Digital PR Campaigns for B2B and Professional Services: How to Build Visibility in Your Niche
Your business has limited reach. So how do you extend beyond your audience to build new visibility online? Digital advertising is one option, but it can be expensive and short-sighted. Organic search or social can build sustained visibility but can take a long time for most B2B and professional services firms. A third option combines the best of both worlds. With Digital PR campaigns, you can reach pockets of new buyers today and strengthen your website for the future.
After a decade in the agency world, I’ve been involved in dozens, if not hundreds, of Digital PR campaigns in one way or another. It may not be the flashiest form of marketing, especially in B2B and professional services, but it can have a massive impact on visibility. This blog post covers the intersection of Digital PR and SEO, answering questions like
What are Digital PR campaigns?
How do you set expectations for Digital PR and SEO internally?
Why is Digital PR link-building important?
What makes for a high-quality backlink?
How do you create effective Digital PR campaigns?
What is an example of Digital PR?
Recently, I joined the Path to Visibility podcast to share my thoughts and experience running Digital PR campaigns. Give it a listen:
What are Digital PR campaigns?
Digital PR is simply “digital public relations.” A Digital PR campaign is when you reach out to journalists, bloggers, podcasters, or other media contacts to secure a guest blog placement, social media mention, or other kinds of coverage for a newsworthy topic.
Digital PR campaigns are different from traditional PR campaigns because they secure digital media placement, as opposed to traditional media like print, TV, and radio. But you don’t need a bylined article in the Wall Street Journal for Digital PR to be successful. Far from it. The goal is to build brand visibility where buyers seek information about your expertise.
How do you set expectations for Digital PR campaigns internally?
When pitching the idea of Digital PR and SEO to stakeholders, it’s critical to show the timescale of such an investment. SEO improvements can take anywhere from 3-6 months to show impact. Depending on your strategy, Digital PR can have a similar time horizon.
In my experience managing Digital PR campaigns, there was about a three-month lead time from pitch to publication. Sometimes it was shorter if editors needed content to fill their calendars. Other times it took longer if the publication had a full content pipeline.
Why is Digital PR link-building important?
Securing guest articles is one way to accumulate links that point back to your website, also known as “backlinks.” These links are critical to SEO. They pass authority (or “link juice”) from one website to another. The number and quality of links are also known ranking factors in the eyes of search algorithms like Google and Bing.
For marketers who have been around long enough, the term “link building” has negative connotations. In the primitive days of digital marketing, you could purchase links that point back to your website. This form of “black hat” SEO was soon penalized by search engines. Early in my marketing career, I witnessed what happened when Google penalized a website. Organic traffic significantly declined. It took months to disavow bad links and appeal the penalty.
Fearing retribution from Google doesn’t mean you should avoid trying to get links. Quite the contrary. You must still accumulate links to your website to grow organic search traffic. But they have to be quality links.
What makes for a high-quality backlink?
A high-quality backlink doesn’t need to come from major publications like the Wall Street Journal. Instead, high-quality backlinks can point to your site from credible, trustworthy websites that publish content related to your expertise.
Google has an index of most, if not all, websites on the internet. So how does Google know if a website has authority? It looks at many factors, like your total number of public website pages, how many external links point back to your site, and the number of users who visit your website.
While Google won’t disclose how they view your website’s authority, there are other tools you can use.
Measuring a website’s authority
For example, “domain authority” is a metric that scores websites on a logarithmic scale from 0-100. Software development company Moz created a “domain authority” metric more than ten years ago that gives an overview of likely search engine performance. You could also consider it a measure of how influential a website is to an audience. Other tools have similar metrics.
To put it in perspective, the Wall Street Journal has an “authority score” of 89, according to SEMRush’s tool. But as the Twitter bros would say, “the riches are in the niches.” It would be more impactful for your Digital PR campaign to target publications with lower authority focusing on a niche.
For example, you’re an accounting firm trying to reach self-employed marketing freelancers. Instead of trying to land coverage in WSJ, you could target websites like Accounting Today, which has an authority score of 43, or CPA Journal, which has an authority score of 41.
Do-follow vs. No-follow backlinks
Two kinds of backlinks can point to your website:
Do-follow — passes “link juice” onto your site. These are the most coveted links you can accumulate.
No-follow — while still noteworthy to search engines and may drive traffic, no-follow links will not pass “link juice” to your website.
Website admins and publication editors control whether a link on their website is a do-follow or a no-follow link. If your SEO goal is to accumulate do-follow links, it may be worth clarifying that with publication editors before devoting resources to content production.
Examples of Digital PR Campaigns in Professional Services
A few years ago, I worked with a PR freelancer, and we ran multiple Digital PR campaigns. The agency I worked for had conducted original research on buyers in three different industry verticals and wanted to publicize those research studies by writing bylined articles in niche industry publications.
To illustrate, here is a bylined article from that campaign targeting home improvement business owners. Notice the link to the research study. Accumulating backlinks was one of our goals, and that campaign delivered results.
Once we got the hang of it, we ran an efficient operation. After publicizing each of the three industry research reports, a process for running Digital PR campaigns emerged:
Have something newsworthy to publicize
Research target media opportunities
Craft the pitch
Reach out and manage opportunities
Deliver on expectations
Promote media opportunities
Measure success
Have something newsworthy to publicize
First, for public relations of any kind to be effective, you have to have something newsworthy to publicize. Otherwise, your topic may not be interesting enough for editors to run in their publication.
We conducted original research and compiled a PDF report in the earlier example. Because this was a primary research study, it was unique and appealing to the publications we pitched.
Research target media opportunities
Next, identify websites or digital influencers who share your target market—a professional association with a blog, an established industry publication, or an influencer who serves your niche with a tangential offering.
In the Digital PR campaign example, we started with Google and compiled a list of publications our ideal client would subscribe to. Today, this would be a great use case for ChatGPT, too. We tried to build a list of as many publications as possible. The more we found, the higher our chances of success landing backlinks.
Craft your pitch
This is where you get the messaging right. You butter up your newsworthy topic like a Thanksgiving dinner roll. Your pitch is your chance to show publication editors why your topic will make them look good.
Like most content creation workflows, crafting our pitch was a back-and-forth between myself and the PR freelancer. She would take a first pass based on the creative brief, structured like a traditional press release. I would then suggest edits based on the research findings and key messages. Once refined, we were ready for outreach.
Reach out and manage opportunities
Managing media opportunities is like managing a sales pipeline. Depending on your process, you would have stages like lead, opportunity, pitch, won/lost, or something similar. At scale, organizations have entire lead flows dedicated to media opportunities in their Salesforce or Hubspot instances.
The PR contractor I worked with had existing contacts in some industries for outreach and also posted pitches to a newswire subscription. I managed these opportunities manually in a spreadsheet. One thing to note—some publications allow do-follow links, and some don’t. Make finding out a part of your process if it’s critical to your strategy.
Deliver on expectations
Public relations. Think about the second word. Relations. If you deliver quality work to a publication editor, they will want more. Establishing relationships with these editors can help you become a regular contributor. Also, editors reserve the right to publish—or not publish—contributions from guest authors.
We tried contracting out some guest blogs during our Digital PR campaign but couldn’t find a copywriting fit. Instead, I took on the brunt of it. It was a ton of writing. But I was best positioned to write about the research and its findings. A few of the publications even wanted more contributions.
Promote media opportunities
Extend the reach of your publications, and earn goodwill from editors. Promote your guest blogs after publication. Reach, clicks, and website sessions are vital metrics for publication editors. Help them look good, so they come back for more.
We kept a spreadsheet of all the links from guest blog articles and worked them into periodic promotion cycles on Twitter. We also linked to them from company blog posts. Since many of the guest blogs were under my byline, I posted to my personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
Measuring the success of Digital PR campaigns
Digital tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs provide analytics that shows how many backlinks point to your website, the date they went live, each link’s URL string, and the domain authority of each backlink.
Backlink growth was one of the main ways we measured the success of our Digital PR campaigns, but we also measured success in terms of report downloads. One research report looked at the student journey in higher education during the Covid pandemic. A higher education publication covered that report on their blog, and we saw a fair amount of leads in our CRM.
Are you considering a Digital PR campaign?
Reach out if you want to chat. I’m happy to share my experience and bounce ideas. You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter. I also offer a free digital marketing audit for B2B and professional services firms.
