Driving Sales with Digital PR: What E-commerce Brands Need to Know

When done correctly, digital public relations (PR) enables brands to elevate their presence in online news publications while boosting website authority with a relevant, growing backlink profile. This is why brands, especially brands operating in the e-commerce industry, should implement digital PR into their SEO strategy if they haven’t already!

For e-commerce businesses, digital PR plays a vital role in driving sales and product promotion and provides brands with countless opportunities to tap into third-party audiences and target customers. E-commerce brands can also use digital PR to compete with their competitors and ensure their products and expertise feature alongside others in the industry. This is especially important during critical periods in the e-commerce calendar, such as Black Friday, when, according to the National Retail Federation, 87.12 million people shopped online for Black Friday in 2022.

At The Evergreen Agency, our PR team specializes in helping e-commerce brands, in particular, grow their media presence and help drive sales as a result. Read on to find out how important digital PR really is for e-commerce businesses and learn some of the most successful methods for implementing a tailored e-commerce digital PR strategy.

Why every e-commerce brand should have a digital PR strategy

Digital PR is a link-building tactic and one of the three vital pillars of SEO (technical SEO, content marketing, and link building) that work together to boost your website’s rankings in search results.

It is an ongoing commitment, and if done correctly, digital PR allows brands to push their product reach beyond their primary target audience. Digital PR is an organic method of promoting your brand to share your expertise and products with consumers. It can also be a cost-effective way for smaller brands, in particular, to drive more traffic to their websites.

Reaching journalists in your industry niche

E-commerce brands need to have a digital PR strategy if they want to effectively target the journalists in their niche who will have a genuine interest in the products they’re selling. The only effective way to expose your brand to writers is to pitch highly relevant, niche news, expertise, and products to them that are valuable to the publication they write for.

Creating meaningful relationships with journalists in your industry niche will help to keep your brand top of mind, and over time, you will notice patterns emerge. It will enable you to build a dedicated pool of regular journalist contacts that will come to you as a first point of contact when producing articles that require product recommendations.

Promoting your products to the media

Arguably, one of the most important reasons for having a digital PR strategy as an e-commerce business is the product promotion opportunities it offers. Digital PR engenders organic product placement and the ability to have your products featured in the media, specifically on websites that your target audience is most likely to read.

Many journalists specialize in producing shopping-specific articles, including roundups of the best products on the market for any given topic, meaning they are always looking for new items to review and include.

Shopping guides are particularly popular in the run-up to notable dates in the calendar year, such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, as well as pre-season features in the fashion and home and garden industries.

Your competitors probably have a digital PR strategy

According to insider intelligence, by 2026, the e-commerce market is expected to total over $8.1 trillion. This means that the number of e-commerce brands competing to get their products noticed online is only going to increase.

Now that more businesses understand the importance of having a digital PR strategy to drive sales, it is likely that your competitors will be implementing digital PR techniques to get their brands and products noticed and will be reaping the SEO benefits from this. So, if you’re not currently using digital PR, you are missing out on opportunities that your competitors are likely benefitting from and capitalizing on.

You can find out your top competitors by using the Moz Pro Competitive Research tool, which shows you a comparison of your top 25 true competitors, along with the Domain Authority and Rivalry for each website.

How to uncover your competitors' digital PR activity

When competing with other e-commerce brands in your industry for media placements, uncovering your competitors' digital PR activity is a great way to start. Competitor research can help identify publications, find link opportunities competitors are capitalizing on, and also pinpoint any opportunities they haven’t capitalized on yet. With this information, you can make sure you’re targeting the same publications as them to try and get your products featured alongside theirs in product roundups.

Assessing your competitors' backlink profiles will also allow you to understand any niche target publications your competitors haven’t been featured on yet, meaning you can focus on building relationships here first for a notable competitive advantage.

Moz Pro’s Link Explorer tool allows you to view your own website's backlink profile, as well as your competitors. You can also compare websites' backlink profiles in the ‘compare link profiles’ section, which is helpful when working on your competitor link gap analysis.

Builds trust for your brand

Digital PR Allows you to tap into your audience using a third party, which feels less promotional and organic when compared to direct brand messaging. Trust is a major deciding factor when it comes to making purchases for consumers, and news websites strengthen that trust by featuring your products in articles. This provides readers with a second opinion and a vote of confidence from the journalists.

Consumers are also more likely to purchase a product if they have read about it in an online shopping guide, which can significantly drive sales for the product mentioned.

Generates Links Straight to Your Product Pages

When a journalist features one of your products in their article, they will likely include a direct link to the purchase page to make it as easy as possible for their readers to access the products mentioned. This is great for e-commerce brands, as not only does it direct readers straight to the page where they can purchase the product, increasing the chance of them converting, but it also secures a link straight to the product page, which holds a lot of value when it comes to SEO.

Building links directly to product pages will, in time, enable them to rank better and appear above similar products from competitors in the SERPs. When securing links directly to product pages, ensure you include a link from the product page to the parent category page. This will ensure that the link equity flows through to the most important pages, helping the overall authority of the site for that topic.

Another way to feature in the SERPs

For some search terms, the top organic search results can often be gift guides produced by news websites. If a brand gets its products featured in guides of this kind from publications ranking top on Google, this is essentially the second best way to be featured in the top SERPs.

For example, when you secure a link in a gift guide that ranks in the top 3 for the query “ Christmas gifts for Mom,” your brand is likely to be noticed by users searching this query and browsing the top results on Google.

We’ve highlighted the importance of digital PR and how it can increase sales for e-commerce brands. This brings us to the next question: how can companies start to implement digital PR activity?

The key to securing the best links for digital PR is to assess the industry you operate in and identify notable conversations relating to your industry in the media. Once you understand which topics and products are popular or haven’t been covered yet, you can then evaluate your brand positioning and identify what you can offer to journalists.

Product pitching

Product pitching is one of the most important digital PR tactics. They are also some of the simplest pitches to craft, allowing brands to be more promotional in their writing.

Tip: Make sure you’re targeting the right audience by finding journalists with job roles such as ‘Consumer Writer’ or ‘Shopping Writer.’ Conduct a manual Google search to find journalists who write product-specific articles for your target publications, and ensure their contact details are added to your media/pitch list.

Awareness days

Awareness days and key dates throughout the year should also be utilized by e-commerce brands, as many of these will have products associated with them. Awareness days present a great opportunity for e-commerce brands in the food and beverage industry in particular; days such as ‘World Coffee Day’ or ‘World Cocktail Day’ generate interest from journalists who often write product round-ups for the dates.

Expert knowledge

Aside from promoting products, digital PR allows e-commerce brands to position themselves as experts in their industry by commenting on common topics that journalists and readers are interested in.

Offering expert insight into a topic in your niche helps journalists add more authority to their articles and also proves that your brand is knowledgeable in the industry. Having quotes included in the media that are credited with a link back to your website also helps increase your website authority, showing Google that you comply with its E-E-A-T guidelines.

Reactive digital PR

Reactive digital PR (also known as newsjacking) refers to emerging news stories that brands can quickly jump on to offer journalists valuable information surrounding the topic. Brands do this in the hope of receiving a brand mention and backlink in return. Reactive digital PR could be sharing products relating to the latest social media trend or providing comments surrounding a recent announcement that has made national news.

An example of how an e-commerce brand in the homes and interiors industry could utilize reactive digital PR would be to share expertise around a popular announcement in the industry, such as the Dulux color of the year reveal. Furniture brands could suggest the best products to complement the color along with interior design knowledge if this is available. This is a simple yet effective way for a brand to drive product sales due to a trending topic and put their products and knowledge at the forefront of the conversation.

Digital PR campaigns

Digital PR campaigns are a great tool for e-commerce brands, especially when there is a creative idea surrounding an exciting new product launch. Often, product launches can generate a lot of traction with consumers and lead to cool collaborations between brands that shoppers would buy into. Larger digital PR campaigns are typically aimed to generate a wider interest in the press and, in turn, can generate a higher volume of links.

An example of a successful digital PR campaign from e-commerce brand Jessica Flinn was an engagement ring croc charm. The brand identified the high volume of consumer interest in Crocs, which has risen in popularity in recent years. The brand then found a way to capitalize on this and collaborate by producing its own product line, which also led to organic opportunities to generate links due to it being such a popular topic. As the campaign was based on a new product, journalists linked to the product page in their article, meaning a greater likelihood of the campaign generating more sales from hooked consumers.

Digital PR plays an important part in a business's marketing strategy and, over recent years, has become an increasingly popular method of earning high-quality backlinks, most notably through media placements.

Digital PR is a cost-effective method for e-commerce brands to drive sales simply by utilizing journalists and the media. It’s equally effective for both bigger and smaller brands and offers brilliant opportunities for in-house marketing experts and digital PR specialists alike when done correctly.