How Digital PR Can Elevate Your Emerging Lifestyle Brand’s Online Presence
Earning visibility as a small brand isn’t easy, but it can be done. Big brands like Charlotte Tilbury, Estée Lauder and L’Oréal all have their place, but there’s also space for up-and-coming brands to earn visibility too.
If you want to be at the forefront of a customer’s mind when it comes to making a purchasing decision or opting to go with a specific service, you have to invest in emotional brand-building in the digital space.
One of the best means of emotional brand building is storytelling, something that is at the heart of digital PR campaigns. While it’s increasingly difficult to cut through all of the noise within the media, carefully crafted campaigns, when combined with other channels, can be an effective way of building and maintaining your brand.
Read on to find out more about:
What digital PR is and why it matters for lifestyle brands
The key benefits of digital PR for women’s lifestyle brands
DPR tactics to elevate your brand’s digital presence
How to get started with digital PR for your brand
What is digital PR and why does it matter for lifestyle brands?
While many women’s lifestyle brands will be familiar with traditional PR techniques: influencer and media seeding, gift guides and new product launches, digital PR (DPR) is an opportunity that is still vastly underutilised.
However, DPR can be used as part of an integrated marketing strategy to increase brand awareness whilst also having a positive impact on SEO by improving organic ranking.
For example, given the tutorial-based nature of the beauty industry, digital PR can align with social media-based campaigns to extend their reach and overall performance.
This is important because if a potential customer sees a video online or in TikTok shop, and then later returns to Google to find said product but can’t recall the name of the brand, they may search the internet using a term such as ‘inclusive beauty brand’ or ‘x cleanser’ and as the brand would be ranking organically, the consumer would find you.
Not many consumers purchase the first time they learn about a product, so ensuring your brand appears in both traditional search and social when a consumer is looking for you is vital. If there’s a risk the consumer can’t find you when they start searching, you may miss out on a sale to a competitor who ranks highly.
why should you be investing in digital pr?
A significant number of purchases begin with a search engine, if your brand is neglecting organic performance they are unlikely to be ranking within the first page of Google, and losing out on substantial traffic.
Digital PR can have an impact on a vast number of core metrics. These include:
1. Enhancing brand visibility, alongside brand authority
2. Improving keyword rankings
3. Increasing the domain authority of your website
4. Bringing relevant traffic to your website by featuring in publications relevant to your target audience
5. And it also has an impact on E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness, which is a principle Google use to determine the quality and effectiveness of the search results they’re providing to users
Digital PR Tactics to Elevate Your Brand’s Online Presence
Make your influencer marketing work harder by creating an angle for press
Do you have a high-performing influencer campaign that’s also press-friendly? For example, in the beauty sphere if you have a campaign exploring how your product is a budget-friendly dupe for a premium product, or if you’re in the fashion sphere and you’ve recently had a high-profile influencer or celeb wear one of your pieces, there’s a press opportunity. Maximise the moment by encapsulating the key details within a press release including any social media content, and start curating a list of journalists that would be most relevant to send out too.
Target publications that your target consumer actually reads, and meet them where they’re at
A lot of brands get stuck in vanity metrics when it comes to digital PR, aiming for coverage in publications that sound great on paper, but aren’t where their audience is. It’s important to diversify between aiming for those prestigious publications, as well as strategising to outreach to publications that are relevant to your industry and audience, and that are actually going to move the needle.
Optimising your campaigns for social sharing also enables publications to share news across their social media channels (which some publications are increasingly LOVING to do).
During outreach, we can target these publications ensuring the campaign assets are correctly formatted and look great on a variety of social media platforms. Whether that’s a gif, static graphic or video-based asset, how best can we visualise the data that would also work on social media?
Do you have a great DPR campaign idea? The chances are it’ll work across other platforms too so think about how it can be created and executed to optimise reach.
Take the opportunity to create campaigns that align with your brand, resonate with your audience and achieve your content goals (ie. educate or inform)
When creating content we have to think audience-first: what topics are they interested in? Which publications do they read and what do they write about? What are they likely to share with their friends and how? What are their biggest problems?
All of these questions bring you closer to aligning with the target audience, creating a sense of shared values and developing the groundwork for a sense of community that so many brands covet.
What are the brand’s core values and how can they use those to ideate campaigns that align?
It’s so important for emerging brands in this sector to lean into their core values when competing against bigger brands that have already generated brand awareness and trust.
How to Get Started with Digital PR for Your Lifestyle Brand
While it’s possible to DIY PR on a small scale for your brand, for example responding to journalist’s requests through platforms like Twitter (X) or Qwoted, it’s difficult to launch full-scale digital PR campaigns without working with a professional, understanding the skills and techniques involved, or having a designated team. It’s also incredibly time-intensive, which is often a sticking point for busy founders.
Digital PR efforts require expertise across strategy and ideation, knowledge of industry tools and trends, data collection, press release writing, maintaining media contacts, and much more. Luckily, there’s a wide variety of agencies and freelance professionals you can consult with the exact skills to help your business secure digital PR wins.
What should you do next?
These are the key takeaways I want you to remember and act upon.
Emerging lifestyle brands need to build trust and expand their brand awareness to compete with bigger brands
Leaning into core values and emphasising these through the types of campaigns you create is important for creating a connection with the target audience, building community and solidifying a wider brand image
Don’t rely on going viral or gaining hype within one platform; an integrated strategy is necessary for longevity
Digital PR can be amplified by combining traditional PR, social media, and even paid ads
Now that you fully understand the power of building your brand and Digital PR, why not get in touch today to find out whether we can work together to take your brand to the next level?
