Digital PR vs. Traditional PR

If you are a marketer working across digital marketing strategy, inbound marketing, or content marketing, chances are you’ve stumbled across the term digital PR. But what does it actually mean, and what makes it different from traditional PR? In this blog, we’ll guide you through the terms and help you decide which PR strategy is the best for you and your business.

Building and increasing brand awareness with your target audience is crucial for any business and historically, PR has been a key component in most businesses’ marketing mix. In today’s competitive world where brands are battling for customer awareness across numerous channels, PR, in any form, is as important as ever.

What is Traditional PR?

Traditional public relations, or PR, can be defined as the art of building, developing, and in many cases, controlling brand awareness, reputation and image across all types of media outlets. This includes TV, print publications, digital, social media channels and events.

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR focuses on earning high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant online media publications back to your site, to increase authority, awareness and ultimately, organic rankings.

Digital PR is just one component under the link-acquisition umbrella, which also includes more traditional link-acquisition tactics like link building, broken links, and guest posting.

Benefits of digital pr campaigns

While the benefits of traditional PR are more well-known, the benefits of digital PR campaigns may not be. Some of the main benefits include:

• Increasing organic search traffic
• Increasing online visibility with target audiences
• Creating brand awareness
• Reaching new, potential customers by inserting the brand in relevant conversations
• Building brand authority online
• Earning links on authoritative and relevant sites (which you or your competitors can’t buy)

Similarities between traditional PR and digital PR?

Overall purpose

The main similarity between traditional PR and digital PR is the overall goal; to ultimately increase brand awareness. In other words, traditional PR and digital PR are two different tactics which can be used to achieve the same overall strategy.

Content is key

Creating quality content is absolutely key and essential to achieving success in both traditional and digital PR strategies. Without newsworthy and relevant content it will be extremely hard to get your brand’s name out there and target those high-authority websites. As such, coming up with creative strategies and all-around excellent content is crucial.

Pitching journalists

Whether you are doing traditional PR focusing on press releases or digital PR focusing on creative content, prospecting and pitching potential journalists who might cover your story is a critical part of the process. You can have the best content in the world, but if you can’t get it in front of the right journalists at the right publications at the right time, it won’t do you much good from a brand awareness perspective. This is often the most overlooked part of any form of PR strategy and where success or failure is often decided.

Differences between traditional PR and digital PR?

There are plenty of differences between traditional and digital PR. Understanding how these different forms of marketing work is essential to ensure you target the right areas for your business.

Use of content

Digital and traditional PR use content in different ways to achieve their goals.

Traditional PR is often used to launch new products, services or announcements to the general public. As such, it tends to be product-focused and often involves a commercial aspect, which may be perceived as being less organic. It’s often direct and straight-to-the-point.

Content used for digital PR campaigns is more subtle. A key component in earning the links is the utilisation of original and creative content, which organically inserts the brand into a relevant conversation.

Measuring success

Measuring success across traditional PR and digital PR is one of the main differences.

Traditional PR is fundamentally difficult to measure, but that doesn’t stop marketers from trying. Popular metrics include:

• Media mentions
• Brand mentions on relevant websites
• Share of voice
• AVE (advertising value equivalent)
• Readership & potential reach

Measuring the success of a digital PR campaign is, on the other hand, much easier to do due to its online nature. Using SEO tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console as well as digital PR tools, digital PR agencies are able to measure success in a much more data-oriented and accurate way, reporting on tangible figures such as:

• Amount of relevant links & high-quality links
• Search engine visibility
• Sessions
• Direct traffic and referral traffic
• Brand name searches on Google

Integration into other marketing strategies

While traditional PR is often viewed as a standalone tactic, digital PR works best as an integrated part of the overall SEO strategy. With digital PR you deploy traditional PR tactics to generate SEO-focused results, more specifically, authoritative and relevant backlinks from credible sources and sites.

Traditional PR or digital PR strategy – What is right for you?

Using any form of PR strategy is crucial for raising brand awareness. Deciding on whether to go with traditional or digital PR for your brand comes down to your situation.

If you are a major brand with internal PR and SEO teams, having both tactics simultaneously might be the best option as it can bring the best of both worlds.

If you’re a brand in a highly regulated industry, traditional PR may be your best option due to its to-the-point nature. This allows you to be extremely accurate in your communication and apply a more corporate tone-of-voice.

Lastly, if you’re looking for a way to stretch your marketing budget to cover more with less, or if you are highly focused on having tangible results to report, tapping into the digital PR world might be the best option for you.

If you’re looking for a digital PR agency to implement successful digital PR campaigns to increase brand awareness & authority, lead generation and customer loyalty, reach out today to see how we can help.