What Is Reactive Digital PR And Its Function

What Is Reactive Digital PR And Its Function

Reactive digital PR is the process of adding value to upcoming or existing trending news stories. Coming to digital PR tactics like creative campaigns, enables you to create a piece of research and story from scratch, whilst ‘reactive’ gives you a foot in the door from the get go. As a process, this mostly changes the ‘ideation’ phase of a typical Digital PR campaign.

Reactive digital PR is when you spot an opportunity to gain coverage and links for a business and react quickly to that opportunity to seize it. It’s dependent on someone else (usually a journalist or news outlet) publishing a story that fits the business you’re working with.

Types of Reactive Digital PR:-

Newsjacking, PR Requests, and Proactive are the three core groups we can put ‘reactive’. Being reactive to a current trending story is newsjacking, If a celebrity does something or a piece of data hits the news that causes a wave of attention, or even when a TV show goes bananas, then creating content piggybacking that story is newsjacking. While PR requests for the time spent responding to them can lead to some hugely valuable links, with very little time spent. Platforms like Qwoted, Response Source, etc., and even #prrequest or #journorequest on X/Bluesky are all ways for journalists to ask industry experts for their insight to be included in an article they are currently working on. On any given day, you could have 390 opportunities drop in your inbox, which means you are being reactive to opportunity. The last type, Proactive, includes types of opportunities you plan to proactive for are International and National Days, Large events, TV shows or movie releases, Celebrity deaths, political events, and others.

Contrast this with proactive digital PR, where planned campaigns aim to push messages to your target audience that they may not have otherwise heard. Use of reactive digital PR depends on several factors. Some of the examples include topical relevance, Speed, Realistic Expectations, and you need to think about when considering trying to reactive digital PR.

Furthermore, reactive digital PR is likely to present you with opportunities to do things that may lead to coverage and links. These aren’t mutually exclusive to opportunities that larger, hero-style campaigns may present, but most likely to come about without the need for large-scale content.

Opportunities To Be Found :-

1. Commenting on topical news stories using some type of hashtag or using services like HARO or ResponseSource. Spot these opportunities for in-house experts by providing a comment of brand mention, or a link. This provides a chance to gain credibility in the topic area and building relationship with journalists.

2. Content on a specific item provided to journalists to help support stories they may be planning to publish on a news item. It includes producing content very quickly and making it specific to the news item or topic already being talked about. Content should be simple, easy to produce, and should have unique information on a developing news story.

3. Additions to existing stories are fairly common for journalists to update news stories after publication. This is especially common for developing news where more information is gathered and added to the existing story.   

Final Outcomes

Setting expectations with these tactics won’t always yield the results of a larger, planned hero campaign. But as with most things, it is difficult to predict.

Further, the time and resources you invest should be proportional to the expected results. If reactive digital PR tasks take 15 minutes and you get one link, that is a good return on the time that you have spent. You will likely get a mix of regular links, nofollow links and brand mentions with this type of activity.

How To Prepare For Reactive Digital PR

This doesn’t need extreme opinions, but you should probably know which side of the fence you sit on in most situations. Ideally, they should have reasonably clear or strong views to stand out to a journalist writing about that topic.

There would be certain dates when topics are written about more often than usual. Some are clearly not serious and just a bit of fun, look for days of the year relevant to your topic and may provoke news and stories from journalists. Prepare some content tied to the day of the year. You can pitch this content to journalists ahead of time and perhaps get covered in their stories.

Speed is important for reactive digital PR and helping in combating content production and slowing down signing off, enabling you to prepare assets before you actually need them. Reactive digital PR could be a great method for generating more links and coverage for a brand, but it's not for everyone. Plan as much and prepare to move quickly when opportunities present themselves