What is Digital PR: The Ultimate Guide for a Beginner

Right from making newsworthy announcements to promoting thought leaders, Digital PR is the most effective online marketing strategy in trend today.

Content promotion is one of the hardest parts of any successful marketing campaign.

Though there are hundreds of platforms and communities to promote to, it is hard to pick the right choices and we cannot define how effective this promotion can be.

For any company looking to create brand awareness with their marketing campaign, PR campaigns are the go-to option.

Right from making newsworthy announcements to promoting thought leaders, Digital PR is the most effective online marketing strategy in trend today.

What does Digital PR stand for?

For anyone wondering what is digital pr, Digital PR (Digital Public Relations) is an online marketing strategy used to be a digital PR agency to increase the online presence of a brand.

Digital PR campaign involves online press release, posting in influential social media accounts, partnerships with content marketers, press features, high-quality articles by digital influencers, etc.

It is one of the most effective channels in digital marketing used by Inbound marketers to increase their client’s reputations.

What is the difference between digital PR and traditional PR?

The competition between digital pr vs traditional pr has been continuing since the age of the internet began.

The difference between Traditional PR and Digital PR is the exact difference between Magazine and a Blog.

Unlike traditional PR, Digital PR campaigns provide an opportunity to reach a wider audience through search engines and social media platforms, i.e it makes the best use of digital marketing.

Digital PR strategies involve digital print publications, online press releases, link building involving websites with high domain authority, influencer campaigns, etc.

Both channels have their audience, their strength, and their best capabilities. It is up to the brand’s marketing team to choose what will work best for them.

One main difference that makes marketers choose Digital PR is that – it is accountable. You can track the progress with tools like google analytics, measure efforts with search engine optimisation, improve the brand image, etc with simple content creation for the target keywords.

Brand awareness can be seen as output and be measured in digital pr campaigns, whereas, in Traditional PR, every campaign is viewed merely as a paid advertisement.

To understand in detail, the differences, read: What’s The Difference Between Traditional PR and Digital PR?

The rise of Digital PR

With the introduction of the internet, every computer user shifted their focus to digital devices.

The blogs which were only used by budding writers became news publications and the search engines love their content.

Quality content published gave rise to high authority websites. These relevant websites attracted more readers and their organic search traffic kept increasing. This gave the small firms the opportunity to increase brand awareness, improve organic rankings, get good referral traffic, without investing much in print media.

The metrics to track in Traditional PR were the word of mouth and sales numbers. Now with digital PR, there are a bunch of key metrics to measure such as search engine traffic, organic rankings, social media performance, referral traffic, website traffic, domain authority, backlinks, etc.

Now we know how Digital PR benefits.

Why Digital PR is important?

Digital PR is important because it gains media mentions, online reviews, search visibility, and has high performing search engine results.

Along with increasing organic traffic, it also helps to generate leads as the media mentions are gained in trusted publications. It helps to get backlinks from a credible source, exactly what the search engines trust.

The online reputation of a brand plays a key role in marketing. Digital PR helps with a reputation as well as crisis management.

One main reason people choose digital PR over any other channel is that gains relevant links from online publications which have shown readership of a brand’s target audience.

How to design a Digital PR strategy?

A solid digital pr strategy aims at improving the overall reach of the brand online. It takes a 360-degree approach to ensure that that the promotion is successful in every aspect.

Below are a few examples of digital pr campaigns:

  • Press release
  • Publish content in high authority sites
  • Increase website traffic
  • Gain high quality backlinks
  • Improve search results and website’s ranking

What do you need to do for Digital PR?

Find the right people to outreach

Creating quality content is important. Behind every successful digital pr campaign, there are bloggers, journalists, and influential publications.

In order for a campaign to succeed, you need to focus on partnering with the right set of influencers who can grow your business.

Here is how you can use Social Animal to find the right influencers to outreach on Twitter:

Step 1: Log into Social Animal Influencer Tab

Step 2: Type your target query & Choose the right filters to narrow down your results

Step 3: Hit export and download the list of influencers

You now have the perfect list of Twitter influencers to reach out to.

Gather content ideas

What type of content stands out? If you think about it, the simple and most apt answer would be the content that makes eyeballs roll.

Valuable content is the best magnet used in link building and it is an irreplaceable part of a good SEO strategy.

How do you know that content is outstanding?

We can agree that social media engagement is a valuable metric. The likes, shares, and comments are signals that the audience is enjoying the content and are interacting in return.

Here is how you can gather content ideas:

Tip: Syndicating newsworthy content is better than creating content originally and is essential to stand out on social networks

1. Go to Social Animal’s article section

2. Type your target query

3. Find the trending articles (Use the multiple filters to narrow down your search)

4. Save the articles for future reference


Click here to sign up or log into Social Animal.


Wondering what is digital pr work in blogging campaigns? Here is your answer.

Trending publications have more organic traffic and a huge number of email subscribers. Not only that, their readership keeps growing.

Landing a content opportunity with a trending publication will be a boom for your business growth.

Here are the steps to find trending domains in your niche:

Step 1: Move to the insights tab in Social Animal

Step 2: Enter your target query

Step 3: Click on export

Now you can have the keyword engagement overview, top 50 domains, top 50 authors, and also content analysis for your target keyword or domain.

Validate influence


One key step to take before making decisions in influencer marketing of a digital pr campaign is to validate the blog, brand, or individual.

You can do it easily in two ways:

1. Analyze the domain

Enter your target domain in Social Animal’s articles search bar.

Now, you will get the top shared quality content published from the domain. You can switch over to the deep search to find how well they are mentioned online.

The insights section provides you with very useful data like average engagements, best network to promote, the best day to post, title length to target, etc.

With these data points in your hand, you can create content based on these data and plan your digital pr campaign accordingly.

2. Analyze their Twitter profile

Twitter influencer campaigns are a very effective part of digital pr and they have a great impact in the B2B sector.

You can easily analyze the Twitter profile of an individual using Tweeple Search.

Step 1: Log into Tweeple Search

Step 2: Go to Analyzer mode.

Step 3: Enter the id of the profile you want to analyze.

Step 4: Validate the influencer with the various parameters.

3. Analyze promotion opportunities

Content promotion plays an important role in digital pr strategy and it includes getting visibility in top publications and press releases.

This promotes link building and also helps to gain backlinks from credible sources.

You can analyze the reach of your target publications using Social Animal’s article section.

Ex: If you are planning to write an article on inc.com for the topic – entrepreneurship – here is your analysis.

Now you know, what kind of articles top the social media table for your target keyword in your desired publication. Best of all, you can add value to the readers by making your article more informative.

Top 10 Digital PR influencers on Twitter

1. The Bloggers’ Lounge

Tailored brand collaboration & digital PR solutions. Award-winning bloggers’ advice hub for building presence and commercial success.

Website: bloggers-lounge.co.uk

2. Luca Rallo

CEO @brandtopia_it | Digital PR Strategist


Website: brandtopia.it

3. Authoramp

Helping #Authors & #Publishers | #BookMarketing | Blogger Outreach | Media Coverage | Book Reviews | Digital PR | Promotion | Publicity

Website: authoramp.com

4. Sally Falkow

Digital PR & Content Strategist. Author of SMART News: how to create branded content that gets found & shared online


Website: proactivereport.com

5. Karl Young

Senior Digital PR Manager – @CIPR_UK Accredited PR Practitioner


Website: yorkshiredad.co.uk

6. Kellie Whitehead

Founder & Partner – Female Fusion Network. Kickass marketeer & digital PR

Website: femalefusionnetwork.com

7. Ubisoft Newsroom

Digital PR & Communication Corporate


8. Ian & Lise Manley

Founded in 2000, ManleySocial is a Communications Hub, Digital PR Agency & Perception Management Consultancy.

Website: manleysocial.com

9. James Brockbank

MD of Digitaloft, a multi-award winning SEO & Digital PR agency. Proud dad. #SEO geek! Search Engine Journal & SEMrush writer.

Website: digitaloft.co.uk

10. Brandtopia

Check off the box | Digital PR | Influencer Marketing | Consulenza | Formazione | BigData Analysis

Website: brandtopia.it

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Krishna works as an Inbound Marketer at Social Animal. Being a marketing enthusiast, he loves reading and sharing the best articles on Growth, SEO and Sales.