PR vs Backlinking Strategies: What’s the Difference?

Once you’ve developed a solid digital marketing strategy, it’s important to consider how you’ll spread awareness of your efforts. Although organically sharing content to your social media channels and home site is essential, there are additional ways to spread the word about your company and its kick*ss marketing strategy. 

Two of the most commonly used options include public relations (PR) and backlinking. But what’s the difference? Which should you use? How are you supposed to know if one option is better than the other or if you should use them both? Keep reading to understand more. 

Public Relations (PR)

The basis of good PR is getting your name out there. Whether it be issuing press releases or responding to relevant news to build a name for your brand, a successful publicist has the potential to bring in significant links. 

Overall, PR is similar to linking, as we’ll discuss below. One of the primary differences between the two, however, is that PR focuses on developing your brand’s position and reputation. While utilizing PR may benefit larger companies looking to get their name out to large sectors, it may not be as immediately beneficial in driving organic traffic as a linking strategy. 

Backlinking

Backlinking is an extremely valuable tactic to use in sharing your site content. The same way that including relevant and resourceful links throughout your own content helps position you as a trustworthy and authoritative source, the same goes for others. 

Backlinking is the action of linking back to another external site on your own. In other words, a backlink is when a site links back to yours as a point of reference. In many cases, marketers might consider backlinking as a tradeoff. “I’ll link to you if you link to me” is a common occurrence when working with peers in the industry that provide relevant and helpful information to one another. 

While some backlinking occurs based on networking and connections with peers that may be willing to share your content with their followers and vice versa, this is hardly the only way to do so. Backlinking also occurs when another site organically references your site. For example, referencing or citing a direct quote or statistic from another site is grounds for a link. A link provides readers access to the original source where you collected your data from. 

As you write and build content, backlinking is the ultimate goal. Creating content that satisfies a searcher’s intent can help not only answer their questions but the questions of others like them. If your content answers a question for an influencer, blogger, or even just your average Joe, they may be more inclined to share your content to their own site for their viewers’ reference. 

If your site can’t be found in organic searches, it’s essentially invisible. You may still get traffic from your social media channels or direct searches, however, both of these require your leads to already have awareness of your brand. Organic search is a critical aspect to building a successful long-term marketing strategy. 

Deciding whether or not to implement linking, PR, or a combination of the two into your strategy may depend on your individual brand. If you’re looking to begin building your brand’s marketing strategy and don’t know where to start, call or contact Digital Storyteller today. We specialize in organic digital marketing for clients within the financial services industry and can help evaluate your unique needs to design a customized marketing strategy for you.