30 Things All Digital PRs Need to Know in 2024

Whether you’re a total newbie or have been a part of the industry for several years, the fast-paced nature of digital PR means we must stay ahead of the curve. 

As the industry continues to evolve, it’s more important than ever to ensure that digital PRs continuously develop their knowledge of the industry and strengthen the core skills that will help drive results for clients.

With this in mind, I want to share thirty top tips that all digital PRs need to know in 2024. Whether it’s for reactive PR or full-blown hero campaigns, bring these hacks into your strategy from today to see results.

For some, digital PR is still just about links, which is a backward way of thinking and should be a thing of the past. To educate your clients who may need clarification on whether they should invest in the service, you need to understand the broader impact of digital PR.

Digital PR can drive organic growth, earn links and coverage on high-authority and hyper-relevant publications, and build brand awareness, media relationships, and trust in consumers and search engines. 

This results in direct sales, demonstrates E-E-A-T, increases social engagement, boosts referral traffic, and supports the efficacy of wider SEO campaigns.

To implement a robust digital PR strategy, you need to ensure that you are positioning your client as the expert and authoritative voice within their industry, which will help demonstrate E-E-A-T.

It’s important to ensure that any outreach you carry out is aimed at your client’s target audience and publications within their industry. Some ways to implement this include carrying out link gap analysis and creating bespoke media lists for your clients.

Learn more about the role of digital PR in demonstrating E-E-A-T.

As the industry continues to evolve, staying up-to-date with Google updates is a must. Not only will you find yourself more knowledgeable about the digital PR and SEO landscape, but you’ll also be able to implement any necessary changes to your DPR strategies. Being proactive and at the forefront of the industry will also help to show clients you are the expert.

To stay up to date and learn more about Google updates, X and LinkedIn are great places to start. Follow industry voices on social media who share information about updates and learn from first-hand experience and expertise.

Knowing where to start when it comes to ideating can be a difficult task, especially for clients in more niche industries. 

Digital PR campaigns must be relevant to your client and their products and services, so keywords and landing pages should be used as a starting point. This will ensure that the concept always links back to your client’s core areas and maintains that all-important relevancy factor.

There is a never-ending list of data sources online, but sometimes, breaking them down and understanding what they mean can be challenging. If you’re struggling for digital PR campaign inspiration or where to find rock-solid data, keep up to date with industry newsletters and monitor social media.

Although you may not find the inspiration you were hoping for, you may come across tips or helpful advice from fellow digital PRs that could spark a new idea or point you in the right direction for the data you may be looking for.

You can also lean on tools to help with ideation. Our Digital PR Director, Amy Irvine, created a definitive list of the 60 best PR tools and websites that are invaluable to anyone working in the business of backlinks – check it out and bookmark it for later!

Journalists want to see eye-catching campaigns that will appeal to their readers today and highlight the importance of relevant data. Ideally, you don’t want to use data older than 12 months unless that is the most recent source and no other option is available.

A journalist is unlikely to cover data that is two years out of date. The data could have easily changed during this period, so make sure you consider this before launching a campaign.

Alongside your client’s hero campaigns, their on-site blog can be one of the best sources of inspiration. Spend some time reading through the published articles to see if you can repurpose and outreach any as expert tips or thought leadership pieces, which will help to link back to E-E-A-T and drive SEO performance.

Once you have onboarded a client and understand the topics they are happy to share their expert knowledge on, start to create a comment bank. Compile expert commentary and ask the client to sign this off ahead of time so that you’re ready to go if any opportunities arise. Then, over time, you can continuously add to the comment bank and be able to react to journalists’ requests much faster – increasing the chances of securing coverage/

Whether it be in a piece of expert commentary off the back of an opportunity you have found through ResponseSource or you’re writing a pitch for a campaign, including links to your client’s author pages is crucial and signals to Google that the person in question is an expert in their field.

Linking to author pages where possible will strengthen trust between your client and their target audience. Your client will be positioned as the leading experts in their field, so ensure that author pages are as up-to-date and detailed as possible – listing qualifications, previous work experience and more.

Stuck on how to craft the perfect author profile page? Here are 11 standout author page examples that brilliantly showcase E-E-A-T.

All brands will be competing against their own competitors, so it’s part of the digital PRs’ job to analyse their competitor’s activity and see if there are any gaps.

Analysing competitors’ work doesn’t have to be complicated. 

Start by looking at any campaigns they have launched and what they publish on their blog, and conduct an in-depth analysis of their backlink profile. In particular, identify if there are any backlinks to competitors’ sites which your client doesn’t have. If they’re relevant to the brand you’re working on, add them to your list of target publications. 

If your pitch isn’t relevant to a trending news topic or is irrelevant to the focus areas of the journalists you’re pitching to, it’s unlikely your research will be covered.

Before pitching to a journalist, look and see if you can hook your campaign to any trending topics, which will highlight why you’re pitching the research now. If the news cycle is relatively quiet, then use search data or Google trends to see if you can find any data that will help back up your research.

Although a pitch should be snappy and to the point, it’s important to cover as much of the campaign research as possible and highlight any key findings and standout pieces of data.

In the pitch, clearly explain any data tables, graphs and other visuals to the journalist, explaining some of the key findings and how the pitch can tie into topics the journalist would usually cover.

The relevancy link between your client and the publications they are being featured on has never been so important. When creating a media list, you should avoid creating extensive database-style lists. Instead, spend the majority of your time manually searching for relevant contacts.

Journalists will only want to cover research relevant to their niche, so it’s much better to have a targeted list of 100 contacts than a list of 300 contacts pulled from a database.

Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2024 Report revealed that almost 50% of journalists surveyed receive around six pitches every day. Of course, this number will increase significantly depending on national events such as the spring budget. With this in mind, making sure your subject line is attention-grabbing is vital, as this will increase your chances of securing coverage.

A subject line should be short and snappy, with the key part of the message you’re trying to deliver to the journalist being at the front. You also want to consider using bold phrases such as ‘alarming data reveals’, ‘a surge in cases’ and ‘figures in 2024 have skyrocketed’ and adding stats.

After launching a campaign, it’s essential to monitor how well your pitch has been received based on open rates and subject line performance. Most email scheduling tools will allow you to gain access to these stats, so make sure you use them to your advantage.

If open rates aren’t as good as you might have hoped, it’s worth revisiting your campaign strategy and analysing whether you can tweak the subject line or find a stronger ‘why now’ hook. 

If you can dedicate some time to understanding the topics the journalists you’re frequently targeting cover, you can create a stronger relationship with them. 

Developing solid journalist relationships increases your chances of securing coverage for your clients. In addition, the journalists in question will also get to understand your clients and will be confident in reaching out to you for expert commentary.

If you’re pitching global campaigns, it’s essential to consider different time zones. If you have been outreaching to UK journalists for a long time, pitching first thing in the morning can become second nature. However, when outreaching to global press, you need to factor in the time zone for each country and also understand when the best times are to pitch to journalists in each country.

I recently wrote a post on the Digitaloft blog, which shared advice on understanding the US media landscape as there are differences from the UK landscape. If you’re launching a campaign in the US, it’s essential to know that securing coverage is considerably slower than in the UK.

Before you start ideating, I recommend taking the time to understand what topics do and don’t work in the US. Just because a campaign has performed well in the UK doesn’t mean it will receive the same reception in the US.

When creating a list of manual contacts, it can sometimes be challenging if you’re outreaching to global press. The best way to find contacts in countries like the US is to use a VPN and change your search engine location settings.

Another tip for finding global contacts is to look at your client’s backlink profile and see which publications link to them in their respective countries.

For some time now, the goal for many brands has been to land coverage on publications with a high DR. Of course, this is still important, but with relevancy being a key focus, the DR of a site shouldn’t be the primary target, and the recent Google documentation leak backs this claim up. 

Instead, consider the relevancy of the site you have landed coverage for your client. A niche publication that is super relevant to its brand but has a lower DR than a national newspaper will gain better exposure and results for your client.

Really, relevance is the new gold standard in digital PR. Seek coverage in spaces that align with your brand’s identity…spaces that talk about the same topics you’re talking about. Aiming for features based purely on readership size won’t have the impact you’re looking for, and it could even have a detrimental effect on your domain’s authority.

If a journalist covers your research but only includes a brand mention, you’ll want to reach out to the journalist and ask if they can include a link to your client’s site. It’s unlikely a journalist will add a link if they don’t see its value to them and their readers.

When contacting a journalist, explain the benefits of including a link in the article, whether that be so their readers can explore your research in more detail or if you think it’s important to link back to an author bio page on site to highlight your client’s expertise.

Journalists often like to cover research that can hook to national days, so plan ahead. At the start of each year or when you onboard a new client, start compiling a list of national days relevant to your clients. 

This links back to the “Why now?” hook we covered in tip 11. Make a journalist’s life easy by showing them how your story or angle will resonate with their readership, and your chances of pick-up will increase significantly. 

Alongside hero campaigns and planned reactive work, newsjacking can help boost link numbers. Throughout the day, stay up to date with the news cycle and trending topics and jump on anything relevant for your client.

This links back to my previous point about keeping a folder full of expert commentary. If you already have tips and advice ready to go, you may just need to tweak the copy slightly to hook to trending topics, but more importantly, you can react quickly.

The news cycle is changing daily, so it’s essential to remember this when launching or repitching campaigns. It’s vital to regularly revisit strategies and see if any new hooks can be added, whether that be through search data or a new subject line to tie into current events.

Remember, journalists are only likely to cover research relevant to their topics and trending news, highlighting the importance of tweaking strategies regularly.

After launching a campaign, most PRs check for coverage as soon as the pitch lands in the journalist’s inbox. As well as checking on search engines throughout the day for coverage, it’s worth dedicating some time at the start and end of the week to do a deep dive on ahrefs to find any coverage you may have missed throughout the week.

As I mentioned at the start of this blog, understanding the broader impact of digital PR is a vital part of the role. No matter how often you have performance reviews with your clients, showcasing more than just the coverage and links you have earned is crucial. 

In addition to links, shout about the relevancy of the coverage you have secured, whether organic traffic has increased throughout the quarter, whether the site’s DR has increased, and so much more.

In a recent blog post about leveraging market downturns for digital PR dominance, I explained how marketing budgets are often the first to be cut during difficult times. Client reviews are the perfect time to showcase the impact of digital PR and why it’s an essential service.

Closing the gap between your client and their competitors is crucial. Understanding the topics they might be gaining links from and whether this is an area you can improve on will help drive results.

Here at Digitaloft, we know how important it is to ensure relevancy is at the forefront of our strategies and that building around key topics is more important than ever. With this in mind, we have launched Relevance by Digitaloft to help supercharge our client’s results by helping us understand where we need to gain links from and so much more.

In line with E-E-A-T, it is crucial to highlight your client’s expertise, position, and brand within the industry. To showcase your client’s expertise and knowledge, you need to include expert commentary in all pitches, whether tips or predictions.

As well as linking to your client’s author page, use the pitch to explain what your client is an expert in. For example…

“The motoring experts at [car brand] have shared X tips to help you stay safe on the roads this winter”. 

Or…

“John Smith, energy expert at [utility provider], reveals X exclusive money-saving hacks to cut fuel bills”.

Company positioning will help strengthen trust between your client, the journalist and their target audience.

At times, wires can get crossed between you and your client, and they may suggest ideas you aren’t confident about. In these instances, it’s important to be able to push back and explain to your client why you don’t believe they’ll work.

Showing your clients that you’re the expert, have a clear understanding of their brand, and have reflected this in your strategy will help to reassure them and build a trusting relationship.

There’s no hiding from the fact that, lately, the news agenda has been more negative than positive, which can take its toll on those working in digital PR. Constantly keeping up with the news can have its downsides, but there are no rules that say it has to feel this way.

Once you have finished work for the day, try to disconnect from what’s going on around the world so you can create boundaries between work and personal life. Switching off like this is essential to prevent burnout and let you keep scoring the best possible coverage for your clients.