THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 2
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 2 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.
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.
Digital PR Tips: The Best Newsletters to subscribe to if you work in Digital PR
Digital PR Tips: How to find experts for you Digital PR campaigns
BuzzStream: How Ahrefs’ Best Bootstrapped Backlink Builders Got Their Links
BuzzStream Podcast: The Art of Re-Pitching Digital PR Campaigns w/ Bekki Ramsay
NOVOS: Why affiliate links are still important for your brand
NOVOS: The Steps You Need to Take When Doing Digital PR in the U.S. Market
Wolfenden: 10 tips to adapt your PR strategy for Black Friday
Bottle: Link Building - The Backlink Quality Vs Quantity Debate
Level Fifty: How to build a successful Digital PR Strategy?
Distinctly: Using novel methodologies to gain international coverage
pressfarm: Maximising Digital PR with Data Insights
Bulldog Digital Media: What Is A Good Link?
Digital PR Explained Podcast: Making the Most of Substacks for PR - Tips on Subscribing and Pitching
Propel: Media Embargoes Explained - A PR Pro’s Guide to Getting It Right
On LinkedIn, I’m posting a Digital PR tip every workday. Give me a follow on there so you catch each daily tip as it goes out. However, if you miss any, I’ll share the five tips from the past week in here each issue.
1️⃣ If your first subject line didn't do the job in getting your email opened, you can change your subject line to something different when sending your follow up email.
This is great for when you have multiple headlines you think would be of interest to a certain Journalist, but you're torn on which to use.
Why not use both of them!
Then if you notice that the follow up subject line is getting better open rates, you can lead with that one in the original pitch for your next waves of outreach 💡
2️⃣ Looking to get your products featured in Christmas gift guides (or any gift guides)?
pressloft.com is a great resource that Journos use to source products to include in their gift guides.
Some of your best links can come from gift guides and Product PR. And even if the SEO value of affiliate links is less, that's more than made up for with the direct impact on sales these links can have.
Adding all your products is pretty simple if a bit time consuming. Make sure you have HQ imagery and optimise your products with relevant keywords a Journo may be searching for, especially more niche variations.
In your dashboard you can also see how often your images have been downloaded to track popularity too.
3️⃣ Press Loft has a new database of media experts available for adding comments in your stories
The same site that I shared yesterday, also has a new tool that is a great starting point for sourcing experts to use in your campaigns.
You can find it at https://www.pressloft.com/app/profile/experts/search
It's a new tool so I imagine the database of experts will continue to grow, but definitely a good starting point to quickly search if anyone matches your criteria for the expert you're looking for!
4️⃣ Visual Capitalist is one of the best sources out there for finding:
✅ Content inspo
✅ Data sources
✅ Data vis inspo
As well as the site that is updated daily with amazing new data led content stories that great campaign inspo, they also have a newsletter which you can sign up for at https://www.visualcapitalist.com/subscribe_pages/main/
5️⃣ No backlink tools are perfect. The number of links any tool shows for a page is a good starting point and useful for comparisons, but they’re rarely perfect at capturing the complete picture.
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 Google Dataset Search
Google has its own search engine specifically for datasets. A great starting point for content inspo or finding a specific dataset.
2️⃣ Bank of International Settlements Data and Statistics
Global finance statistics. Lots of regularly released reports on topics such as debt, property prices, exchange rates, banking statistics and more.
3️⃣ NHS GP Patient Surveys
GP patient survey results for every UK GP. These surveys contain a lot of interesting audience insights about every GP in the UK, including how easy people find it to make an appointment, trust levels, and service satisfaction. A cool tool if you want to do any comparisons of GP’s.
4️⃣ iwaspoisoned.com
A database of food poisoning reports. Unfortunately all of the data isn’t super accessible without some clever scraping, but it could definitely be a great source for finding complaints by city, restaurant, or type of food.
5️⃣ Social Blade
A fab resource for tracking follower growth on a number of different social platforms. You can get most of what you need from the free account too.
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 The 2024 Lost & Found Index by Uber
📊 291 RDs DR 50+
Uber’s Lost & Found Index is one of my favourite annual report campaigns. It’s fun, creative, and super on brand. But what I love the most about it is how much it’s grown each year from a link building pov.
I think 2019 was the first year they did the report. 52 RDs (all of these are just DR 50+). 2020 - 31 RDs. 2021 - 36 RDs. 2022 - 62 RDs. 2023 - 84 RDs. 2024 - 291 RDs. That’s pretty impressive growth, but also evidence of how annual reports like this (especially branded ones) can grow and become even more successful over time. One idea, repeated every year, with almost guaranteed results at this stage.
As I mentioned last week, I would always suggest from an SEO pov keeping one url for the most recent report and then moving previous years to a new url so that you’re building all of the links to one consistent url, but obviously this campaign for Uber is more about brand than SEO so I doubt they’re too bothered.
2️⃣ Website Issues Which Cause Users The Most Stress by Cyber Duck
No RDs data because it’s one of those campaigns with no landing page (🥲) but it definitely did well getting on some cool Tech/Design websites, as well as PC Mag and Entrepreneur. This is a really great example of what some people might write off as a “boring” industry (web design), not being a barrier to producing creative content that is still extremely relevant and on brand.
The campaign was an experiment to analyse how people’s blood pressure changed when met with annoying UX elements on websites like slow loading pages and auto-play videos. Experiments like this can be quite time consuming but I would love to see more Digital PR content like this being produced these days.
3️⃣ The Bacteria That Lives Under Your Engagement Ring by H&T Jewellery
📊 12 RDs DR 50+
Ah the old swab campaigns. Did these stop working or did everyone in Digital PR just get sick of them? Another campaign that used a creative idea without moving outside the scope of relevancy for the brand.
I really like the landing page here too. Great graphics, video content and some nice expert tips at the end. Most of the top coverage I had a nosy at used their graphics as well, which goes to show that Journos will use your imagery if it adds value to their story.
4️⃣ Safe Cities Index by The Economist
📊 562 RDs DR 50+
Ok so obviously not everyone can create webpages like The Economist can, but can we all take a second to appreciate how gorgeous this campaign page is 😍.
This index was originally done in 2015, then 2017 and 2019, and the one above is from 2021. This is another great example of how valuable index and report campaigns can be over the long term. The Economist also did what I suggested with the url for the Uber campaign which allowed them to build up the link value going to a single url over the course of almost a decade now.
5️⃣ Scientific Study Reveals The Words Dogs Love The Most by OnBuy
📊 12 RDs DR 50+
Science! I love the creativity of this campaign, taking the heart rate monitor format but doing it on dogs rather than humans. The results aren’t especially surprising but it’s a really well rounded campaign page that also includes some breakdowns by breed, and some nice quotes from dog owners.
I was a bit surprised looking at the sites it has links from that it didn’t get picked up by the big Nationals, which from my experience gets a lot of PRs down if they don’t get the big fancy titles. Instead the links are from pet sites and some international sites too. The upside of this though is from those 12 RDs DR 50+, it earned 9 follow links.
And that’s a wrap for Issue 2. 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
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 🙂
6 November 2024
