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Hiring a Digital PR Agency: How & Why
The days when digital communications were an optional practice for businesses are long gone.
As the internet age continues to accelerate at unfathomable speed, the importance of a strong online presence becomes increasingly essential. Investing in high-calibre digital PR services is vital for any brand that wishes to avoid being left in the dust by its competitors.
While some businesses opt to hire their own in-house team, more companies than ever are placing their trust in the hands of a leading digital PR agency. Hiring one can be the perfect way to separate yourself from the competition. By handing your strategy over to industry specialists you’ll ensure your campaigns are delivered with expertise.
With so many different agencies, consultants, and firms populating the internet, deciding on the best digital PR agency for you can feel like an impossible task. Fortunately, Reboot is on hand to provide you with all the key considerations when hiring a digital PR agency.
What is a digital PR agency?
A digital PR agency is a company hired by other businesses to help them with their digital PR strategy. These agencies combine the tried-and-tested processes of traditional PR with innovative, modern practices essential to success in the online era.
The entire business model of these agencies is centred around delivering successful digital PR strategies for their clients. As such, the best digital PR agencies possess unparalleled resources, contacts, and knowledge across a breadth of industries.
Reboot is a digital PR agency with a selection of specialist teams, each possessing expertise in one of the key facets of digital PR such as content, graphics, outreach, and SEO.
Why should I hire a digital PR agency?
The importance of digital PR in the modern day is beyond question. Regardless of your industry, it’s essential that you maximise your brand’s visibility online to ensure you stay one step ahead of your competitors.
While some businesses choose to go down the route of employing an in-house digital PR team, this can come with limitations. Although it may cost less up front, the outlay spend on paying a team of staff is likely to cost more in the long run. This is before you even account for the cost of programs, systems, and the regular training required to keep your employees up to date with the latest best practices.
What’s more, as digital PR is comprised of multiple independent processes, you’ll likely need to hire more employees if you want your strategy to reach its full potential.
Hiring a leading link building agency like Reboot takes the stress of hiring and training your own team away from you. With access to our unrivalled resources, you can be sure that your campaign is being delivered by specialists who are fully up-to-date with the latest industry demands.
With designated teams for each of the fundamental digital PR areas, you can be sure that every facet of your campaign is being delivered to the highest standard.
Choosing the Right Digital PR Agency
Considering how fast paced the digital marketing industry is, there's a plethora of strategies and tactics that are discovered on a daily basis, and so it can be difficult to stay on top of the latest trends without sufficient guidance.
There's nothing embarrassing about admitting you need the help of a digital marketing agency, and specifically a Digital PR agency to streamline your business and take it to the next level in the rankings.
When choosing a Digital PR agency, the decision shouldn't come too easy - ultimately you want to pick one that fits with your brand values and principles and understands what you wish to get out of your brand.
How to Vet a Digital PR Agency
Understand your company's marketing needs
As much as you're scouting a company to satisfy your company's needs, it's only made possible if you understand exactly what you're after. What are you looking for specifically? What's your core focus? Do you have a budget in mind and where do you wish to prioritise your budget?
Research agencies, as much as they’d research you
Like with anything in life, take the time to do your homework. When looking for Digital PR agencies, you should take the time to investigate the work they do and if their results is impressive.
Do they outsource some of their services you're after, or do they conduct them entirely in-house? Can they run effective SEO and Digital PR on their own site? Do they have a healthy backlink profile?
Furthermore, we all love to be referred a company through recommendations. So, ask around in your business community, friends and family if they know anyone they'd recommend.
Prepare Your Questions
It can be easy to lose sight of what it is you're after, especially if your first meeting, whether in person or virtually goes on for several hours. Before your first conversation, think about the kind of questions that will help you find an agency that suits your needs.
Try Before You Buy
A meeting is the best way forward after you've been initially impressed by a Digital PR agency. Scheduling a meeting is the best test that your company gels with the agency of your choice and it's the best way to ensure one can work with one another.
Like to learn more? This blog post details some useful information as to the steps you can take when choosing a digital marketing agency.
What are the benefits of hiring a digital PR agency?
Your digital PR campaign is only as good as the people working on it. While hiring a digital PR agency can bring endless advantages, it’s imperative that you find a high-calibre agency that is a good fit for your business. We’ll delve further into the differences between a good and bad agency a little later.
When done well, digital PR can bring numerous benefits to your business, from increased web visibility to improved brand authority and revenue. While these are the core goals, the best digital PR agencies rely on an array of bespoke practices to achieve these results for your business. These include:
Targeted digital PR campaigns
A digital PR campaign is a sequence of planned actions designed to raise your business profile and enhance your brand’s image on the web.
The most successful digital PR campaigns combine longstanding traditional PR practices like outreach and contact building with modern processes like content writing, SEO, and data acquisition, to cultivate in-demand stories that generate positive coverage for your business.
At Reboot, we rely on our cross-industry expertise to identify the most on-trend, relevant topics that will engage your target audience. This allows us to create relevant content and ensure your brand is covered by the right channels to reach as many potential customers as possible.
We use an array of unorthodox SEO company and digital PR techniques like newsjacking and reactive PR to catapult your brand to the forefront of the latest trends and current events.
Expert content creation
While writing has always played a part in PR strategy, its role in digital PR is more profound. Whereas content writing in traditional PR was typically limited to direct promotion methods like press releases and print advertisements, the best digital PR agencies employ more sophisticated techniques.
Reboot produces blogs, studies, assets, and news stories that offer your audience value beyond the mere confines of brand promotion. From solving a problem with an informative guide to providing entertainment with an on-trend story, we produce content that will attract relevant readers while showcasing your brand in the best possible light.
We understand that engaging content in the digital age is about more than just good writing. This is why we have expert teams in graphic design and data acquisition. With studies claiming that as many as 91% of people prefer visual content, our talented graphics pros are masters at bringing articles to life with stunning images and infographics.
By producing our own unique data studies (primary data), as well as acquiring data from reputable external sources (secondary data), we’re able to find unique angles that can be brought to life by our talented creatives.
Improved search engine visibility
As the digital age continues to accelerate, the importance of SEO grows ever stronger. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of fine-tuning your online content to achieve the highest possible placement in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When done well, SEO can ensure your site gets seen by as many relevant people as possible while keeping your brand a step ahead of its competitors.
SEO is comprised of several different processes including keyword research and implementation, internal and external linking, and page optimisation, with each process constantly evolving to cope with the ever-changing demands of search engine algorithms.
Reboot’s acclaimed SEO agency team relies on a string of proven yet developing principles to keep its clients ahead of the curve.
High profile, relevant links and placements
As with traditional PR, securing relevant coverage is essential to the success of your digital PR strategy. Whereas conventional PR may have looked at building relationships with print journalists to secure press coverage, digital PR uses a diverse range of outreach tactics to maximise your company’s presence online.
The best digital PR agencies possess high-profile contacts across an array of industries. With experience in so many different fields, these agencies can use contacts gained on previous projects to secure valuable placements for your campaign.
As well as possessing a strong contact book, skilled outreach teams rely on proven tactics in link building to align your content with the most well-regarded outlets within your field.
Link building is a fundamental aspect of your digital PR strategy, with the quality and quantity of links pointing to your page a key determiner of your site’s authority in the eyes of the search engines. By sourcing links from the most relevant, respected brands within your niche, you portray a trustworthy image both to your customers and the SERPs.
From nationally recognised outlets to respected, industry-specific publications, a good agency will be armed with all the tools required to generate the most relevant exposure for your brand.
In-house digital PR vs hiring an agency
Despite the growing popularity of digital PR agencies, many companies still opt to hire an in-house team to oversee their strategy.
While hiring your own digital PR staff may look like a more cost-effective solution than paying out for an agency, the endless benefits of hiring a company of experts to handle your digital PR strategy can provide more value in the long run.
As a company whose entire focus is the successful implementation of digital PR, elite agencies possess incomparable knowledge, resources, and skills within the industry. Whereas for most companies, digital PR plays second fiddle to primary issues like sales and revenue, digital PR agencies plough all of their resources into delivering the best strategies for their clients.
Although a skilled in-house employee may possess knowledge in all areas of digital PR, it’s only natural that they’ll be stronger in some facets than others. This can result in a strategy that is exceptional in some aspects but lacking in others.
If you want your campaign to be handled with expertise in all areas, you’ll likely have to hire designated teams for content, SEO, outreach, data, and graphics which can see your costs rack up over time.
With the average annual salary for a PR specialist found to be £35,862 according to Glassdoor, employing a full team of specialists is no small feat. These costs can soar even further when you factor in the regular training required to keep your employees at the cutting edge of this ever-changing industry.
Hiring a digital PR agency or link building agency removes the stress and financial responsibility of employing and training your own in-house staff. By outsourcing your strategy to a high-calibre agency like Reboot, your campaign will be handled by a string of teams that each specialise in a specific aspect of digital PR. This means that any additional training or resources required will be covered by the agency, leaving you with more time to run the other fundamental areas of your business.
Digital PR agency vs digital PR consultant
Despite the undeniable benefits of working with a digital PR agency, some businesses opt to hire a sole freelancer or consultant to manage their digital PR affairs. For smaller, upstart companies with less ambitious campaign expectations, employing a digital PR consultant can be an affordable, productive solution.
Digital PR consultants tend to work either independently or with a small team of fellow consultants to implement your digital PR strategy. Whereas agencies like Reboot have specified teams for each area of digital PR, consultants tend to employ a ‘jack of all trades’ approach, with a single professional responsible for all aspects of your campaign. It is good to know the differences like those above between digital PR consultants vs agencies.
Though this can work brilliantly for basic strategies, the sheer volume of skills and tasks required to implement a larger digital PR campaign can leave consultants too stretched to give due attention to all of the key practices required to maximise success. This problem is amplified if your consultant is working with numerous other clients and can result in your campaign feeling rushed and lacking in key areas.
The best digital PR agencies have resources to accommodate a variety of different campaign expectations. Whereas smaller companies with more basic requirements can opt to pay for just the essential services, larger businesses with higher reaching goals may choose a more expansive, holistic strategy that will maximise their potential online.
What’s more, with such a vast range of services at their disposal, many agencies allow their clients to expand or contract their approach to align with their current business situation. Paying for basic services but looking to maximise your growth? Then why not upgrade your plan for a more holistic strategy? Similarly, if you’ve been on a premium plan but are looking to tighten the belt for a while, then why not downgrade to a more economical offering?
Working with an agency allows you to grow your digital PR strategy at the same pace as your brand.
How do I spot a bad digital PR agency?
Whoever coined the phrase ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ clearly never had the misfortune of hiring a lacklustre digital PR company. Just as a well-executed digital PR strategy can wield untold advantages for your business, so too can a badly run campaign leave your online reputation in ruins.
There are a multitude of flaws that can define a poor digital PR agency. Whereas some lack the resources to implement a genuinely far-reaching campaign, others have invested too little in staff training to prevent their methods from becoming obsolete. Indeed, some agencies still opt to use notorious black-hat SEO tactics in the vein hope of establishing their clients as a powerhouse online.
Despite insurmountable evidence of their diminishing success, black-hat tactics like keyword stuffing and cloaking continue to be seen across the internet from businesses desperate to fool the search engines. Not only are black-hat tactics unlikely to even bring short-term success in the modern day, but they can also result in heavy penalties from google that can see your SERP ranking spiral while leaving your brand authority in tatters.
Any agency employing these tactics in the modern day is probably looking to make a quick payday from their clients.
Avoiding companies that employ any of these archaic or underhand tactics can be achieved with just a small amount of research. Our tips for reviewing a digital PR agency in advance include:
● Check their case studies
● Check the services they offer
● Be wary of unrealistic claims
● Ask the right questions
After checking out the company online, we recommend asking these questions to a digital PR agency before signing a digital PR contract:
● Which companies have you worked with previously and can you provide references to these?
● Which companies have you worked for within our industry?
● Is there any part of your business that you outsource?
● How many employees do you have?
● What metrics do you use to measure the success of campaigns?
● How active are you within the digital PR community?
● Do you have designated teams for every digital PR service?
● What do you need from me?
What is the cost of hiring a digital PR agency?
The cost of hiring a digital PR agency can depend on an array of factors, from the agency to the hours spent on your campaign and the type of work you have done.
At Reboot, we offer tailored plans to suit every business, allowing you to choose the services that matter most while leaving the ones you don’t require.
Though the price of our campaigns can vary substantially, it stands to reason that an all-encompassing digital PR strategy will cost more than a single service like content or outreach due to the increased time and outlay involved.
What results can I expect from a digital PR agency?
As discussed earlier, the results of your digital PR campaign can only be as good as the agency you hire. Thankfully, with just a modicum of due diligence, you can ensure your find a digital PR agency that’s perfectly suited to enhance your brand’s digital presence.
Employing a best-in-class agency like Reboot can result in numerous quantifiable results for your business that can provide the catalyst to long-term success on the web. These include:
● Enhanced digital presence from our industry-focussed media coverage and quality backlinks
● Improved search engine visibility from our cutting-edge SEO strategy
● Improved brand authority and publicity from our outstanding content creation
● Targeted PR campaigns designed to reach your target audience
● Expert campaigns backed by data
Find out more
There are endless free resources on our site to enhance your digital PR knowledge before you take out our services. Check out our blog for all the latest developments and insights into the worlds of digital PR, content marketing, and SEO.
To find out more about our award-winning digital PR services, get in touch with Reboot Online today.
