The difference between PR and Online Outreach

Online outreach has stemmed from traditional PR to help websites gain a wider audience and increase brand awareness online, however there is a distinct difference between the to. Let’s start with the ways that these two marketing activities are similar so we can begin to understand why these teams need to work together in the modern marketing world:

• You’re pitching to people – language is key whether you are speaking to a journalist or a website/blog owner – they need to relate to you and understand what you are asking/informing them about.
• You need to follow up your initial contact – so many potential relationships can be lost if you don’t follow up with another email or better still a phone call. If I haven’t heard back from a prospect I will forward on my initial email to them four days later and ask if they received it. If I feel I’m being a little pushy I will create a white lie and say that I have been experiencing some technical difficulties with my email and just wondered if my message was received.
• You’re marketing a company’s image, service and or product, aiming to increase their fan/customer base. Visibility is key whether it is online or print.

Fundamentally PR and outreach pitches are the same. However, with online outreach being a more recent phenomenon the rules are not so strict. – it takes a modern approach to traditional PR. 

Pitching language

The main difference between PR and outreach is the tone. The tone can be less formal, more conversational depending on the industry you’re pitching to.

In the pitch you need to keep it short, simple and punchy. Create a bullet point list about the product you're pitching, or the ways that you believe you can collaborate with them.

Relate to the site, tell them what blog piece you really enjoyed and how it helped you.

With outreach you need to tailor your pitch to each site along with any content that is agreed to ensure it keeps with the site or blog’s tone of voice, like you would each press release you send out through traditional PR.

Content

Another large difference is the amount of content you’re able to market. You can have a much broader scope of content to market. You can market your client’s industry knowledge in the form of guest articles, white papers, PDFs, promote events, success stories to industry news lead sites, infographics, photography and press releases. Whereas with traditional PR you typically send out press releases, which can market a product, service, success story or event and then tailors each one to the specific magazine or newspaper.

Guest articles you provide to relevant sites can be an opinion piece or specific article on a topic that will be well received by the site’s readers. The story you pitch through PR can’t be as loose such as writing an opinion piece on an important piece of industry news, the story has to be about the client – it’s far less open. 

Links 

With outreach you need to think about links and where you want to direct the reader and Google, something that you typically wouldn’t have to think about with PR. In the article you build brand awareness by linking to the homepage with brand anchor text, you can build links into specific landing pages or product pages to make sure they can be easily found in Google searches. 

Links can also come in the form of credits for photographs. If you are sharing photos of a client’s design project for example you can simply ask if the site owner wouldn’t mind crediting them to your client with a link using brand anchor text. This however, can only be done if you have bought the copyright of each image, which in some circumstances can be quite costly.