In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Chloe Osunsami provides 3 simple steps for crafting a successful digital PR strategy in 2026. Join her to discover how to analyze competitors, find AI visibility gaps, and secure authoritative brand mentions.

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Hi, welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Chloe, Head of Digital PR at Aira, and today I'm going to take you through how to set up a solid digital PR strategy for 2026 using 3 simple steps.

So, as many of you will be aware, digital PR has come back into the spotlight over the last 18 months or so, thanks to the evolution of search and the rise of GEO.

Alongside a strong technical foundation and fantastic content, digital PR is needed to increase visibility within these spaces, and that's because digital PR helps to build relevant, authoritative brand mentions and links, which serve as trust signals to these systems.

Now, some of you might say, "Chloe, but I was already doing that." And that is great, but you just need to continue doing that. And there are also things that you can look at to make sure your strategy is set up to really drive additional ROI in this new space. 

First of all, we want to start by looking at competitor performance. But how do we know who to dig into? Now your target audience is not going to look at just your brand. Your brand won't operate in a vacuum, and therefore, you have to think about the other brands that your target audience might go after. 

So even brands that have made their name synonymous with a product will not be operating in a vacuum. Take, for instance, Hoover. They are so renowned for their vacuum cleaners. But a buyer is likely to compare them to, say, VAX or Dyson, or Samsung. So even Hoover doesn't operate in a vacuum. I did intend that pun.

So if you have a list of competitors, great. If you don't, there are ways that you can uncover competitors using SEO tools and look at competing domains. These tend to look at a share of common keywords, so I would delve into the site a little bit and just double-check that the product or service is equivalent or very similar to what you offer.

I would also look at challenger brands, so ones that may not be as big right now, but are trying to make waves within the industry. So, getting back to the vacuum example, Electrolux launched in 1910, the same year as Hoover. Hoover dominated the market until the '30s, when Electrolux actually took the top spot.

Now, if Hoover hadn't monitored Electrolux, they wouldn't have known what to do to try and maintain that top spot or even take it back over. So it's really important that you monitor these. Nowadays, there are tools, like Google Alerts or Alertmouse, that help you to monitor those newcomers in the industry. So I do recommend setting up alerts, and that's to be able to spot those.

Now, once you have your competitors, you want to start digging into their performance. So you want to be able to answer the question, "Who are the ones to watch?" Now, to do that, you can look into some of these metrics or all of these metrics, depending on what you want to delve into. But I would highly recommend looking at organic traffic to see who is performing best in the organic space.

Domain Authority is also a good measure to look at the quality of their backlink profile. You can have a look at the keywords and the specific areas that competitors are focusing on, the ones that they're performing best in, and how many of their keywords are in top positions. Referring domain profile, both for the quality and also the relevancy of that, as well as AI visibility.

Once you've got a handle on which competitors are performing best, you can really start to dig into what is linked to those top-performing competitors. And this is when you dig into the slightly more digital PR-esque metrics. But this is very important for you to be able to know which ones to dig into. 

Now, when looking at the gaps, you want to start with looking at coverage and AI visibility. Now this is both links and brand mentions, as well as prompts or cluster gaps within the AI space that your competitors are being mentioned in or cited in that you're not.

Now with links, you can use a link intersect. That is a very helpful way to find out where your competitors are being linked to or linked from that you're not yet.

Brand mentions, there are tools that can help uncover brand mentions, but you can also use Google search parameters to uncover coverage for your competitors. 

And then, finally, AI prompts and cluster gaps: you can use specific tools to uncover them.

Now, once you have those gaps, the quality-relevant gaps are going to become your targets, and you want to start digging into those quality-relevant mentions and citations to understand how competitors got there.

Now you could be asking questions about the type of content they produced. Maybe it's informational and super helpful. And it might not be something you cover, but it's always helpful to be able to then suggest it to other teams because that will also impact your work. We're all working towards the same goals at the end of the day.

You also want to think about if they are using specific insight within their distribution strategy, whether it's proprietary data or thought leadership, and if there are any particular digital PR tactics that could be helping.

Once you've done this, you then want to dig into the media landscape. Now, these are places that you would like your brand to be mentioned or linked from that are relevant and authoritative within your space, but also publications that are regularly cited or trusted by LLMs.

Now you want to dig into the topics that these publications are covering, that are relevant, what's exactly being covered around these topics, how could you add to that, and any gaps that potentially your brand or client could fill with helpful content and stories that are relevant to your target audience. 

Now, once you have all of this insight, is when the story starts to come together. Now there is no set way to do this final bit. You need to puzzle all these pieces together. 

We're looking at bringing together your brand knowledge and their key focuses or the key focuses from the SEO strategy as well, because that is going to be important to what you do.

Target audience, their wants, needs, their desires, how those tie in. Along with the competitor insight you've pulled today from all of this, and the media landscape analysis that you've done.

With all of these bits, you want to start to pull together a data-backed story on what you should do over the next 6, 12, 24 months to be able to compete with the competitors that you pulled out.

When you are starting to pull that together, step back, put yourself in a senior stakeholder's shoes, and ask questions like, "If this were presented to me, would I be asking extra questions into this bit? Or do I need extra insight? Or would I ask why we're not considering this route, for instance?" And really review what you're suggesting from their shoes.

If you were a budget holder, would you be happy with what you're suggesting if it was your budget?

And that is everything. So I have a template which will help with this section, and we'll link to it in the transcript. And I hope this was helpful. Happy auditing.