This isn’t a Trends predictions post. I can’t be arsed pretending like I know what the future will bring, and the reality is that most predictions posts are just full of bold predictions that end up having a minimal impact on the industry at best.

Instead, I’ve come up with five things I’m putting on my “Digital PR Wishlist” for 2025. Five things that I’m hoping changes for the better within the industry over the next 12 months.

1: A more brand driven approach

When I say a more brand driven approach, what I’d really like to see is this on a broader level within the Digital PR space. I think we all get that relevancy is an important thing to factor into campaigns at this point. What I’m talking about is creating and shaping brands across a number of campaigns. Making a brand known for something. Creating campaigns that are quintessentially [INSERT BRAND]. 

I’d love to see more case studies going beyond just talking about how many links they earned, and even beyond the impact on keyword rankings. I want to see how the work that we’re producing impacts the popularity and recognition of a brand, how it affects branded searches, purchasing intent, and actual sales. 

I actually kinda hate the term Digital PR because I don’t feel like it’s an accurate representation of what most of the Digital PR industry is (not a knock). It’s more Content Marketing than Public Relations in my opinion. It does however feel like more of a shift towards a blurring of the lines between “Digital PR” and “Traditional PR” is starting to emerge. 

But in order for that to effectively happen, the Digital PR space needs to start putting brand at the forefront of their client strategies. And that means taking more risks.

The Digital PR industry does a great job of earning coverage and links, but I feel like sometimes we (myself included!) focus too much on just creating content that we’re confident will get covered. Safe content if you will. But taking risks is a key aspect of creating brands that people remember and become fans of. 

Which brings me on to my next wish…

2: More creativity in the industry

One of the biggest shifts in 2024 that I’ve noticed in the industry, is the decline of the big Hero Campaign. The ones with amazing datasets, creative analysis, and sick landing pages. 

Agencies are moving away from that type of campaign. And I get why. They’re expensive, and can be risky in terms of the results they generate. Which isn’t a great combination, especially when the industry is getting more competitive, and clients are becoming a combination of more demanding, and more budget conscious. 

Reactive PR on the other hand, is cheaper, and more likely to hit link targets. Expert commentary is a safe tactic, but a very effective one. And I totally get why people are rinsing that kind of content. The turnaround time is quick, it’s great for building E-E-A-T, and why spend months and 3-5x the budget on a Hero Campaign when you can get similar if not better results from a campaign that costs a fraction of the budget, and can be created in a fraction of the time. 

But are we all getting a bit bored of the same type of content every single month? I know people who are outreaching campaigns every week that feel this way. And this isn’t me knocking this approach to Digital PR and earning coverage. At all. But I do push back on the idea that Hero Campaigns are on the way out. 

Bad Hero Campaigns are. But there’s 100% still a place in the industry for great Hero Campaigns. And here’s the thing about these types of campaigns, they’re the ones that will supercharge your results and get you volumes of coverage that Reactive PR will find much harder to achieve. 

They won’t work without creativity though. Creative ideas, creative analysis, creative outreach. Creative approaches to every stage of the campaign. 

And that means we have to be prepared to have campaigns that might flop sometimes. Big ideas are bloody difficult. But in order to have them, we have to move from the safety of the shallow end and start playing in the deep end of the pool. And maybe more to the point, team leads need to allow people to play in the deep end and not be petrified of drowning. 

Great Hero Campaigns also take time. And I think this is maybe the biggest barrier to Digital PR becoming more brand driven, and more creative. You don’t get great ideas by walking up to a vending machine and pressing a button. 

I’ve seen multiple surveys that have shown the amount of time Digital PRs put into coming up with campaign ideas, and it’s quite frankly shocking. 

Creating amazing creative stories that will drive brand metrics takes a lot of planning. Understanding who your brand’s existing audience is, who their desired audience is, which demographics you want to grow, understanding what those audiences are influenced by, researching what stories will connect with Journalists, separating the right idea from the good ideas. And that’s before you even get into actually producing the thing! 

But when done well, the results you can achieve are so much greater, and so much more rewarding. 

3: More of a multi-channel approach to content

So these first three are all kind of connected. Something I’m a big proponent of that I’d love to see showcased more within the Digital PR circles in 2025, is content that can be used as more than just a piece of content to send to a Journalist in the hopes of some coverage and a backlink.

That’s where we can make bigger budget Hero Campaigns more successful. Good content is good content, and every marketing channel needs content. Think about how the content and stories you’re producing can be repurposed for other distribution channels. 

What makes for an engaging story isn’t drastically different from PR to Social to Email. It’s the format and presentation of the content that is the big change. 

If you want to make your Digital PR offering more valuable to clients, start showing them how the content you produce can be passed to other teams to also use. 

Show them how they can create engaging Social content across different platforms based on your content. Show them how it can be used for content in Newsletters to drive website traffic. Go big and show them how OOH Advertising can bring your story to life on an even grander scale. 

4: Not viewing Digital PR as a transactional service

The “you pay us X and we’ll give you X number of links” model isn’t going away. And as a model I don’t have a massive issue with it. What I do take issue with is the term “guaranteed links” or “guaranteed coverage” because that just isn’t a thing you can “guarantee” with earned media. You can’t guarantee something you’re not in complete control of. That might seem nitpicky, but this is PR, words are important. 

What concerns me more is this switch to Digital PR being viewed by many as a transactional service. I give you money, you give me backlinks. 

Here’s the issue with that. Backlinks alone don’t mean shit. Clients don’t really care about how many links we build. What they really care about is what comes from those links. How did they impact rankings? Are we getting more traffic to our website? Are we generating more sales/leads since working with you?

That’s what my interpretation of “Digital PR” is. It’s more than just building links.

Industrialising Digital PR into a transactional service feels like a step backwards for the whole quality over quantity ethos. “I give you money, you give me backlinks” becomes all about quantity. For this amount you’ll get 10 backlinks. Ok? 10 backlinks doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It implies that every backlink is of equal value.  

And that’s where Digital PR will become split down the middle in terms of service offering. You’ll have the ones that sell X number of links for X fee (and that’s fine). Then on the other side of the divide, will be the ones that aren’t bothered about achieving a set number of links, but rather hitting KPIs based on traffic and brand metrics. 

There’s an audience for both models. And there always will be. But what I’d love to see is, more of the industry talking about how their Digital PR activity impacted traffic and brand metrics, rather than being solely focused on hitting a KPI of X number of links. Which is something that both models can absolutely do.  

5: Rebuilding the Digital PR Twitter community

Oh how I miss the glory days of Digital PR Twitter until Elon massacred it. It was such a great platform that allowed the generous knowledge sharing that I love about the Digital PR industry to thrive, and for everyone to benefit from it. 

In 2024 it’s felt like the community aspect of the Digital PR industry has massively suffered. Yes there’s LinkedIn. But it’s… LinkedIn. TikTok isn’t really set up for conversations and debates. There’s Slack groups for niches of the community, but there’s not really one with a mass audience (not one that I’ve been invited to anyway haha). 

Bluesky has emerged in the past month or so. And I really like it so far! The Digital PR community on there is growing, and I already get much better engagements on my posts on Bluesky than I do on Twitter, especially now they restrict the reach of posts with links in them. 

Bluesky is definitely the most promising successor so far, but it’s still a bit… quiet? 

Regardless of where it ends up being, can we all just choose somewhere that doesn’t hate hyperlinks where we can share resources and talk about Digital PR at please?