help of PR outreach, excellent content grounded in sector knowledge and, working alongside digital marketing, your brand presence can grow to new heights, elevating your business above your competitors. Combining these with an understanding of the target audience is a recipe for a successful online marketing campaign.
Sam Morris-Warburton
Web Results Direct www.webresultsdirect.com