Digital PR – Planning a Strategy for Niche Industries
Digital PR is an integral element to any holistic online marketing strategy. PR is the glue between your social media, content marketing and SEO strategies and should be high on your list of considerations when creating your digital B2B marketing plan.
Any good plan needs to start with a clear and concise aim and this is where some people get confused when it comes to Digital PR. Some will be approaching the exercise from a pure PR point of view, in the traditional sense, where the aim of the discipline is purely for brand or product awareness. Others are coming from an SEO background, as the Google Penguin algorithm update has meant that meaningful relationships with journos are the only realistic way of gaining any real value from link building.
It’s always been a struggle to attribute the value of traditional PR to a company’s bottom line unless the company is in crisis, whereas with Digital PR it’s much easier to create attribution models based on traffic and digital sales funnels. Whether your aim is to increase traffic and revenue from digital awareness or use your PR more towards an SEO halo effect (which will also increase traffic and revenue) your first point of call is to decide with your team how you will reflect your ROI through reporting and agree on KPIs to ensure you’re constantly reporting on and refining your strategy.
After deciding on how to report on your success there are two real sides to your strategy, the first is your calendar of content which dictates what types of stories you’ll be able to create at what times of the year. The second is your list of contacts and placements.
When it comes to very niche industries, it may be a daunting task to consider either of these aspects, as many of our clients tell us, ‘we don’t have anything interesting to talk about’. – We have never once found this to be the case with any client in any industry.
Content Calendar
It’s always a good idea to create an annual content plan, this way you can break down your brainstorming into months and seasons or quarters. Consider what your clients are doing in those months, after all, it’s potential clients or customers you’re looking to entice with your content so it should be helpful and insightful for their industry, not your own.
Contacts and Placements
In terms of how you’re going to seed your content, when you’re in a niche industry you have to think a little outside of the box. For an engineering company, for example, you may already have established links with all of your industry journals and news sites but seeding to the same sites runs the risk of over-saturation.
Think about running your content on the types of sites your clients are more likely to be reading. If we use engineering as an example again, the insight from such a broad-ranging subject could fit into the media schedules of outlets of various different subjects from energy and the environment to IT and even aeronautics.
If your business is within a very niche industry and you think you have run out of options when it comes to Digital PR, please contact us here. We love bringing different industries together and creating synergy through insightful content and PR!