THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 11

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 11 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.
First off, apologies to those that didn’t receive the newsletter last week. In my first week back I managed to botch sending the newsletter out, take my website offline, and disconnect my email. But I managed to fix them all! Don’t ever let it be said that I’m not a good problem solver!
If you missed last week’s issue, or any others, you can always catch previous issues of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter here.
Here’s what you’ll get in this newsletter:
The latest Digital PR news 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
The latest Digital PR jobs
If you're not already signed up, you can do so at using the button below.


This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Lazy Link Building Course.
The Lazy Link Building Course is a FREE, 5-day email course breaking down exactly how to generate passive backlinks from the world's biggest publications.
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Drop me a message to matt@digitalprtips.com


Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.
The PR Insider: How Introverts Can Succeed in Digital PR and Leverage Their Unique Strengths
The PR Insider: 2024 Annual Campaigns Report
The PR Insider: How to Use Your Marketing Expertise to Transition into a PR Role
Search Engine Land: PR for the algorithm age - 5 tips to pitch stories that rank and resonate
Idea Grove: Crafting the Best Seasonal Stories: Tips for PR Success
PR Daily: 4 steps for correcting important mistakes in statements
PRmoment: Is PR data deficient?
Search Engine Roundtable: Is Google Blocking SEO Rank Checking Tools As Search Volatility Continues
SparkToro: The State of Digital Agencies in 2024
BuzzStream Podcast: How a Digital PR Campaign About Fast Food Went Viral w/ Chris Lewis
Digitaloft: Jan 29th at 2pm - LoftTalk S2 E1: Breaking Borders: Building Your Brand Awareness Through Global Campaigns
Connective3: Pitch to speak at the next Digital Bites event


Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ Most of the time, taking an educated guess at what a Journo's email could be will get you the right one. This tool is great to help confirm if your guess is correct. https://tools.emailhippo.com/
2️⃣ Many of the same principles of presenting your blog post in a user friendly manner should also apply to the presentation of your email pitches. Emails that are easier on the eye, flow more naturally and make it simple to pull key points from are more likely to convert.
3️⃣ Getting a lot of OOO's from Journos currently? Check which Journos are currently publishing stories that day and pitch your story to them. Chances are pretty good that you won't get hit with more OOO's from these writers.
4️⃣ Fancy expensive visuals are super to have, but ask yourself what value they are adding to the content. If they're just improving the aesthetics and not the user journey, they're probably not worth the cost and are just cutting into your ROI.
5️⃣ If your site is only building follow links with barely any nofollow links this will make your link profile start to look a little suspicious. While we all deflate a little when we see that nofollow tag, they're needed for a natural looking link profile.


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 ONS data on household expenditure in the UK
A really interesting ONS dataset that gets updated each quarter with insights into the amount spent by UK on household goods and services. The data dates back to 1997 so is great for comparison purposes and covers seasonally adjusted expenditure on a very broad mix of different goods and services including food and drink, house utilities, health, transport, pets, gardens, restaurants, hotels, education, and much much more. A highly recommended dataset for any UK consumer/financial brands.
2️⃣ UK MP’s annual budgets, costs and claims
Financial data for British MPs such as all the expenses they claim for, salaries, reward payments made to staff and much more. Some very creative things you could do with this data. Plus just very interesting to have a nosy at!
3️⃣ Taxi Calculator
Get the cost of taxi fares for different countries and cities across the world. Great for Travel campaigns, especially indexes.
4️⃣ Toilet Map
A database and map of every public toilet in the UK. The tool isn’t super easy to extra data from but the Toilet Map Explorer page nicely lists out the number of toilets in each city.
5️⃣ Alcohol Consumption by US State
Data from World Population Review on which US States consume the most alcohol. Also has data for each state on the number of Driving Fatalities involving Alcohol and the Excessive Drinking Rate. World Population Review is a fantastic resource in general for data about different cities, states, etc around the world.


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 The Pumpkin Spice Ring by Angelic Diamonds
📊 44 RDs DR 50+
The Pumpkin Spice Latte Ring by Angelic Diamonds is one of my favourite examples of Product PR being used for link building purposes. There’s a lot of really great examples of creative Product PR out there but too often I see them totally neglect having a page they can earn links to from all that coverage.
Angelic Diamonds managed just that with a really well crafted product page that helped them earn 113 RDs in total, 44 DR 50+. The page is simple but effective and the high quality images compliment the creative really well.
I also love that they’ve “priced” the ring at £10k which also gave them the extra hook of the ring being priced absurdly high, a storytelling device which always seems to do really well at earning coverage, as you can see from this example.
2️⃣ Where do the happiest pet owners in the world live? by Petplan
📊 10 RDs DR 50+
I loooooove this campaign so much. It’s such a cool example of how AI tools can be used for really creative purposes within the Digital PR space. At first I expected this to be a basic survey campaign (which is fine) but the methodology is so much more creative, and produced a significantly better output.
To find out where the happiest pet owners live, Petplan used AI to analyse the facial emotions of 250,000 images of pet owners and their pets found via Instagram and Google Images, to give them an average happiness score for each photo. Really creative use of AI tools 👏.
3️⃣ Which sports teams have the biggest fair-weather fans? by World Sports Network
📊 6 RDs DR 50+
This is another really cool example of a campaign that could have easily been a survey but chose a far more creative and thorough route via sentiment analysis tools. The campaign analysed over 100,000 comments on major US Sports teams’ Facebook pages after they won and lost a game.
Personally, I’m not sure “fair-weather fans” is exactly what they’re measuring. The data measured the positivity/negativity of each post which I think could be better framed as most passionate fans perhaps? The analysis of the data and the construction of the campaign page are really well executed, with some great visuals and comparisons between different teams, as well as men vs women.
4️⃣ The emotional secrets behind how the world’s most powerful leaders speak to the public by Preply
📊 2 RDs DR 50+
Ahrefs only shows 2 RDs for this campaign but I’ve included it as I think it’s a very clever use of AI tools, that if anything is maybe a little bit too complex in its execution? Continuing the theme of sentiment analysis, Preply (bonus points for being super on brand) analysed the emotions in the language used by famous public speakers, interestingly finding anger to be the most prominent emotion.
The campaign was done in 2022 and I wonder if maybe it would have performed stronger in the last year or so by analysing political rally speeches during the recent US election, and the number of different political party leader changes in the UK.
5️⃣ Clean Sheets Calculator by Secret Linen
📊 17 RDs DR 50+
I’ll always be a fan of calculator tools as link building assets and this is a really good one from Secret Linen back in 2022, that’s not only an effective link building asset, but a genuinely useful tool still to this day.
I really like how thorough the tool is by asking you 12 different questions so it feels as though you’re getting a totally personalised response from the tool based on your unique sleeping arrangement.


In this section, you’ll find some of the latest Digital PR roles being advertised. If you’re currently hiring for a Digital PR role and want the position advertising here, you can add it using this form.
Likewise, if you’re looking for a new Digital PR role and are happy to have that advertised, drop me an email and I’m happy to give you a “looking for work” plug in this section too!
Position: Digital PR Associate (entry-level position, part-time or full-time) at Prosperity Media (Agency)
Location: Sydney, Australia
Remote/Office Split: 4 days a week in the office, one day from home
Salary: Around A$55,000 inc super/yr (depending on experience and pro-rated if part-time)
How to Apply: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4130090425
Position: Senior Digital PR Executive at Business Waste (In House)
Location: York, UK
Remote/Office Split: 2 days a month in office + ADHOC
Salary: £26-29k Per annum
How to Apply: https://uk.indeed.com/job/senior-digital-pr-executive-da02aaf40d9c2499
Position: Digital PR Director at Propellernet (Agency)
Location: Brighton, UK
Remote/Office Split: At least once a month in Brighton office
Salary: £50,000+
How to Apply: https://www.propellernet.co.uk/who-we-are/working-here/current-opportunities/digital-pr-director/
Position: Digital PR Director at Propellernet (Agency)
Location: Brighton, UK
Remote/Office Split: At least once a month in Brighton office
Salary: £40,000+
How to Apply: https://www.propellernet.co.uk/who-we-are/working-here/current-opportunities/digital-pr-manager/

And that’s a wrap for Issue 11. 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 news 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
The latest Digital PR jobs
If you’ve missed any previous editions of the newsletter, you can go through the archive of issues on the Digital PR Tips website.

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 🙂

22 January 2025