How to Boost Online Presence Through Digital PR

The global digital marketing market size is expected to be worth around $1,099.33 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.1% from 2024 to 2032. Furthermore, consumers are increasingly accessing alternative channels for their information, such as YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, meaning search volumes are down on Google, and digital PR has stepped into the fold, playing a more prominent role.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to take, and the strategies to adopt to ensure your digital PR is boosting your online presence and aiding your business growth objectives.

Understanding your brand and audience

Defining your brand identity and messages

Before embarking upon any PR strategy, digital or traditional, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of your brand’s identity. What are your core values, unique selling points (USPs), key messages and overall mission? A well-defined brand will make it easier to communicate to your target audiences what you do, and why they should listen to you.

Identifying your target audience

Understanding your audience’s needs, pain points, and online behaviour allows you to craft messages that resonate with them. Google Analytics, surveys, and social media insights are a great way to gain the data you need in the first instance.

Analyse and understand your competitors

Conducting competitor analysis will help you to identify gaps in their proposition and opportunities to differentiate your brand. Likewise, conduct further research into the companies you are, or aspire to be, compared to. Monitor industry trends to ensure you’re relevant and helping to set the agenda, or ‘lobby’ on behalf of your industry and the overriding forces (economic, demographic and geo-political) that impact it.

Building the foundations

Optimising your website for SEO/GEO

Your website serves as your online shop window, but it doesn’t end there. It should be a vital component to your lead generating strategy. Ensure it’s optimised for search engines by using relevant keywords, improving page speed, and offering mobile-friendly navigation.

Setting up and managing social media channels

Social media platforms are vital for engaging with your audience. Choose platforms that align with your target demographic, post at regular intervals and maintain a consistent tone of voice.

Establishing a consistent brand voice across platforms

A consistent brand voice builds trust. Whether it’s social media posts, blogs, press releases or thought leadership articles, establish and maintain an appropriate tone, and ensure your staff and colleagues do likewise.

Your five key digital PR strategies to boost online presence

Thought leadership, media outreach and linkbuilding

Establish relationships with journalists, bloggers, and influencers in your sector, but more importantly, in the sectors in which you sell into.

By tailoring press releases, or thought leadership articles to a publication’s audience, with unique angles that demonstrate problem solving and education, you’ll not only increase your chances of securing coverage in those publications, but also build up a collective of backlinks from high authority sites.

Thought leadership can now work much harder for you in the digital landscape. Not only does it help to create a voice of authority, so your prospects can see you’re an authority on issues that impact their business and livelihoods, but also in that it boosts your search rankings and your DA.

Content marketing

For years, PR professionals have strived to infiltrate target audiences by placing articles, news and features in the publications they consume. With content marketing, we look to bring the audience to us.

Creating valuable, shareable content augments all digital PR. Develop blogs, infographics, explainer videos, white papers and videos that provide solutions to your audience’s problems or answer their questions.

Furthermore, enhanced natural language processing (NLP) will enable Google algorithms to analyse user behaviour more effectively, enabling the creation of personalised content and ensuring its alignment with Google’s standards.

Align everything with SEO/GEO, and build your domain authority

Never has search been more important in your digital marketing strategy. With the introduction of AI scouring information to provide overviews, it’s critical that digital PR strategies incorporate SEO to ensure keywords are intrinsic to messaging, while AI picks up the GEO content.

With AI overviews now answering many queries for the browser, you need to work harder to get clicks through to your website, making it ever more critical to understand the impact of AI, and to use digital PR to work to your advantage to build online presence, enhancing your website’s DA.

Digital PR and SEO work seamlessly together to elevate brand visibility, enhance online performance, and build trust. Backlinks from high-authority sites to your content carry substantial value, and each acts as a vote of confidence, signalling that a trusted publication endorses your content.

Use social media as a casting net

Close the loop on all content marketing by sharing content and earned media coverage/links across your social media platforms.

Not only does this extend reach and readership, but also by sharing unique and rich content you’ll be rewarded by Google for it in your SEO rankings.

Online reviews and testimonials

Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on platforms such as Google. Responding to feedback, positive and negative, demonstrates your commitment to improving your products and services and that you value customer and stakeholder opinion.

Leveraging social media for digital PR

Choosing the right platforms

According to Forbes, 24% of consumers are turning to social media to find answers to their questions, but not all social media platforms are created equal. Focus on the ones where your target audience is most active. For instance, Instagram works well for visually driven brands, while LinkedIn is ideal in B2B sectors.

Engaging with your audience

Interact with your followers by responding to comments, participating in discussions, and sharing user-generated content. From a PR perspective, it helps prospects to see that you are connected to the right networks, including journalists, key opinion formers and publications and that you are engaging with them to add gravitas to your proposition and to build your community.

Running social media campaigns

Targeted campaigns help to open up conversations and widen your reach. Experiment with paid ads, influencer collaborations, or hashtags to boost visibility while also using a mix of media to suit your market, including video, polls, and infographics.

Harnessing data and analytics

Tracking key metrics for digital PR success

Monitor metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, and backlink growth to measure the effectiveness of your strategies.

Analysing campaign performance

Review what worked and what didn’t in your past campaigns. Use tools such as Google Analytics and SEMrush for detailed insights.

Refining your strategies based on data

Adapt your approach based on performance data and ensure they align with your overriding business objectives.

The role of influencers in digital PR

Why influencers?

The role of the influencer is nothing new, but as the digital era evolved, so did the variety, and creativity, of influencers. In fact, 69% of TikTok users said that lead generation ads “grabbed their attention”. It’s a great way to associate your brand with someone a consumer respects and aspires to be like – and endorsement is one of the oldest forms of PR.

Identifying relevant influencers for your brand

Look for influencers whose values align with your brand. The value generated by influencers has more than doubled over the past five years, and a quarter of brands now consistently collaborate with social media content creators.

Micro-influencers often have highly engaged audiences and can be more cost-effective than celebrities or household names who will not necessarily resonate with your audience.

Creating authentic partnerships

Collaborate with influencers to create genuine content that feels organic and relatable. Authenticity is key to successful influencer marketing.

Measuring the impact of influencer campaigns

Track metrics such as engagement rates, referral traffic, and conversions generated by influencer collaborations. David Gaylord, former chief of staff at Shopify, uses a simple Cost Per Mile (CPM) formula to measure the impact of an influencer. It’s not perfect, but it acts as a starting point.

Five emerging trends in Digital PR to watch in 2025

AI is no longer the elephant in the room

We simply can’t ignore AI, and today is the worst it’s ever going to be – AI is improving at an unbelievable pace. It will become absolutely intrinsic to digital PR in 2025.

Our clients are increasingly demanding more efficient, qualified and quality lead generation, and digital PR sits at the very heart of this.

Google Gemini’s AI-generated overviews will continue to scour high ranking sites and online publications to provide answers and information, with link building not only driving traffic to your landing pages, but also boosting domain authority and increasing visitor engagement.

Ensure your news and views are peppering these sites.

Embracing data, metrics and analytics

Data driven analytics are going to be key in 2025.

While reach, readership and circulation are still very important, there are many analytical tools to allow your digital PR campaigns to be measured and benchmarked against agreed KPIs and criteria.

From the first pitch to an editor through to online publication, web traffic, links, brand mentions, leads and conversion rates – measurement exists every step of the way.

However – it’s crucial you understand and agree what SUCCESS looks like on day one of your digital PR campaign, and how that will be measured.

Otherwise, metrics will be meaningless – regardless of the data you have, and the results you present to your board.

SEO is your new BFF

SEO is adapting to AI, and now with GEO on the scene, we need to be optimising content to boost visibility with AI-driven search engines – such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot. Perplexity and others.

In 2025, digital PR and SEO has to be more strategic; more streamlined to ensure your efforts are rewarded.

Digital PR will help all other digital marketing disciplines drive the user to their desired destination quicker, and easier.

Micro influencing to niche markets

The world is gradually waking up to authenticity in brand promotion. And it’s a great opportunity for digital PR to utilise its strengths in 2025.

ROI in big-buck celebrity endorsements is dwindling, and companies selling into niche markets are increasingly turning to micro influencers to promote their brands and services.

They are more authentic. Their follower growth is organic, and real. They share life experiences, with likeminded audiences and they are not simply for hire, or part of the gig economy.

You want an influencer for your outdoor clothing range? Then look to content creators who have built a strong following in that market and are at one with nature, their audience and potentially your brand.

Greater diversity from media partners

Online publications are no longer just a mirror of their print offering, they are multi channel, interactive tools, lead generating resources – rich in data and engaged followers.

Traditional advertising has steadily transitioned into content partnerships, not least because of the decline in ad revenue as vendors are spending their ad budgets on Google, and other tech platforms. In 2025 media partnerships will be driven by what you require, rather than what the media partner is offering.

Video, webinar integration, interactive polls and infographics will become even more prominent as digital PR pushes the boundaries of possibility, and media organisations provide data, and platforms to help drive client growth.

How Catalyst PR can help you build your online presence

We do more than just craft stories or focus solely on narrative. We engage your prospects and stakeholders in their language, uncover untapped revenue opportunities in new markets, and strengthen your digital presence through strategic digital PR and improved search engine rankings.

As Part of the wider Catalyst Marketing Group, comprising of disciplines across search (SEO/GEO/PPC), content marketing, web, design, social media and CRM, we pull on resources that close the loop in digital marketing and deliver integrated strategies to help deliver business growth in line with your commercial objectives.

Digital PR is fast-becoming intrinsic to digital marketing strategy, not least given AI is looking to answer questions for browsers, and marketing professionals need to become more savvy, more strategic to ensure lead generation is optimised, and prospects are nurtured through your sales funnel.