Twenty-five years ago we had never heard of digital PR.
How the landscape has changed… In the intervening years, this field has introduced a huge transformation to the PR industry via a raft of new trends and methods of working. These developments have been responsible for totally changing companies’ marketing strategies and plans.
Today’s market is characterised by evolution taking place at breakneck speed. SEO and social media are now standard inclusions in every effective PR toolkit. PR professionals fully accept that digital channels are an essential component of an impactful PR campaign and their clients now expect their promotions to include comprehensive digital outreach.
Digital PR is concerned with combining traditional PR with content marketing, social media and search. It transforms company/brand news into conversations to speak directly to the target audience online, getting their immediate feedback and increasing engagement. It focuses on online visibility, which means working with Google and other search engines to ensure that a client’s website ranks highly in online searches. It involves generating high-quality links to a client’s website from each piece of digital content and optimising the website’s functionality.
Traditional PR’s focus is offline visibility involving the production of press releases to send to the media, the organisation of press conferences and the staging of events. It conveys information to a wide audience with the communication very much one-way and feedback limited. Traditional PR has benefitted from the advances in the speed of communication since the advent of the internet, but it relies on non-digital information in the form of text and image attachments. It also involves a greater degree of interaction with the media through one-to-one, personal communication through follow-ups and pitches.
Digital tools have become essential components of today’s public relations landscape, offering unique advantages that are crucial to any successful campaign.