Are you one of the millions of new businesses launched this year? If yes, building a strong online presence will be crucial for you to navigate the intense competition. If your marketing approach is not right, it will be hard to set yourself as an authority. Thankfully, with digital PR for startups, it is easy to get past the many challenges you may face as a new business. Digital PR is a blend of traditional public relations and modern digital or online marketing. Discover how important it is for startups below.
What Makes Up Digital PR for Startups?
The elements of a digital PR technique for any new business include:
Content Marketing & Search Engine Optimization
Giving the audience value through content is the first component. Superior content, such as blogs, videos, and podcasts on different channels, improves the image of a business trying to set foot in a competitive landscape. It also includes securing coverage in magazines and news outlets. Recall Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign. It used content marketing by posting and circulating user-generated content, videos, and social media posts. SEO comes along with content marketing. Digital PR includes optimizing the startup’s website and making it a place that people can go to when they want to find solutions or see authoritative content they can trust.
Building Relationships with Media
As a startup, you need to do everything that contributes to your unique and positive perception. A big component of digital PR for this purpose is to refurbish your image on news channels that are consumed the most by your target prospects. Specialists using this approach cultivate relationships with bloggers, journalists, and acclaimed media persons who act as conduits to making you seen across news publications and magazines. When you gain coverage, it naturally improves your online visibility and builds awareness.
Social Media Marketing
How do you usually discover new products or brands? Most certainly, on social media. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are hubs of target audiences of brands in various domains. In fact, they are the favorite of over half of GenZ. So, as a startup, utilizing them to increase your online visibility is more important than you think. Digital PR strategies for social media allow you to interact with your target customers, understand what piques them and their sentiments, and create content that brings you nearer to them.
Reputation Management
Remember that we said that digital PR for startups helps refurbish your image? Online reputation management is an extension of redefining your image, leading to much better brand awareness. However, reputation is not only managed through press releases in prominent magazines. It is done by monitoring what people are saying about you on social media, responding to customer reviews, and partnering with influencers to spread your reach. All this is a part of digital PR for startups to make them steadily expand their online footprint.
Ways to Increase a Startup’s Visibility via Digital PR
A strategic online PR plan is a result of many techniques. Here are the major ones.
Define Smart Objectives
You never define success vaguely. Similar is the case with digital PR strategies. SMART or specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives are the key to understanding the impact of the efforts. This makes it easy to allocate resources in the right places and work on areas that need improvement. For example, the SMART goal for greater visibility can be as follows: Using SEO top practices to increase traffic by 50% over the next four months.
Identify Target Audience for Tailored Communication
Have you nailed who those eager lots are who want to seek your services? Knowing that, in most cases, is the secret to skyrocketing sales by up to 20%! PR campaigns are always tailored to those audiences who align with your brand values and need your services in some way. That is why many digital PR agencies spend the most time uncovering users’ demographics, interests, and behavior. Once this is discovered, the right messaging and communication plans are made, which come with a guarantee of increasing your online presence. It also includes determining the social media where your leads thrive and the media outlets where you can be featured.
Form Your POV or Narrative
You certainly had an innovative idea when you started your business. If that unique idea is not disseminated well, it will never become something big. Your narrative or POV increases your relevancy in the eyes of media persons who are always willing to cover out-of-the-box stories. Here, storytelling emerges as a dominant force. Digital PR strategies leverage it to forge deep connections with people and help them retain your brand values and message. Storytelling engages people on an emotional level, which is what you want to build a big, loyal following for yourself.
Connect with Popular Brands & Influencers
You may have often found yourself seeking an influencer’s advice for a new gadget or kitchen appliance. Similar is the case with your target audience. Many people actively use all that their favorite brand promoters say. Digital PR agencies use the sway of these famous personalities on different channels to enable a new business to make inroads in a competitive world. It is done by connecting with relevant figures and requesting them to promote your service in return for monetary compensation. Sometimes, the compensation can be a free product(s) as well.
Employ Different PR Campaigns
The best digital PR campaigns for fueling greater awareness are the following:
A campaign using an existing data campaign: Use a specific data source and study it deeply to get insights. Create pitches for prominent media publications using those insights. Google Trends and Census.gov are some great public data sources.
Survey campaign: Is a data source hard to come by? In that case, create surveys. Ask people about their opinions and analyze them. Draw insights from their views, and you will be able to create a robust pitch.
Map campaign: You can use any kind of data for this campaign. Overlay your observations and findings on a map for localized results. You can then create localized pitches for stories. Most journalists love to explore and expand localized stories.
Make Your Website a Repository of High-Quality Content
Website SEO means finetuning your website. You refine it with content punctuated with keywords and terms that your customers use. How can you do that?
Answer people’s questions through elaborate blog posts.
Show them your solutions through well-optimized landing pages.
Satisfy their curiosity about your unique product through demo videos.
Digital PR strategies for increasing visibility take into account your website’s ability to rank well on search results. It helps increase traffic, which leads to greater awareness.
Use Metrics to Refine & Re-strategize
Digital PR is a consistent process for a startup’s growth in this dynamic digital world. The following metrics prove valuable in this regard.
- Share of voice or SOV: SOV is used to compute the percentage of your new business’s visibility with respect to many things. These include the number of mentions, PR, social media, SEO, and PPC.
- Pitches sent and covered: Digital PR aims to build media relationships. Gauge its effectiveness by tracking the number of pitches sent, those that received a response, and those that successfully became a press release.
- Social media engagement: This metric monitors engagement, indicated through impressions, clicks, likes, and comments on your dominant social channels and platforms.
- Backlinks: Backlinks are a significant metric for SEO, whether inbound or outbound. If they are high, it means greater reach and successful strategic outreach to journalists.
Conclusion
Startups begin with great energy and enthusiasm. But when you realize that spreading the word about yourself is not that easy, it can dampen your enthusiasm. The process of gaining validation and progressing to a leadership position in a competitive market is gradual. However, in the absence of knowledge of building connections and managing reputation and social media, building a top-notch presence is not possible. Digital PR strategies and tools help you enhance your presence and gain visibility to scale. Today, using this approach forms a bedrock of positive brand image and greater visibility.
