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MUSINGS AND MILLION-DOLLAR STRATEGIES

Types of Digital PR - The Ultimate Breakdown

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9
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Strategy
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Digital public relations (PR) plays a critical role in business success, shaping your brand’s awareness, visibility, and authority. As such, it offers a way to establish trust at scale.

This has become even more important in the AI search era, where large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini prioritize authoritative, credible brands when generating answers.

That’s the outcome digital PR aims for, and its success hinges on your strategy and execution. You must deploy multiple types of digital PR to build a durable profile and strong signals that influence LLMs and search engines.

In this post, we explore the different types of digital PR to help you strengthen your strategy for success.

TL;DR - Types of Digital PR Activities

There are multiple digital PR activities you can incorporate into your strategy to build strong authority and brand mentions, including:

  • Content-led campaigns and digital assets
  • Data-driven and visual content
  • Reactive PR and newsjacking
  • Journalist and blogger outreach
  • Influencer marketing and social media PR
  • Online reputation management (ORM)
  • Guest blogging and thought leadership
  • Press release distribution

When developing your strategy, prioritize these types to ensure well-rounded campaigns that deliver value through consistency and variety.

Remember, digital PR is no longer just about brand mentions and backlinks, but it also focuses on Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

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What is Digital PR and Why It Matters

Digital PR is a multi-faceted marketing strategy for building visibility, authority, and credibility through brand mentions, backlinks, and strong narrative.

It bridges traditional PR with SEO, providing measurable results and empowering brands to reach global audiences. Here is why it matters:

  • Increases brand visibility: It uses online channels like blogs, industry publications, social media, podcasts, and news to put your brand in front of a larger audience.
  • Establishes authority: Brand mentions and citations on authoritative and reputable sites improve your authority in your niche or market.
  • Builds trust and reputation: It fosters positive brand perception and boosts credibility through influencer collaboration and guest posting.
  • Ensure consistent entity identity: It provides consistent brand information across all channels and platforms, making it easy for LLMs to establish your niche or expertise.

Unlike other marketing strategies, digital PR campaigns employ different tactics to build your overall brand authority and credibility.

How to Choose the Right Digital PR Strategy for Your Goals

There’s no sure-fire PR strategy for achieving your goals. Instead, the right digital PR strategy is the result of continuous testing, monitoring, measuring, and improvement.

Let’s take a look at what you need to do:

  • Define your goals: Set clear, measurable targets for your PR campaign, such as securing 10 high-quality backlinks within 5 months or increasing web traffic by 20%.
  • Identify your key strategies: Based on your goals, implement the most suitable approaches, such as conducting industry research and guest blogging for backlinks.
  • Tailor your tactics: Identify specific audiences and align your tactics and messaging with their interests to ensure effective targeting.
  • Measure and adapt: Use tracking tools like Google Analytics to monitor your traffic and backlinks and adjust your PR strategy based on your performance data.

This is a continuous process that helps you identify what works and what doesn't, making it easy to refine your strategy for better performance.

However, it requires significant time and effort, which may divert your bandwidth from other essential business functions.

That’s why it makes sense to work with a reliable agency, ProfitEngine, which can implement the best strategy for your campaign.

At ProfitEngine, we connect you with top-tier journalists for media placements through HARO link-building. We can also run your outreach and guest posting campaigns to deliver highly relevant backlinks for your site.

 Get your link-building strategy and receive actionable tactics to improve your PR campaigns.

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Types of Digital PR Activities - Complete Breakdown

An effective digital PR campaign involves a mix of complementary activities, each designed to strengthen your brand’s visibility, credibility, and authority online.

Let’s explore the different PR activities you can implement to drive long-term success:

Content-Led Campaigns and Digital Assets

This involves creating high-value, authoritative content and digital assets and sharing them online. Examples include infographics, white papers, reports, e-books, and interactive tools.

When you publish high-quality content and assets, other websites are likely to link to them if they’re helpful or insightful. This can also establish your brand as an authoritative source in your niche.

Data-Driven and Visual Content

You can use internal company data, industry surveys, or public datasets to create compelling studies that journalists and publications find newsworthy. This lets you share evidence-based narratives that set your brand apart.

You can also transform complex data into engaging visual formats, such as infographics, charts, and interactive assets, to reinforce your story's impact.

Reactive PR and Newsjacking

Reactive PR or newsjacking involves responding to trending news or events in your niche or industry. This is an opportunity to share expert insights, comments, or advice on a viral event or news.

It helps enhance your online visibility and positions your brand as an authority in a specific field or topic. For example, a mortgage broker who comments on changes in the mortgage interest rates can strengthen their credibility and establish a trusted voice in the market.

Journalist and Blogger Outreach

This activity involves building relationships with journalists and bloggers to secure media coverage, product reviews, and high-quality backlinks. It allows you to get featured in top publications, such as Forbes, Digiday, or Marketing Week.

Journalists and bloggers can cover your story or product, boosting your brand visibility and SERP rankings. Aim to work with bloggers and journalists within your specific niche to ensure optimal impact.

Influencer Marketing and Social Media PR

With this PR type, you partner with trusted online voices, content creators, and social media influencers to reach specific audiences and build credibility.

For example, influencers like Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylie Jenner occasionally partner with fashion and perfume brands to showcase their products.

This approach combines authentic storytelling with strategic communication to drive higher engagement and capture new audiences. It also allows you to turn influencers into brand ambassadors to secure organic coverage.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

The strategic PR activity involves monitoring, influencing, and managing your brand’s online perception to ensure a positive image or stellar reputation. It’s particularly helpful in fixing negative coverage.

It involves:

  • Actively monitoring your brand’s sentiment.
  • Responding to customer reviews on sites like Yelp and Google.
  • Boosting positive content via SEO.
  • Suppressing negative results to ensure credibility.

Effective ORM involves proactive and reactive measures to control external narratives that can impact your brand’s image.

Guest Blogging and Thought Leadership

You can also write high-quality content for reputable third-party websites to establish thought leadership and secure relevant links.

For example, marketing and advertising professionals can contribute valuable content to websites such as Ad Age, Adweek, Digiday, and Marketing Week.

This is an effective way to reach new audiences, influence industry narratives, and showcase your expertise. It also acts as a long-term strategy for building trust and visibility.

Press Release Distribution

This activity involves sending company news, announcements, or updates to journalists, media outlets, and online platforms to increase coverage and awareness. Popular PR services you can use include PR Newswire, eReleases, and Newswire.com.

These services provide access to millions of contacts, increasing the likelihood of journalists, influencers, or media outlets picking up your story or news. Ensure your press release is newsworthy and always use an embargo to allow journalists time to prepare stories.

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Key Metrics to Measure Digital PR Success

Running a successful PR campaign is not about implementing the most tactics. Instead, you need to track and measure the right metrics to understand whether your efforts are delivering real impact.

Here are the key metrics to track:

  • Backlink volume: This is the number of inbound links from authoritative, relevant sites.
  • Referral traffic: The volume of visitors clicking through to your website from other sites.
  • Brand mentions: The number of linked and unlinked brand mentions across the web.
  • Share of voice (SoV): Measure of your brand’s digital visibility compared to your rivals.
  • Sentiment analysis: The overall perception of your brand by customers; it can be positive, negative, or neutral.
  • Social media engagement: Measures how audiences interact with your content and brand through likes, shares, comments, clicks, and saves.

For accurate measurement, establish baseline data for benchmarking. Record performance across your key metrics before the campaign and use it as a reference point for evaluations.

Steps to Implement Your Digital PR Strategy

Turning your digital PR strategy into measurable results demands clear planning, effective execution, and ongoing optimization.

Here is what you need to do:

  1. Define your objectives: Use the SMART strategy to set clear goals for your campaign and determine the right tactics.
  2. Identify your target audience and media: Understand who you are targeting and how you will reach them. Prioritize sites in your niche that potential customers frequent.
  3. Create value-driven content: Brainstorm and create newsworthy content with a strong narrative, engaging visuals, and raw authenticity.
  4. Execute outreach and build Relationships: Write compelling pitches to journalists, influencers, content creators, and media outlets, and nurture strong relationships.
  5. Amplify via multiple channels: Extend the reach of earned media, press releases, and branded stories across owned, earned, paid, and shared channels to boost visibility.

This process isn’t a one-time initiative; instead, you need to monitor your performance and results to support ongoing optimization.

You can use tools like Google Analytics, Brandwatch, Ahrefs, and Semrush for metric tracking, social listening, and backlink analysis.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

For more actionable insights, here are our responses to common questions that marketers ask:

What Budget Range Fits Digital PR Campaigns?

The budget range for digital PR should be about $5,000 to $20,000 per month, depending on your industry and goals. Enterprise-level initiatives usually exceed $30,000 per month.

Your ideal budget depends on the intensity of your media outreach, content creation, and project scope. A common strategy is to allocate 10% to 20% of your marketing budget to PR campaigns.

How Long Do Digital PR Campaigns Take to Show Results?

Digital PR campaigns typically take 3 to 6 months to show significant, sustainable results, depending on your consistency and intensity.

Digital PR is a “slow-burn” strategy, as it requires building relationships with journalists, researching trending topics, creating high-value content, and waiting for outlets to publish. This impacts the overall timelines for initial results.

What is the Difference Between Digital PR and Traditional PR?

While they share the same goals, digital PR and traditional PR differ in their channels, target audiences, and measurability.

Digital PR uses online channels like social media, blogs, and SEO-driven content to increase brand visibility and generate measurable traffic or backlinks. Conversely, traditional PR relies on offline, legacy media, such as TV, radio, and newspapers, to shape public opinion through one-way communication.

How Does Digital PR Support SEO Performance?

Digital PR supports SEO performance by securing high-authority coverage and quality backlinks, potentially increasing a website’s domain authority and SERP rankings.

Quality backlinks improve your domain authority and signal to search engines that your website is a reputable and trusted source. This augments our SEO performance as search engines prioritize reliable, high-quality, and authoritative websites.

Conclusion

Digital PR offers an effective way to boost your brand’s visibility, awareness, and reputation. It puts your brand in front of a broader audience, secures high-quality backlinks, and boosts your credibility.

But effective PR needs a well-planned strategy backed by expertise, time, and media relationships - resources that many businesses lack. That’s why working with an agency adds real value.

At ProfitEngine, we offer a range of services, including guest posting, outreach, and HARO link building, to support your PR campaigns. You can also pick one of our link-building packages to earn relevant links from our established partners and networks.

Get in touch with us today to discover how strategic link-building can enhance your digital PR.

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