THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 13
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 13 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.
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.
Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.
Digital PR Tips: The Best Experts for Earning PR Coverage
Digital PR Tips: Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From January
StrategiQ: Bridge or Burn? Deciding Whether To Seek Digital PR Coverage in Opposing Outlets
Ahrefs: How to Measure Brand Awareness in 2025 (AKA the Year of the Brand)
Root Digital: How to Build (Actually Valuable) Backlinks | Ultimate Tactics List
Bottle: Why Google Loves Author Bio Links to Pages
Reboot: How iGaming Brands Can Utilise Data in Digital PR
NOVOS: We Ask the Journalists Series: WFLA’s Brody Wooddell
Wild PR: The Most Popular PR Campaigns: What’s Working and Why
Motive PR: Nine Digital PR Tips for Startups
PRmoment: PR and LGBT+ History Month – should your client get involved?
Cision: Success Tips for Starting Your PR Career
PA Media: The dos and don’ts of brands jumping on the back of a news story
Ahrefs: Google Says “Links Matter Less”—We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs to See if It’s True
Siege Media: 8 Content Marketing Trends Shaping 2025
Search Engine Land: Your guide to SEO forecasting with Google Sheets
Level 343: Building Topical Authority: The Foundation
Diary Directory: TikTok releases 2025 Marketing Calendars for major regions
Marketing Communications News: An alarming 33% have considered leaving the industry because of ‘the stress of working in New Business or on pitches’
LoftTalk: Breaking Borders: Building Your Brand Awareness Through Global Campaigns
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ Everyone will have campaigns that they thought would be great that go nowhere. Not everyone shares them but everyone has them. Don't get discouraged. They're valuable learning experiences. These aren't failures, they're missed shots at success. Keep shooting.
2️⃣ Start your day with quick tasks that you can get done in ten minutes or less. You'll get a motivation boost from getting something done, and that will get you rolling for the rest of the day.
3️⃣ One of the best ways to find sites to send your campaign to, is to Google similar campaigns and run them through a backlink tool to see which sites linked to that campaign.
4️⃣ Pay attention to how you're formatting publication names in your pitches. It's not a great look if they like to stylise their name in all caps and you write it in lowercase.
5️⃣ Media databases aren’t essential for finding Journalist’s emails - they just make it quicker. With good processes and some extra work you can either find or guess pretty much any email.
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 Inrix Global Traffic Scorecard
You have to give them your email to receive the full report and all of its data, but there is a lot of very interesting traffic data in this report by Inrix. Their latest Global Traffic Scorecard has data from the last three years on traffic delay times, congestion costs, peak travel times, and more, covering over 900 cities around the world.
2️⃣ Complete Historical NBA Data and Player Box Scores
A crazy dataset that covers team and player statistics from every NBA game from 1946 to the present day, which also looks as though it gets updated daily too! There’s soooo many different ideas for NBA campaigns you can come up with from this dataset, comparing player and team stats throughout the history of the NBA.
3️⃣ The Office Dialogue Dataset
Another Kaggle gem. This dataset contains the complete script from every episode of The Office (US). There are some really fun ideas you could do with this dataset around the most common words/catchphrases used in the show, sentiment analysis by character/season, evolutions over seasons, etc. Kaggle also has a lot of other similar datasets to this for many other popular TV Shows if you go exploring on there.
4️⃣ AlleCijfers.nl
I’m conscious that most of the datasets I share are geared towards UK and US audiences, so here’s one that’s a bit different. This site is a curation of public datasets covering the Netherlands. A really great starting point for sourcing stats or brainstorming ideas for any Dutch campaigns.
5️⃣ Find Top Words in Text
This final one is more of a tool than a data source, but it can be very useful for quickly analysing large datasets. The tool lets you input a block of text and then pulls out the most common words used in all of the text that you input. What I really like about this tool is that you can increase the number of words in the top words to find the most used phrases of 2, 3, 4, etc words, which is much more useful for campaign purposes than just individual words. I tested it with nearly 40,000 lines of text so it seems ideal for analysing quite large datasets of text.
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 ComputerTan by Skcin
📊 61 RDs DR 50+
I love a good PR stunt campaign, and this is a good example of one that also gets some SEO value from a stunt as well… almost. Skin Cancer charity Skcin created a fake website called ComputerTan.com which was advertised as a way to top up your tan from the comfort of your office desk using "revolutionary new technology". Seemingly preposterous right?
Well, apparently they took out various ads to advertise it and on the launch day it received 30,000 visits. But when you did visit the website you were greeted with shocking images and facts about skin cancer, as well as a link to Skcin's website for more information. So you’ve got a great stunt concept, super on brand for a valuable cause, loads of great coverage, and an asset that drives website traffic too!
Theoretically, by creating a fake landing page that gets lots of backlinks (186 RDs in total), you’d get a lot of long term SEO value from the campaign too. But the landing page isn’t on Skcin’s domain. Which is fine to start with. The optimised domain name adds to the campaign, and it’s ok as long as you redirect it to your domain post campaign. But they haven’t done that, and even worse, the domain doesn’t even have any content on it now. Campaigns hosted on different domains are fine if the different domain name adds to the campaign, but make sure you redirect them to yours afterwards!
2️⃣ The Type of Business Every Country Wants to Start by ZenBusiness
📊 10 RDs DR 50+
B2B campaigns can sometimes be difficult to come up with really interesting ideas for. This is a really good example of a B2B campaign by ZenBusiness who analysed search volume data to find the type of businesses people around the world are most interested in creating. Great data and the graphics are sexy af too.
For search volume campaigns like this, Ahrefs can be really useful for giving you suggested keywords that match your searched for terms, making it great for finding long tail variations of your keywords that may have more searches than the exact keyword you’re originally searching for.
3️⃣ Free Car Treasure Hunt by Scrap Car Comparison
📊 7 RDs DR 50+
Competitions can be a tricky campaign format to pull off, especially in the digital space (imo at least). But when they’re done well they can be extremely effective. For me, the key to the successful ones, just like any campaign format, is the story linked to the competition. A competition in itself usually isn’t enough of a hook. Unless you go big. This campaign by Scrap Car Comparison has a bit of both.
They created a treasure hunt, and the person that found the buried keys would win themselves a free car. A great prize, but it’s the treasure hunt part of it that really makes the story connect imo. I also love that they produced a follow up story with the winner, and used that to earn some extra coverage. Using competition winners for extra content can be a great way of topping up those coverage numbers!
4️⃣ The price of electricity per KWh in 230 countries by Cable.co.uk
📊 46 RDs DR 50+
This campaign by Cable.co.uk is a really good example of how a Digital PR campaign can build a large number of links, while staying super relevant from a brand pov, and establishing a lot of topical authority. They researched the price of electricity around the world and created a lovely landing page with some great visuals to go along with the data. Having ideas really closely connected to the core product doesn’t have to be a restriction on creativity and results!
Nearly all of the campaign’s links are from Tech and Finance industry publications rather than the big Nationals, which is further proof that you don’t always need stories that have a mainstream appeal in order to earn a large number of links.
5️⃣ Which animals could Britons beat in a fight? by YouGov
📊 23 RDs DR 50+
I’m not a massive of surveys, but I am a big fan of surveys that are frankly… a bit silly. The “could you beat a [insert daft thing] in a fight” is a great formula for a survey campaign that you can somewhat safely predict will give you an eye catching headline, mostly because you can rely on people’s ego and overconfidence coming out in polls.
YouGov polls are a fantastic source of both creative inspo, as well as additional data you can include in your pitches. Sometimes you’ll get silly polls like this too, which I’ll always see doing numbers on social media as well. A great tip for producing surveys with a “viral” element to them like this, is to work backwards and come up with a wacky headline, then run the poll aimed to get the dream headline you’ve reverse engineered.
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: Senior PR Executive at FATJOE (Agency)
Location: UK
Remote/Office Split: Remote
Salary: £28,000 - £32,000
How to Apply: https://fatjoewho.typeform.com/SrPRExec2025
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
And that’s a wrap for Issue 13. Same time again next week ✌️
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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 🙂
5 February 2025
