Digital PR: What It Is + 10 Successful Examples

Digital PR (or digital public relations) is a strategy focused on increasing awareness, visibility, and the reputation of your brand across digital channels. While the overall goal of this strategy remains similar to traditional PR, brands are able to take a much more targeted approach.

Throughout this article, we’re going to introduce you to digital PR, cover some key benefits, and walk you through 10 successful digital PR tactics (complete with examples) that your brand can emulate.

Let’s get started.

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR focuses on boosting your brand’s visibility and reputation via online public relations tactics like generating backlinks, digital media coverage, and brand mentions across online channels. 

Digital PR involves tactics like:

• Creating content like digital press releases, data-rich research, and survey results that people want to share and source
• Building relationships with journalists, freelancers, and other industry professionals that can help your brand generate more reach
• Conducting digital outreach that gets your brand featured in more online publications and blogs
• Partnering with influencers and creators to expand your reach even further
• Managing your brand’s online reputation by monitoring mentions and responding to all relevant conversations

Digital PR vs. Traditional PR

Like we mentioned, the end goal between digital and traditional PR is the same—an improved brand reputation and a boost in brand visibility. However, traditional PR focuses on tactics like print publication features, TV and radio spots, and crisis reputation management.

Digital public relations breaks into the online space, focusing more on digital channels like online blogs, social media platforms, and website performance.

However, it’s a good idea to aim to blend these two public relations strategies where you can. For example, if you’re launching a new product, you might aim to get coverage in both traditional and digital spaces to bolster your reach as much as possible.

5 Amazing Benefits of Digital PR

Digital PR is an essential strategy for many businesses. Its benefits prove just how important it can be to build up online visibility around your brand.

• Increase website traffic: Because you’re using digital PR tactics to increase the number of links to your website and the number of online mentions people come across, your website traffic will also naturally increase.
• Boost SEO: Getting more links to your website will improve your domain authority, helping you to rank higher in search results.
• Improve brand authority and reputation: Gaining coverage in major online publications helps your brand feel more credible, improving your overall authority, reputation, and trustworthiness.
• Generate organic backlinks: We’ve mentioned this, but it’s such a major benefit that it deserves its own spot—generating organic backlinks to your website is so important for your brand health and growth.
• Track results: Another big benefit of digital PR is that your results are easy to track and measure, giving you a clear picture of your ROI.

10 Successful Digital PR Tactics (With Examples)

Get ready to run your first digital PR campaign by employing one or more of these tactics. We’ve compiled a list of 10 successful digital public relations tactics plus real-life examples you can emulate in your own strategy.

1. Distribute Press Releases Digitally

First, we have to talk about what’s probably the most well-known public relations strategy out there—creating press releases. A press release is a formal document sent out to media companies, journalists, and other important people that shares an update within your company.

For example, you might send out a press release when you launch a new product, acquire a company, or hire someone influential in your industry.

There are several online press release distribution sites that make it easy to send out your press releases to a large number of people. Keep in mind, though, that they can be expensive. A few top distribution sites you’ll want to stick to include:

• PR Newswire
• Business Wire
• PRWeb

Distributing press releases can be a great way to get the word out about something new your company is doing.

Back in 2020, the website support-restaurants.org (a resource created by the National Restaurants Association to help support restaurants during the pandemic lockdowns) started The Dining Bonds Initiative.

This initiative began as a small-scale effort to help support local New York City restaurants as everything was shutting down, so the company created and distributed a press release to get the word out.

The press release certainly did its job, getting nearly 500 restaurants worldwide to participate within the first month. It was able to generate such a big response due to getting media coverage from nearly 100 publications, resulting in articles like the following:

Source

Create press releases that help you get the word out about your business in hopes you can generate a similar response.

2. Conduct Original Research Studies

Another great digital PR tactic involves conducting original research that you can publish on your website and share with your audience and industry professionals. Many companies look to source original research in their own content, giving you the opportunity to boost organic backlinks and authority for your website.

Sprout Social’s 2025 Content Benchmarks Report is a great example of this. The social media marketing software analyzed over 3 billion pieces of social media content from over 1 million public social profiles to compile its research for this report.

And it’s obviously worked well. Ahrefs’ backlink checker showcases that this report has generated 834 backlinks from 250 different linking websites.

3. Create Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership content is created by industry experts as a way to put their voice, insights, and opinions into the industry conversation. Company founders or team leaders should regularly be creating thought leadership pieces in order to facilitate conversation while also boosting their own authority (and generating links to their content).

Resource management software company Float has a great example of this. The brand’s CEO & co-founder wrote and published an article on its own blog about how more leaders should be embracing asynchronous work.

Not only does this article’s topic pertain to Float’s product (resource management, planning, and scheduling software), but it also presents a hot take that’s going to get more leaders and executives talking (and linking back to the article).

4. Share Your Expert Insights

Whether you’re a founder, team leader, or simply have your own specialized knowledge in your field, sharing your expert insights for other company blogs can be a great way to get links back to your website, increase authority, and start improving your professional standing.

Three popular websites that many journalists and bloggers will use to find quotes to help bolster their articles are:

• Qwoted
• HARO
• HaB2Bw 

All you need to do is keep an eye out for queries that are relevant to you or your business so that you can submit your own response in hopes of being quoted.

Let’s look at an example. The Head of Growth at newsletter software beehiv shared an example and information about it for Hootsuite to use in its recent article about LinkedIn carousels.

As you can see above, the writer included this quote alongside a link to both the source’s LinkedIn profile and the company’s website, helping increase awareness of both.

5. Create Viral Campaigns

Going viral is a surefire way to boost your brand’s reach, but it’s difficult to actually manufacture a viral moment. Regardless, working to create viral content is something your marketing team should still strive for.

Adult cereal brand Surreal does a great job of trying to create viral moments by sharing big, bold billboard messages that grab attention. The brand regularly reshares those billboards on its LinkedIn, generating even more buzz.

Take a look at one example below:

This post alone got over 1,500 reactions, 71 comments, and 55 reposts. And there’s no telling how much foot traffic the billboards themselves reached.

But Surreal does more than just funny billboards. It creates humorous LinkedIn carousels using its bold branding, like this one below where the team shared a big marketing faux pas it made:

This post went even more viral, garnering over TEN THOUSAND reactions, nearly 500 comments, and more than 200 shares.

What’s the recipe to going viral? While there’s no one-size-fits-all, a few things to keep in mind are:

• Use a big personality and brand voice
• Stay on top of trending topics
• Reuse formats that others are having success with in your own way
• Try, try, and try again

6. Build Interactive Content

Interactive content that has a great use case is a really easy tactic for generating website traffic and building links back to your website.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. Photo album site Shutterfly has its own wedding hashtag generator that engaged couples can use to come up with a hashtag that their wedding guests can use when posting on social media.

Not only will engaged couples find and share this with friends, but many other brands in the wedding industry are likely to share it with their audience as it’s a useful (and fun) tool. 

And yes, Ahrefs’ backlink checker tells us that this page has generated 335 backlinks from 208 linking websites.

Another great option is a calculator, like Credit Karma’s savings calculator.

This handy calculator can be used by people trying to be more financially savvy to see how they can reach their savings goals. While it only has 46 backlinks from 22 linking websites, it’s also a great SEO ploy for generating a lot of traffic from people searching for help saving money.

Talk to your team to see what interactive tools you could build to share with your target audience for free.

7. Generate Major Media Mentions

This is another more traditional PR play, but we’re doing it in digital mode. Getting mentions in major media’s digital articles is just as important as traditional or print media.

In this example, the New York Times has written an article about a tech start-up that’s working on creating a battery for electric vehicles:

Although this article doesn’t once link to start-up Factorial Energy’s website, it’s a complete profile of its founders and its journey. Sure, the NY Times isn’t lending any link juice to Factorial’s website, but media coverage like this is still huge for reputation and awareness.

Pitch your brand or founder story to different media publications to see if anyone is interested in covering you in a similar fashion.

8. Collect Survey Data

If original research isn’t your thing, consider conducting a survey and using that data to compile a useful report that can build links back to your website.

This is exactly what influencer marketing software Aspire did with its State of Influencer Marketing report.

The brand took a survey of over 1,000 marketers and creators, then collected that data to put together this extremely comprehensive report.

9. Compile Listicles or Roundups

A listicle or roundup is another very linkable resource that your brand could easily put together. You can create a roundup of products in your industry, software options, or well-known creators or influencers.

Or, you can take a page out of these two brands and create a linkable (and shoppable) resource for those in your industry and your own customers.

Williams Sonoma, for one, put together a gift guide consisting entirely of its own products.

It’s broken down into categories like “Gifts for Mom” or “Gifts by Color,” making it easier to shop, but it provides tons of linking opportunities and is a great way to get found in search results.

Graphic design tool Visme did something similar with its templates. By creating a roundup of goal-setting worksheets made up exclusively of its software’s own design templates, the company has created a useful resource that will also ultimately impact its bottom line.

10. Respond to Current Events

Our last recommendation is to use your company blog or professional social media profiles to respond to current events. This is a great way to start conversations in your industry or get yourself media mentions as news sources link back to your article.

Social media software Buffer recently shared an article about how one of its team members uses AI:

Because AI and the adoption of AI tools are such a hot topic at the moment, an article like this is perfect for getting people to read and share it across their networks.

Similarly, course creation software Teachable wrote an article about a recent Instagram update and how that could impact creators:

By incorporating current events, this article becomes a timely resource that its target audience is going to want to read.

Consider creating a “News” section on your blog or website that gets regularly updated with content like this. While it has a much shorter shelf life than the rest of your blog content, it still plays an important role.

Create Your First Digital PR Campaign

Employ these digital PR tactics to run your first campaign. Start boosting brand awareness, increasing links to your website, improving your overall authority, and more through these proven online public relations methods.