Do you want to know how to create a Digital PR campaign? Well, you’re in the right place! A near-perfect PR campaign can be hard to create, but not impossible. If you understand what elements are needed to make that perfect campaign, and a step by step guide to follow, you’ll be well on your way to producing a digital PR campaign that delivers you the results you want.
What is digital PR?
The term ‘PR’ is thrown around a lot within marketing, but it isn’t just another buzzword. PR, or public relations, is a creative, powerful and tactical way to drive results for your brand/business.
A strong PR strategy can help you connect with your audience, build brand awareness, raise your brand’s reputation, and also support your wider marketing goals/efforts.
Why digital PR?
Digital PR is just as important to building your brand as other methods of marketing, such as SEO.
Digital PR is a measurable way to drive brand awareness by driving traffic to a website, creating links that boost organic ranking and also driving sales and a social following.
If done correctly, digital PR is an invaluable element of your marketing strategy and is a fun way to stay ahead and stand out from your competitors.
How Honcho can help your business
How to Create a Digital PR Campaign
If you’re looking to create a Digital PR campaign, these six steps will guide you through the process to make it as smooth as possible. Don’t rush the process and allow creativity to flow.
Step One: Objectives
Determine your objectives and what you want your campaign to achieve.
Before you randomly start throwing ideas around the room, it’s best to start with some objectives, KPIs and goals to help you know what you’re aiming for, and have an understanding of what success looks like for you.
Objectives could be:
- Raise brand awareness
- Increase sales of specific products
- Drive website traffic
- Supporting SEO links
- Inform the public about company news
- Enhance brand reputation
- Recruiting
- Partner Engagement
- Brand valuation
Whichever objective you choose to focus on, make sure your team has an understanding of what you’re going to track/measure and what results would you deem successful.
Also, when creating your objectives, make sure you’re collecting as much data beforehand as possible across all marketing channels, as a strong digital PR campaign can affect all channels.
Step Two: Define your Target Audience
The more you know about your target audience, the better. If you’re running a campaign for your own brand, pull out your target audience personas and get to know them well.
You’ll want to know the basic demographics, but also psychographics. Having a detailed understanding of their behaviour, opinions and interests can help you craft a campaign you’ll know they won’t be able to resist reading/clicking.
If your target audience is segmented, it may be beneficial to run campaigns targeted towards individual segments rather than targeting them all at once.
Step Three: Idea Generation/Brainstorming
This is where people get stuck. When thinking about how to create a Digital PR Campaign, people focus on the outreach, but creative ideas are the key to success. Finding a campaign that is current, on-brand, and appealing to the masses can be hard. And finding something that hasn’t already been done is even harder.
However, persevere with digital PR as a great campaign can do wonders for your business/brand.
How to Get Creative
The digital world is a very noisy space and to ensure your campaign stands out you need to get creative! We highly recommend that the ideation process isn’t rushed, you should set aside a decent amount of time to brainstorm!
Invite your Entire Team, and Even Members from Other Teams.
Everyone thinks differently and has a different experience of the world so they may come up with ideas you may never have thought of.
Do Some Research
When you start planning a campaign, it can be really useful to investigate what events are coming up in the next few weeks/months. Are Netflix releasing their next big series? Is the holiday season starting? Is there a new iPhone, Playstation etc.?
There are things coming up that could inspire your next campaign, and also things to stay away from. So cover all bases and do thorough research.
It is also a good idea to research what has happened in the past to see if you can jump on any annual trends that journalists are interested in.
Start Brainstorming
To start with, make sure everyone knows the brief and what you’re trying to achieve. It could benefit them to understand the process of how to create a Digital PR campaign. You could even send this blog around beforehand.
Have someone to write down everything, and I mean everything! No idea is a bad idea, it could be the instigator for a great campaign idea.
When someone comes up with an idea, roll with it. Keep bouncing ideas off of one another to see if you can collectively come together with huge ideas.
Remember, you want your campaign to resonate not only with the media you will be approaching but also with the audience you’re trying to reach. The ideas will need to be new, fresh and super creative so if you don’t come up with some solid ideas in the first session, book in another and keep brainstorming until one sticks.
Double-Checking your Idea
Once you have come up with your idea(s), run it past people outside of the brainstorming team to just double-check that your idea is as great as you think it is.
Step Four: Data, Data, Data
For an outstanding campaign, and one that might go viral, data is going to be your best friend.
Journalists want to run stories that are backed up with compelling and interesting data. They want the evidence, and they want it to be accurate.
Having a data and analytics specialist is crucial to ensure they are gathering reliable and valid data. Plus, they also know how to gather the data and turn it into the format you need.
Don’t know where to find a data specialist, we have a team here at Honcho that would love to support your campaign.
Step Five: Execution
This is one of the most important steps to your digital PR campaign, because if no one sees it, it’s almost pointless.
We recently wrote an article on prospecting in PR which you’ll find very useful.
Strong execution is vital and a good skill to foster. You can’t just send an email to as many people as possible and hope it lands.
Plan out your execution. Here are a few things to think out:
- Are you hosting an event?
- Do you need to create a video?
- Are you recruiting influencers to help push your campaign?
- Are you sending out emails, booking meetings or picking up the phone?
Once you’ve got your execution ideas, make a timeline giving you plenty of time for setbacks.
From social media to billboards, Adidas’ recent campaign was shared on various platforms to get maximum coverage.
Step Six: Measurement and Tracking
Now you know how to create a Digital PR Campaign, let’s focus on the results!
Remember the objectives you set out at the start? You’ll need them now as this is what you’ll be measuring your campaign success against.
Create a Google Sheet and track everything in this. Every link, every post, engagement, shares, changes to rankings, traffic increases… the lot! It all helps you understand the impact of your campaign.
Other things to consider
- Give yourself time! Plan ahead and don’t rush campaigns.
- Follow up plan – Make sure you’ve got a follow-up plan in place. Ensure you’re ready to tell journalists why your story is newsworthy today, or tomorrow, or even if it’s still relevant in 2 weeks’ time.
- Could this campaign win an award? Keep it in mind and track, screenshot and record everything.
- Shout about your success, write a blog post and tell the world exactly how you achieved great success.
Introducing Digital PR at Honcho
Although you now know how to create a Digital PR campaign, we have a fantastic Digital PR team here at Honcho if you need support.
We use a combination approach to outreach to ensure an ‘always-on’ perspective that both maximises your budget and allows us to be flexible to the changing news agenda.
Amplified Campaigns create thorough, data-driven stories from proprietary methodologies. This approach allows us to outreach for longer, go to multiple prospecting channels, and regularly update and refresh the content throughout the year.
Opportunity Campaigns allow us to tell complicated data stories simply and effectively by focussing on the most relevant niches and stories. These lightweight campaigns are written up as blog posts and accompanied by illustrated assets or graphs that provide all the information for a journalist and context for the readers.
Reactive Campaigns are the result of our ‘always-on’ approach. We will gain links and coverage for your brand by monitoring the news agenda and leveraging developing stories within your niche. We will do this by outreaching existing, relevant, assets on your site, as well as using your expertise by providing quotes on breaking stories.
To learn more about our PR offering and how we can help you, head to our Digital PR page.
Along with being a digital PR agency, we also specialise in other digital marketing areas including paid media, PPC and shopping, SEO and content creation.
Jade Halstead
