Digital PR is a highly beneficial marketing channel with many advantages; from gaining brand exposure, to building credibility and backlinks, and getting the name of your business in front of the right audience.
But there is another, often overlooked, benefit to digital PR - reduced advertising spend...
PPC is incredibly worthwhile for many businesses, but managing the cost of it can be a challenge, especially in more competitive markets. Luckily, this is where digital PR can help.
So, let’s explore how digital PR can lower your paid advertising costs without compromising the growth of your business.
Paid search is highly effective at driving immediate traffic and leads. However, as soon as you stop spending, your visibility in this space can essentially disappear.
Digital PR may not have instant results like PPC, but it will help you build long-term value through high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites, which are a signal of trust to search engines.
Over time, this increases your own domain authority, in turn improving your organic keyword rankings. Eventually, you’ll start landing top spots in the SERPs for terms that you were once spending significant amounts bidding on.
Once you’ve hit the top of the SERPs, you can begin to scale back your PPC bids and instead rely on free, organic traffic to generate leads and conversions.
When operating on platforms like Google Ads, your CPC (cost-per-click) is massively influenced by your Quality Score - a metric determined by ad relevance, expected click-through rates, and landing page experience.
Typically, the higher your Quality Score is, the lower your CPC will be. But many marketers overlook the correlation between good digital PR and your Quality Score.
When a digital PR campaign successfully gains traction, it can bring with it a wave of highly targeted and engaged referral traffic from trusted third-party outlets to your site. This leads to lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates, and more positive user behaviour signals, all of which tell Google that what you are offering is genuinely useful to your audience. In return, it rewards your premium page experience with a higher Quality Score, meaning you can secure the same top ad placements for less.
Most consumers will typically pick a brand that they’ve heard of over one they haven’t. On average, 84% of purchases involve people choosing brands they are already biased towards.
Bidding on non-branded keywords to win over users who’ve never heard of your business can significantly drain your PPC budget, but if you have very little organic presence, this cost is necessary.
By leveraging digital PR, however, you can place your brand name directly in front of your target audience, on the publications they trust and read everyday. Over time, this will help you build recognition, and once people are familiar with you, they may start looking for your brand specifically, rather than searching for generic terms.
In addition, branded keywords are, in many cases, considerably less competitive, effectively lowering your CPC. There’s also a good chance users will click on your organic listing instead of the paid ad, giving you the traffic without the added expense.
Using digital PR, you can boost your brand recognition and attract more direct and organic traffic, reducing the amount you need to spend on advertising.
Now you understand how digital PR can lower your ad expenses, it’s important to know which PR activities can help you achieve it. Different PR tactics can produce different results, but here are four types of PR campaign that are highly effective at minimising paid spend.
Surveying your target audience or analysing proprietary data is one of the best ways to get a journalist’s attention. When you offer original research and exclusive data, high-authority publications may link to your site as the source, helping you build authority, boost organic rankings, and reduce your need to bid on expensive, high-competition keywords.
Getting your products in gift guides or roundups on trusted publications provides third-party endorsement and targeted referral traffic. People who click links on buying guides are typically high-intent visitors, so traffic from here can perform exceptionally well, often lowering bounce rates and increasing conversion rates, both of which improve your Google Ads Quality Score.
Paid advertising generally targets users at the end of the buying journey, where competition is highest and clicks are most expensive. By offering trusted publications expert comments, you can build brand authority and confidence early on. When users are ready to buy, you’ll already be top of mind, and they may bypass ads entirely to look for you specifically.
Monitoring the news and jumping on trends that are relative to your industry is one of the most effective ways of building brand exposure on a large scale quickly. By providing quick insights or resources to journalists looking for a new angle, you can place your brand in front of thousands, if not millions, of readers organically, which can have a significant impact on brand awareness.
Through high-quality, relevant coverage, you can drive free traffic to your site and limit your reliance on paid advertising. While digital PR may not have instant results, it is a highly beneficial, long-term investment. So, if you’re looking to lower your PPC budget by leveraging digital PR, get in touch with the experts today.
