The Dream Team: Web Dev and Public Relations
by Ryan Picardal •
Web Design and Public Relations are often thought about as two different disciplines and departments that have nothing to do with each other. More recently, we are beginning to see the importance of the two functioning together, as the combination and work of both can significantly impact your business (or brand). Let’s start by talking about Public Relations, or PR for short…
What is PR?
The Public Relations Society of America defines public relations as “A strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”
One of the major goals of PR is building brand awareness. This goal is the main reason PR is so important for Web development.
When building a new website, the PR team will be the in charge of helping drive people to the website by securing press placements and introducing the brand to people that may be interested. PR will look for something unique and original about the business that makes it stand apart from other companies. The uniqueness will make the company (or brand) pitchable and intriguing for the press and its readers. The more that people land on the website, the greater the chances of conversion. This is one of many ways on how to improve your conversion rate. We will go into a few more ways in a bit!
How Do They Do That?
PR helps keyword rankings and domain authority
One of the most important things within PR strategy is landing PR placements. What is this strategy and how does it affect your business? Basically, creating PR placements consists of securing quality links on other authoritative websites. For example, Forbes wrote an article about energy bars, and your company is Quest energy bars. The goal of your company (Quest) would be to get the Forbes article to talk about you and make one of the words link to your site. This will drive users to the site, increasing not only the chances of someone converting but your keyword rankings and domain authority as well.
Why Is it Important to Grow Your Domain Authority?
Domain authority is measured by the backlinks your site has. So, if we return to the previous example, the backlinks would be the links that live on the Forbes article to the Quest website. As the site gains more backlinks, the domain authority increases.
A link shows that your website is a good source, which drives link equity to your website from the site linking to yours.
Related: What is domain authority?
So, now that we have a basic understanding of some of the strategies PR uses to grow your business, let’s see how far their potential goes when working closely with the web design team.
Why is Web Design so Important for PR?
Nowadays, design has become a new medium for presenting information. Telling a story through verbal and written language is necessary, but most of the times it takes more than words to stand out. Visuals allow us to tell that same story in a glance and give us the opportunity to leverage mediums that weren’t traditionally accessible.
Here is where we step in: we help PR visually catch users’ attention.
How Do We Do That?
There are a lot of different directions we could take when talking about visually impacting the user. It can range from an entire website to a simple CTA.
A good website is a must in today’s highly visual market. The way your site looks tells users whether they want to interact and/or do business with you in just a fraction of a second.
One glance at your site can either turn someone into a potential customer, or can push someone away from your business entirely.
We make sure brands are cohesive. Your brand is so much more than just some pretty designs. It’s about personality, voice, tone, consistency, and what you value and deliver to your customers. We as designers make sure that these values are reflected in all of the visual elements and make your website easy to navigate. These core practices create consistency and brand cohesion that lead to trust and value of your brand. If we’re lucky (and we usually are), the trust of the brand and site will turn into a conversion. Read more to learn about components of an effective homepage and how to create a great landing page that really converts.
Design seems like the primary focus here; it’s the part that shines for everyone to see. However, design is only one small part of the web development team’s role. Most of the time, our work is behind the scenes. This is one of the real and essential values of design to PR. We basically try to make their life easier by taking care of the technical stuff like bugs, sites that are down, implementing content, codes, and more.
So why should you hire a professional web developer? At Power Digital, our dev team created a fully functional influencer database: Dexter. Our influencer database is proprietary software with thousands of influencers that can be easily refined to create lists of influencers. Rather than starting from ground zero and identifying influencers through Instagram and YouTube research, we expedite this process with our database of influencers who are all previously vetted and can be easily sorted by gender, niche, sponsored fee, social channel, and reach.
Related: How to Develop and Influencer Outreach Strategy That Converts
Conclusion
The idea of combined communications as a whole is becoming a trend in the industry. Marketing efforts are more effective when all areas work as a team. Your branding, messaging, and communication channels are all connected between each other and need to be strategic and consistent. This includes the use of visuals as a tool so that all channels establish an efficient, lasting connection.