instagram digital public relations
Saturday, April 25, 2026

Digital PR: what it is, why it matters and what to do about it

Your product could be brilliant. Your service could be flawless. But if nobody credible is talking about you online, you are invisible. That is the problem digital PR solves.

Most businesses know they need to show up online. Fewer understand that how others talk about you online is just as powerful as anything you say yourself.

That is the premise of digital PR. And for tourism and hospitality brands, it is not optional. People check who else vouches for you before they book.

what is digital pr? we'll explain it.

So what actually is digital PR?

Digital PR is the strategy of building your brand’s presence, authority, and reputation through earned online coverage. Not paid advertising. Not boosted posts. Earned.

That means:

  • Backlinks from credible publications. When high-authority websites link back to yours, search engines treat your site as more trustworthy. Your rankings improve. You become more findable.
  • Coverage from journalists and online publications. A mention in an outlet your guests actually read does more for your credibility than a thousand ad impressions from people who were never going to book.
  • Influencer and creator partnerships. Not the spray-and-pray kind. The kind where a creator with the right audience tells the right story about your brand because they genuinely experienced it.
  • Social media mentions from real people and real accounts. Volume matters less than relevance. One mention from the right voice is worth more than fifty from the wrong ones.

All of it compounds. Each piece of coverage builds on the last. The result is a brand that people find, trust, and talk about.

Digital PR versus traditional PR: what is the difference?

Traditional PR lives in broadcast media. Radio, television, print. It is wide reach with little targeting, and it is hard to measure.

Digital PR lives where your audience actually spends their time. It is built for the way people discover, research, and decide in 2026.

More importantly, digital PR is measurable. You can see the backlinks. You can track referral traffic. You can measure how coverage translates into enquiries, bookings, and brand searches. That accountability is what makes it a business tool, not a reputation exercise.

Why tourism and hospitality brands cannot afford to ignore it

People do not book experiences on impulse. They research. They look for social proof. They ask whether other people have been there, what they said, and whether the brand feels worth their time and money.

Digital PR is what shapes those answers before the question is even asked.

A review in a respected travel publication. A reel from a trusted creator. A mention in a roundup of WA’s best dining experiences. Each one is a data point that tells a potential guest: this place is real, this experience is worth it, other people have validated this choice.

For brands in tourism and hospitality, this is not brand building for its own sake. It is the direct line between visibility and revenue.

What Coffey & Tea does and does not do

We do not do traditional PR or media relations. Full stop. We are not a jack-of-all-trades agency trying to cover every channel and medium. We know digital, and we know tourism and hospitality, and the overlap between those two things is where we do our best work.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

Influencer and creator strategy. We do not maintain a list of influencers and blast them with pitches. We build genuine relationships with the right creators for your brand, brief them properly, and create the experiences worth talking about. Content follows credibility, not the other way around.

Where we stop. Press releases and journalist pitching are not our game. We make sure that when a journalist or creator does come looking, there is content and social proof worth finding.

Content that earns coverage. Whether it is a campaign, an event, an experience, or a piece of editorial, we build things that give journalists, creators, and audiences a genuine reason to talk.

Social proof strategy. Reviews, mentions, user-generated content. We build the systems that turn a great customer experience into public evidence of one.

The thing most brands get wrong

They confuse activity with strategy. They send a press release to fifty journalists. They gift a product to an influencer with three hundred thousand followers and no relevance to their audience. They collect backlinks without considering whether the source means anything.

Digital PR only works when every element points in the same direction. The right publications. The right creators. The right stories. All aligned with where you are trying to take the brand.

That is the difference between digital PR as a tactic and digital PR as a system.

What this looks like when it works

Your brand starts appearing in the right places. Search traffic improves because credible sites are linking to yours. A creator shares an experience at your property and some of their audience books. A journalist covers you because there was something worth covering. People are finding you because the right people have vouched for you.

That is digital PR done properly. Our part is the content, the creators and the social proof that make it possible.

Who is vouching for your brand when guests go looking?

Tell us what you want to be known for and who you want saying it. We will map the creators and content to get you there, and tell you straight where PR needs a specialist. Meg reads every enquiry herself. Start your enquiry