Digital PR campaigns are used to build a brand’s reputation using online channels. It is a very effective strategy in 2025 because most of the world uses the Internet to find and interact with brands.
E-commerce itself is booming, and online shopping is now the norm rather than an exception. However, due to this very boom, the competition in the digital space is cut-throat.
That’s why a good brand reputation is necessary for success. However, many brands make some mistakes that cause their PR campaigns to fail or underperform.
Today, we will explore these mistakes and learn how to avoid them and launch a successful PR campaign.
5 Errors Brands Make in Digital PR Campaigns
Given below are the five most common errors that result in failed PR campaigns. Learn about them so that you can avoid them.
1. Neglecting Technical Website Readiness
A digital PR campaign requires that you have a website. Without a website, your campaign has no anchor and funnel. The funnel is the place where you divert your audience after they have been attracted by your advertising and marketing.
For the success of your PR campaign, it is necessary for your website to have technical readiness. Here’s what technical readiness entails.
- Fully functioning. The website should not have any broken links, navigation errors, or slow load times.
- Server stability and hosting capacity. The servers your website is hosted on should be stable and have no downtime. They should also have the capacity to deal with increased traffic without denial of service.
- DNS configuration. The DNS settings and records of the website/domain should be in order. There should be no problems that lead to your website becoming unreachable.
There are plenty of other things we list here, but those are the most important ones.
Too often, a brand will start its PR campaign while its website only has a few pages. Or they haven’t stress-tested the server to see if it can work under a heavy load.
Here’s how you can fix these errors. A website audit will help you find broken links and missing pages. A stress testing tool like K6 or ApacheBench can simulate HTTPS requests to see how many your server can handle before crashing. As for DNS settings, you can use a DNS lookup tool to verify all your records.
In this way, you can ensure that your website’s technical readiness is complete ahead of your PR campaign.
2. Chasing Irrelevant Links
One aspect of digital PR is to obtain authoritative backlinks from other websites. However, there are certain best practices for obtaining backlinks that campaign runners often ignore.
Those are the following.
- The website from which you are getting backlinks must have a high domain ranking and authority.
- The target website should be related to your own niche.
- The target website must have a lot of traffic.
It is better to get just one link from such a site than ten links from irrelevant and low-quality websites. That is because one good link makes you rank higher, while bad links will reduce that rank. The rank we are talking about is the search engine results page (SERP) ranking, which dictates how high your website appears for relevant search queries.
Campaigners sometimes lose sight of this fact and chase irrelevant and bad links in a misguided attempt to increase exposure and authority. So, stop doing that, do your research, and only chase valuable links that will build your own authority.
3. Not Using Enough Data-Driven Stories
One of the best ways to have a good reputation is to “put your money where your mouth is.” That is a saying that means “doing what you say.” So, whatever service or products your brand provides, you need to show with real data that they indeed solve the problems you designed them for.
One of the best ways of doing so is to get your previous clients to testify for you. You can do that by making a reviews or testimonials section on your website and encouraging your clients to leave reviews for services rendered.
You can also use analytic tools to check out how your product or service benefited someone and then use that data to promote your brand. For example, if your services are related to increasing the foot traffic of a store, then you can measure the number of people who entered the store after your services. Then compare that figure with the number of people who entered before your services, and then show the result as a percentage.
Then you can say something impressive like: “With our approach, you can improve foot traffic by up to 75%.”
So, using data in this way to promote your brand in your PR campaigns is necessary to develop a good reputation. The alternative is that you don’t use data and provide people no reason to trust your brand.
So, the lesson is to always back up your claims with data.
4. Not Personalizing Outreach
A digital PR campaign is a mix of marketing and authority building. A brand will publish content and posts to build its authority, create social media posts and comments to interact with its audience, as well as a host of other things.
However, one thing you will notice is that all of these things require public interaction in some shape or form. All the content is read by the audience, and the social media posts and comments are used for engagement with the audience. Everything in a PR campaign is ultimately an interaction with your target audience.
So, to make the most of these interactions, you have to customize and personalize them. That means you should have the market data and know things about your audience, such as the following:
- The audience age and demographic
- Region
- Perceived likes and dislikes
- Contextual data (in B2B scenarios) such as current problems, revenue range, etc.
Brands make the mistake of not using such data as much as they should. They send out generic content and posts that do not resonate with their audience, so the PR campaign falls flat.
That’s why you need to personalize as much of your outreach as possible to boost the engagement rate of your audience.
5. Inadequate Monitoring and Optimization
Any campaign, whether for PR, marketing, or sales, needs to be monitored throughout its lifecycle and thoroughly analyzed.
All sorts of metrics that can affect your outcomes need to be monitored and then optimized for better results. Some common examples of KPIs to be monitored are as follows.
- Website uptime
- Incoming traffic
- Sentiment analysis
- Conversions from marketing
- Customer satisfaction
- Overall engagement
A mistake that brands make in PR campaigns is that they either don’t measure the KPIs adequately or they are measuring the wrong KPIs.
To avoid making this mistake, have a plan of action ready and use tools and software that let you monitor digital platforms automatically, like Ahrefs, SemRush, or our very own Agility PR media monitoring tool.
This will let you optimize your PR strategy on the fly to ensure that no resources are wasted on dead ends. It will also help you to fix the shortcomings of the campaign and improve its performance.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, five mistakes that brands make in PR campaigns that can cost them their reputation and business. These mistakes simply amount to oversight and carelessness. If you are prudent about them, you will be fine. Just invest in the right tools, technology, and talent to make these matters easier for you, and your brand will be fine.
