The top four tactics guiding digital PR today

Our team joined more than 500 industry professionals at the 2026 Digital PR Summit, which in its third year is quickly becoming the go-to event for those looking to learn the latest in digital PR and SEO.

With a schedule comprising journalist panels, talks packed with first-hand learnings and plenty of conversations around AI, it’s a melting pot for people working in all areas of PR and the digital media landscape with lots of actionable insights.

We’ve shared the four takeaways that matter the most and those that could shape your next digital PR strategy:

Lauren Bolton, senior account executive: 

Listicles and reviews, or ‘product PR’ has always been a sales booster for e-commerce brands, but for LLM visibility (being seen on responses generated by language models such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity) this needs to be a core part of your Digital PR strategy too – a key topic in one seminar we attended led by Amy Gibson. The way people shop has changed, as research shows 73% of buyers now interact with an average of six touchpoints before making a purchase, including AI search results.

Getting your brand consistently featured in the third-party sources that tools like ChatGPT draw from ensures continued visibility as customer research habits evolve. Editorial product roundups are a prime example, updated frequently and known to be a key source for AI-generated recommendations.

Sitting at the intersection of traditional PR and organic search, product PR allows brands to show up at those high-intent moments. It's about building excitement and credibility around a product and getting it in front of the right audiences through earned media. To succeed, it comes down to strong imagery, offering samples where possible, reacting to seasonal moments like Black Friday and not shying away from affiliate links as a driver of sales. We used strategic product sampling to deliver business impact for premium bedding brand Woolroom - and this tactic will remain an important part of our wider digital PR work for e-commerce brands.

Gemma Cockrell, senior account executive:

Another key topic at the summit was the importance of making press pitching more targeted and relevant, and how greater investment in this area can deliver far stronger results.

When campaigns struggle to gain traction, many people often increase outreach volume in an attempt to land coverage. Speaker Vince Nero explained that his firm’s internal data shows that this approach isn’t effective. Journalists are now receiving 16% more pitches each day, yet a staggering 50% say they rarely receive anything relevant in their inboxes. The evidence points in a different direction: smaller, highly-targeted campaigns consistently outperform broad, generic outreach.

A successful pitch must align with current conversations, land at the right moment, reflect the journalist’s geographic focus and match the format they typically cover. This level of targeting requires time and careful research - as well as market-leading tools - which can be a barrier for many people, especially in-house marketing teams. Despite this, it remains one of the most effective ways to secure meaningful coverage in today’s increasingly competitive landscape.

Molly Earle, account manager:

A great reminder of how much the people behind a business matter was highlighted in a talk that covered many points that are at the core of our own PR strategies. ‘Why People Are the Future of Brands' encouraged the use of thought leadership and expert commentary to get the right voices into the right conversations to boost a spokesperson's online presence. This tactic isn’t only for the CEO or managing director of a business, and anyone with real expertise in their area, such as a subject specialist at a professional services company, or a product developer for a food and drink business, can be a credible and compelling voice.

Successful profile-building campaigns won’t just say things because they're relevant in the news cycle though, explained Ash Jones. Instead, they will understand where a spokesperson’s authority actually holds weight and, perhaps most importantly, consider: are they saying something that nobody else can?

Audiences and editors can spot inauthentic content quickly, and if your comment is sharing the same view as your competitors, you’re just adding to the noise instead of cutting through. Everything needs to feel authentic and consistent, not a contradiction of the brand’s key messages. How people perceive a brand’s key voices will shape how they perceive the whole brand, making people-focused thought leadership an amazing PR tool when done right. 

Eileen Pegg, senior account manager:

Digital PR can help a business to make real commercial impact and, the summit heard that our industry could be showing clients this more clearly. With this mindset, strategies can be adapted to work towards that goal specifically and it’s something we’ve been focusing on at Cartwright.

Internally, digital PR teams love to track the number of do-follow links a campaign secured, the number of brand mentions and the domain authority of a website that your coverage featured on. But once discussions reach the boardroom we know that leaders don’t often know or care about this ‘jargon’. They want to know they’re getting a good return on investment, and that the work we’re doing is helping them commercially by making them money or rising above their competitors, especially if they’re in e-commerce.

To succeed, it’s all about closing the gap between what a business wants to sell more of, which webpages strategically could help them do that, and which competitors are leading the way. Understanding this should come first, said James Brockbank, before deciding on the tactic to get there – whether that’s Digital PR, social, paid media, on-page SEO support or, more likely, a combination of them all. This requires an open conversation at the start from both the clients and the agency – working towards the goal of owning the market of your niche product through both revenue and category visibility will be far more effective for everyone than setting a target of achieving 50 links that may not even deliver a business impact.

With this in mind, campaigns can be crafted with a laser sharp focus on what matters, messages can remain consistent across all brand channels – something that’s key for LLM visibility – and together, teams can work towards reporting on how we’re reaching a shared goal that makes sense to everyone, not just other agency people.