Digital PR: How the convergence of SEO, Influencer Marketing & Content Can Drive Traffic & Revenue for your Business

The media landscape is fragmented and changing constantly. Today, the lifecycle of a news story is hours at best and consumers are overwhelmed, which is why we think PR needs to evolve.

We’re investing in new and diverse ways to connect organizations with their target audiences, to maximize every mention and impression to its full potential, and to drive measurable impact in the form of engagement, traffic, leads and sales.

Skeptical that this can be accomplished through PR? Give me a chance to explain.

InkHouse was conceived in 2007 from a belief that social media, content and media relations could not (and should not) be done in silos. Today, the digital media and PR silos also must dissolve. Customers, whether consumers or organizations, require single clicks to immediate actions. They don’t peruse magazines and content -- that content must find them. And the old era that birthed Facebook and Twitter is coming to an end, ushering a new phase that is still to be determined, but must feature more user control and greater privacy.

For much of my career in the search marketing industry, I led the design and execution of influencer and content strategies aimed to increase traffic and ultimately, revenue for a broad range of organizations. I’ve had the opportunity to help some of the world’s best known disruptors surpass global, legacy brands and helped legacy brands expand into new digital terrain. The approach? Create stories around brands that people find interesting, and get publishers of all kinds to share and engage with those stories on blogs, social media and other platforms in a way that drives measurable results.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s digital PR, yet no one really talks about it in that way.  

I still don’t entirely understand why public relations, SEO, content marketing, social media and influencer relations are still primarily deployed as disparate tactics rather than working in synergy with one another to maximize their combined output. It ALL starts with telling a great story, so who better to drive the strategy behind all of it than us?

It’s more critical than ever for brands to leverage new, trusted voices to tell their stories and create content that can be found by their audiences when they want it, where they want it. There’s a massive opportunity in PR to expand beyond the direct impact of our placements to solve for this. For example, the utilization of influencers should be considered an extension of every media relations strategy. Not only do they have the capability to expand a brand’s reach, but they’re trusted voices who influence consumer perception and purchasing decisions more than traditional media. Oh -- and if leveraged correctly, they just so happen to help you rank, too.

In addition, by more regularly utilizing data to inform content strategy, we can maximize the impact of client campaigns. Establishing thought leadership through content is critical for success, but it can go miles further if it’s strategically aligned with solutions to problems that a key audience is searching for and discovering on their own. What’s most exciting to me is that we have all the tools under one roof to achieve this.