Branded3 Communications Director, Laura Crimmons says one of the key secrets is to, “write content for questions people are asking (long-tail keywords).” As part of a go-to SEO agency in the UK, she reveals what you need to know about creating a digital PR strategy.

How do businesses engage in effective digital PR?

The principles of Digital PR are very similar to traditional PR; so, it’s not a huge step for businesses to start working on this and it’s important because traditional PR (print) is dying out as most people will know.

Digital PR is still all about building relationships and increasingly, the same journalists will work across both print and online titles. So often, you can get the best of both worlds. The biggest difference if you’re looking to do Digital PR to support your SEO strategy, is that you need to also generate links to your website.

The way to do this is to ensure you have an asset worth linking to.

Review sites (like TripAdvisor) capture customer service experiences instantaneously, yet, many businesses are still not engaging in two-way dialogue – what’s best practice?

The most important thing is just to set up social and online listening so that you know what people are saying about you online – whether you have Twitter or Facebook etc or not.

People will still be talking about you on there; so, it’s important that you see what they’re saying and, where appropriate, respond. There are many benefits to actually analysing what people are saying and in particular, any questions that they’re asking as these can be the basis of your content strategy.

The more of their questions you can answer with your content online, the less time your customer service team will have to spend answering the same questions.

Slicing data to create stories is an increasing, why do you think this is a crucial strategy?

I think this works well because we’ve seen a huge trend in data journalism and therefore by utilising data you’re giving journalists what they want: which makes getting your coverage much easier.

Also, data allows us to tell a story so well and make it relevant for lots of different people – slicing the data by region can make it relevant to people in a certain area; slicing it by age means you can target student or mature titles with relevant data.

Also, a lot of businesses just don’t realise how interesting their data actually is – so sometimes it takes an outsider perspective to see what might work from a PR point of view.

Why you need to move to digital PR:

• Improved brand awareness
• Increased brand affinity\loyalty
• Valuable citations
• Featured snippets\Extra S.E.R.P (search engine results page) real estate
• Traffic ripe for remarketing
• Direct and assisted conversions