The Importance of B2B PR in E-Commerce Success

Over the past few years digital PR has become an essential marketing tool for e-commerce businesses.

Online retailers need links to power their SEO and they understand that PR is the most effective way of generating high quality links from media sites which have very high domain authority.

One of the many beauties of the online business model for retailers is that they can serve clients across the country from one location. Digital PR helps them build powerful links from news and media sites across the web which in turn brings traffic from all over the UK and, sometimes, further afield as well. Literally introducing the brand to potential customers the length and breadth of the country.

Most digital PR campaigns target consumers as there are so many consumer facing websites out there with high authority. As Motive’s Greatest Hits show, one piece of consumer PR activity can result in hundreds of links so it is little wonder that this kind of PR is a key strategy for most online brands.

Because of its success many e-commerce brands put all of their marketing efforts into consumer PR and revel in the link-fest that it brings in. However, while it is certainly true that consumer titles offer plenty of juicy links it can be a mistake to forget good old fashioned B2B and trade coverage.

Having a separate strand for trade PR alongside consumer makes a lot of sense. Trade coverage helps to raise your profile within your sector. It can help to build your professional reputation, help to create a feel-good factor for your teams and act as an aid to recruitment.

But there’s another reason why B2B and trade media coverage should be part of the marketing strategy for e-commerce brands and that brings us back to links once again. Trade titles often include links from their websites, and they tend to be high authority too. While there are fewer targets to go at focusing on key trade titles as well as consumer will mean more domains are hit, helping to power up SEO even further.

Every SEO and digital PR specialist understands that optimising a site means increasing the number of referring domains and not only the number of backlinks alone. By using a mix of B2C and B2B outreach e-commerce brands can ensure they are maximising their chances of growing their backlink profiles.

At Motive we typically recommend an 80/20 split when it comes to B2C vs B2B coverage. Each case is different but, generally speaking, consumer outreach will bring in more results simply because there are so many targets to go at. B2B though is still essential and definitely should not be ignored.

It can also be enlightening to take a look under the bonnet at the backlinks which competitor sites are attracting and to see how many of these are coming from trade titles. If you’d like Motive to conduct a backlink or competitor analysis for your website or these of your competitors, please do get in touch today.