Are you wondering if increasing your PR budget can have a direct impact on your marketing ROI? The answer is yes, absolutely.
PR and digital marketing have traditionally been thought of as distinct fields, but in the digital age, the dividing lines have become increasingly blurred.
In this article, we’ll explore the various ways that PR interacts with digital marketing and marketing in general. Ready? Let’s dive in!
Understanding PR and Digital Marketing ROI
PR efforts tend to be focused on managing the public perception of a company. Marketing, on the other hand, including both digital and offline marketing, is focused on the promotion of a business’s products and services.
As Leigh McKenzie, Community Advocate at Traffic Think Tank, explains, “Increasingly, digital marketing channels such as social media are being used to help with PR; however, the reverse is also true, as PR can contribute tremendously to digital marketing ROI.”
Unfortunately, things like brand perception are difficult to measure quantitatively since they don’t typically have a direct impact on sales and other marketing metrics. In the past, the approach would typically have been to rely on Advertising Value Equivalencies (AVE), a system of quantitative measurement of PR ROI. As we’ll explore subsequently, however, the best practice would be to rely on a more qualitative approach to PR metrics.
Using this approach, as you’ll see in the coming sections, it is clear that modern PR can have a huge impact on digital marketing ROI.
How PR Enhances Digital Marketing ROI
In the simplest terms, we would argue that good PR can be thought of as the root of all marketing, similar to how understanding the roots of a language, like Old English, can support your understanding of modern English.
As search engines like Google look to prioritize content and links from high-authority sources, brand signals are becoming an increasingly important factor in SEO–if not the most important.
In addition to helping to boost a site’s SEO profile, the improved brand recognition and trust that comes with effective digital PR can also help increase clickthrough and conversion rates. Clearly, without strong PR, digital marketing efforts are likely to be a waste.
In the next section, we’ll explore this theme more, taking a look at some of the ways PR can impact SEO and digital marketing ROI.
Strategies to Leverage PR for Better SEO and Digital Marketing ROI
As we’ve described above, effective PR may help strengthen your brand recognition and perception, which are important factors that Google takes notice of. But digital PR can also help in some other ways, as we explore below:
Backlink Acquisition
Backlinks are a pretty important SEO factor, and digital PR can contribute to the implementation of an effective backlink strategy. Newsworthy press releases and other PR content that generate interest may gain some traction or go viral. While these types of content are not primarily created for backlink purposes, they can have this effect when done right.
Traditional PR strategies can also help enhance core digital marketing efforts. For instance, Kaplan’s Business Credit Resources for Women is a valuable resource page that may attract some backlinks. With good PR–possibly linked to news articles on relevant subjects like female entrepreneurship, this page may see its backlink profile strengthened considerably.
PR and Social Media
As we previously mentioned, social media channels can be very effective ways to amplify PR messaging.
Instead of relying primarily on traditional PR channels such as news sites, brand managers can distribute PR messaging through newer channels such as social-based influencers.
While PR doesn’t directly affect digital marketing in this way, it does have a secondary effect on SEO by helping to broaden your brand’s digital footprint.
Measuring PR’s Impact on Digital Marketing ROI
PR’s impact on marketing ROI isn’t always easy to measure, but there are some metrics you can rely on to get a picture of how your PR efforts are affecting your marketing results. Here are some key metrics you can track:
Media Mentions
Mentions are a metric that tracks the number of times a brand is mentioned on a platform. Tracking things like mentions through social monitoring is a great way to actively manage your business’s online reputation.
Share of Voice (SOV)
Share of voice is a closely related metric to mentions. It measures how much attention your brand gets from media sources and influencers within your industry when compared to your competitors.
Website Traffic
Although PR isn’t directly an SEO tactic, PR initiatives can lead to a spike in traffic as people look to learn more about your brand. Measuring the amount by which your traffic spikes in the aftermath of a PR campaign will help you determine how much value PR brings to your SEO.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is one of the most critical marketing activities, which makes tracking the number of leads you garner from digital PR a key metric to measure. You can do this by tracking the conversion rates of landing pages linked to press releases or mentions in articles.
For service businesses like digital marketing agencies, lead generation through digital PR can be particularly relevant. This is because service businesses are adapted to marketing tactics such as online events, making a strong digital footprint necessary.
Start Boosting Your Digital Marketing ROI with PR
In this article, we’ve shown how an effectively implemented digital PR strategy can significantly contribute to your digital marketing ROI by enhancing brand perception, improving SEO through backlinks and keyword optimization, and amplifying your messaging on social media. If you found this article helpful, we’d invite you to learn how to gain the best results from your PR, from our guide to stopping journalists from ignoring you.
