You know e-mail, you get e-commerce, but what about e-PR? Electronic public relations is a digital-first approach to achieving earned publicity. It’s flexible enough to work alongside your traditional PR and marketing methods, but robust enough to be a standalone pillar in your communications plan.
How does e-PR work?
Like all things ‘e’, e-PR is built on links. Links take us to the products we purchase, the stories we read and the digital tools we use. The internet would be nothing without them, quite literally. Since they are a critical part of the internet’s infrastructure, it’s a very strategic decision to use links to leverage publicity.
e-PR borrows from traditional PR methods and adapts them to suit our modern, digitally-driven lives. If a link to your brand’s website appears on a credible, authoritative website that reflects well on your reputation – just as earned media in a respected magazine or television segment does.
This also does wonders for your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy by building backlinks. Backlinks are mutual and reciprocal. They appear on your website to link to an external website, and that external, trusted website links back to your website. This transaction tells search engines, “Yes, a website we already trust agrees that this brand’s website is also trustworthy.”
What are the benefits of e-PR?
e-PR strengthens your brand’s reputation, digital marketing objectives and SEO strategy, all in one step. Imagine your skincare brand appears in an online article about the best moisturisers, and it’s published by a reputable digital media outlet. Readers will notice your inclusion, prompting them to click-through to your website, and search engines will reward you for it with better search result rankings.
When your website link appears in various places on the internet, it creates more opportunities to drive traffic to your products. Ideally, this process will trigger the reader of a digital article to become a customer of yours.
Adding to this, e-PR builds your brand’s content library. Every brand has those dreaded moments of ‘What can I post about?’ which can be challenging to overcome. This is where e-PR doubles as a content creation tool – you can re-post media coverage, share KOL insights, and re-package what has been said about your brand.
Another beneficial aspect of e-PR is the opportunity to access or align with key opinion leaders (KOL). KOL are experts in their field and are fantastic for providing a voice and validity to your brand. Partnering with KOLs online contributes to your e-PR efforts and can be mutually beneficial when it’s done with the right expert.
The more you appear online across various platforms and contribute to your field digitally, the more organically your digital presence will build. Since our society is bolstered by the online world, investing in e-PR is a key way to stay relevant and keep connected with target markets.
How do e-PR agencies work?
e-PR specialists will be able to guide and support you, your team and your brand through the process. An effective e-PR strategy should work in tandem with your communications and digital approaches to complement each other.
Full-service agencies, such as Coote Communications Group, understand this relationship clearly and help to streamline the process. This is a time-saver in every sense: from big-picture strategy sessions to simplifying the smaller details like invoicing.