PR and digital marketing go hand in hand. Only when you put both together can you further your company’s goals. The internet has become so integral to our everyday lives that offline and online have blended together. We see a talk, we look online for more information. We see a digital ad, we go and sign up for a workshop.
With offline and online channels mixing so seamlessly together, it’s time for your digital marketing strategy to support your PR strategy, and vice versa.
To accomplish this, follow this guide:
How your website can reinforce PR
To bring more traffic to your website, and in turn to spur more people on to see your events, hear your interviews, and more, then you need a great website they keep returning to. This feedback loop is very healthy for businesses, but you need a site that users love, first.
If you haven’t already, you should consider switching your site to a web host that can boost your speed, performance, and security—without those pillars, nothing else on your website will stand. From there create an interactive, engaging site that offers and reinforces the information you want users to know about your company.
Once your website is beautiful and something users will want to visit again and again you will want to use these steps to reinforce your PR efforts:
1. Publish blogs relating to talks or workshops you’re giving
Talks and workshops are a great way to boost brand awareness and authority. By creating a series of blog or article posts that reaffirm the lectures you are giving, you can send users to your website after your talk, and more importantly, give a highly relevant website for organic traffic. Your goal with talks and workshops is for others to go on to write about it. When they link to your website, you want it to be very relevant to the topics you talked about.
2. Offer free resources
Blogs are a great resource, but if you want to really boost your PR, then you will need to invest in in-depth research. Groundbreaking reports that you can then go and talk about and use to further your company’s reputation are also the sort of content that gets linked to. If users cannot find it or access it on your site, however, you have wasted a key PR/digital marketing opportunity.
3. Highlight the language you want people to use
Your digital marketing team and your PR team should use the same top keywords for your brand. This way you can go out and build up your company’s PR, and when those people in turn search for your company, they will use the same language you are paying PPC marketing for.
Your website is your home base online, but it can only be truly effective when your PR strategy and your digital marketing strategy work in conjunction to bring traffic to it and then back to public speaking, interviews, and other PR work.
