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Digital PR is a great tool for promoting your business. Why? Because getting backlinks to your website from media websites or online industry publications can give your site a better chance at ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages). It can also increase your website’s overall authority, which gives Google the heads up that your site is worth showing to searchers. It’s not always the easiest task coming up with new ideas for digital PR all the time though, and it’s also usually a case of trial and error – some things work really well, and others barely get off the ground. It’s all part of the fun at the end of the day!
So, if you’re looking to start shouting about your business and get some good quality backlinks in, we’ve laid out some of our top tips on how to come up with digital PR ideas for your business.
Now we’ve all heard the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, and this is also true when it comes to brainstorming. Don’t invite everyone and their dog, as you’ll more than likely struggle to manage everyone and all the thoughts flooding in. It is, however, important to choose perhaps one person from each key area of the business. Have a think about themes that fit for your industry and how might be able to build these out into something a journalist and their publication’s readers might think is interesting. Sorry to be brutal here, but it’s key to remember that just because you think it’s exciting… doesn’t mean it would be to a journalist.
So, the dream is to get a piece of editorial content into The Sunday Times, or House and Garden, or modern dog magazine – whatever your niche. How might you get there? The best thing you can do is research what types of articles make it into these publications. What sort of content are they publishing, is there a trend, are there any key topics they like to revisit? This can help you tailor your ideas around what you know that publication likes to post, giving you the best chance of solidifying an idea that you know their editor will be interested in. Just make sure you’re not wasting time being a copycat – if they’ve covered that idea once they don’t want the same thing again. You can also check out our list of 101 free directories to support your outreach strategy.
Do you have customer data that you could use which showcases interesting trends that might work as a PR story? You might be able to deduce certain things from in-house data that can be supported with further research to produce something interesting. If you don’t have in-house data that’s any good, you can go to sites like ONS, Public Health England, Statista and gov.uk to find data insights that can be worked into a PR story. Just as usual, keep journalist interest in mind.
If you’d rather, you can look to be a bit more reactive than proactive when it comes to PR ideas. The downside to this that timing is a thing and you may need to drop what you’re doing to get onto a breaking news story, but it can work well if you can do this. If something is going on in the news that’s related to your industry, can you offer any of the journalists additional expert insights? Or maybe you can create your own release off the back of what’s going on with a slightly different angle. This is more commonly referred to as newsjumping.
Sometimes, the idea for a good PR story is already out there, but businesses and spokespeople are needed to help publications or freelance journalists get the expertise behind them. If you want to be active in replying to these requests, make sure you take a look at #journorequest on Twitter and sign up to daily notifications from the likes of HARO (help a reporter out).
All that’s left to do is come up with some kick-ass digital PR ideas and get to work!
