THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 20

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 20 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.

This issue marks a little milestone for the newsletter - 20 issues and counting!

It’s not a huge number but I’ve subscribed to enough newsletters that don’t make it this far to be a lil proud of it ☺️

So whether you’re an OG subscriber or a newbie, thank you to everyone that has subscribed!

The newsletter is a bit of a labour of love at times but I do enjoy putting it together each week, and hopefully people find at least one thing from each issue that teaches them something new or sparks a bit of creative inspo.

Over 20 issues I’ve now shared 100 quick fire tips, 100 datasets, and 100 successful campaigns.

I’ve got some new plans coming up for Digital PR Tips but as always, if anyone has any suggestions or feedback, please do share them as it helps boost my motivation for creating more content like this!

🫶🫶🫶

Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Root Digital: The BEST Digital PR & Link Building Campaigns (New 2025 Update)

The Digital PR Newsletter: How to Improve Your Outreach in the US (Even If You’re Not From There)

Prowly: What is PR Link Building? With Relevant Tips and Strategies in 2025

The Drum: Well-crafted AI guidelines are key to responsible innovation

Cision: Media Kit Checklist for PR Pros

Propel: Why Your Press Releases Aren’t Getting Picked Up (And How to Fix It)

Propel: 7 Muck Rack Alternatives for PR Professionals in 2025

BuzzStream: We Tested Email Lookup Tools — They Don’t Work for PR

PRmoment: How to build your personal brand as a PR professional

Kirsty-Elise Noonan on LinkedIn: PR’s role in the negativity dominating the news and what we can do to change that

Response Source: The Independent Launches News Service Using AI-Powered Editorial Tools

Search Engine Land: Reddit SEO: Everything you need to know

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Links vs Trust and the Digital PR Shift You Need to Know w/ Beth Nunnington

The Digital PR Podcast: How To Win International PR Coverage w/ Charlie Clark

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

1️⃣ A lot of sites will have media packs detailing who their readership is. Referring to this in your pitch can be an easy win to prove to a Journalist why your story will be relevant to their core audience. For example, “I saw from your media pack that [DEMO] makes up a large part of your readership. A new study from [BRAND] has revealed that [DEMO] ...”

2️⃣ "Most searched for" is not the same as "most popular". Lance Armstrong is probably still one of the most "searched for" cyclists but he definitely isn't one of the most "popular". If you do a campaign using search volume data, avoid positioning the top results as the most popular ones.

3️⃣ If you're running a search volume piece, pay attention to if your keywords could have multiple purposes, like if there are two famous people with the same name. For example, there is Adam Scott the Actor and Adam Scott the Golfer. If this has a big impact on results then consider longer tail searches, omitting that search, or switching to a new idea.

4️⃣ Stock imagery is a very underrated form of content for link building purposes. Everyone needs to use it and if you can highlight a gap and produce quality free to use imagery, you have an extremely sustainable asset that you own to build links with.

5️⃣ Everyone will respond differently to various formats of brainstorming sessions. Learn what formats work best for you and your team and have the ability to be flexible and switch things up depending who is in your brainstorm.

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 Happiness Report 2025

One of my favourite data sources for global index campaigns is the World Happiness Report, and the latest report with 2024 data has recently been released. The report has been running since 2012 (which means lots of comparison points!) and ranks countries based on a number of different factors to evaluate how happy the people living there are.

The data points are largely based off survey questions to 147 different countries on topics such as perception of their own freedom and access to social support, if they’ve donated to a charity in the last year, and the emotions they are currently feeling, as well as factual data points such as the nation’s GDP per capita and life expectancy.

All of the data is available to break down by the different data points, and is easy to download for current and previous years from here. A really amazing resource for index campaigns and connecting to major events in a country such as political changes, sporting success, etc.

2️⃣ US Census - Income in the United States

The US Census Bureau is a fantastic resource and a great starting point for any data collection relating to the US population. I’ll no doubt be sharing more of my favourite US Census reports in future issues, but to start with, this report on earnings and income for different demographics is a great resource for audience insights, weighting other findings by income levels of different age groups, races, education levels, etc, and exploring how income levels have grown across different demographics.

3️⃣ Shazam Weekly Charts

Shazam for those of you unaware, is one of the greatest apps ever created that uses your phone’s microphone to listen to a song and then tells you what that song is. I only recently discovered that they share weekly insights into the most “Shazamed” songs. It doesn’t seem to be great for historical charts but you can filter by country and by certain cities. A pretty cool resource for finding trending songs and unusual patterns.

4️⃣ AirDNA Airbnb Calculator

This is a neat tool from AirDNA that lets you work out how much your house could make as an Airbnb. It’s an American site but the search suggests addresses from around the world so I’m assuming it works well for any address. Could be a useful tool for any Travel or Property clients. Possibly a story in comparing the price ratio of house prices vs Airbnb prices in an area?

5️⃣ Athlete Career Length

This is a cool Kaggle dataset that I recently found which has data on the career length of NFL, NBA, and MLB athletes dating from 1871 to 2024. The NBA dataset also has extra data on height, weight, and position played. Could be a good dataset for analysing what positions have the longest expected careers, how career length has changed over the years for each sport, and the changing height and weight of NBA players through the years.

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.

This week is a pet themed special and a preview of a post I’m working on around inspo for pet campaigns.

1️⃣ Doggy Devotion by Canine Cottages

📊 242 RDs, 118 DR 50+

When I think of pet campaigns this is always the first one that comes to mind for me. It’s a really great example of finding a great sweet spot for a campaign that blends creativity, a great methodology, and a topic that hits an emotional trigger for a large audience.

For the campaign Canine Cottages used doggy heart rate monitors to study how their heart rates reacted to different scenarios, finding that they got most excited when humans told them they love them 🥹.

The campaign just lists three examples from the study so it isn’t clear if they explored more reactions but it would be cool to see the data explored in more depth on the campaign page if it was available. It does go to show though that your campaign doesn’t always need a load of different data points as long as it has one great one that can create lots of good headlines.

2️⃣ The Most Popular Dog Names by Rover

📊 241 RDs, 171 DR 50+

This campaign by Rover that reveals the most popular dog names combines two of my favourite Digital PR tactics - internal data and annual reports. Rover is a directory for dog sitters and dog walkers and uses the data that customers input about their dogs to reveal the most popular names. I love that the campaign page also digs into trends as well, such as how dog names are inspired by pop culture events like the Olympics, and unique one of a kind names, my faves being Ruepaw and Albus Dumblepaw.

My favourite part of the campaign though is the fact that they update the campaign every year. One of the best campaign hacks is if you can find a format that works and is repeatable, run that shit back! Rover have been doing this same campaign every year since 2021 and it allows them to get great PR coverage every year from it. But they’re also smart about using the same url each year and updating the content rather than the url, which is why the page has so many referring domains.

Of course it’s also a super on brand idea for Rover and allows them to effortlessly target their core audience. All of these things combined with the success of the campaign has also enabled the campaign page to earn its own organic visibility and rank high for keywords such as “popular dog names” and “most common dog names”.

3️⃣ The most popular people names for dogs by The Washington Post

📊 51 RDs, 21 DR 50+

Sites like The Washington Post, New York Times, etc, that publish a lot of their own long form research stories can be really great sources of creative inspo if you do a site search followed by some relevant keywords such as your topic and things like data, interactive, etc. This is a fun piece that The Washington Post did exploring the crossover between names used for humans vs names used for dogs. To do so they analysed the names of US Citizens vs the names of 61,000 dogs available for adoption on Petfinder.

It’s a really well constructed landing page with great graphics like the one below, along with a fab tool that tells you if your name is more likely to be a dog name or a human name (apparently Matt is a “mostly dog name” 🐶). I really like how they’ve added a few case studies and pics of dogs with very human names and the stories behind why they were given those names.

4️⃣ The Most (and Least) Pet-Friendly States in America by SafeWise

📊 143 RDs, 35 DR 50+

The actual idea for this campaign isn’t the most original one ever. I think most experienced PRs would think of an index campaign ranking pet friendly places. What I really like about this one though is the methodology and the metrics they’ve used to define how pet friendly each State is.

Rather than just looking at things like the population of pets and number of pet friendly apartments in each State, SafeWise also looked at ranking States based on how safe they are for pets to live in by analysing ranking factors such as Pets-left-in-car laws and Animal fighting paraphernalia law. I really like that as a creative spin on what I feel like the most likely direction would have been for this campaign in most cases.

5️⃣ How Pets See Your Home by HomeAdvisor

📊 46 RDs, 22 DR 50+

As Digital PR becomes more competitive, big budget design led campaigns like this have really become a thing of the past. Which is understandable, they’re not cheap to produce. This is one of my favourite examples of the sliding perspectives format that HomeAdvisor created to show how different pets see your home.

As well as being a cool piece of content, it also has a genuinely useful use for pet owners which is likely why it did so well on a PR front. My favourite is the Parrot one below that basically gives the room a colourful boujee makeover 😅.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 20. 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 🙂