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In a content marketing campaign, an asset is created and promoted to give publishers a reason to talk about your brand.

The way we at Green Flag Digital do digital PR, and many of our contemporaries do, heavily overlaps with content marketing for link building.

In essence, we treat digital PR and content marketing as almost the same. The main difference in our mind is that digital PR campaigns do three things differently from content marketing:

  1. Primarily concerned with link and press mentions than with organic traffic to a specific content asset
  2. Target higher-end press than a broad content marketing campaign would
  3. The campaign can sometimes be built around a concept or idea more so than simply a piece of content, such as is the case with PR stunts.

One more distinction as well. When we talk about content marketing for SEO purposes, we are mainly talking about building content aligned with keywords to drive organic traffic, but also content pieces that we can promote and get links to. With digital PR, there is less of an emphasis on keyword research, and more of an emphasis of getting as many mentions of the highest quality possible about the brand.

When creating campaigns, we typically bucket the campaign into one of three categories, depending on the client’s goals:

  1. Link-dominant campaign: the client mainly cares about link acquisition to improve the overall domain authority of the site to drive traffic to internal product and service pages
  2. Traffic-dominant campaign: the client has a strong site already, and wants more SEO-driven organic traffic. This works best with brands that have strong retargeting and email opt-in campaigns to make use of the traffic, often top-of-funnel or middle-of-funnel.
  3. Hybrid campaign: a hybrid campaign can sometimes be the best of both worlds. The content that lives on your site will earn traffic for the keywords it’s targeting, as well as be a pitchable story to get link placements.

There is also the concept of broad content marketing, which entails email marketing, social media content, reaching out to influencers, offline content, content for sales enablement, content built for visitors browsing the site, etc. Broad content marketing is 100% an important piece of your overall marketing strategy, but beyond the scope of this comparison.

So digital PR and content marketing are closely related. How does digital PR stack up against traditional link building?

Joe Robison

Founder & Consultant
Joe Robison is the founder of Green Flag Digital. He founded the agency in 2015 and has been heads-down scaling content marketing and SEO services for clients ever since. He is an occasional surfer, fledgling yogi, and sucker for organized travel tours.