THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 15

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 15 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: PR Campaigns I Saw and Kinda Liked Vol. 1

Digital PR Tips: Links from Reach PLC sites may be harder to get now: Here’s why you shouldn’t panic

BuzzStream: 12 Digital PR Metrics To Include In Your Reports

Mark Perkins Creative: Why (some) of your colleagues are the biggest threat to creative success

Mark Perkins Creative: Here's an idea: why don't we bin the brainstorm

Reflect Digital: Our Best Digital PR Campaigns of 2024

NOVOS: How To Gain Location-Specific Digital PR Links (English Speaking)

Distinctly: Should influencer marketing be part of your digital PR strategy?

The PR Insider: How to balance your PR career and parenthood as a Dad

Octiv Digital: What is Reactive Digital PR for Link Building?

Elisha Vadhia on LinkedIn: Do you ever feel like you're stuck in a rut when it comes to ideation?

Britney Muller on LinkedIn: Brand mentions are the new backlinks in the age of AI search

Manchester DM #5: Thursday 6th March 17:45-21:00

PressGazette: New London newspaper launches with promise to revitalise Fleet Street

BuzzStream Podcast: Measuring Success with Digital PR w/ Chris Panteli

Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:

1️⃣ When analysing a domain in Ahrefs, make sure you remove the www. www. is a subdomain, meaning that Ahrefs will only analyse urls with www. in them, and ignore other subdomains, for example, if your blog sits on a subdomain these would be ignored.

2️⃣ If you are creating an overall index score, make sure it’s easy for the user to understand. An index score of 70 out of a possible 100 means a lot more than an index score of just 70.

3️⃣ If you have a campaign with some interesting data, make it easy for the user to find if they’re skim reading your campaign page. Use headings, lists, charts, etc. Intros are nice but don’t give them your life story before getting to what they came here for.

4️⃣ Remember to ask your clients about any causes that they are passionate about. This can be great knowledge to factor into brainstorm sessions to create campaigns that can have a genuine social impact.

5️⃣ How many people click on your link > the DR of that referring domain.

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 Celebrity Net Worth

Celebrity Net Worth is a great resource for researching the net worth of famous people. The site also has a Top Lists section which is very useful for finding the richest people in the world, the richest couples, and the richest people by different categories such as athletes, actors, artists, and more.

As well as being a great source for the net worth of famous people, it’s also a great source for creating seed lists of the most famous people in different sectors.

2️⃣ Ranker

Speaking of sources for seed lists of different things, Ranker is a great source for creating seed lists for your campaigns. Ranker has most popular ranking lists for basically anything Entertainment and Lifestyle related.

I wouldn’t use the vote count data as a source for campaigns, but when it comes to finding the top athletes, artists, films, shows, etc, to collect data for, Ranker is a great starting point.

3️⃣ Statista

Statista is one of my favourite tools for ideating and producing Digital PR campaigns, and you can get a lot of amazing insights with a free account. When brainstorming ideas, Statista is a great place to search for keywords related to your topic to see what audience insights and data sources come up.

These can be great for triggering content ideas, as well as finding data sources you could use (the data itself may be behind a paywall but it usually shows you the data source so you can look it up yourself). The audience insights can also be great inclusions in your press releases to help add another layer to your story.

4️⃣ Capology

Capology is a really good source for finance data about Football clubs and players. You can look up current and previous salary data for players, which can be a great way of weighting the success of different players based on the value of their contract.

You can also get lots of financial data for clubs, such as the teams with the highest salaries, and which players take up the largest percentage of the team’s overall payroll. I love that the tables are super easy to copy straight into Excel for easy analysis too.

5️⃣ Ratings and impressions of different names

I’ve shared Behind The Name as a data source in a previous issue, this is a different section of the site that I find super interesting and could make for a great Digital PR campaign ranking different baby names.

Here, people can vote on their impressions of different names, for example how masculine vs feminine a name is, is it a good vs a bad name, is it a mature name, a comedic name, a nerdy name, etc. The sample size is good for the really popular names but less so for less common ones, but I think something along the lines of “the nerdiest baby names” could be an interesting campaign idea.

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 Cost of Living Ranking by Mercer

📊 394 RDs DR 50+

Mercer’s Cost of Living Index is a great example of taking a long-term brand approach to creating an Index campaign. Based on some of the coverage I saw, it seems as though Mercer had been producing this Index since the late 90’s! By producing a valuable asset year-after-year, Mercer created the strongest topical authority signal possible, they became known as THE source for cost of living data comparing different countries and cities.

It’s also a great case study in the value of producing content that can rank for relevant keywords, and how that search visibility helps to earn links from your content being organically found and covered.

The page currently ranks for over 30,000 keywords globally, driving 27,000 monthly organic visits, including ranking first for searches like “most expensive cities in the world” and “highest cost of living in the world”. If a Journo is writing a story on the most expensive places to live, there’s a very strong chance they head to Google to research some facts and find some data on the topic that they can use. And when they do, Mercer’s research is right there at the top.

2️⃣ Cars Against Humanity… What would you give up to improve the environment? by CompareTheMarket

📊 47 RDs DR 50+

I think this is a great example of how a survey campaign on a topic that’s not only evergreen, but growing in interest, can be an extremely valuable link building asset. Launched in 2018, the campaign by CompareTheMarket surveyed Brits to reveal the environmentally-conscious behaviour changes that people were making.

Being ahead of eco-friendly trends with their research, CompareTheMarket managed to get their audience insights included as part of many environmental articles that Journos were writing, not necessarily as the main focus of the story, but as a supporting data point. I think this is a great example of how data-led insights can also be used to newsjack news stories about trending topics, especially when the data you have is evergreen.

The survey itself is for the most part quite simple in its execution, but it gives Journalists exactly the type of bitesize stats they’re looking for, which no doubt helped it to be featured regularly across major titles such as The Guardian, The Independent and HuffPost from 2018-2020. I do love this bit of creativity at the end of the survey too - “When faced with the dilemma of choosing their car or eating meat, nearly half say they would no longer eat meat, less than one in five say they would no longer drive, a third aren’t sure…”

3️⃣ Every Football Stadium in the UK, as Seen From the Sky by On Stride Financial

📊 11 RDs DR 50+

I really like this as a campaign format that’s a bit different. On Stride Financial used Google Maps to take images of every Football Stadium in the UK to show what they look like from overhead.

It’s quite a simple execution, but one that I think would be even more interesting done today in comparison to these shots from 2019, especially with a lot of new top flight stadiums that seemingly all look the same these days.

4️⃣ If 7 film directors designed your home office by Budget Direct

📊 13 RDs DR 50+

Campaigns like this feel very early 2020’s to me. For a time it felt like the “reimagined as” format was running rampant and usually performed quite well. Not necessarily hitting the dizzy heights of earning links at a huge scale, but consistently getting 10-20 links and on some really great publications. But now it seems as though their day has come and gone and campaigns like this just wouldn’t work anymore?

I think there’s definitely something to that. I think the big reason is the more competitive nature of the Digital PR industry. Campaigns like this are expensive and time consuming to produce, which isn’t a great combination when the ramifications for an agency of a high budget flop campaign became more significant. Plus there’s only so many things you can reimagine in a different design. Personally, I love the designs, but I always think it’s tough to make a PR story out of something that you see and go “ah that’s cool” and then move on after five seconds.

5️⃣ Floriography: Flower Meanings & Language of Flowers by Bloom & Wild

📊 9 RDs DR 50+

I really like this piece of content by Bloom & Wild analysing the symbolic meaning and language of different flowers. It’s super on brand and does a fantastic job of positioning Bloom & Wild as a topical expert, while also creating content that there’s clearly a lot of audience interest in.

This is another campaign that does a great job of not just earning links, but driving organic traffic, something that I’d argue is even more valuable for a piece of content like this that is so on brand, and going to be attracting visits from users that can easily be converted into customers.

Just over two years after launching, the page now ranks for over 11,000 keywords globally, nearly 600 on page 1, and 198 ranking position 1. Strong ranking positions for popular searches such as “flower language” (13,000 MSV) and “meaning of flowers” (4,600 MSV) are super strong trust signals, not just to search engines around topical relevance and authority, but to users in the research stage of their customer journey, who will find the Bloom & Wild website before they start making transactional searches, possibly prompting them to skip that step and go straight to buying from them.

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 Digital PR Executive (DE or IT) at Reboot (Agency)

Location: Remote (UK)

Remote/Office Split: Fully remote - we work a 4 day week (Fridays off)

Salary: £28,000

How to Apply: Email your cover letter and CV to HR@rebootonline.com addressed to Zoe Blogg

And that’s a wrap for Issue 15. 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 🙂