Are you the proud owner of a startup? Do you run an established business that’s a bit short on cash? In either case, you might be wondering how to improve your digital PR presence on a budget. Even if you don’t have experience with digital marketing, there are basic tasks to expand the breadth of your online presence. Take a look.
Tip #1: Sign Up for Help a Reporter Out
To broaden the reach of your PR online, you should sign up for Help a Reporter Out, or HARO; this subscription website will enable you to get your pitches in front of reporters around the world. You can expand your reach globally. HARO is a win-win for business owners like you and reporters. You get to share the news that promotes your brand and reporters can source stories.
HARO has four subscription plans. Paid plans start at just $19 per month and go up to $149 per month. While you may want to pay for a plan, many business owners will find that HARO’s basic plan will suit their PR purposes just fine. HARO does not charge a fee for its Basic subscription plan. Most individuals can leverage the benefits at no cost.
You should vote that HARO is more than “just” a great place to attract media coverage of the news you share. The website is also an excellent source where you can consistently earn high-quality backlinks to your website. With links being a ranking factor that determines where your site lands in search engine results pages, the links you get as a result of using HARO can dramatically improve your search engine optimization results.
Tip #2: Actively Manage Your Social Media Pages Efficiently
First, If you’re not already using social media to promote your brand, you should start now. So, identify the social sites the members of your target market use most often and set up an account for your business. For you to use social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn effectively, you’ll need to be active on your social pages. Luckily, there are web-based tools that can help you manage your social media accounts efficiently.
Next, two of the most streamlined and intuitive tools many business owners and digital marketers use to manage their social media accounts are Hootsuite and TweetDeck. Crowdfire, Buffer and Sprout Social are a few other tools you may want to consider using to manage your social media pages.
Tip #3: Monitor the Conversation
Then, to elevate your PR presence online, it’s vital for you to track what people are saying about your industry as well as your brand, location and goods or services. Reading material about your niche isn’t enough. You need to monitor every conversation that can relate to your brand.
While that may seem like an impossible task, many online tools can help you monitor the conversations that are relevant to your organization. You can use Hootsuite to monitor the use of select keywords, for example. You can use BuzzSumo to find the content that performs the best for any topic or competitor in any industry as well.
Tip #4: Create and Share Meaningful Content That’s Relevant
As you probably suspect, creating content is a vital part of a digital public relations strategy. It’s not enough to create content, however. You have to ensure that your content is meaningful and relevant to the members of your target audience. How can you achieve those things? By preparing material that speaks directly to your audience’s wants, needs, and pain points.
So, If you don’t already have one, create a blog for your website. Set up a content schedule that requires you to publish new posts regularly. Once people learn when they can expect new posts, the likelihood that they’ll return becomes higher. Your readers begin to look forward to your latest content.
As far as digital public relations go, your goal is to ensure your brand is always top of mind. You can accomplish that objective by sharing your content on your social pages and encouraging your followers to do the same. Next, you can share links to your material via email. Furthermore, you may want to promote content about your brand, products or services by using paid ads as well.
Tip #5: Get Familiar with Search Engine Optimization
Since you want to keep your brand at the forefront of consumers’ minds, it’s crucial to familiarize yourself with SEO. While SEO is continually evolving, its primary purpose is and will remain the same:
- Improve where your website lands in SERPs
- Drive organic traffic to your site
One way you can improve the effectiveness of your SEO efforts is to identify the keywords you can competitively rank. Use those keywords sparingly throughout your content and incorporate them into your social media strategy.
Although it used to be an SEO best practice to use your chosen keywords as much as possible, it no longer is. In the current environment, it’s generally wise to use your keywords carefully without using them so much that your material is viewed as spam by search engines.
Some SEO experts may advise you to limit your use of keywords to titles, subheadings, title tags, image descriptions, and the like. Still, your SEO must be consistent — it’s a balancing act.
Bonus Tip: Become a Guest Blogger
Finally, we promised to deliver five actionable tips to elevate your digital PR presence, but we’re going to provide you with a valuable bonus tip: Become a guest blogger. Writing for authority websites can help you establish a reputation for being an industry expert. Guest blogging has multiple SEO benefits. In turn, you will motivate people to seek out your other content. It can also create opportunities to link to your previous work, which can help your SEO.
Our Digital PR Services
If you lack the time or interest in handling your digital public relations internally, we can help. We have an in-house team of experts who can manage your digital PR for you. Look over our case studies now and contact Heroic Search to learn more about our Internet PR services today.
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