What is digital PR?
Traditional PR gets you into newspapers and magazines. Digital PR gets you into the online outlets your customers read, and earns a link back to your site while it does it.
That link is the point. Journalists are measured on traffic and engagement, so they want stories their readers click, share and talk about. Give them one, and you get coverage, a link from a site Google trusts, and people searching for your brand by name.
Search has changed. Google no longer just ranks websites. It ranks brands, authority and cultural relevance. AI answers work the same way: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews quote the brands that the press and the internet already talk about.
“It’s just as critical as tech SEO, probably more so in many cases.”
John Mueller, Google, on digital PR (23 January 2021)
Why digital PR and SEO belong together
Old SEO was keywords plus backlinks. New SEO is culture, coverage and conversation.
When we weigh up what moves rankings, we split it roughly like this: technical SEO 10%, what’s on the page 20%, and what other sites say about you 70%. Most brands spend in the opposite order.
In one haircare audit, a competitor’s UK search traffic tripled in under a year while its content output dropped. The only thing that grew was its links: from 645 to 2,309. The brand we were auditing gained four to six quality links a month. Its competitors gained about 100.
If you don’t build authority and relevance, you won’t win in search or AI search, even with great products. PR is the foundation that makes paid, social and product marketing work harder.
Quality beats quantity
Links still matter. But here’s the twist: one link from the right publication beats 100 random ones.
Not every link is worth the same. A handful of placements on the sites that actually drive attention can outperform hundreds of small mentions. Big sites get copied, quoted and syndicated, so one good placement snowballs.
Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? In PR, pick the duck.
The five types of digital PR
Every campaign we run fits one of these five. Most brands only ever try one.
- Newsjacking. Put your brand at the centre of what people already talk about. Big trends (working from home, a major tournament) and small ones (whatever everyone is watching this week).
- Data stories. Use your own data or public data to tell people something new. A resource or an index gets linked to for years.
- Journalist requests. Journalists ask for experts every day. Answer fast, answer well, and you get quoted with a link.
- Product PR. Use a trend to sell more product, seed it to journalists and creators, or make a one-off product that creates the story.
- Thought leadership. Have an opinion, and be ready to share it. Journalists always want an expert’s take on breaking news.
Write for the journalist, not for your brand
Journalists are the audience. They’re measured on views, time on page, comments and shares. They need an angle, a hook, original images, graphs, data, sources and an expert quote.
The closer a campaign sits to your product, the less journalists trust it. The closer it sits to culture, data and people, the further it travels.
Use the pub test: would anyone talk about this in the pub? And think in three rings: your customer, their friends and family, then everyone. The best stories reach the third ring and still lead back to your product.
Why PR works better with a B.R.A.I.N.™
The hardest part of PR isn’t the pitch. It’s knowing which story to tell, and who to tell it to. We know because we track it: every brand we work with has a B.R.A.I.N.™, built on deep avatar work, so we know the worlds our customers live in.
Know your customer
Who buys, why they buy, and what they want next.
Know your community
The worlds they live in, online and off.
Know what they talk about
The topics, trends and in-jokes that get them talking.
Know who they listen to
The titles, creators, podcasts and newsletters they trust.
Know who to speak to
The journalists and outlets that put you in front of them, in placements that matter.
That’s why we don’t run PR for any brand without a B.R.A.I.N.™ Without one, every story starts from a guess and we can’t move as fast. With it in place, we spot the story the day it breaks, and AI helps us find the angle, the data and the right journalist in hours, not weeks. PR, supercharged.
Our 8-point story test
Before anything goes out, it has to score on these eight points. If it doesn’t, we fix it or kill it.
- Adds to the web. Something new, not a rewrite.
- Simple. You can explain it in one line.
- Unexpected. It makes people say “really?”
- Concrete. Real numbers, real places, real people.
- Credible. The data and the source hold up.
- Emotional. Laughter, fear, shock, disgust or love. The most memorable campaigns make us feel something.
- Shareable. People want to send it on.
- A story. It has a beginning, a twist and a reason to care.
To get the link, give something: value, an expert, a resource or something to play with. If the journalist can cover the story without linking to you, start again.
Supercharge PR with social
PR and social work best as one campaign. Social proves a story has legs before you pitch it, and press coverage gives social something to talk about.
For The Last Bunch, we launched the world’s first miniature bouquets for bees. Nobody was searching for them, because they didn’t exist. We created the demand: 4.3 million views and 900 sales in 6 hours.
Organic social is the engine room. Test the story for free, then put PR and paid behind the one that takes off.
Built for AI search
AI answers lean on what the internet says about you: press coverage, reviews, Reddit threads and social conversation.
Data stories get cited, and every citation is another signal. Interactive tools (a quiz, a calculator, a “what would you look like in the 80s”) get shared on Reddit and social, and those mentions feed the AI answers your customers read.
This isn’t a one-off campaign. Consistent activity over months moves rankings, brand searches and AI visibility. A single hit doesn’t.
Campaigns that travelled: Lisa Paasche
Lisa is a consultant to the business and supports us in certain PR strategy. These campaigns are Lisa’s work at Verve Search, and they show every principle on this page in action.
Only want PR? Talk to Lisa.
“If you only want to run PR, Lisa is the only person in the industry I would recommend. She’s one of the most respected names in creative digital PR, a close friend, and her thinking runs through everything we do.”
Mary-AnneLisa Paasche founded Verve Search in 2009 and built it into an award-winning SEO and digital PR agency of more than 50 people. Omnicom bought Verve in 2017. Her new agency, No Carrot, helps brands build the authority they need to show up in search engines and AI answers.
| Campaign | Client | The idea | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Director’s Cut | GoCompare | Ranked films by on-screen deaths | Over 700 links, and the director of the top film spent two hours tweeting about it |
| Twenty-Four Hour LDN | Lenstore, with Nikon | A 24-hour gigapixel time-lapse of London’s skyline, shot on kit borrowed from Nikon | 159 links and millions of views, including CNN, NBC, Time Out London and TechRadar |
| Profanity on Film | Buzz Bingo | Analysed more than 3,500 film scripts to find the sweariest actors and films | 871 links and 15 million views, covered by NME and the Guardian |
Results as reported by the agency at the time.
Your digital PR plan in seven steps
- Know your customer first. Build the avatar work: who buys, where they spend time, what they talk about and who they listen to. In our world, that’s your B.R.A.I.N.™
- Audit your links against your competitors. How many sites link to you, how strong they are, and how fast your competitors gain new ones.
- Pick the pages you want to lift. Usually your best collection pages and the searches your customers already make.
- Find the story. Your data, a public dataset, a trend you can jack, or something that nearly worked for someone else that you can do better.
- Run the 8-point test. Fix it or kill it.
- Test it on social, then pitch it. Lead with the journalist’s angle, not your product.
- Measure what matters. Links from strong sites, brand searches, sales from search, and how often AI answers mention you.
Know your avatars, find where they are, then get in front of them.