14 Feb 2024
- 08 Jun 2022
Why you should always reangle your digital PR campaigns, plus 6 top tips from an expert
Digital PR campaigns are fast becoming one of the most effective and popular ways to build valuable, high-quality backlinks for SEO. Although several different types of techniques and content that can be used to strengthen your backlink profile, digital PR campaigns are particularly cost-efficient, as you can recycle, re-angle and re-target the content much more easily. This makes the process much less time- and labour-intensive, resulting in a lower cost-per-link.
Here at Glass Digital, we’ve had great success using digital PR as part of our Outreach strategy, and have secured hundreds of high domain-authority links for our clients with this technique. In this post, I’ll share some of my top tips on how to effectively re-angle existing digital PR campaigns to ensure you’re getting the most value out of them, all while keeping costs to a minimum.
What is digital PR, and how does it differ from traditional outreach tactics?
But first: what is digital PR, and how does it differ from other outreach techniques?
Digital PR is ultimately a way for companies to increase their presence online by designing and pitching original research or content to lots of publications in exchange for a backlink as attribution. As with any outreach tactic, the central goal of digital PR is link acquisition, along with increasing brand awareness, boosting the domain authority of the site, and driving traffic towards the brand’s key pages.
However, the crucial difference between digital PR and traditional outreach tactics is in the types of content that are created, as well as the process for outreaching them. Digital PR campaigns may encompass original research or survey data, infographics, long-form content, or even interactive media, such as quizzes. The finished campaign is then outreached to a wide range of publications, which may then feature it in exchange for an attribution link.
When successful, this approach can allow brands to gain lots of coverage and backlinks on a wide range of websites, including high-DA national publications, all using a single asset or piece of content.
Why you should re-angle digital PR campaigns
In order to succeed, a good digital PR campaign must offer editors a fresh, insightful angle that will grab their reader’s attention. As a consequence, digital PR campaigns tend to be more resource and time-intensive to create than other types of outreach. And, even if the potential gains are greater, the costs can stack up.
However, a simple way to make the process easier and more cost-effective is by re-angling and repurposing existing campaigns. This helps to cut down the workload, which in turn reduces the cost-per-link and allows you to reach a wider audience using fewer resources.
For example, the Outreach team here at Glass Digital created a campaign around ‘What to do with leftover cooking water’ for one of our clients, as discussed during our Head Of Marketing’s BrightonSEO talk in September 2021. We originally sent this out to lifestyle, eco-friendly and sustainability publications, building several links in the process.
Once this was exhausted, we dissected the campaign for alternative stories and began pitching ‘why you should use leftover cooking water as a hair mask’ to hair and beauty publications, then moved on to ‘how to use leftover cooking water to improve houseplant health’ to gardening and home publications. The new angles gave us fresh targets and gained our clients more links. This particular campaign ended up being featured on House Beautiful (DA 85), Country Living (DA 83), The Express (DA 93) and Wales Online (DA 89).
How to re-angle digital PR: 6 top tips
So, as we’ve seen, re-angled existing campaigns can be a fantastic way to gain coverage. But just how do you pull it off? Here, I’ve shared 6 top tips for giving your existing campaigns a quick refresh.
Focus on evergreen topics and hero campaigns
One of the best ways to do this is to focus on hero campaigns with multiple angles and multiple targets in mind to maximise value. Hero campaigns take more time to research, develop, and send out as they tend to be extensive stories that may pique the interest of multiple journalists and publications. As a result, these types of digital PR campaigns are usually designed to be evergreen, which can consist of many different angles to get the most links possible.
Think seasonally
A quick and easy way to ensure your campaign can be re-used over and over is to build in a seasonal hook. This way, your campaign can be re-used each year, or even tweaked and outreached for a different seasonal event. For example, instead of just outreaching tips for reducing waste, you could tie it in to a particular event, like Halloween, Christmas, or summer heatwaves. These events will always recur, meaning your campaign can always be re-used — it’s a simple but seriously effective approach.
Take inspiration from all types of online media
To inspire a digital PR campaign which you know will be simple to re-angle, it is important to look at multiple sources. Useful resources for inspiration include Google Trends, Reddit, Answer The Public, Twitter, SEO Monitor, news outlets and Buzzsumo. This will help you keep tabs on the latest and buzziest topics and trends, meaning you’ll be ready to jump onto any new angles that are related to your campaign.
Future-proof your campaign by scoping out targets from the start
A great way to ensure your campaign has legs is to create a mind map of all the possible targets from the outset. If the research is relevant to many areas, topics, trends, and events, then try to think of how you might tweak the way your content or research is presented and analysed in order to appeal to different publications and sectors.
Create potential angles during ideation
Another way to future-proof your campaign is to create a number of possible headlines during the initial ideation process. This will ensure the idea is broad enough to be recycled later on. It will also give your team a head start when the time comes to update your campaign, saving time and ensuring you’re ready to strike while the latest trend is still topical.
Don’t forget to keep your client in the loop
All your hard work will have been for nothing if you aren’t keeping your client up-to-date with what’s going on. Good communication and transparency are our ethos here at Glass Digital, which is why we take care to update our clients at every stage of the digital PR process, from ideation to after the campaign goes live. This ensures our clients can see exactly how their campaign is doing, and appreciate the creativity that went into making it all happen.
So, keep your client informed and involved in the journey to avoid confusion. When you’ve designed a digital PR idea, be sure to explain why you’ve gone with that angle, and where and when you are planning to pitch it. They’re sure to appreciate the insight, and may even have some expert input or suggestions that could make your campaign all the stronger.
As the industry shifts further towards digital PR as a bread-and-butter tactic, teams are having to get more creative with the way they consume news and develop stories. By re-angling your campaigns using the tips I’ve shared above, you can ensure you’re getting the most out of each and every idea, for maximum backlinks with minimal effort.
Want to see how our innovative, efficient, and ethical link-building service could benefit your brand? Book in for a free, no-obligation grow with SEO consultation to learn what we can do for you.
