Reading Time: 4 minutesConnecting with popular, credible media sources is one of the most effective marketing strategies you can utilize to increase your brand exposure, build credibility, and drive traffic to your website. Press coverage has always been a valuable tool for businesses, but unfortunately, it can be difficult to gain media exposure in today’s highly competitive market. Journalists receive hundreds of emails every day from brands in all types of industries, so simply sending a story idea about your brand is unlikely to get their attention. Thankfully, that’s where digital PR comes in, along with helpful tools such as HARO (Help a Reporter Out).
At Vizion Interactive, we utilize HARO as part of our digital PR strategy. With HARO, you can avoid crafting and sending endless pitch emails with little or no response because this platform allows the journalist to come to you. Vizion works with HARO to match journalists and bloggers with business owners who serve as expert sources for their stories. When a journalist or publication company has an idea for an article, they post a query on the HARO website. Vizion then receives keyword alerts about the queries that match our clients’ industries and we work with our clients to submit useful information, insights, and quotes for their article and are given credit in return.
It’s important to note, HARO is just one part of digital PR. Vizion also works directly with publishers/journalists/bloggers and develops those relationships so that our team has direct access to them for future opportunities. When writers come to us directly, it’s one less opportunity for the competition to be quoted.
6 Ways Your Brand Can Benefit from Digital PR & HARO
- Obtain Free Media Coverage
HARO can be incredibly useful for businesses because of the opportunity for free media coverage. Journalists want to speak with industry experts when writing their articles, acquire valuable insights about a given topic, and that could be from your brand. By providing them with the information they seek, you give your brand the chance to be featured in a publication that reaches a wide audience of potential clients, allowing you to stand out from your competitors. Just think: every placement you receive is a piece of media exposure that is not going to your competition. #winning
- Enhance Brand Awareness
The most obvious benefit of digital PR is the ability to expose your brand and your offerings to the largest possible audience. HARO alone distributes over 50,000 queries each year from 75,000 journalists and bloggers, including some of the most highly respected and sought-after media outlets. When you are credited as an expert source in an article from a reputable publication, potential clients making searches relevant to your brand or industry see you quoted in the article, which enhances awareness of your brand among people who have likely never heard of you before and demonstrates your credibility as a source.
- Establish a Reputation for Thought Leadership
Responding to journalist queries with informative, valuable answers helps to establish you as a thought leader within your industry, a goal every business should strive to accomplish. Some of the most well-known media outlets around the nation use HARO to find sources, including Time, Forbes, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and consumers trust these sources to provide accurate, high-quality information. By connecting your brand with these platforms, you are not only reaching a wide audience, but you are clearly distinguishing yourself as a reputable leader in your industry and encouraging readers to engage with your brand in the future. Businesses looking for reputation management can also benefit greatly from digital PR. When your business’s thought leaders are put out there using messaging that they control, the resulting media coverage shows them off in a good light.
- Secure Valuable Backlinks
When a respected publisher features a backlink to your website in their article, this essentially serves as a vote of confidence for your brand. Earning backlinks from trustworthy and authoritative websites signals to search engines that your site provides valuable, relevant content for searchers. The more backlinks you can secure, the more credible your brand becomes. This drives your rankings up the search engine results pages, boosting your visibility and further improving brand awareness.
- Increase Referral Traffic
Media coverage, brand awareness, thought leadership, and backlinks all work together to drive referral traffic to your website. Referral traffic exposes your brand to more potential customers in your target audience, adds legitimacy to your brand, and drives more qualified leads to your site. Because visitors are coming from a site they already know and trust, they are more likely to stay on your site for a longer period of time, and not bounce. Google analyzes referral traffic, as well as low bounce rates, as a measure of a website’s quality and success, so the more referral traffic you have with low bounce rates, the higher your site will rank on search results pages.
- Build Relationships
Befriending journalists from top media outlets is not an easy task, but working with Vizion’s digital PR experts gives you the chance to work with these writers and build valuable, productive, and lasting relationships beyond a single standalone article. After you have proven yourself as an interesting and helpful source, journalists will likely continue to approach you for commentary on other similar stories they write. Furthermore, if you want to publish a press release for your brand, you will already have a network of contacts you can approach to increase your news distribution.
Contact Vizion For Digital PR
If you are interested in enhancing brand awareness, strengthening your reputation, and increasing quality traffic to your site, Digital PR could be the perfect solution for your brand. At Vizion, our team of Digital PR experts can help you take advantage of this valuable opportunity to expand your reach and boost your revenue. Contact us today for more information on how we can support the success and long-term growth of your brand.
