Fairfield Institute of Management and Technology

AN OVERVIEW ON ONLINE PR

Subject:
Digital Marketing

Subject Code: 304

Submitted to :- Submitted by :-
MR. AZAM Tarun Sharma
Enrollment No : 44451401718
Course: BBA(G)
Semester - 6th
 AN
OVERVIEW
ON
ONLINE
PR
 Table of Contents

Contents Page No
Introduction 1
Objective 2
Online PR vs traditional PR 3
How to create a strong online PR strategy 4-7
Techniques 7-10
Advantages & Disadvantages 11-12
Conclusion 13
Bibliography 14
 Introduction
Digital PR is an online marketing strategy used by businesses to
increase their online presence. Digital PR agencies network with
journalists, bloggers and influencers and send online press releases to
gain high-quality backlinks, social media mentions and improve their
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
 Objective

To develop further understanding of the theories and

concept covered in the course
To develop a practice of learning new aspects of the
subject and develop a habit of research related to the
subject
 An overview on online PR

What is online PR?

Online PR, also known as digital PR, is a link-building tactic that involves creating a story or
piece of creative content, and distributing it to target media to secure coverage that includes
backlinks to a client’s website, thereby improving SEO and overall search rankings on Google.
Essentially, a digital PR’s goal is to build a range of quality links on relevant, high authority
publications that mean something to the client – whilst simultaneously aiming to enhance the
client’s reputation and increase brand awareness.

Online PR vs traditional PR
To really understand what online PR is, it’s important to be able to distinguish between
traditional and digital PR.
Traditional PR is focused on creating brand awareness for clients through stories and press
releases (mostly intended for print, radio or television coverage), event coordination, and crisis
management.
PRs working at traditional firms are likely to have a ‘little black book’ of media contacts that
they regularly phone, and wine and dine (think Samantha, Sex in the City).
Measurement in traditional PR can often take longer than in digital PR as print publications
often require long lead times, and exact metrics on audience reach can be hard to track. For
example reach on broadcast and print outlets are estimations based on potential audiences or
readers of the publication, but actual figures on how many people have seen the placement can
be hard to achieve. Alongside this, traditional PRs will be looking at how their client has been
portrayed in a feature, or how many times the brand is mentioned throughout the placement.
The key difference between traditional and online PR is the measurement of the two strategies.
Both types of public relations have the same aim at their core – to build brand awareness and
create a positive story on behalf of the client, to help them engage with the most relevant
audiences. The process of securing in online PR is largely the same as in traditional PR too –
online PRs create digital content such as infographics, surveys or interactive content, before
pitching the press releases and stories of this content to targeted journalists, with the goal of
securing coverage and links on relevant (online) publications.
Once coverage has been secured, digital PRs are able to use much more precise metrics than
traditional PRs. Different ways to measure the success of an online PR campaign include:

1. Backlinks
2. Brand awareness
3. Website traffic
4. Engagement
5. Search rankings
 6. Conversions/sales
You can use a range of online tools including Buzzsumo, Google Analytics and Majestic to
measure the amount of links, social shares and traffic your campaign has generated. This means
you have lots of different tangible ways to work out which online PR campaigns have worked
better than others.

How to create a strong online PR strategy

So, you’ve decided to run an online PR campaign for your business. To ensure that the
campaign is a success, it’s important to have an effective digital PR strategy.
As with any marketing or PR strategy, it’s best to start with the goals of the campaign you’re
planning to run. In an online PR context, you need to work out the goals and aims of your
content campaign and ensure that these complement the overall business goals of your client.
Here are some things to think about before you even come up with an idea for a campaign:

• What does your business or client want to be known for? What are the values and points of
expertise of the business? Which topics do they want to steer clear of?
• What sort of topics and content are your target audience likely to be interested in?
• What objectives do your business or client want to achieve from this digital PR campaign? Do
they want to boost traffic or conversions to a particular part of the site or business? Do they
want to boost brand awareness or social following?

Once you have these objectives written down, you can begin to plan and schedule for your
online PR campaign. Work out who you will need approvals from and when, and work this
into your schedule, allowing sufficient time for ideation and research, content creation and
review, and outreach and promotion.

When your schedule is in place, you can move on to the fun part – ideation! Ideation is the
process of coming up with ideas for your digital PR campaign and content, and can take time
– link-worthy content doesn’t just fall out of the sky!

To ensure you’re coming up with content journalists are going to want to feature, make sure
these three aspects are covered:

1. A strong data set to underpin the idea and give the campaign credibility
2. An eye-grabbing visual execution for the campaign, that is easily digestible and clear to read
the story
3. Create a strong, unique hook that journalists can’t resist covering, and that is relevant and
appealing to your target audiences

If you have these three points covered within your idea, then you can be assured that you have
a well-rounded content campaign for link building. Ideation is undoubtedly tricky though – if
you get stuck, why not take a read of senior content strategist Lucy’s top ideation tips for link
building.

Once your ideas have been signed off you can get into content creation. Whether you’re
designing your campaign in-house, or with a designer, pimplement a thorough QA process in
place to ensure you’re producing content of the highest quality possible.
Finally, you can begin outreaching and promoting your online PR campaign to a list of targeted
journalists, and hopefully see those links start to come through. When the links and coverage
do start trickling in, you can measure the results and track them, using tools such as those
mentioned above. Remain patient and persistent though – not all campaigns blow up overnight.

7 Steps for Creating an Effective Digital PR Strategy:-

1. What are your goals?
We don’t mean #careergoals or #couplegoals, we mean the goals that relate to your strategy
and what you want to see as a direct output or result of your activity.
At Aira, we place a big focus on our client’s traffic, rankings and revenue goals and their
increase over time, and then work back from that point to establish how many links or
campaigns are needed to shift the needle. Other goals might include increasing the number of
quality inbound links to your site, diversifying your backlink profile or increasing brand
awareness.
No two companies’ goals will be the same, so it’s important to map yours out from the start to
make sure everything you do as part of your strategy is working towards them.

2. Target audience
Your goals will tie directly into your target audience, so the next step is to define who you want
to communicate with through your digital PR campaigns.
It can really help to define personas when trying to work this out so you can get under the skin
of your audience.

3. Find your brand’s voice

Identifying your brand’s voice is one of the most important parts of your strategy.
You need to work out what your brand can confidently talk about or be related to and how that
ties back into your target audience’s interests. Make a list of topics or themes that marry well
with your brand and audience to help with your content creation further down the line. If there’s
a mismatch between what you think you can talk about and your audience, you’re less likely
to get coverage when you pitch your content to the press.

4. Editorial content calendar

Editorial content calendars are a key part of any digital PR work.
This document will underpin your content production schedule and outreach plans. In a perfect
world, we’d use it to place pins in key dates, events or awareness days that we’re going to
 generate buzz and links for our clients for. But, you also need to use the content calendar to
earmark days that you shouldn’t engage the press with,

5. Create content
Now that you have your goals, audience and brand voice defined as well as your content
calendar created, it’s time to start thinking about the kinds of content you can create on behalf
of the brand to drive coverage and links.
Broadly, there are three kinds of content offerings:
1. Data visualisation – these can be interactive, statics, GIFs or even video but generally, we take
a complex data set and bring the compelling stories within it to life through creative content.
Here’s an example
2. Thought leadership – this includes taking a key stakeholder within the business and then
profiling them in the media by offering commentary, by-lined articles and interviews. Here’s
an example and you can get some top writing tips here
3. Tactical content – this encompasses resource guide led content creation, broken link
building and citation work. Here’s an example
The content offerings are not mutually exclusive. You can use one, two or all three as part of
your strategy. Remember, it’s important to optimise any content for SEO and run a thorough
QA check before launching it.

6. Outreach & media list creation

Arguably, everything in your strategy has been building up to this point.
Before you launch your campaign, you need to establish which media or press contacts you’re
going to be reaching out to. At Aira, we take a very manual approach to creating our outreach
lists and the team will conduct lots of research to find out who’s writing about the content topic
they’re going to launch.
You can do the same by:
• Reading online news sites and looking for writers who cover similar themes
• Take a look on Twitter to find out what journalists and bloggers are talking about
• Reaching out to old contacts you have to gauge their interest in the campaign topic
There’s no right or wrong number of journalists or bloggers you have on your media list as it
will vary from campaign to campaign.
When it comes to launching your campaign, it’s also good to consider the following:
1. Awareness days in your content calendar you can latch onto
2. Writing a clear, punchy and concise pitch email with a bold subject – take a look at this post for
more information
3. Securing an exclusive with a ‘golden’ publication

7. Reporting & evaluation

The last step of any digital PR campaign is reporting and evaluation.
Reporting is incredibly important because it helps prove that you’re getting a good ROI on
your digital PR activity, and it can show you which campaigns are struggling so you can learn
from them in the future.
 There are different ways you can report on your digital PR activity:

1. Links – You can break this down into follow and no follow – ideally we want as many followed
links as possible!
2. Coverage – There’s still value in securing a brand mention for clients as it increases brand
awareness and proves you have a good story
3. Rankings – Keeping a close eye monthly on the keywords you’re trying to increase search
visibility for will help you understand if your strategy is working
4. Traffic – Using Google Analytics you can measure an increase in sessions and organic traffic
5. Revenue – This is the hardest to report on when it comes to digital PR because it’s very
unlikely a person will land on a creative campaign and then purchase a product or make a
booking. Revenue is likely to increase due to a number of factors, with digital PR being one

Online PR techniques

1. Link building:-

Link building is a key activity for SEO. It can be considered to be an element of online PR
since it is about getting your brand visible on third party sites and creating backlinks related to
your site.

Link building needs to be structured effort to achieve as many quality links into a website as
possible from referring websites (these commonly include reciprocal links which tend to be
less valuable from an SEO perspective than one-way links). Your position in search engine
results pages will be higher if you have quality links into relevant content on your site (not
necessarily the home page).

McGraffic (2004) provides a great introduction to implementing a structured link building

programme. The main principle of link building is as follows: ‘create great content, link to
great content and great content will link to you’. He describes how you should review existing
links, link to competitors, set targets and then proactively enquire to suitable site owners for
links.

2. Reviewing your links into a site:-

You can use the syntax link:site in Google to see examples of links into a page on a site judged
by Google, e.g. site:www.mudu.io. But note that this also includes internal links and is not
comprehensive. A better option to display links is the SEOmoz Open Site Explorer tool
(www.opensiteexplorer.com). For alerts of new links or new mentions on other sites, Google’s
own alerts (www.google.com/alerts) are useful tools.
3. Blogs and blogging:-

Blogs give an easy method of regularly publishing web pages as online journals, diaries or
news or events listings. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject.
Others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images and links
to other blogs, web pages and other media related to its topic. The capability for readers to
leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Feedback
(trackback) comments from from other sites are also sometimes incorporated. Frequency can
be hourly, daily, weekly or less frequently, but several updates daily is typical.

There are many free services which enable anyone to blog

(e.g. http://www.wordpress.com, http://www.blogger.com) The blogging format enables the
content on a website to be delivered in different ways:

• By topic – in categories or topics to browse. E.g. social media marketing category.

• By tag – more detailed topics. Each article will be tagged with several tags to help them
appear in searchers. E.g. ‘B2B’ or ‘case studies’.
• By author – features from different columnists who can be internal or external. Guest
posting is an effective method for both guest author and blog to increase reach.
• By time – all posts broken down by different methods above are in reverse date order.

4. Social bookmarking:-

Sites like Digg, Google, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us allows users to store, organize,
search and manage favorite web pages on the internet. With such social bookmarking systems,
users save links to web pages that they want to remember and / or share on bookmark hosting
sites. These bookmarks are usually public but can be saved privately, shared only with specified
people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or some other combination of public and
private domains.

Podcasts are related to blogs since they can potentially be generated by individuals or
organizations to voice an opinion either as audio (typically MP3) or less commonly currently
as video (video podcasts). They have been successfully used by media organizations such as
the BBC which as used them for popular programs such as film reviews or discussions and for
live recordings such as the Beethoven symphonies that received over 600,000 downloads in
June 2005 alone. Virgin Radio has also used podcasting, but cannot broadcast music (due to
copyright restrictions), only the presenters. A big challenge for achieving visibility for podcasts
is that content can only currently be recognized by tags and it is difficult to assess quality
without listening to the start of a podcast. All the main search engines are working on
techniques to make searching of voice and video practical. In the meantime, some startups such
as Odeo (www.odeo.com) and Blinkx (www.blinkx.com) are developing solutions.
In a business-to-business context, network provided by Cisco (www.cisco.com) has used video
podcasts for its interaction network, which is used to sell the benefits of its services to small
and medium businesses.

Advantages and disadvantages of online PR

Advantages
The advantages of the proactive public relations techniques which seek to build a buzz around
a campaign or to gain favourable mentions and links on third-party sites are:

Reach. E-PR can be relatively low-cost method of directly reaching a niche audience or a mass
audience if the brand is amenable to stories that are of interest to publishers. This is often the
case for new online brands and startups such as Zopa (www.zopa.com). If buzz around the
online campaign orchestrated through PR is successful then additional reach and impact may
also be generated by traditional mass media such as TV, print and radio.

1. Cost

The costs for online PR are the agency or internal staff fees for developing the online PR plan,
concepts and content. Since there are no media placement costs, this can be cost effective.

2. Credibility

Independent comments that are made by a person independent from a company are considered
more authentic and can so help raise trust about an online provider such as a retailer. Personal
recommendations are particularly important and seem to be trusted more than content sites
giving reviews and opinions.

3. Search engine optimisation

E-PR can help generate backlinks to a site which are favourable for SEO, often from large sites
such as online newspapers or magazines which have good link quality.

4. Brand-enhancement and protection

Favourable stories can enhance the reputation of a brand among its target audience and
amplification through influencers can help reach a new audience, But since unfavourable media
mentions may damage a brand, so monitoring and response to these is a necessity for most
brands.
Disadvantages
The main disadvantage of e-PR is that it is not a controlled discipline like online advertising
techniques such as pay-per-click marketing or display advertising where the returns generated
will be know for a given expenditure. In other words, it could be considered a high risk
investment.

Many marketers are also wary of creating blogs or forums on their sites which may solicit
negative comments. However, there are counter-arguments to this, namely that it is best to
control and be involved with conversations about a brand on the site rather than when it is less
controlled on third-party sites. For example, brands such as Dell and Honda enable web users
to make comments about their brands so this shows they are listening to customer comments
and gain valuable sentiment that can feed intro new product development ideas.
 Conclusion
In conclusion, the goal of a digital PR campaign is to produce story or
content ideas that are likely to attract high quality backlinks and
coverage, using a thorough idea-generation and validation process.
The core aims of online PR are not all that dissimilar to traditional PR
– both are trying to build brand awareness and engage with the most
relevant audiences possible to aid specific business goals.
When implemented effectively, digital PR campaigns can improve
brand awareness, search rankings and sales, and ultimately help grow
a business.
 Bibliography

1. Book:- Fundamental of digital marketing by Dr.Karishma

Gulati Trehan

2. Website: - www.wikipedia.com