Digital PR has always been about earning coverage and links on trusted news websites to raise brand awareness among customers and build authority for search engines. It’s now becoming much bigger. As AI search becomes more of a thing, LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity are turning to brand mentions in respected news outlets to find
Digital PR has always been about earning coverage and links on trusted news websites to raise brand awareness among customers and build authority for search engines.
It’s now becoming much bigger. As AI search becomes more of a thing, LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity are turning to brand mentions in respected news outlets to find brands to recommend in AI search.
And digital PR is the most effective way of getting these important brand mentions that make you more visible in all the places your customers are looking for you.
In this guide, you’ll learn about digital PR and how to use it to increase brand awareness and results from digital marketing.
Digital PR earns coverage, links and online visibility for brands in key media outlets and industry blogs. Unlike link building (which usually involves paying for links) digital PR is about earning the right to appear in news sites and earning links with interesting content.
It takes the best of “traditional” PR – building relationships with journalists, telling interesting stories and building brand awareness – but moves the results online, making the aim to get online mentions, rather than print coverage.
Digital PR has always been an important part of content marketing and SEO. Building high authority links organically in national, trade and regional media that signal to Google, search engines and LLMs like ChatGPT that you’re website is worth paying attention to.
The main difference between digital and traditional PR is where you’re trying to get coverage.
Traditional PR has historically been about getting coverage in print publications or with broadcasters.
Digital PR is about getting coverage (and links) from news websites or respected industry blogs to impact SEO and online visibility.
Imagine walking around a room telling everyone who’ll listen how great you are.
That’s essentially what your website is doing online.
It’s telling Google and LLMs that your business should be ranked highly or referenced in AI search results.
But your website would say that, wouldn’t it?
Now imagine someone else is walking around the room telling people on your behalf how great you are. That person is more likely to be believed and trusted because it’s a third-party recommendation.
That’s what digital PR does. By building links from other websites to yours, you’re building trust signals that Google and LLMs pay attention to when it comes to deciding where you’ll rank in SERPs, and whether you’ll be referenced in AI search results.
By mixing digital PR and the credibility it earns with high-quality content on your website, you’re more likely to increase your online visibility, get in front of more customers, and win more sales and leads.
One benefit of digital PR (just like traditional PR) is getting coverage for your brand in the media outlets that your customers read and trust.
Whether that’s coverage in a national news website like The Guardian or coverage in a trusted B2B industry publication, getting your brand mentioned in these types of websites builds your reputation as an industry leader and builds awareness and trust with your audience.
But the biggest benefit of digital PR that you can’t get with traditional PR is the impact it can have on your website’s SEO and AI search visibility.
Authoritative coverage earns high-quality links that strengthen your website’s authority and help you compete in search results against bigger brands.
That’s because Google treats links as one of the main trust signals when it comes to rankings.
All other things being equal, the site with the better quality links will win.
And link quality is the important point to remember, and why digital PR is more effective than buying links.
That’s because Google prefers organic links that were earned over links that have been paid for. And you can’t buy the type of links you can earn with digital PR.
Buying links tends to get you high volume, but on lower authority blogs. Digital PR earns links on industry news sites that are more trusted.
These media placements can also earn referral traffic from readers, getting more traffic to your site from potential customers who are interested in what you do.
It also compounds because journalists tend to read industry publications for story ideas, so if they come across your brand and story, it means you’ll organically pick up more coverage and links, without even pitching to them.
This happened for a client of ours – Bromley Estates Marbella – when we ran a campaign about the best countries for digital nomads.
While initially we pitched this story to The Mirror, earning coverage in the national site, it was later picked up by Yahoo and other websites, without us ever sending the story to them:
Digital PR campaigns – especially data-led campaigns – are also easily repeatable, meaning you can run similar campaigns every year, reducing the time and money you need to come up with new ideas.
For example, a retail business might run a “most expensive city for Christmas shopping” campaign, or a SaaS business might run a “state of remote work in the UK” report.
Both of these campaigns can then be repeated the next year, with the new stats used to identify trends in opinions or customer behaviour, creating brand new stories using the same campaign data.
The best digital PR campaigns don’t just have to be one-off stunts. Instead, they can be repeatable ideas that you can come back to and that continue to generate interest over time.
In B2B, your digital PR campaigns can even become annual industry benchmarks that people in your industry actually wait to be released.
PwC take this approach effectively, releasing a series of benchmark reports throughout the year on a variety of topics like business innovation, finance and sustainability.
(PwC releases benchmark reports along with PR material to generate interest in their content)
While digital PR has long been important for link building and improving SEO results, the increasing use of ChatGPT, Perplexity and LLMs, along with AI overviews, has only made it more important.
Although no one really knows yet how these platforms source results, there is growing evidence that they pull information from trusted news sources and websites, rather than company pages or blogs.
It means “success” for digital PR isn’t just links and SEO, it’s now the benefits you can get from just having your brand referenced on sites like the BBC, The Times or other industry publications.
AI as a search tool has made digital PR essential for increasing brand visibility in the places LLMs use to source brands.
By being cited consistently in the press, you’re more likely to appear in AI search, increasing visibility across all the places your customers use to research.
Step 1: Set the goal
Why do you want to do digital PR? Are you looking to get links to a particular product or category page? Become more visible in AI search? Improve SEO? Or use digital PR to raise awareness of a product or service?
Step 2: Research your audience and the news agenda
Look for an issue you can tie a digital PR campaign to. Read the news or trade press to look for good angles or topics that are generating interest that you can add something to. Look for seasonal trends like cost of living, graduation, sports events, national holidays or industry moments like budget or political announcements or changes to regulations in your industry.
Think about how you can get involved in the discussion. Maybe commission a research report to take a different look at an issue, or use your own experts to add commentary to stories journalists are already writing about.
Step 3: Choose a campaign format
Journalists get spammed with hundreds of emails a day, so sending a generic press release isn’t going to get their attention. Instead, think of a campaign format that they would find interesting.
We’ve given some examples already with national surveys, data-driven or interactive content or even video content.
If you’re using research, think about how you can cut your data up to increase your reach, for example, cutting data up into particular industries, geographical regions and even by demographics.
Digging more into the data will help you find stories you can pitch to national, local and trade media to increase your coverage.
Step 4: Source and validate the data
If you’re using data as the source of a PR story, you’ll need to make sure it’s reputable, or journalists won’t be interested.
Original research is an ideal source of digital PR content and gives you something to talk about that no one else can. Public data is also useful if you can give a different take, but again, it needs to come from a reputable source like the ONS or a regulatory body like Ofgem.
Make sure you include your sample size or methodology for putting your reports together to prove to journalists that the study is legit.
Step 5: Create a story around your data
Journalists want stories, not stats, so don’t just regurgitate the information you’ve got. Instead, provide commentary and expert insights about what the data is telling you.
Look for any stat that’s surprising, controversial or clear and build your main story around it.
Step 6: Create press material
This could be a dedicated landing page, research report, infographic, video or interactive content.
A press release can work to tell your story, but should be tied to something you can link back to.
Keep your story concise and get to the point of the story quickly so journalists understand what it is.
Step 7: Prepare your media list
Look for journalists at publications who actually write about the topic you’re pitching. The worst thing you can do is just spray your PR campaign to a generic list of journalists.
This will just damage your reputation and increase the chances of future campaigns ending up in the spam folder.
One of the ways to build a list is to create tiers for the priority journalists you want to focus on.
For example, your A tier could be national press or a particular trade outlet you want to feature in.
Send your story to a journalist in this tier first as an exclusive to see if they’re interested. If it’s not for them, move down your list until it’s exhausted before moving to the tier below.
One of the advantages of this is that if you get coverage in a tier A publication, your story can naturally get picked up by lower-tier publications organically (as we did with Bromley Estates)
If you blast your story out to everyone, and it gets picked up in a lower-tier publication first, it’s less likely a higher-tier publication will then pick it up because it’s lost some of its news value.
Step 8: Pitch your story
Make your subject line something that would grab a journalist’s attention (use the headline from your story) and make sure you mark your email as exclusive if you’re offering it as one.
Add a one or two-line explainer to tell the journalist what your story is about.
Include your press release in the body of the email and embed images or videos in the main body (or add links to a dropbox)
Don’t add anything as an attachment, as this can reduce the chances of your email being sent and increase the chances of it getting flagged as spam.
Once you’ve sent your story, don’t be afraid to follow up if the journalist hasn’t responded or published your story after a day or two.
Resend everything with a polite note that you’re following up in case they’ve missed your original pitch (it does happen).
If you’re not getting success, try to reangle your story using a different stat or angle.
Step 9: Measure your results
Track your coverage and the percentage of coverage that has links. Check the authority of the websites you’re getting links from, any referral traffic you’re getting (and where it’s coming from).
You should also look for any SEO improvements for target pages or keywords.
Using GA4 you can also attribute any conversions or enquiries that have come directly from PR links.
And check whether your brand is becoming more visible in LLMs and AI searches to monitor how digital PR is impacting your overall visibility online, not just in search engines.
Step 10: Review and repeat
If your campaign has been successful, it’s worth logging the idea for use again in the future (don’t run the same campaign straight away)
Instead, begin the process again with a new angle or data to target a different segment of your target media to earn a greater variety of links.
Digital PR has gone past the label of link building.
With AI search continuing to grow, and LLMs looking to reliable media sources to reference brands, digital PR has become a key part of growing your online visibility in all the places your customers and potential customers are looking for you.
If you want help from a digital PR agency to create effective campaigns, get in touch for a free strategy session.
We’ll run through your goals and objectives for digital PR and help come up with some campaigns you could use to earn press mentions and links in the publications your audience, search engines and LLMs trust.
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