By William Furney, PR & content strategist, Reachology

Ingredients for successful digital PR: creative campaigns with a dollop of SEO.

You may know what a hybrid car is — one running on a combination of petrol and batteries — but how about a hybrid digital PR agency? What kind of service is it, and how do you know you might need one to create a digital PR strategy to grow your brand and sales? Is it even better (or worse) than more usual digital PR?

Internet-based public relations has come a long way in a relatively short time. It’s the shift from traditional PR to places where people mostly hang out online these days – news sites, social media, forums and elsewhere across the vast digital ecosystem that has taken over our lives. 

But anything online, including digital PR, comes with an added element: search engine optimisation (SEO). If your website and its content is not primed to match with users’ queries, there’s a risk that all your efforts may be in vain as Google and other search engines don’t pick up your material and you don’t rank high, or anywhere, in search results. And so you plunge into a cyber rabbit hole that might be hard to get out of. 

Maximising digital PR with a hybrid approach

Here at Reachology, we know that going the extra mile for our clients gives them the online exposure and success they want. It means being aware of SEO and incorporating parts of it into everything we do. So when we start to create a digital PR strategy that aligns with clients’ goals and also has newsworthy appeal, for the journalists we pitch to, we’ll incorporate such aspects as the keywords our clients are currently ranking for, or not. 

Then, when our articles are published in top-tier media, they have a number of effects that are just not possible with old-school PR: backlinks and keywords that give a big boost to a site and help increase its traffic and rankings, along with immediate visibility and increased brand awareness. These digital benefits can be available in a single article, which can prove invaluable to a company – if done the right way, with research, content creation and pitching to journalists the right way. 

Higher ROI with digital PR and SEO

Hybrid digital PR means companies also lower their risk of blowing their marketing spend and getting little or nothing in return. Clients we speak to say they’ve been flummoxed in the past over lack of returns on their investment in digital PR, when, after spending many thousands of pounds on a campaign over several months, there was no online traction and hardly anything happened to get them attention online or to enhance their brands or grow their website with quality backlinks from leading digital media. 

But now, when our digital PR executives create strategies with SEO in mind, and work with our SEO experts to ensure campaigns are in line with Google’s requirements for quality content and ranking factors, the results become apparent almost as soon as a strategy is executed: pick-ups, links from top media to clients’ sites and mentions across social media that, combined, drive a company and its brands forwards in the incredibly competitive online sphere. 

Hybrid digital PR with a guarantee 

We also believe in going further, and providing clients with a guarantee of results that gives them peace of mind in what can often be an unpredictable industry where promises are easily made but hard to keep — saying you’ll get a certain amount of media coverage is easy, after all, but achieving it is another thing. 

We don’t place a time limit on when we’ll secure placements either, because if a campaign period is coming to an end and not enough press coverage has been secured, we’ll keep going until we hit the target and beyond. 

It’s honest and transparent digital PR, backed up by our equally unique formulas – Q-Flux and ReachScore – that work out what online coverage is worth, in monetary terms, so that marketers and company owners can immediately see they have tangible results and a solid return on investment. 

In a digital PR world where there’s often a lot of talk and little action or results, companies should demand nothing less. 

If you’d like to know more about hybrid digital PR and how it can benefit your business, schedule a free initial consultation with Reachology now.