Digital PR vs Traditional PR

Ronn Torossian
3 min readJun 25, 2021
Digital Public Relations versus Traditional Public Relations: What is the difference?

The process of delivering information in a way that makes a positive impact on the target audience is what PR is all about.

Additionally, PR campaigns are driven and focused on the goal of creating a positive image for a company with its target audience.

One of the main differences between digital and traditional public relations is the budget and the landscape.

Digital PR

The goal of digital public relations is to increase a company’s reach and manage its reputation.

Many times, companies will approach influencers with a significant number of followers, or subscribers, to work on promoting themselves.

Additionally, news outlets and digital journalists can also be contacted to share public relations stories or press releases.

The reason behind digital public relations efforts is for the company to be able to communicate with its target audience in the right way.

Not only that, but digital PR works closely with digital marketing tactics such as PPC, SEO, and a number of other strategies.

When these two different efforts are combined, they can help in increasing the reach and the visibility of a company.

Most of the time, with digital PR, companies are looking for backlinks from relevant online news publications, to get the attention of the target audience.

Additionally, the success of any digital PR campaign can easily be measured with various tools or software, such as Google Analytics.

With these tools, companies can get a better understanding of which strategies and efforts are working from their PR campaigns, and which ones should be improved upon.

Traditional PR

On the other hand, with traditional public relations strategies, companies are able to use traditional mass media channels such as magazines, newspapers, TV, etc.

With the traditional PR methods, companies are focused on executing manual tasks, such as sending out press releases with journalists or reporters, and informing them when and what to publish to the audience.

However, traditional PR doesn’t work with many different marketing tactics, and the number of magazines and newspapers is in decline, making traditional PR less effective than its digital counterpart.

Digital or Traditional PR

There are a number of benefits to digital public relations. For starters, digital PR efforts are cost-effective, faster, and have a wider number of approaches.

With digital PR companies can also get a relatively faster response either from journalists, or the target audience.

There are also a variety of tools available to companies that can help them not just create campaigns, but keep track of how effective each strategy is, and adjust the ones that are not working so that they’re able to increase and improve a company’s reach and reputation.

Despite a decrease in popularity, traditional PR is still pervasive, and very relevant, which makes traditional PR tactics just as important as ever. The downside to traditional PR is that the impact and efficiency of a company’s PR efforts can be difficult to measure, as most outlets have estimated numbers.

Fortunately, as more tools have been introduced throughout the years, more traditional PR efforts have introduced ways for companies to be able to track views and impressions.

At the end of the day, whatever approach the company decides to take in terms of public relations, it’s always working towards a single goal, which is promoting the company‘s reputation, building brand awareness, and engaging with the target audience.

Ronn Torossian is the CEO and Founder of 5W Public Relations. 5W PR is a leading digital PR and influencer marketing agency.

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Ronn Torossian

Ronn Torossian is Chairman & Founder of 5WPR, one of America’s leading & largest PR Agencies and the Author of the best-selling PR book: "For Immediate Release"