The biggest digital PR mistakes brands still make

Digital PR has matured considerably over the last decade. The tactics are more sophisticated, the measurement is more robust, and the understanding of what good looks like has improved across the board. And yet, the same fundamental mistakes keep showing up – in briefs, in campaigns, and in the conversations that happen when results don’t land the way anyone expected.

Most of them aren’t complicated errors. They’re the kind of things that seem reasonable in the moment and only become obviously wrong in hindsight. Here’s what to watch out for.

Treating digital PR as a campaign channel rather than an always-on one

The most common structural mistake brands make is turning digital PR on when they want coverage and off when they don’t. A product launch, a seasonal push, a specific campaign window – and then nothing until the next one.

The problem is that authority doesn’t work like that. Journalists don’t remember a brand they heard from once six months ago. Search engines don’t reward sporadic bursts of coverage followed by long silences. The brands that appear consistently in the press do so because they’re consistently active – pitching, commenting, building relationships, and staying visible even when there’s no specific campaign to hang it on.

Digital PR that only runs when there’s something to announce will always underperform against a brand that’s in the conversation permanently. The gap compounds over time.

Prioritising domain authority over relevance

This one is understandable. Domain authority is a clean, easy-to-report metric, and a link from a high-DA publication feels like a concrete win. But chasing DA at the expense of relevance produces coverage that looks good in a spreadsheet and does relatively little for the brand in practice.

A link from a mid-tier publication that is read closely by your exact target audience is worth more – commercially, and often in terms of SEO signal too — than a passing mention in a high-DA outlet where your brand has no real business being. Relevance is harder to quantify than domain authority, which is probably why it gets deprioritised. That doesn’t make it less important.

Producing data campaigns with predictable findings

Original research is one of the most reliable routes to consistent coverage. A well-constructed survey, an interesting industry data set, a piece of research that says something genuinely new – these work because they give journalists something to report that didn’t exist yesterday.

What doesn’t work is data that confirms what everyone already assumed. A study that finds people are stressed at work, that consumers prefer good customer service, or that most people use their phones a lot – that’s not research, it’s the illusion of research. Journalists can spot a predetermined conclusion dressed up as a survey, and the coverage reflects it.

The question to ask before commissioning any data campaign is: if the findings came back the opposite of what we expect, would that be more interesting or less? If the answer is less, the campaign probably isn’t built on a strong enough idea.

Writing for the brand rather than the journalist

Press releases, pitches, and campaign assets that read like marketing materials are the single biggest reason good stories don’t get covered. The instinct to make everything sound polished, positive, and on-brand is understandable – but it produces content that is actively harder for a journalist to use.

Journalists are not looking for copy they can paste directly into their publication. They’re looking for a story, a source, a data point, or an angle they can work with. The more a pitch reads like an ad, the more work it creates for the person receiving it – and the less likely they are to do that work when there are easier stories in their inbox.

The reframe is simple but significant: write every piece of outreach for the journalist reading it, not the stakeholder approving it.

Ignoring reactive PR

A huge proportion of digital PR budgets and resource goes into planned, proactive campaigns. Which makes sense – they’re controllable, measurable, and easier to report on. But brands that focus exclusively on planned activity are missing one of the most cost-effective routes to coverage available to them.

Reactive PR – responding quickly and credibly to news, trends, and cultural moments that create a natural hook for your brand – can generate high-quality coverage with a fraction of the creative investment of a full campaign. The catch is that it requires speed, a clear point of view, and someone empowered to move without three rounds of approval. Brands that can do that consistently will outperform the ones that can’t, regardless of how good their planned campaigns are.

Measuring success by volume rather than value

Twenty pieces of coverage in low-relevance publications is not a better result than five pieces of coverage in exactly the right ones. But coverage volume is easy to count and easy to present, which means it often becomes the default measure of success – even when it isn’t telling anyone whether the campaign actually worked.

The metrics worth tracking are the ones connected to what the campaign was actually trying to achieve: organic visibility movement, branded search trends, quality and relevance of links earned, share of voice in target publications, and – where it can be tracked – the contribution to referral traffic and commercial enquiries. Those numbers are harder to pull together, but they’re the ones that tell the real story.

Not investing in relationships

Digital PR is, at its core, a relationship business. Journalists who know and trust you will open your emails. They’ll consider your angles. They’ll come back to you for comment when a story breaks in your sector. That level of access doesn’t happen without investment – not financial investment, but the consistent, unglamorous work of being useful, responsive, and honest over time.

Brands and agencies that treat media outreach as a numbers game – send enough emails and something will land – get the coverage that approach deserves. The ones that treat it as relationship-building tend to get considerably more, and to keep getting it.

Not pushing back on bad briefs

This last one is less about tactics and more about the conversations that happen before any campaign starts. A brief that asks for coverage of something that isn’t genuinely newsworthy, a data campaign built on a conclusion that was decided before the research was commissioned, a pitch timeline that doesn’t allow enough time to build something credible – these are the inputs that produce disappointing results.

The mistake isn’t always in the execution. Sometimes the mistake is accepting a brief that was never going to produce good work, and not saying so clearly enough at the start. The best PR teams push back early, propose alternatives, and explain honestly what is and isn’t likely to land. That conversation is harder in the short term and almost always worth having.

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