As the world continues to embrace online and new media, clients are shifting away from traditional PR in favor of digital approaches. This has resulted in agencies going beyond what they once focused on—traditional marketing and public relations practices—to include social media and content marketing. Nowadays, getting your Digital PR Strategy right is crucial the growth of your business online.
If you want to learn how to strategize and execute an effective Digital Marketing Plan, here’s how you can do it, in just five easy steps!
1. Define your goals.
When developing a Digital PR Strategy, it is crucial to identify goals for your campaign. Having clear-cut goals will help steer you in the right direction and create a solid marketing plan for your businesss.
2. Define your target audience.
Identifying who you want to communicate with through your digital PR campaigns will help you set goals for the campaigns and promote them in a way that will best resonate with your target audience.
A great way to identify your target audience is to create a “Buyer Persona,” a representation of your ideal customer based on demographics, professional info, values, pain-points, interests, challenges, behavior, etc.
Creating a Buyer Personal is extremely helpful to ensure your PR & marketing efforts are tailored toward your ideal customer.
Here is a useful free tool by Hubspot to guide you through the process of creating a Buyer Persona.
3. Come up with content ideas.
A content schedule is incredibly useful for planning content, it will serve as a framework for your PR campaigns. A content schedule will help you organize content, plan content relevant to key events, and also help you avoid bad days to interact with the press.
Here is a link to a free content calendar template from Backlinko to help you in your Digital PR efforts.
4. Create!
The next step is to put your content ideas and schedule to use! Create blog posts, articles, videos, how-to guides, anything you can think of which can bring value to your potential customers.
They key is to create content that will genuinely add value to the viewer’s life. This is where the Buyer Persona from step 2 comes in handy! Consider the pain-points, challenges, questions, and interests of your target audience to find ways to help.
5. Outreach
The final step is to build a PR list and do lots of email outreach.
Journalists receive dozens of emails a day from people wanting the same thing as you. This is why it is important to differentiate yourself and give journalists a reason to open your email.
- Personalize your email – thousands of marketers are sending out cold emails to tons of publications every day, saying the same exact things. Stand out and show the recipient that you’re not a bot who has blasted out the same email to a hundred other people – do your research, use their name, reference other work they’ve done in the past, give a genuine compliment.
- Make your subject unique – journalists are busy people. If you want them to open your emails, you must grab their attention via the subject line of your email and give them a reason to check out your message.
- Make GOOD content – the best way to be successful with email outreach is to pitch content that is too good to turn down. Create and pitch content that would be valuable for others to link to or use in their own work. Once again, think about how you can provide value!
- Be consistent – do not get discouraged if things are slow, email outreach is a tedious process. In order to truly see results you need to be persistent and not give up.
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