When it comes to generating ideas for Digital PR campaigns, coming up with good ideas is only part of the challenge. The aim should be to come up with not just good ideas, but the right idea for the brand you're working with.

Therefore, I've listed five key questions you should be considering before pitching a Digital PR campaign. Factoring these into your pitch process will hopefully help ensure your campaigns will also have a positive impact on brand metrics, and provide the best possible ROI to keep everyone's bosses happy!

Do I have the authority to talk about this topic?

For me, this is the biggest issue with “bad” Digital PR campaigns, far more so than relevancy.

Certain topics like health and financial topics you just shouldn’t be talking about if you don’t have any authority or expertise to do so. If you do so, chances are it won’t produce great results, and even if it does get links, those links won’t be doing much for your brand or your SEO (E-E-A-T is of extra importance for YMYL content).

The pub test is a good concept for validating interest in ideas, but also authority. If some random bloke at the bar starts giving you health or financial advice you’re probably not going to take what they say too seriously and act on it (hopefully not anyway!).

Will our target audience be interested in this?

Would this content get posted on the brand’s social channels? Would they send it out to their newsletter subscribers?

If not then it sounds like content that you’re creating for Google, not the brand's audience.

For me, this is also a better definition of relevancy than saying brands can only talk about the core products/services that they sell.

Could this content be repurposed for other channels too?

You’ve just thought about whether the brand WOULD share your campaign via their other channels. Now ask yourself COULD they?

Too often Digital PR campaigns are just used to send to Journalists with the aim of earning backlinks. But this overlooks so much extra value the content you’ve already created could also have.

Not to mention it also helps to sell your work as an even better investment that can be used for more than just Digital PR activity.

Does this campaign educate or entertain?

There's a lot of different variations of the fundamentals of content marketing, but they pretty much all revolve around the notion that all good content should either educate or entertain the reader. And this absolutely applies to Digital PR campaigns too.

If you can’t show how your campaign will either educate or entertain the reader, it likely doesn’t have a strong enough hook to sell a Journalist on writing an article about it.

How risky is it?

The biggest question the person signing your idea off will be asking is “will it work?”. Now despite what some may say, there’s no way of guaranteeing your campaign will earn coverage, but you can use data to show how likely it is to work.

Use data to answer questions such as, will this topic be trending when you outreach your idea, did a similar story work elsewhere that you think you can replicate, and can you get enough angles from it to justify the budget.

Doing this will help filter out the ideas that aren’t actually newsworthy, or need some improvement, while also providing you with solid data to further sell people on signing off your campaign.