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Digital PR Agency Manchester

Money: the real links effect

Digital PR is so much more than traditional PR. Real Digital PR targets users at every stage of the funnel, from untapped audiences to longtime lurkers to customers on the cusp of making that final purchase. It’s the ultimate combination of search demand, media relevance, Content Marketing and link-building that bridges the gap between SEO and PR. A damn powerful tool, if you know how to wield it. Links are expected. The real KPIs are traffic and money. Heaps of it.

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Take notes

Our data-driven Digital PR agency focuses on:

  • Brand management: Manage your online reputation across all digital channels, increase brand visibility and gain coverage in trusted online sources to build credibility and a positive brand image
  • Compelling content: Our Digital PR agency creates data-driven campaigns, unique narratives, and newsworthy stories that journalists want to cover
  • Links, links and more links: Earn media coverage and acquire high-authority backlinks from reputable websites to improve search engine rankings and brand reputation
  • Improve SEO performance: Digital PR is intrinsically linked to SEO services, with high-quality, do-follow backlinks directly contributing to a stronger website authority, improved keyword rankings, and more traffic to your website
  • Increase traffic (and money): High-quality backlinks directly drive more relevant traffic to your website from news outlets, directories, forums and bloggers. 

Enhanced AI visibility: AI search engines and LLMs often scrape backlinks, citations, and brand mentions to feature websites in their answers

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A Digital PR company with tangible impact

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55 links

acquired on average in the first 9 months

226%

average increase in domain rating

1,062%

average increase in number of referring domains

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Links secured

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Partnering with our Digital PR agency

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9%

average increase in brand searches following media coverage

52%

of citations in AI Overviews and news features are ranking in the top 10 positions

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Going up in the world  

Our Digital PR agency improves your brand’s online presence with results that would make Bonnie Blue’s mum blush. More coverage, more relevant links, more authority, more traffic, more influence, more leads and the big one – more money. 

Data-driven campaigns

Major news sites want interesting stories that are reliable and transparent. Data-driven campaigns that compile and analyse statistics from a range of sources generate compelling, newsworthy insights that have the big names chomping at the bit.

Expert commentary

Journalists are always looking for knowledgeable people in their field to explain the latest news and trends. That’s where you come in as the expert. Using commentary from one of your team, we help you draft authoritative insights that resonate with industry-specific media.

Reactive pitching

Successful Digital PR services aren’t just proactive. When breaking news hits the media, journalists want as many eyes on their screens as possible. We monitor the news agenda to seize quick-fire opportunities faster than your competitors can blink. In fact, most of our reactive campaigns are turned around within 12 hours.

Journalist requests  

Our Digital PR experts receive hundreds of requests every day from journos seeking information to help them produce content (and engagement) for their outlets. Using expert insights, thought leadership, and authoritative advice, we put your brand in the spotlight.

Thought leadership

Don’t just join conversations in your industry; shape them. Thought leadership in Digital PR positions you as a trusted expert and influential voice within a specific industry or niche by consistently creating and distributing original, insightful, and authoritative content.

Product placements

Get your products in front of users who are searching for what you’ve got. Gift guides, product round-ups, expert reviews, and influencer marketing are all ways our Digital PR agency puts your wares in front of customers.

Directory citations

Directory links may not be sexy, but they are essential for any Digital PR agency. Local and industry-specific directories boost your visibility, increase your backlinks, and are often used as citation sources by Google’s AI Overviews and LLMs.

The Digital PR agency driven by data  

Preparation  

Forensic research is at the black heart of our Digital PR agency. After in-depth conversations with you about your brand, goals and competitors, we use every Digital PR tool at our disposal to get to know your audience and industry inside out, to create the foundations of a KPI-driven PR marketing strategy.

Production

Our Digital PR experts hold ongoing ideation sessions and meticulously analyse their findings to craft compelling narratives that catch the media’s eye and make your audience pause when they’re scrolling through socials on their lunch breaks. We make you the brand they can’t wait to tell their mates about. Awareness, authority and the almighty dollar.

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Launch  

With over 30 years of experience in PR, we’ve got to know many journos – and how to establish those meaningful media relations that secure links and mentions. We tap into our extensive media lists to secure high-quality coverage that drives qualified users straight to your website.

Analysis

We don’t set and forget. Our Digital PR experts let you know when we’ve secured coverage every step of the way, so you can see the fruits of our labour in real time. Each month, we assemble a forensic report that details what’s been done and the impact it’s had on the KPIs set at the start of the campaign. It all comes full circle.

Regenerate

More than Doctor Who. Refresh, re-angle, re-pitch. We’re always looking for new opportunities to get your brand front and centre of your audience organically. Breaking news that would benefit from your expert insight? How about additional data that could help your campaign go further? We’ll be waiting, ready to repurpose and reshape your campaign to answer the media’s call. We will not rest.

 

Dark Horse Digital PR is all about the ROI for your business. If it ain’t making you money, it’s not real Digital PR.

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Digital PR salvation

  • 4420% increase in backlinks
  • 70+ domain authority of backlinks acquired
  • Coverage on global outlets, including Metro, Yahoo and TechRadar

Premium presentation design agency, Buffalo 7, wanted to increase their brand authority within their industry. The Dark Horse Digital PR team eagerly accepted the quest.

We designed a data-driven Digital PR strategy targeting on-site assets aimed at top-tier news and tech outlets. In just 1 week of outreach, we acquired high-quality earned links from over 200 relevant media outlets, making our piece the 4th most linked to content on the website to date. Our ROI on Digital PR didn’t stop there. This campaign has continued to naturally generate links and organic authority as evergreen Digital PR content. Beautiful.

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Recent campaigns

Recent campaigns

Inflation vs the right to party

In 2025…, a Glasto ticket, aka a ticket to stand in a field, will set you back £378.50. That’s a 218% increase – more than twice the cost. As in… one ticket now would’ve bought you two tickets and your dinner back then.

It’s no secret that gig and festival tickets are on the rise. In 2024, Oasis tickets, which were originally priced at £135, rose to as much as £350 and higher, thanks to the advent of dynamic pricing.

To understand this pricey phenomenon more and more, the DH cavalry dove into live music prices back in’ day to expose the horror show that is festival pricing in the modern day.

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Gigs vs inflation

Ticket prices have rocketed so far beyond inflation, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were set by a time traveller with a grudge. Music lovers have long felt the slow, painful squeeze of rising gig prices, like watching your bank account bleed out, one ticket at a time. And some gigs are now charging prices that inflation wouldn’t expect until 2081. Assuming we’re not trading in bottle caps by then.

So we asked ourselves… whose ticket costs have increased the most in the last 20 years? We then ran the numbers to see which musicians are demanding a bigger slice of our wage packet compared to ‘05…

See for yourself

The UK’s funniest region

Merseyside claims the comedy crown, boasting 19.6 comedians per million people. That’s more than anywhere else in the UK.

It’s not just a statistic, it’s a way of life. Merseyside has long been a hotbed of humour, where quick wit and sharper tongues are as common as cups of tea. From the pubs of Liverpool to the stages of the West End, Scouse comedy has carved out a proud and influential legacy.

This is the region that gave us scouse humour: cheeky, irreverent, clever, and bursting with character. Whether it’s observational quips or boundary-pushing satire, Merseyside comedians have been leading the charge for decades.

Laugh on

The UK’s most in-demand job roles revealed

There’s one thing the latest ONS job market data tells us loud and clear: sales and marketing pros are running the show. Out of nearly 1.4 million live job ads in the UK in May, over 78,000 were hunting for people who know how to sell, persuade, and grow. That’s more than any other profession.

But here’s the kicker: while sales and marketing still hold the top spot, demand has slipped since 2022, by 38%. IT roles? They’ve taken an even bigger hit, dropping over 40%. Proof that no industry stays on top forever.

On the flip side, education roles are climbing fast.

Read the brief

To make a dent in your margins, you need a specialist Digital PR agency. A team of highly skilled brains that will get their hands dirty and check under the hood of your website to find the issues, fix the gaps and start making you money.

Let our Dark Horse Digital PR masterminds rip your website apart and show you where you could be. Seriously, book a consultation, shoot us an email, send us smoke signals or Morse code and let our team audit your website for free. No strings attached. Brutal honesty.

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What you want to know

How much does Digital PR cost?
How much does Digital PR cost? - Expand

A standalone Digital PR service in the UK can cost anywhere from £1,000 per month for entry-level retainers up to £17,000+ per month for large-scale, complex campaigns. The exact price will differ depending on the scale of your business, the industry you operate in, the location of the Digital PR agency, the pricing model an agency uses, and the aggressiveness of your goals.

SEO and Digital PR are often paired together as they naturally impact one another, and you will get better results by engaging with both channels simultaneously.

What kind of results should be expected from Digital PR?
What kind of results should be expected from Digital PR? - Expand

Ultimately, more money in your bank account. To get there, Digital PR services should be driving the following results:

  • Increase brand awareness and brand mentions
  • More high-quality backlinks
  • Increase domain authority/rating score
  • Improvements in rankings for target keywords
  • Increase in referral traffic from publications
  • Elevate EEAT presence
  • Greater share of voice (SOV) in the industry
What key metrics do you report on for Digital PR?
What key metrics do you report on for Digital PR? - Expand

Digital PR reporting focuses on a blend of three key metric categories: coverage quality (authority, relevance and reach), SEO performance (ranking increases), and referral or direct traffic increases (action). Moving past traditional ‘vanity metrics’ like raw impressions, we select modern Digital PR metrics to align directly with your business’s growth goals, particularly SEO and revenue.

This includes:

  • Total coverage secured
  • Number of referring domains
  • Domain authority/rating
  • Types of links acquired
  • Message pull-through
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Brand search volume and click-throughs
  • Referral traffic
  • Organic keyword rankings
  • Assisted conversions
  • Conversion rate from PR sources
What if the Digital PR strategy isn't driving organic growth?
What if the Digital PR strategy isn't driving organic growth? - Expand

Look, it happens. The most well-researched, relevant, interesting Digital PR strategy can sometimes fall flat. Maybe it’s the wrong timing, the wrong journo, or something else has taken precedence in the news. We don’t let that keep us down. We analyse, re-angle, and re-pitch to get the results we’re after. 

Sometimes, the performance of a Digital PR campaign is negatively impacted by your website’s Technical SEO set-up. Having a full lay of the land is essential to diagnose and fix any strategy that isn’t performing well. That’s why our Digital PR agency combines Technical, On-Page SEO and Content Marketing to take full accountability for your organic performance.

How fast does Digital PR get results/coverage?
How fast does Digital PR get results/coverage? - Expand

That depends on how fast you can mobilise. Generally, the faster you get stuck into a Digital PR campaign, the faster you can expect to see results. This will also depend on the type of campaign, the journalist’s own turnaround, and the wider media landscape.

What if our team can’t work quickly or operate in a regulated industry?
What if our team can’t work quickly or operate in a regulated industry? - Expand

Our PR experts will work with the timescales available for your internal team and base our strategies and campaigns on achievable goals that suit your business.

Heavily regulated industries have become a key part of our Digital PR service in recent years, with long-standing collaborations with US brands across the Novanta Group, including Jadak who specialise in RFID readers and machine vision software, and UK health and safety experts Rhino Safety.

How do you reach out to media contacts?
How do you reach out to media contacts? - Expand

Our Digital PR agency invests time, money and elbow grease into leading industry platforms like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Roxhill to build and run outreach campaigns. We also have subscriptions to global journalist request outlets, such as Qwoted, Featured, and Editorielle, so no opportunity goes amiss.

What is the difference between traditional and Digital PR?
What is the difference between traditional and Digital PR? - Expand

Traditional PR is all about maintaining a positive brand image and building your brand awareness. Edina, Patsy and lots of quaffed bubbles. It’s been around for longer than The Rolling Stones, but with the digital evolution dominating every brand, it’s becoming less and less effective as a standalone marketing tactic.

The big downside of traditional PR is that you can’t measure it. The number of times your brand is uttered or seen by your audience in the real world is an impossible metric. With no tangible way of knowing the effect your PR campaign has had, you could be throwing your hard-earned cash down the drain without realising it.

Digital PR goes further than trad PR. It’s so much more than a brand mention. With about 50 million internet users daily in the UK, taking your PR strategies online is a no-brainer. And the quality, relevance and quantity of links that point to your website is a Google ranking factor. It often means the difference between page 3 and page 1. Between getting crushed, or crushing your competition. 

With Digital PR, a single brand mention or link is a signal to search engines that your brand is worth rooting for; a beacon of credibility and trustworthiness in a wild west of commercial cowboys. Over time, these links and mentions work to push your rankings and AI visibility further…all of which turn into traffic and generate sales. And you can measure all of that. From little acorns, the Dark Forest grows.

DPR fits seamlessly alongside SEO, influencer marketing, your social media strategy, and even your offline marketing for a true multi-pronged approach. Gone are the days when prosecco lunches at the country club with balloon arches made any sense for marketing. Don’t waste your budget.

Do you work with traditional PR teams?
Do you work with traditional PR teams? - Expand

Yes, we have worked alongside traditional PR teams for multiple clients. Our Digital PR agency will work alongside any existing PR roadmaps or content calendars to make sure everyone is working towards the same messaging and goal. 

In our experience, having clearly defined remits of which team will be most responsible for the different areas or PR has been the key to success. Open communication lines lead to better results for your brand.