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THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 1




Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 1 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.


Here’s what you’ll get in this newsletter:


  • The latest Digital PR blogs and resources

  • 5 quick fire tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

  • 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

  • 5 successful campaigns from the archives


If you're not already signed up, you can do so at using the button below.








First of all though, a huge thank you to Withfrontier for sponsoring the first edition of the newsletter!


James Congdon is an ex SEO & Digital PR of 12 years, turned recruitment specialist for the industry. James works with some of the best-known agencies in the space, as well as a range of high-growth brands in the dtc and b2b spaces.


Over the last 5 years, James has connected hundreds of digital marketers with a wide range of agencies and brands of all sizes.


Get in touch with him at james@withfrontier.com 💡



Want to sponsor a future issue of the newsletter? Drop me a message to matt@digitalprtips.com





Since this is the first issue, this section is a little longer than it will usually be. Here, I’ve rounded up the latest news and resources from the last couple of weeks that you might have missed.


Buzzstream are running a Digital PR survey that takes a few minutes to complete


Digital PR Tips: How To Optimise Your Campaign’s Landing Page For Sales


NOVOS: A guide to building the perfect media list


ahrefs: 8 PR Report Examples & Templates to Bookmark for Inspiration


The PR Insider: How to Talk to Your Clients About Quality Links vs Quantity in Digital PR and Deliver Better SEO Results


The PR Insider: AI Revolution: How Digital PRs can navigate an ever-changing industry


Digital PR Lab: How To Craft More Impactful Digital PR Headlines Based On Real Data


Digital PR Lab: How To Write The Perfect Press Release In The Age Of Clickbait (Without Being Misleading)


ahrefs: How SEO Can Capture Demand You Create Elsewhere


Agility PR: 6 steps to using gamification in PR: Engaging audiences with interactive campaigns


Motive PR: What is Evergreen PR and Why Is It Important?


Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: Digital PR Experiment: How to double your email open rates


Grace Burton on LinkedIn: What's happening in November for social and PR opportunities


Olivia Lott on LinkedIn: An AI tool that helps you visualise a publication's coverage in seconds


Search Engine Journal: Google’s AI Fails At 43% Of Finance Queries, Study Finds






On LinkedIn, I’m posting a Digital PR tip every workday. Give me a follow on there so you catch each daily tip as it goes out. However, if you miss any, I’ll share the five tips from the past week in here each issue.



1️⃣ Test what your subject lines will look like in people's inbox based on a number of different devices, as well as on both Desktop and Mobile.


How your email preview looks on Mobile will vary depending on the device. Email Tool Tester has a great tool that makes it easy to preview what your subject line will look like on different mobile devices - https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/email-subject-lines-tester/


This is great for seeing how much of your subject line and preview text will get truncated.


Ideally you'll want to make sure have enough to entice the Journo into opening your email at the start of your subject line before it gets cut off depending on how the Journo is viewing their emails.



2️⃣ How to edit any webpage to create a preview of what your coverage may look like.


This is great for showing clients the type of headlines and publications you're aiming for with your campaign, and can look great in pitch decks.


To edit the page of any news article with your own text and images, copy the string of text below, add a new bookmark and paste the text below into the url field.


javascript​:document.body.contentEditable = 'true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0


Then all you have to do is click on that bookmark on any page you're viewing, and just like that you'll be able to edit everything on the page to create your own mockups (as shown in the video below!)


I can't remember who created this bookmarklet so if it was you, take credit for it in the comments and thank you so much for making it!



3️⃣ Journalists cover stories not data. Find the story from your content and make that your focus of your pitch.


For example:


💫 Use your research findings for the reason why your creative product PR solves a problem for people


💫 Use your data to add context to why your expert tips will of interest to readers


💫 Compare multiple data points to create stories showing trends and changes


💫 Add in survey stats to add an extra punch to your creative executions



4️⃣ Received an Out Of Office from a Journalist that you're super confident would love to see your content?


Schedule your follow up email the day after they say they're back in the office rather than the same day.


It's more likely to be missed on their hectic first day back.



5️⃣ High open rates are good but MULTIPLE opens are the true sign of success.






Each week I’ll be sharing five data sources that you can use, either for content inspo, or as data sources for your campaigns.



1️⃣ YouTube Music Charts


Spotify have their own music charts that I know are popular within the Digital PR space, but a good alternative or addition that you can use is YouTube’s music charts. You can view data on the top songs and top artists each day/week, and filter your data by country, or view global numbers.



2️⃣ Google Books NGram Viewer


This is a fascinating tool that is really easy to find yourself down a massive rabbit hole while using. Basically, using the tool you can search for a number of phrases and it will show you the popularity of those phrases based on how often they appear in books, dating all the way back to 1500. A really cool tool for comparing the most popular locations in literature for example, or researching when words start being used in books.



3️⃣ Food Timeline


Ever wondered when different foods were first invented? This great site is a long timeline of just that. For example, fish and chips weren’t a thing until 1860, chicken nuggets didn’t come around until the 1980’s (this floored me), and one of the newest foods is the “Cronut”, a mix of a croissant and a doughnut.



4️⃣ United Nations World Population Prospects


There’s a wealth of knowledge in these tools from the United Nations relating to the forecasted population growth/decline of each country. The tool lets you see projections up to 2101, with data on child mortality rates, fertility rates and marital status, as well as population growth. Lots of cool comparisons you could do between different countries with this data.



5️⃣ NBA Regular Season Shot Location Data


The final data source in this issue is a dataset from Kaggle. For those of you that don’t know, Kaggle is like a search engine specifically for datasets and is a great place to explore going into brainstorms to discover datasets that you could utilise. I love this one that someone shared on Kaggle which is a huge dataset with shot location data for every shot taken in the NBA regular season from 2003/04 to 2023/24. The data is broken down into amazing detail giving it lots of different potential uses, including the type of shot taken, the distance, time in the game, and much more.






In this next section, I take a look at five campaigns from my archive of campaign inspo, with some quick fire analysis of what I liked about them and what made them work. Referring Domains (RDs) figures are taken from ahrefs.



1️⃣ When Did TV Shows Jump The Shark by broadbandchoices


📊 11 RDs DR 50+


I love a campaign about popularity of TV shows and this remains one of my favourite. The campaign took 14 popular shows and analysed iMDB ratings to show exactly when they “jumped the shark” and their popularity started to tank.


The graphics are 10/10 too and add some important context.



2️⃣ Romance Scams On The Up During Lockdown by UK Finance


📊 21 RDs DR 50+


I love love love campaigns that find creative uses for internal data, which is such an underrated data source for your campaigns. Here, UK Finance noticed that the number of romance scams, and their value, was on the rise as the UK went into lockdown (what a time to be alive that was).


A simple bit of analysis and suddenly you’ve got a campaign that hits all the right notes, not just for relevancy, but positions the brand as a genuine thought leader and source of authority within their industry.



3️⃣ What It Takes to Be in the Top 1% by State by SmartAsset


📊 64 RDs DR 50+


For those of you not aware of SmartAsset’s data studies, I thoroughly recommend popping smartasset.com/data-studies/ into your backlink tool of choice and having a nosy at all the amazing data-led insights they produce on US finance topics, and how well they perform. I love this as a creative spin on the top earning states type of content, that is actually relatively simple to produce based on their methodology.


They first did this study in 2022 where they earned 89 RDs DR 50+, a great example of how if you find something that works, just repeat it again the following year for another influx of new links! I would suggest however, that they keep one url for the latest report and then move the previous study to a new url with 2022, etc at the end. That way, they’ll be building more links to one url instead of multiple new urls each year.



4️⃣ Which Countries Cheat The Most At Video Games by Uswitch


📊 11 RDs DR 50+


Too often campaigns fall into the trap of misinterpreting what search volume data means, mistaking volume of searches for popularity. This however, was a very creative use of search volume data with a very extensive seed list to discover which countries were looking up cheat codes for popular video games.


Bonus points as well for adjusting the results to be weighted by each country’s population for more accurate and insightful results. A really creative well executed search volume campaign.



5️⃣ The 2080s “Past is the Future” by FULALEO ART


📊 6 RDs DR 50+


Ok so this last one isn’t a piece of content built with the aim of building links but it is one of the first pieces of content that always springs to mind when I think of super cool content I’ve seen on the internet. This artist reimagined what modern pop artists and their LP covers would have looked like in the 80s, and as you can see from the Drake one below, the results are pretty exceptional.


Design led Digital PR campaigns seem to be a thing of yesteryear, which from a creativity and a fan of cool shit pov, is a shame, but also totally understandable as these type of reimagined campaigns can be quite high risk due to their big budgets and lengthy production process.


https://www.behance.net/gallery/76639865/The-2080s-Past-is-the-future




And that’s a wrap for Issue 1. Same time again next week ✌️




Found this useful? You can sign up to receive The Digital PR Observer Newsletter in your inbox each week for free by clicking the button below.





Each week in the newsletter, you’ll get:


  • The latest Digital PR blogs and resources

  • 5 tips to enhance your Digital PR activity

  • 5 data sources you can use for Digital PR campaigns

  • 5 successful campaigns that we liked




Have any feedback for the newsletter? Anything you liked, disliked, or want to see more of? Send an email to matt@digitalprtips.com and let me know 🙂




30 October 2024

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