Public relations has evolved with technology over the years. Contrary to traditional PR where offline channels like print media are used to build brand visibility and credibility, today, digital PR is used for online marketing with platforms available online.
There are many ways marketing professionals can utilise online public relations. What truly matters, however, is ensuring you can see success in your digital PR strategy. This means setting up your PR to track the right data, which can better inform your strategies.
Read on to discover how to leverage data and analytics in your digital PR.
The Significance of Digital PR Strategies
Digital PR strategies make the most of the online landscape to build brand reputation and relevance, which can drive growth and success for any business.
On its own, digital PR can increase several factors that influence how your target audience perceives your brand, including:
- Brand awareness and reach across multiple platforms
- Audience engagement and interaction in community forums
- SEO and overall online visibility through high-quality backlinks
- Content distribution in a variety of formats
Why is data necessary in digital PR?
Data enables businesses to fully understand audiences, going beyond the surface-level details of demographics. By looking into data and analytics, you can learn their interests and what channel gets the most engagement.
Tracking information can also provide insights into trends, audience behaviours, and relevant outcomes based on historical data. All of these can inform your decision-making process for the best marketing opportunities and ultimately allow you to check for quantifiable measurements of success through reach, engagement, and conversions.
Types of Data for Digital PR
When it comes to digital PR, the typical audience journey to getting to know your brand, content, and ultimately your products or services, is guided by the publishers and influencers you tap. This means that before examining the big numbers, it’s important to understand their sources.
Some digital PR tactics that can increase brand awareness and greatly contribute to data collection include content marketing, influencer partnerships, social media campaigns, online press releases, and SEO. Because digital public relations can be executed on several platforms, many information streams can impact your results. Here are some of the most important platforms to monitor different data types.
Media coverage
Media coverage looks at reputable news outlets that mention your brand. It can cover press releases, blog articles, and video content shared online. This is a significant resource when launching a campaign, as it often has the biggest reach and can be used effectively for link building. These links direct audiences to your site, effectively generating website traffic and potential conversions.
Social media
Social media accounts for all online social platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. This is where you see more authentic interactions with your brand through comments from real people. Relevant data to monitor includes:
- Likes to see how many people resonate with the content and message
- Views to see the number of users who took action after seeing the content
- Shares to learn how many viewers found your content relevant enough to share across other social media platforms
- Subscribers or followers on your brand’s page to determine the growth of your engaged audiences
Website analytics
As your audience starts visiting your page, it becomes crucial to monitor website analytics. This provides you with the opportunity to see the success of your content marketing efforts, which can help you plan any next steps in optimising your pages.
- Website traffic enables you to check for trends and patterns in visitor data
- Bounce rates to determine any usability issues that can improve the user experience and contribute to the success of conversion rates
- Time viewing pages on your site enables you to see how engaging your content is
How to Maximise Data and Analytics to Improve Your Digital PR Strategy
Data is a valuable tool that can inform and shape how you approach digital PR campaigns, content, text messages, and digital marketing. They can refine and enhance your strategies based on the goals and objectives you’ve set. You can use data effectively in digital public relations in a few ways.
1. Gather and integrate data from your online publications
Collecting the right data from publications and influencers who promote your brand is the first step to understanding the effectiveness of your digital PR efforts. This includes everything from social media analytics to website traffic from UTM tracking to Google Analytics, media coverage reports, and your engagement metrics.
2. Analyse audience insights
Look into the different aspects of your audience insights, like demographics, preferences, behaviours, and engagement patterns. Breaking your broader audiences into segments can help shape your content and create a message and strategy they can resonate with.
This can also help you select the right channels for your target audiences. There may be favoured social media platforms, websites, or forums where you can reach people who are most likely interested in your brand.
3. Monitor your media coverage
Tracking and analysing media coverage is the best way to monitor your brand’s presence across media outlets. Using the right monitoring tools, like Google Alerts, will help you see your PR campaign’s actual reach, audience sentiments, and how often your brand is mentioned.
4. Track and optimise your SEO performance
Using search engine optimisation, or SEO, in conjunction with digital PR can have long-term benefits and amplify the effectiveness of your content. With optimised content, search engines can rank your content higher, and your branded press releases, articles, and blog posts can surface higher. In turn, this can enhance your brand authority and expand your reach compared to traditional PR tactics.
5. Utilise social listening
Social listening tools offer real-time data to inform and keep your PR strategies up-to-date. They allow you to monitor conversations that involve your brand, industry trends, and audience preferences. This is beneficial for identifying potential influencers and opportunities to engage your target audience. In the long run, they can assist in crisis detection and management when potential issues arise.
6. Communicate your insights
The most crucial part of maximising your data is sharing insights across your team. Communicating this information will help you align your digital PR efforts with digital marketing strategies and other initiatives to meet your business objectives.
Conclusion
Leveraging data and analytics can greatly inform how you craft your digital PR campaign and foster a cohesive and agile approach to public relations. By pulling information from different channels of your PR strategy, you can analyse detailed insights to make well-informed strategies that suit your target audiences and yield measurable results.
