THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 17

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 17 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.

Root Digital: The top 10 most common words in digital PR headlines

Muck Rack: What makes a pitch irresistible: 4 takeaways from pitches that landed top-tier coverage

Cedarwood Digital: How to secure product placements in top-tier publications

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

Elisha Vadhia on LinkedIn: Mastering Productivity in Digital PR

Charlotte McManus on LinkedIn: What do you do when the pub table method just doesn't cut it?

Becca Tee on LinkedIn: Extended free trial for Reactive PR tool Dot Star Media

BuzzStream Podcast: Building Your Reactive PR Strategy with Alice Walker Gibbons

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

1️⃣ You can plan for "Reactive" PR. Seasonal events such as financial earnings, exam results, etc happen every year and the dates are known ahead of time, meaning you can prepare comments beforehand ready for when they hit the news.

2️⃣ About to launch a campaign and you've just seen that someone else has beat you to it with the same idea? You can still get value out of your campaign but you'll probably have to pivot a little. Find a different way to present the data, target different audiences, go regional where they went national, or possibly just sit on it for a bit and revisit later.

3️⃣ Promote your content on Social as you're sending it out. It's another platform for Journalists to find it from and can become a story they see without even opening your email if it gets enough engagements, especially if they're already following you.

4️⃣ Looking specifically for a dataset? Google have a search engine specifically for dataset results - https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/

5️⃣ The ONS release calendar is a great page to keep bookmarked to find UK data when it’s fresh out the box, and to also know when new datasets are about to be released. This is great to check if there's a new version of your dataset due to be released in the coming weeks - https://www.ons.gov.uk/releasecalendar

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 JustWatch

A really cool site that tells you which streaming platforms TV Shows and Films are available to watch on, which obviously has a great use outside of just campaigns. The pages for each show/film also have a lot of useful data on that you can use for campaigns, including runtime, genres, age rating, and a popularity rating across three different sources - JustWatch, iMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

2️⃣ MuscleWiki

Another site that is very useful for more than just PR campaigns. MuscleWiki is a database of different workouts that you can filter to target certain muscles and by your level of difficulty. Could be a cool resource for finding the easiest and hardest muscles to exercise for beginners as an example.

3️⃣ Eat This Much

Eat This Much is a tool that will plan meals based on your dietary requirements and budget. It’s also a database of nutritional information about different foods such as their calories, carbs, fat, etc. Again, a very useful real life resource, but also one that could have some creative uses for PR campaigns.

4️⃣ Transfermarkt

One of my favourite resources for Football data, Transfermarkt is your go to place for transfer market value data for Footballers. As you dig into the site you’ll see that there’s a lot of ready made reports such as the most valuable players over/under a certain age, from each country, etc.

5️⃣ CamelCamelCamel

I’ve previously shared AverageFinder in this newsletter, which is a tool that lets you look up the average sale price of items in eBay. This is the Amazon version of that tool. Just search for your product and you can see historical price data on how much it’s been listed at on Amazon before. Finishing off the theme of tools that are useful for personal reasons too, you can also setup alerts to be notified when Amazon products drop in price.

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 How Much Income You Need to Afford the Average Home in Every State by HowMuch.net

📊 79 RDs, 26 DR 50+

I love when campaigns take a dataset and find a different creative way of presenting the data that really enhances the storytelling aspect of a campaign. Rather than doing the predictable average house prices in every State, HowMuch.net worked out the salary you would need in each State to afford the average house price.

I thought that was a really clever way of looking at the data from a different point of view that allowed them to tell a better story with the data. And let’s not forget, it’s not data that earns you coverage, it’s the story your data can tell.

The campaign was done in 2018 and I know that was a different era for link building, but 92% of the backlinks being follow links is quite something!

2️⃣ The Most Loving Countries and Cities in the World by Crossword Solver

📊 26 RDs, 10 DR 50+

I’m a huge fan of campaigns that find creative uses of text analysis, and this campaign by Crossword Solver is a fantastic example of this type of campaign. They collected what must have been a massive collection of tweets and analysed how many posts had variations of the phrase “love you” in them, and which countries and cities were geotagged in the post, to reveal the most loving cities around the world.

From a storytelling point of view the campaign hits on some really heartwarming emotions, and I love how many different angles they’ve been able to create with the dataset, from the top countries overall, to the top city in each country, and the top States in America.

3️⃣ How America Sees the World: The Most Common Questions Americans Ask About Other Countries by CashNetUSA

📊 45 RDs, 23 DR 50+

For me at least, search volume campaigns can be very hit and miss, but this is one that works really well in my opinion. CashNetUSA looked up searches starting with “why does”, followed by every country around the world, to reveal the most searched for question Americans have about every Country and State in the US.

Search volume campaigns like this where you need a seed list of searches based on a partial match like “why does France…” is where Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is an incredible tool. It will show you all keywords that have a partial match for your search terms, rather than just an exact match, which makes it great for building a seed list and finding undiscovered keywords you might not have thought about searching for.

Campaigns that give you an angle for every country around the world are amazing if you’re actually going to target all of those countries with your campaign and not just your home country. Which this campaign clearly did, landing links in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, Chile, Argentina, and more.

4️⃣ Canine Car Report by Auto Trader

📊 37 RDs, 20 DR 50+

I really like campaigns that find creative and on-brand ways of taking their core product and creating content that also targets a different niche. This campaign by Auto Trader is a deep dive look into car rides with your canine friends, and I love how the campaign page covers off survey stats, data research, and expert tips all into one campaign.

And more angles means more coverage. Hero campaigns like this should give you more than just one round of outreach, and evergreen angles that you can come back to at any point. This campaign did a great job of that earning links on Digg for the best dog breeds to travel with angle, on The Sun for the expert tips, and on The Scotsman for the best dog-friendly motorway service stations.

5️⃣ Human candles in Denmark warn of youth burnout by P3 Missionen

The creative on this is so powerful! Danish public broadcaster P3 Missionen launched pop up statues around the country of human statues made of candle wax, to promote awareness of the growing issue of burnout in young people. The activation came after they ran a survey finding that 44% of Danish youth are feeling burnt out.

While this isn’t a Digital PR campaign in the sense there’s no landing page or SEO strategy page behind it, I think it’s a great example of what Digital PR can learn from Traditional PR in terms of the emotion and storytelling aspects of campaign executions. I feel like most Digital PR teams would get that survey stat and just launch a survey campaign, but this is a great example of thinking bigger with survey campaigns.

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

And that’s a wrap for Issue 17. 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 🙂