Why You Should Have a Digital Public Relations Strategy for Your Real Estate Business
In the past, if an agent wanted to establish themselves in their local market, they’d focus on mailing out postcards, knocking on doors, or buying up every bus bench advertising space in their neighborhood.
That’s outbound marketing at work.
And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with traditional outbound marketing (and it should be part of your marketing strategy), relying exclusively on outbound techniques is setting yourself up for long-term failure.
That’s because the way people look for and research agents is always changing, and no more so than in the last few years. Before a client ever picks up the phone to call you, they’ve likely Googled your name, looked up your reviews, examined your general online presence, or even asked an AI tool like ChatGPT or Google Gemini more about you.
That means that your digital strategy and how you, your brand, and your business appear online is more crucial to success than ever.
And while it’s critical to understand the important role that SEO, AEO, and GEO plays in a solid, results-driven inbound marketing strategy, there’s one additional piece that is becoming increasingly important.
And that’s building a digital public relations (PR) strategy.
But don’t let the corporate-sounding name intimidate you. Digital PR isn’t just for huge brands with huge budgets. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that real estate agents, teams, and brokerages can use to build trust and authority, dominate local search, and future-proof their business and their digital strategy.
★ Want to learn more about building a lead generation strategy through inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- How Solving Your Audience’s Problems Gets You Higher Quality Leads
- Building a Conversion Strategy That Targets Your Silent Traffic
- Why Slow Leads Are Better Leads (and How to Get Them)
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
What is a Digital PR Strategy?
When most agents think of public relations, they think of press releases, crisis management, or something like that, but a digital PR strategy, built for your inbound marketing strategy, is different.
So what is a digital PR strategy?
Essentially, digital PR is the strategic process of gaining high-quality brand mentions, backlinks, and features on third-party websites, blogs, podcasts, and any other digital media source or platform. The primary objective is to get other authoritative online sources to talk about you and your business and have them point back to your website via a link or brand mention, with the goal of having that playing a role in establishing you as the go-to real estate expert in your local market (and it will, over time).
Because it’s the main place you have complete control over how your business and brand is represented and the best place for you to accurately track ROI through analytics and conversions, your website should always serve as the primary place that you push everyone through your marketing efforts.
And while your overall search strategy is the best and most effective way to do that, your search strategy focuses on what you say about yourself on your website, but your digital PR strategy focuses on what other people say about you in other places online (with the goal of pushing them back to your website).
And, it works. For example, we’ve seen stats where some agents and teams that actively pursue digital PR see an average 25-30% increase in organic traffic and a 35-45% bump in direct brand searches from AI search tools like Google Gemini compared to those relying solely on traditional outbound marketing. So despite the work it takes, digital PR is worth pursuing and building into your inbound marketing strategy.
How Digital PR Helps Your Marketing Strategy
So if you already have an inbound marketing strategy in place, why would you need to add another layer?
1. It Builds Your Referral Traffic Mix
A real estate website with a solid digital strategy in place should never rely on just one traffic source. In a balanced marketing mix, organic search should make up most of the traffic (around 50-75+%), but referral traffic should ideally sit around 20-30%.
And that’s where a digital PR strategy can help, simply because it’s useful for building long-term, reliable referral traffic.
Referral traffic happens when someone clicks a link on another website and gets sent to yours, and your digital PR strategy is a great way to make that happen. For example, when a local lifestyle blog links to your well-written post on neighborhood market trends, or when an online publication interviews you and references your expert quote, they’re setting you up for interested, high-quality traffic via a referral.
★ Want to learn more about building traffic? Have a look at these posts:
- Why Your Website and Your Marketing Strategy Go Hand-in-Hand
- Establishing a Successful Marketing Mix In Your Website Acquisition Strategy
- Creating a Relevant Traffic Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
2. It Helps Raise LLM and AI Visibility
Making sure your business is found online at the right times, for the right reasons, is critical to digital success, but now, that goes beyond traditional search and into AI search.
When an AI or LLM generates an answer to a question, it searches the internet to determine who it thinks is the best result. And to do that, it relies on two main pillars: direct brand visibility (when someone searches your name specifically) and your indirect brand visibility (when someone searches for a top agent or a specific real estate topic in your market).
Whether direct or indirect, your digital PR strategy makes a big difference here as to if you show up or not.
That’s because an intentional digital PR strategy builds the exact digital footprint, via brand mentions, backlinks, and content that meets EEAT, that LLMs and AI are looking for.
★ Want to learn more about building AI visibility? Have a look at these posts:
- Why You Can’t Build an AI Visibility Strategy Without a Website
- Creating an AI Visibility Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
3. It Contributes to Your Local Authority
As we know, Google deeply cares about E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), and if your goal is to build a results-driven marketing strategy, you should care deeply about it too.
And a strong digital PR strategy, built on quality, is one of the ways to show Google that you do care.
That’s because digital PR is part of proving your authority, expertise, and overall, how confidently you can be trusted, based on how others see you and talk about you.
For example, when a reputable news website or a major real estate blog mentions you and/or links to your website, it directly contributes to showing your local authority and comprehensive expertise. Essentially, the more high-quality mentions and links you earn through your digital PR strategy, the more authoritative your site looks to search engines, which raises your overall rankings and makes your core content strategy a lot more effective.
★ Want to learn more about building local authority? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Hyper-Local Real Estate Marketing Strategy
- How to Build an Online Presence Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
- How Being Authoritative Can Bring You More Quality Website Traffic
4. It’s an Important Part of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
While building a digital PR strategy might not be easy, it’s worth the effort if your goal is to avoid outbound and build inbound, which ultimately gets better results.
That’s because if you stop door-knocking or stop paying for ads, the leads you build in that type of outbound marketing strategy dry up instantly, but through inbound marketing, backed by a strong digital PR strategy, you can build a plan that generates leads, in the background, continuously.
For example, when you’re featured (either mentions, linked, or both) as an expert in an article or a podcast, that piece of content lives online forever, which means that months or even years down the road, a prospective buyer or seller that finds, clicks through to your website, and reaches out because they already trust you and your expertise.
In short, inbound marketing gets better results, and a digital PR strategy helps to make it even more effective.
★ Want to learn more about building a PR digital strategy through brand mention? Have a look at this post called: How Unlinked Brand Mentions Help Your AI Visibility Strategy.
Managing How They See You
The best part of creating a digital PR strategy is that it builds on the foundational work you’re probably already doing. For example, if you have a solid content strategy and a modern website, digital PR works as the amplifier that projects your expertise. It bridges the gap between traditional SEO and the AI search, giving you a massive competitive advantage over agents who are still relying entirely on being discovered by accident.
By consistently putting yourself out there, sharing your expertise, and earning the digital trust of other platforms, you’ll build a strong inbound marketing strategy that establishes you as the local real estate authority.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
