No matter if you have been doing Digital PR for years or months, creating a roadmap can help you plan, manage, and measure your activities more effectively.

A Digital PR Roadmap is designed to help you plan the activities that you will do for your client or brand and when.

Kobe Digital is a multi-layered and always-on approach in Digital PR. This makes their roadmaps crucial to breaking down the resources they have to support their campaigns. It also ensures that all parties are clear about what they will deliver.

The Benefits of Digital PR for your B2B Business

A solid B2B digital marketing in NYC strategy should include digital PR. Traditional PR’s goal is to create brand awareness, which is usually for print media or broadcast media. However, digital PR supports other SEO goals, such as increasing keyword rankings, and search volume, and driving traffic to the site.

If you want to increase your brand’s value through:

• Acquiring quality links back to your website will increase your visibility in search engines.

• Increased awareness for your brand and your products/services

• Referral traffic to your website can be increased

• Your target audience will engage and lead you to take action

Kobe Digital recommends this 5-step process for creating a Digital PR plan for your B2B company. It will ensure that you have a well-resourced and secure map for all your future activities.

Step 1 – Understanding the role digital PR plays for your brand

Understanding your goals is the first step to creating a Digital PR plan. Every activity you take in Miami’s digital marketing agency should aim to achieve set goals, especially Digital PR.

Start by assessing your SEO activity and key performance indicators to determine how your roadmap fits in.

Your PR activity can be a partner with SEO to increase traffic, rankings, and brand awareness.

It is important to understand which keywords you want to target. This information is often provided by the SEO strategy.

Your strategy, as the person or team responsible for the Digital PR activity, will help build the brand’s backlink profile and improve keyword ranking.

It is crucial to understand the definition of success for your client or team to successfully execute digital PR.

1. What keywords are you most interested in?
2. What pages are you linking to?
3. What sector would you like to target with your activities?
4. What number of campaigns would you like to run in each quarter or year?
5. Which publications would you like to see your dream publication featured in?
6. Are you a brand in the YMYL sector

This will influence how many campaigns you want to run in a quarter, their focus, and how much thought leader and reactive public relations will be included in the roadmap.

Step 2 – Competitor Research

It is essential to understand the digital PR activities of your competitors to be able to rank higher than them.

They could have emphasized creative campaigns and are frequently featured in a wide range of publications.

They may also be focusing on reactive media and seeing trickle in links from lifestyle and national publications each month.

Google is the best place to begin your search. Search for your competitor’s name and see if anything is notable in the news section. This will give you insight into what stories are successful for them, and could also serve as inspiration for your campaign ideas.

Next, conduct a hyperlink to compile a list of all domains that link to your competitors.

You can conduct a link intersection by going to the link intersect section on ahrefs. Here you can enter your top three (or more!) competitors to see which domains are missing from your backlink profile.

A link intersect can reveal trends in titles and verticals that your competitors have landed.

This will give you visibility into the types of PR activity that they are doing and allow you to use this information to inform your Digital PR strategy.

Step 3 – Assess Your Resource

It is important to understand how many resources you have for the planned activity before you commit to specific timelines, results, and campaigns.

This could be the number and type of people who are available to work on your account, as well as the hours/days that you have available. It also includes the budget you have to cover costs like infographics, surveys, or designs for your campaigns.

This will help you determine how many campaigns you can afford to run per quarter, how long you can devote to reactive PR and how much time you have to write articles for thought leadership outreach.

A multi-faceted B2B Digital PR strategy is more effective if multiple activities are happening at the same time. However, this requires a greater investment in both time and staff.

This could be a campaign that is being prepared (e.g. The data is being pulled together, one reactive press release is sent out, and a thought leader feature is sent to the journalist at once. 

You can have multiple periods of activity simultaneously, which helps you avoid putting all your eggs into one basket. It also contributes to a natural-looking backlink profile.

Kobe Digital suggests that your roadmap should incorporate a multi-layered approach, which includes larger content campaigns and thought leadership features as well as reactive PR.

• Content campaigns require more resources as they are often data-driven, visual, or survey-based campaigns. However, they can gain a lot of traction. These campaigns can be marketed over many months and have multiple angles.

• Thought leadership is a way to show your client or brand as an industry expert by writing bespoke articles for relevant publications. This activity is aimed at establishing your brand and client as an authority in the field. This is a great opportunity to build the brand’s voice and tie your business to current events.

• Reactive PR – This requires fewer resources. It involves commenting on news stories that relate to your brand, responding via Twitter to journalist requests using the hashtags #PRrequest or #journorequest for stories that are related to your brand, or promoting your client’s news through press releases and statements to the media.

Step 4 – Ideate Your Ideas

One of the most difficult stages in the process is the ideation stage for digital PR campaigns that will fit within your B2B agenda.

You are here to brainstorm campaign ideas, thought leadership pitches, or reactive opportunities that relate to your brand. These opportunities should also be newsworthy enough for a journalist to pick up.

Start by looking at your competitors and your industry to get ideas for campaign ideas.

Google searches, reports, government data, and news stories can help you understand hot topics, areas, or buzzwords related to your brand.

BuzzSumo and ExplodingTopics are great tools to use to generate stories and drive measurable results.

Once you are familiar with the areas of greatest interest and the most interesting keywords, you can gather your team and brainstorm the best angles and stories to appeal to your target audience.

This is where the key lies: Make sure your stories are compelling enough to grab the attention of a journalist, and still feasible within your timeline.

Step 5 – Create Your Roadmap   

Next, you will need to start building your roadmap with your campaign ideas as well as your allocated resources.

This is where you create a document that shows which activity will be completed each month, how many resources are allocated to it, and who will be doing the activity.

Kobe Digital created a Digital PR Roadmap as a template for your brand.

This roadmap will help you plan each campaign in detail. You can see how long they will last and how they will overlap with other activities.