B2B Digital PR is a tactic that helps increase a business’ media presence by placing articles and news stories online. Unlike with traditional PR, the focus is a lot more heavily weighted to digital media, including online publications, social media, and SEO PR strategies.
The use of Digital PR services has increased in importance as the media continues to shift online - from traditional newspapers and magazines to websites, digital downloads and even video.
But while this has brought significant benefits and opportunities, there are also new challenges to overcome.
In just a short period of time, our lives have shifted from the physical to the virtual. Banking, education, our work, our health and fitness can all be accomplished online. We love to shop online, which is why online shopping is soon to become the most dominant force of retail.
Working with the media and constantly battling with what can be classed as ‘news’ and what plainly isn’t, it’s worrying to see that half of people now get their news from social media.
Our lives now exist at such a pace that newspapers and glossy magazines can’t compete.. However, it’s not just about how we consume our news and information, the reason for the continuing decline has an older, more established motive - it’s about proving value for money, not vanity metrics.
As media spend on magazine and newspaper adverts increased to target a wider audience, companies demanded a better return on their investments.
Yet when it came to proving the effect of these print advertisements with hard stats, traditional ROI models were not able to provide the level of detailed data needed to keep them running. The investment vs the perceived return was light years apart.
Businesses instead started to turn their focus, and cash, to online channels that enabled quantifiable spend. Google AdWords and social media spend quickly became the news kids on the block.
In terms of data the two could provide, it was the digital cost-per-click vs the offline ‘potential readership’. Marketers had no choice but to spend their budgets on tangible results.
You would think then, that it’s easier than ever to market and advertise a company and put it in front of an audience of potential buyers. But you’d be wrong.
What this shift to online advertising did is open the floodgates and has actually made it much harder to cut through the noise and figure out what information is reliable, valuable and trust-worthy.
With hundreds if not thousands of businesses competing for the same media space, standing out from the crowd has become vital.
Learn how to stand out from the crowd with our guide on writing for the Media
B2B Digital PR has reacted to this new environment and when done correctly, it can not only improve a company’s online presence, brand awareness and public trust, but also help boost it’s number one sales tool - the website.
87% of B2B buyers say that online content has a significant impact on their buying decision, while just 17% of that time is spent physically meeting with potential suppliers.
It’s the reason why Google and Inbound Marketing are becoming more and more important.
Your website meets your prospects before anyone else in your company, but only if they can find you in the first place.
The power and ranking of a website in search engines depends on a lot of factors, but one that’s becoming more prominent is backlinking.
The leading B2B Digital PR agencies are creating content strategies that target third-party websites to provide hyperlinks to content from the original source - i.e. the company website.
Backlinks are vital for SEO. Google prides itself on providing the most relevant responses first, formatted in the fastest and most accurate way possible. The better it can do this, the happier its users will be.
One way to do this is to create valuable, unique content based around search terms you know your customers are typing into Google and you become a source of reference with other companies and websites linking back to your content.
Having content readily available on your website that provides hard statistics, such as research surveys and market reports, typically do well in this regard. But it’s still a hit and hope strategy with no guarantee of success - something we’ve written about in the past.
By earning high-quality backlinks to your website through consistent media coverage, you’re not only improving your best sales tool, but improving your brand’s online presence while you’re at it. Win-win.
Plus, by gaining backlinks in high-value online publications, which your target audience and buyer personas read on a regular basis, B2B Digital PR also starts to boost lead generation, conversion rates and, ultimately, has a greater impact on target ROI.
For a full guide on how to measure your B2B Digital PR campaign, click here