10 Yetis Insight Blog - How to Choose between a Traditional and Online PR Agency

In recent years, the PR industry has taken a shift away from the traditional sense and has a big focus on online work. Whilst traditional PR methods are still usable, the benefits of online PR have started to far outweigh their traditional brothers.

If you are looking to hire a PR agency to work with your business and help you gain exposure then you need to make a big decision of which path to go down. Both have their positives but you need to decide which is best for your business.

Here is my take on what you need to do to choose between a traditional and online PR agency.

Considerations

1. What Do You Want?

Before making any decisions, it’s important to think about what you want from your public relations campaign. Your objectives should lead all your major decisions, including how to choose between a traditional and online PR agency. Have a good, hard think about this before jumping into any partnerships.

There can be a big price difference between online PR agencies and traditional ones. Traditional PR agencies are often more expensive and have a limited reach. Decide on your budget and see which form of agency can give you the most for your money.

3.Do You Want A SEO Element?

A really important consideration to make when deciding between a traditional and online PR agency is whether you want a SEO element in your PR campaign or not? Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a huge part of any online PR agency’s campaign and can be really essential in promoting your business. A traditional PR agency will not usually include a SEO element in their campaign, so make sure you take this into consideration if you are after PR for SEO.

4.Who do you want to connect with?

When deciding between an online PR agency and a traditional PR agency you have to consider who you want to connect with. Many traditional PR agencies will simply target news outlets, whereas online PR agencies will target wider media outlets and will have a strong social media, blogger and influencer focus.

5.Local vs National

Again, consider what type of coverage you want to achieve whilst deciding between online PR and traditional PR. Most traditional PR agencies will solely concentrate their efforts on local and trade print coverage, while online PR agencies will concentrate on a wider push to influencers, online outlets and bloggers with campaigns which may be friendlier for national outlets looking to connect with a more tech-savvy audience.

Advantages of Online PR

1. Innovation

One of the advantages of Online PR agencies is the fact that they are innovative and lead the way in their field. Traditional PR methods are outdated, with the shift in focus towards online outlets, bloggers and influencers producing better results and return on investment.

2.Wider Audience

Online PR agencies reach a much wider audience with their content, meaning a bigger potential reach for your campaign. This increases the potential coverage and exposure for your campaign and business, from influencers on social media to big time bloggers and key journalists.

The best thing about online PR agencies is they can often offer multiple services all under the one roof. For example, here at 10 Yetis we offer PR, social media, web design, graphic design and a video team. This enables us to offer all necessary services a digital campaign could need to our clients without the hassle of having to connect multiple camps for the campaign.

This also enables an Online PR agency to execute a cross-platform campaign, a really effective way to target consumers and journalists alike. A cross platform campaign is something that a traditional PR agency cannot offer and definitely gives Online PR the upper hand.

In the past few years, online influencers have started to play a huge part in trending topics and things that go viral. Online PR agencies target these influencers as part of their campaign.

Influencers are great people to target and get on board with your campaign because they do what they say on the tin; influence people. Journalists and consumers alike turn to these key influencers to see what is trendy and what bandwagons to jump on. Online PR agencies will target these influencers in a bid to promote your product or business further than just print coverage.

5.Easier To Measure

Traditional PR usually generates newspaper mentions, but can you determine what commercial benefit this generates? With online PR, we can generate online links back to your website through coverage, which can easily be used to monitor exactly how many readers visit your website. You can also monitor the buzz and talk of your business or products on social media through using an online PR agency.