THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 19

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 19 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

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.

NOVOS: Top Tips for Conducting the Perfect Interview for a UGC

BuzzStream: How to Use Passive Link Building to Generate Hundreds of Links

Bottle: The Evolution of Digital PR: From Links to Brand Authority

FATJOE: Why Is Digital PR SO Important For SEO In 2025?

Wild PR: Nofollow Links vs. Follow Links: What You Need to Know

PRmoment: Is there any point in PR forging strong media relationships?

Ahrefs: 14 of the Best AI Marketing Tools We’ve Tried & Spied in 2025

Ella Grappy on LinkedIn: Why anchor text is a powerful but overlooked tool in Digital PR

Raquel Pinto on LinkedIn: What separates a high-impact campaign from a forgettable one

Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: Tips for making freedom of information requests

BuzzStream Podcast: Digital PR Secrets From a Former Journalist (Now Agency Owner) w/ Amanda Walls

Prolific North: MMA and boxing in the spotlight as Reach launches second ‘All Out’ platform

Search Engine Journal: Google Begins Rolling Out March Core Algorithm Update

Confidence Live: 19th June - tickets available

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

1️⃣ When sending out expert commentary campaigns, ask your client if they're also available to answer additional questions from Journalists. Then you can also mention in your pitch that your expert is available to answer any exclusive questions your target Journalists might have. This can be a great way of securing coverage from sites that are interested in content from your expert but on a different topic to the ones you're pitching, or to provide them with exclusive quotes to provide them with unique content.

2️⃣ When running search volume campaigns, also try and look at collecting the same data for each State/City rather than just at a national level. This helps give you unique insights for each region to expand your story and help local Journalists make their story more relevant to their local audiences.

3️⃣ sharedcount.com is a great free tool for seeing how many Facebook and Pinterest shares your campaign, and coverage of your campaign has received. This can be useful for comparing engagement between campaigns and discovering which sites have the most relevant audience for your brand.

4️⃣ Just because a site has covered a type of campaign a few times recently doesn’t mean they will continue to do so. They may have tried them, not got great traffic or engagement, and now they want to stay away from them.

5️⃣ Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution. If you're struggling to find an email for a Journo, just try Googling their name followed by "email" and see what comes up.

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 TradeStats Express

The trade.gov site has some really great datasets on US Trade, Finance and Employment topics. This one here has data on how much each US State makes on imports and exports, and which countries are their most common trade partners. The level of data available from the tool is super detailed, with breakdowns of trade stats for every US State which you can filter by a huge range of different products and countries. Could be great for looking at the most common import/export for each State, which countries States trade with the most, and how each have increased/decreased with data for every year dating back to 2009.

2️⃣ World Risk Poll Risk Indexes

I’ve previously shared the World Risk Poll Report with all of the findings from the report on what different countries around the world worry about the most. From that data, Lloyds Register Foundation have also created these fab indexes that rank countries based on three different criteria - how much each country worries about everyday risks such as severe weather, violent crime, work, food, water, road crashes and mental health issues, how much they actually experience these risks (which also creates an interesting comparison with difference between fear vs reality scores), and how resilient they are in response to each risk affecting them.

3️⃣ The Number of First Time Buyer Mortgage Sales by UK Local Authority

This is a really interesting report released just yesterday by ONS detailing how many first time buyers have took out mortgages in each local authority in the UK, from 2006 to 2023. What I really like about ONS reports is that (for most of them) they also publish overviews of the key findings of the reports, which can be a great time saver for PRs trying to quickly work out what the report is about and if there’s any relevant and interesting data we could use from it.

This could be a great report from a data pov for looking at where first time buyers are buying houses in the UK, and which areas are becoming more/less popular (there’s some interesting data on how first time buyers in London are on a significant decline). Reports like these can also be great starting points for finding topics that your experts can add insights to for expert commentary stories too.

4️⃣ The Most and Least Loved Car Brands

Consumer Reports run a number of audience surveys on different topics that are really interesting audience insights which you could make use of for campaign purposes. This one is from their 2024 Annual Auto Surveys, which cover more than 300,000 vehicles, to reveal how satisfied car owners are with their vehicle based on a number of different criteria such as how comfortable the car is and how easy it is to drive. Also a useful bit of insight if you’re thinking of buying a new car soon!

5️⃣ Parking Costs in the Netherlands

Finally, a more niche one. Prettig Parkeren is a great site that shows you the cost of parking in different areas of the Netherlands. It gives you different prices depending on the time of the day and the type of parking you’re looking for. A cool resource for a Travel campaign, but also if you’re planning a trip abroad to the Dutch area! If the site is glitching while loading on Mobile try it on Desktop instead, it’s being a bit weird for me atm but it does usually work!

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 Which Drivers Are Most Likely To Be Psychopaths? by Scrap Car Comparison

📊 126 RDs, 59 DR 50+

I love survey campaigns that find a way to take a creative spin on the format, and this campaign by Scrap Car Comparison is one of my favourite examples of this. They ran a survey asking people what car they drove and then getting them to take a personality test to reveal how many traits of psychopathy they show.

It’s a really creative approach to generating a guaranteed eye catching headline as the …”drivers are most likely to be psychopaths” part is locked in, you’re just relying on the survey to give you the car brand. This avoids you running into the risk of spending a lot of money on a survey that could possibly leave you with not very interesting insights. The campaign also effortlessly translates to any country too with a lot of the links coming from international domains.

2️⃣ The Great Resignation Survey by FlexJobs

📊 369 RDs, 119 DR 50+

Another survey campaign, but this time an example of one that doesn’t have to be super “creative” to get amazing results. Sometimes all you need is a trending topic with large interest that you can add some additional insights too. For this campaign, FlexJobs ran a survey in response to data from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics releasing data around record levels of workers quitting their jobs, to help them gain insights as to why people were quitting their jobs.

What makes it so effective at earning links at scale is that the survey results don’t have to be the sole focus of a Journo’s story. It can be a great stat to add to any work related story which is where a lot of the coverage has come from. Usually coverage like that may come from ranking for relevant statistics keywords that a Journo is searching for, but this one seems to be from earning a strong amount of coverage when first launched, and then being able to ride the wave of that success to keep earning further coverage.

3️⃣ The Drift Gaming Bed by Dreams

📊 16 RDs, 11 DR 50+

Product PR is a difficult tactic to really pull off well, but this example by Dreams who created the perfect bad for gamers to game from, does a great job of creating an actual product that people can buy (it’s not a fake product), that is also newsworthy enough to earn coverage and backlinks.

For Product PR to be newsworthy it needs to have something unique about it, for example something that is new to the market, mixes two things that are a bit unusual, or is positioned as “the world’s most expensive…”. The Drift Gaming Bed does a good job of incorporating all three elements allowing it to produce headlines such as “This $2000 king-size bed is specifically designed for gamers who are too lazy to leave the comfort of their beds”.

4️⃣ Majestic’s Vinternship by Majestic

📊 34 RDs, 22 DR 50+

Did we all get bored of Dream Job campaigns or did they stop working? I’d love to know if anyone has any insight. Dream Job campaigns once upon a time were the ultimate hack for an easy bit of content almost guaranteed to earn some top tier coverage. You could argue they weren’t the most creative pieces of work ever… but they worked, and that’s all that really matters.

This was one of the simpler examples from Majestic who created a Vinternship so someone could get paid to go on holiday and drink wine. Not hard to see how that can create a eye catching headline. What always makes me chuckle with these is when they say “the equivalent of a £52,000 per year salary” and it’s actually just £600 over three days haha.

5️⃣ Migration Patterns

📊 149 RDs, 85 DR 50+

This is a really cool data vis project that explores where young people in America have moved to. The methodology isn’t as clear as it could be but the gist of what they did is look up Federal Tax data to find where Americans born 1984-1992 lived when they were 16 vs when they were 26.

I’m not totally clear whether it’s the same data for each individual or aggregated data, but it definitely provides a really fascinating look at which US States and Cities see the most young adults relocating and where they relocate to and from.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 19. 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

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 🙂