THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 16

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 16 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.

The PR Insider: Why Your Digital PR Tactics Aren’t Working (and What to Do Instead)

WPR: How To Write A Great PR Brief

Motive PR: Five Resources to Spark Creative Ideas for Digital PR Campaigns

Alex Aldrich on LinkedIn: 10 brutal PR truths they don’t teach you when you start out

James Brockbank on LinkedIn: Here’s how to go about running a campaign retrospective to uncover learnings from an underperforming campaign

Press Gazette: ChatGPT referrals to top publishers up eight times in six months but still negligible

The Digital PR Podcast: The Truth About In-House PR w/ Sophie Mawby

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

1️⃣ If you run any type of campaign that has user interaction as a CTA (competition, user generated content, etc), put the submission form on your site rather than giving the option of emailing. Any coverage then has to link to the submission form on your site.

2️⃣ Dream job campaigns are great for building links but they're also a goldmine for collecting user data that you can build a mailing list, remarketing list, etc out of. Plus they drive huge numbers of referral traffic going to your application form, and therefore landing on your site.

3️⃣ Adding "As featured in" logos from sites that covered your content to your website's homepage can be really good for sending positive trust signals to both Google and users, and in turn help to improve on site conversions.

4️⃣ Unless it's a super topical story that will be useless after a couple of days, or you've already spoken to that person about the content you're sending, try to leave follow up emails to at least 2 days after your first pitch.

5️⃣ A great tip if you've got a lovely data campaign - if you can find a way to include a guide/expert tips/etc on your landing page this can be a great way of positioning your brand as more than just the source of some interesting data and get users to stay on your site and/or come back later.

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 World Bank Group - Air Pollution Levels by Country

World Bank Group is a site with a whole host of amazing global datasets which can be great resources for Index campaigns. This one looks at air pollution exposure estimates around the world with comparison points dating back to 1990. I always love datasets that have a download as a csv option too that make our jobs so much easier.

2️⃣ The CIA World Factbook

One of the very best data sources that exists. The World Factbook by The CIA has an insane amount of data about every country, continent, and the world in general. Such a great resource to find yourself down a rabbit hole with. The topics cover basically everything from geographical and environmental data about each country, to facts about people and the economy, and a whole lot more in between.

3️⃣ WhoTracks.Me

This resource from Ghostery is a great resource if you want insights into which websites use the most trackers on their webpages, and the different information that websites are collecting about you. You can look up tracking data about any website using the tool, but they already have data for a lot of the top websites in different categories listed out for you here.

4️⃣ NFIB Fraud and Cyber Crime Dashboard

A really interesting live dashboard of data about cyber crimes in England and Scotland. The dashboard is really easy to use with lots of filters that make it easy to get the exact data you’re looking for based on the type of crime, region, date range, and type of victim. Plus it’s regularly updated daily with the latest data.

5️⃣ UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024

Another dataset about cybersecurity, this time focusing more on how businesses feel about cyber crime in the UK, what they’re doing to protect themselves, and how they’re reacting to attacks. Reports like this can be really great sources for contextualising campaigns and helping to show why the content is topical, to both clients you’re pitching the campaign idea to, and Journos that you’re pitching the story to, while also helping them to flesh their article out further.

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 European Pickpocketing Index by Quotezone

📊 114 RDs, 53 DR 50+

Index campaigns are, for me at least, one of the best formats for producing campaigns capable of earning links, both at scale, and consistently over time. The key however, like with any campaign, is less so the format and more so having a topical hook that allows you to tell a compelling story that resonates with your target audience. Pickpocketing nicely fits that criteria in terms of being a hot issue, but also one that a lot of people seek out information on. It goes beyond just a curiosity emotion, and into those stronger emotions such as fear, that allow you to create an even stronger story with your campaign.

The campaign earned links from lots of different countries, but curiously they’ve used this as the landing page to build most of the links to, and then created a different page to host all of the content on. The second page also has an extra 21 RDs DR 50+.

2️⃣ Why is sex in movies declining? by Stephen Follows

📊 134 RDs, 72 DR 50+

For those new to the newsletter, Stephen Follows is a fantastic blog for data stories, particularly around Entertainment topics. His data-led breakdowns of topics are always fascinating reads, and this one on why sex in movies is declining is one of my favourite.

What I find really interesting about his content is how it naturally earns so many backlinks, and from really high authority publications. In total his blog has over 2,000 referring domains, and this post has links from sites like New York Times, New York Post, and The Guardian. I could be wrong but I’m assuming he isn’t pitching his content to them in a traditional PR sense, which goes to show the value of creating great content consistently over time, and how great content creators will organically earn backlinks by marketing themselves.

The point I’m trying to make is, Digital PR is a long-term strategy, and the more and more great content you create, especially if you’re able to rank it for relevant keywords, the easier earning links will become, and the better the results from every piece of content will be. But we’re talking years of investment in creating effective and well optimised content.

3️⃣ The Sports Fans Who Swear The Most by Preply

📊 44 RDs, 5 DR 50+

Preply are a really great case study in how to take your core topic (learning languages) and connecting them to broader topics to create compelling PR stories. Here they’ve analysed subreddits for major sports teams in the UK and US to reveal which fanbases are the most foul-mouthed.

It’s a great example of finding broader topics with bigger audiences and introducing your brand into their conversations. I also really like the methodology as a cool alternative to just doing this as a Survey campaign, where you’d no doubt be looking at tiny sample sizes specific to each team.

4️⃣ What People Read Around The World by Studying in Switzerland

📊 30 RDs, 11 DR 50+

I really like this as an example of a campaign that you can launch around a specific day as a Reactive PR story, but also has a strong evergreen element to it, allowing you to still earn coverage from the content past your initial launch pitches, which is exactly what this campaign analysing the most popular book genres around the world seems to have done.

The study has been done based on search volumes in every country for each type of book genre. Which is a totally fine way of doing it, but I feel as though the data could have been even stronger by analysing sites like Goodreads and Open Library to look at book sales and ratings and then categorising them by genre.

5️⃣ Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades

📊 522 RDs, 235 DR 50+

Yes, the link does go to a scientific paper! I thought this was a really curious example of how great content that earns lots of backlinks from really high authority domains can come from anywhere and everywhere. Scientific papers aren’t exactly very user friendly to read, but exploring the most linked to pages from sites that host academic reports like this can be a great way of finding content inspo, that also probably looks at topics from a different angle to other sources that you’re exploring for content inspo and ideas.

The topic of song lyrics and their development (or regression) over the decades is really interesting. If you find a cool paper that looks like an interesting read for content inspo, pop the url into a backlink tool and just find some news articles that reference it as a source, for example this write up by The Guardian, and they usually do the job for providing you with an easier to read version that hits the key points more succinctly.

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 Specialist at Blue Array (Agency)

Location: Remote (UK)

Remote/Office Split: Fully remote with access to co-working

Salary: £32,000 - £36,000 PA, depending on experience

How to Apply: https://bluearray.bamboohr.com/careers/108

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 16. 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 🙂