Top tips for using Paid Media to bolster and complement your Digital PR strategy

Paid Media and Digital PR are, more often than not, separated into two different categories and thought of as two completely different marketing strategies. However, when done correctly, the benefits of incorporating Paid Media within a Digital PR campaign can be huge.

Although there are many stark differences between the two, in actuality, PR and Paid Media share many of the same purposes and end goals; each creating brand awareness, generating traffic and providing information on a brand or product to drum up interest in whatever it may be they are promoting. 

Of course, the nature of Paid Media means it won’t be suited to absolutely every campaign, but when utilised in the right way at the right time, it’s a powerful tool that allows you to reach the exact audiences you are targeting, usually with minimal spend compared with other tactics. 

In this post, I’ll be taking a look at a few key areas where Paid Media can boost the outputs of Digital PR. 

Outreach

Paid Media can be particularly useful in supporting outreach in B2B campaigns. For instance, if you have a client in a niche sector, outreaching any press release will only get you so far due to the fewer relevant publications who, more often than not, have smaller than average readership/ circulation figures. 

This is where Paid Media can help; by running social ads alongside PR, you will drive more traffic to the client’s site than if you just relied on the backlinks from outreach. As well as this, you’ll be able to track the exact impact of any PPC campaigns and easily show the client how the impact Paid Media is having alongside the outreach. 

Another advantage of supporting outreach with Paid Media is its versatility; whether you are promoting a new product or have an industry-specific thought leadership article, there is a Paid Media platform that will be able to boost your campaign. For example, if you’re outreaching the former, running ads on Google Display Network would provide the perfect platform to drive audiences to the product page. If it’s the latter, a LinkedIn ad campaign would mean you could easily reach your target industry professionals who would be interested in the piece, driving traffic in the process. 

Survey-led campaigns

Surveys have always been a strong data source for virtually any PR campaign and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. If conducted correctly with a large sample and the right questions, surveys provide a huge amount of data that can be used in all sorts of content from press releases to thought leadership whitepapers. Not to mention the credibility and weight it gives to a campaign.

However, many survey-led campaigns rely on third-party companies to conduct them, which can prove costly and take up a healthy chunk of the budget. This is where Paid Media can help, as social ads provide the perfect tool to reach potential participants, allowing PR’s to conduct the survey themselves. 

Although this can be time-consuming, it will more than likely prove more cost-efficient to run ads on platforms such as LinkedIn, targeting exactly who you want than relying on a third party. Plus this allows the client to keep the data for future use, which is something not all data companies offer. 

Reaching target audiences and improving brand image

Paid Media is one of the easiest ways to reach your target audience for any PR campaign, no matter how niche. Thanks to the amazing targeting capabilities that Google, Facebook and LinkedIn etc. provide, it is easy to first see what your audiences are engaged with and then tailor your content accordingly. 

Of course, the only way people start to trust any brand is by hearing good things about it, so once you have your key audiences mapped out, Paid Media can then assist with improving brand image through things like testimonial ads. Or if you have a client that is relatively new/ unknown, brand awareness ad campaigns are the way to go on whichever platform is most frequented by your audiences. 

Again, the impact of any Paid Media campaign can easily be measured thanks to the comprehensive metrics all platforms use to monitor progress and show clients the impact your campaigns have. Spending limits and bid adjustments also mean you can tailor an ad campaign to suit your particular budget. 

Summary

So there you have it, just a few ways Paid Media can boost a Digital PR campaign. Before adding any paid activity to your PR campaign, it’s important to outline your target audience clearly, along with budget and the objective. The versatility of Paid Media means it caters for a wide variety of end goals from brand awareness to product promotion, it can be a very useful tool to assist with virtually any campaign.