THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 25

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 25 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.

Digital PR Tips: Pet PR Campaigns: Examples of Successful Campaigns

The PR Insider: How to Navigate the Ethical Challenges of Storytelling in Health PR

Get Featured: Why I doubt quantity ever beats quality

PR Newswire: Why Are Press Releases Important and Still Relevant?

Press Gazette: UK news media rich list 2025

Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Key PR Dates for May

Francessca Reynoldson on LinkedIn: 50+ Key PR Dates for May

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

1️⃣ Data campaigns about people rather than places can be used for regional outreach too. If you've got a story about a celebrity, or an index ranking the top people for example, research where they were born and create a pitch targeted at those regional news sites. For example, "Essex's own ... has been named ..." or "New data ranks this Essex celebrity as the best ...".

2️⃣ If you can't afford to pay for a paid outreach tool like to track opens of your pitches, Hunter.io (yes the same one as the email finder extension) have a great free MailTracker plugin for Gmail to track opens - https://www.getmailtracker.com/

3️⃣ Sometimes the data you've collected just won't be very good and doesn’t offer anything interesting to make a story out of. In some cases, the best thing to do is to scrap the idea at this stage before putting more budget and resource behind data that just isn’t very interesting.

4️⃣ As tempting as it may be to slightly fudge your data to give you a stronger headline, or to target a specific publication stronger, please avoid doing this. It can start a troubling trend that very quickly turns into putting out false information for the wrong topic that starts to have a bigger impact. By all means, be strategic with your metrics, but don't blatantly change or omit certain data points.

5️⃣ The full impact of a link is usually seen after 90 days. But you'll get a good chunk of that value straight away. SEO takes time but it can produce fast results too with the right links and the right keywords.

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 Income and Hours Worked by UK Region

This ONS dataset gives you loads of different data on the average income per local authority in England and Wales. You can view the average hourly, weekly, and annual income for workers in each region, which is also nicely broken down by gender and full time vs part time working status, with your YoY comparisons and percentile breakdowns also thrown in. This data on it’s own is interesting, but can be really valuable when used to weight other metrics by the average annual salary in each local authority.

2️⃣ Dog Friendly Places

Dog Friendly is a very cool site that lets you search for dog friendly places in the UK. The tool is really useful to use and I love how easy it is to filter by different types of accommodation and activities. This can be such a great resource for Index campaigns if you want to rank the best places with dog friendly places to see or things to do in each city, or rank travel destinations with dog friendly activities as one of your metrics.

3️⃣ 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer

The Edelman Trust Barometer is an annual report that details trust levels across 28 different countries. The report is based on survey responses from over 1,150+ respondents from all 28 countries on topics such as trust in your employer, job security, fear of being discriminated against, and trust in businesses, the media, and governments. A lot of interesting data in this report around trust levels.

4️⃣ 2024 FBI Internet Crime Report

Last week the FBI released the latest edition of their annual Internet Crime Report. This is a really interesting report that breaks down the number of reported internet crimes in the US and their monetary loss value. There’s also a really useful breakdown by States that could provide some great regional angles.

5️⃣ Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report

Another recently released report, this one by Gallup is a huge deep dive into the perceptions of the workplace around the world. The report is 141 pages so covers a lot of different insights. Some of the most interesting data points include the percentage of employees who are engaged and how it has changed dating back to 2009, if employees feel as though they’re thriving vs struggling, what emotions workers feel during an average day, and how many people are currently intending to leave their current role, all broken down by country, age range, gender, job level, and remote working status. A lot of data in this report that could be excellent for best countries to work in type campaigns.

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 Best and Worst Dog Breeds To Share A Bed With by Secret Linen Store

📊 10 RDs, 6 DR 50+

A lot of the most successful PR campaigns in terms of the total number of referring domains earned, often come from ideas that combine two popular topics together and allow you to target more than one major industry with your outreach. Here, a bed brand has combined the topics of sleep and pets together to create a campaign analysing the best dog breeds to share your bed with.

Secret Linen Store created an Index ranking the best dog breeds to snuggle up in your bed with based on their average size, and a shedding, drooling, barking, and energy score for each breed. The methodology isn’t super clear as to how they’ve graded the scores, for example if it’s based on the levels of barking or if it’s just graded on a 5 point scale with an element of personal judgement involved, but I do love how they’ve named their final index score the “Pup All Night Score” 😅.

The landing page is also very well put together with a nice bit of analysis and visuals for the best and worst breeds, as well as some great advice at the end with a breakdown of the pros and cons of sharing a bed with your dog, along with some general advice. Content like this following your data insights can be a great way of showcasing your expertise, adding more value to the user, and optimising the page to rank for relevant keywords.

2️⃣ The Best Cities for Dog Lovers in the World by Protect My Paws

📊 64 RDs, 28 DR 50+

This next campaign from Protect My Paws puts its own twist on the idea of the best cities for dog fans. First of all, they’ve looked at major cities around the world rather than just in the UK, and secondly, they’ve also taken a different approach to how they’ve defined the “best cities”. Rather than creating an Index ranking made up of different factors, they’ve approached the idea less so from the perspective of pet owners, and more at people who love to be around dogs. From there, they've researched the number of dogs in each major city, to find which have the highest number of dogs per km2, and weighted by the population of the city.

I really like the landing page for the campaign which showcases a creative approach to creating the campaign’s visuals that are really user friendly and easy to quickly digest all of the important data points. I also love how they’ve weighted the data by two different metrics - the area size of the city and the population of the city. This helps to create two different sets of “best cities” that you can outreach to regional and national news sites.

3️⃣ Is Your Pet Cath Kidston's Next Dog Model by Cath Kidston

📊 8 RDs, 8 DR 50+

The Dream Job campaign format doesn’t seem to be as prevalent as it was in the early 2020’s when you couldn’t go a week without seeing a new example of a brand looking to pay someone to do something very fun/weird. Nowadays it seems like a format that’s much less commonly utilised. I really like this example that Cath Kidston ran back in 2020 when they created a blend of a Competition and a Dream Job format where you could nominate your dog to become a Cath Kidston Dog Model.

Dream Job campaigns, as is the case with any format, are dependent on the story they’re able to tell, and this example does a great job of hitting on some strong emotions with their target audience. It also does a great job of bringing a Social Media strategy into a PR campaign by using a branded hashtag for the entry submissions, allowing the campaign to produce benefits beyond just backlinks and SEO metrics.

I’m a big fan of campaign formats that can be replicated across lots of different topics and brands, which is very much the case with Dream Job campaigns. For example, you’ve got kids applying with their dogs to be a bean bag tester, the opportunity to visit pubs with your dog to review which are most dog-friendly, and a “Chief of Pet Flicks” where you can get paid to watch animal movies. Brands have also ran Dream Job campaigns to hire someone to review pet-friendly hotels and test how dog-friendly new luxury lodges are.

4️⃣ The Ugliest Buildings in the World by Buildworld

📊 241 RDs, 111 DR 50+

I love a campaign title that immediately jumps off the page and grabs your attention with literally just a few words. As soon as you see the words “ugliest buildings in the world” there’s a certain curiosity factor that is immediately peaked. A great starting point for a brainstorm could be to start writing down the most outrageous headlines you can think of your target publications covering, and then start filtering them down until you find some that are viable to scope and could be answered with some interesting data insights.

To work out which buildings around the world were considered the ugliest, Buildworld analysed Tweets that referenced each building alongside a set of keywords that ensured the post was about the design of the building, and then used AI to determine the sentiment of the posts to reveal how negative the posts were about the design of each building. It’s a great example of how to combine a great dataset with strong emotions from a storytelling perspective to create a powerful campaign that gets really impressive results.

This probably isn’t the sort of campaign that you would instantly assume also has some great search volume potential to try and rank for, but it actually does. “ugliest building in the world” has 500 monthly searches in the US and 100 in the UK, and this page ranks first in both countries, in total driving over 400 monthly organic sessions worldwide.

5️⃣ Every Country's Most Listened-to Current and Past Artists by Liberty Games

📊 142 RDs, 32 DR 50+

In our final campaign this week we’ve got a clever use of YouTube Music Charts data from Liberty Games to reveal the most listened to artists in every country around the world. I feel like most campaigns would just find the top artists overall and leave things there for the campaign. It is a lot of data after all! But I love how they’ve gone a step further here and also researched the most listened to hip-hop, rock, country and classical music artists in each country too.

I know we all love a good Map campaign like this, but I always think they’re not super efficient data campaigns to research if you’re only planning on pitching to English speaking countries for example. Yes the overall map and top countries can be very strong angles, but where Map campaigns usually get so many backlinks is when they get picked up globally and covered in loads of different countries. Sometimes that can happen organically via a major piece of coverage in your home country, but a lot of the time it requires extra time and knowledge to pitch in a different language. Looking through the backlink profile for this campaign you can see it’s proof of how these type of campaigns can end up with 100+ referring domains based on the wide range of international TLD’s in the linking domains, but only if you’re able to get your story to breakthrough into international markets.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 25. 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 🙂