Digital PR is an approach that helps brands expand their online presence by building relationships with influencers such as:
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bloggers
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video creators
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online journalists
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web content writers
As a common example, a brand may want to showcase their product to audience members of an influencer. Or their objective might be to generate some type of feedback, review or mention. If SEO is a priority to the company, digital PR can help to acquire high quality backlink's to improve rankings for a particular search term.
The Big Picture Theory Behind Digital PR
The significance of digital PR can be explained by what is known as Network Theory, written about by authors like Malcolm Gladwell which describes how just about everything in the universe connects. And it applies to how people connect online. There are two main components, nodes and hubs.
Nodes are akin to regular, average users. Hubs are analogous to influencers, people with lots and lots of connections to countless nodes. They are more powerful due to having these numerous connections.
Brands with a smaller number of connections can leverage some of this power by connecting with these hubs. For example, if they want their content, product or video to gain more visibility through a wider reach, they can share what they have created with an influencer. Or, as mentioned earlier, they can also collaborate on creating content together and share the end results with both audiences.
Likewise, in SEO, getting backlinks from a highly influential site carries more weight and value than a lesser known site with lower authority.
Google is also engineered to process information about online networks and the connectedness of brand sites. A study experiment was conducted to see if external or outbound links really mattered for the ranking of sites.
How Content Matters for Digital PR
Just as content quality matters for the main site, SEO and social media, it is also a must-have for success in digital PR. Crafting the right messaging for outreach correspondence to influencers often makes the difference between getting a yes or a nonresponse. They regularly receive numerous emails. And so yours needs to stand out.
Instead of just stating the company's request, outreach messaging needs to emphasize how the offering would benefit the influencer and their audience.
As an added enhancement, the messaging should also reflect familiarity with their content, shows etc, as opposed to being just another general template.
Beyond just the outreach letter, leveraging content can also take the form on co-creating a content piece together as mentioned above.
Screening and Selecting the Right Influencers to Work With
There are many automated tools which are designed to find influencers to connect with. They may rely on factors like page rank, domain authority, keywords, or simply belonging to the same or related niche. However, there are often other criteria that gets overlooked. Automated tools can help to an extent. But ideally, they should also be used in conjunction with hand-selected influencers to create relationships that match alogorithmic factors, but also intrinsically feel like the right connection.