THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 28

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 28 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.

The PR Insider: How to Deal With a Low Coverage Month and How to Get Out Of It

Cision: 10 Media Pitching Tips Directly From Journalists

Cision: How Journalists Use Social Media (and Why It Matters for PR)

Embryo: The data to know before running your first digital PR campaign

No Brainer: The best digital PR campaigns for ecommerce brands

Agility PR: 5 common mistakes brands make when launching digital PR campaigns

The HOTH: Digital PR’s Role in AI Visibility: Earn AI Citations

Press Gazette: How Reach returned to audience growth after two years of decline

The PR Hotline: How To Stay Positive and Protect Your Wellbeing When PR Never Switches Off w/ Kirsty-Elise Noonan

The PR Hotline: How To Master Switching Between Sectors Without Burning Out in PR w/ Charlotte McManus

The Digital PR Podcast: AI Powered Digital PR w/ Raquel Pinto

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

1️⃣ An opportunity that lots of sites seem to miss out on - if you ran a great index/rankings campaign, keep it updated! When new data comes out you've already got a head start on a concept that you know works (plus you can apply your learnings from last time here)

2️⃣ Coverage that links to other coverage of your content rather than your landing page isn't ideal, but the more links pointing to that piece of coverage, the stronger the link value that will be passed from that original piece of coverage.

3️⃣ Just because an idea has been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done again. Just make sure you do it better

4️⃣ How to find content ideas from Reddit. Search for your keyword, set filters to “top” and “all time”. Then pull out discussions that look interesting and/or have a lot of upvotes.

5️⃣ If you're running a survey, make sure you're collecting your demographic data. This gives better context to your data and gives you lots of extra angles that you can focus your outreach with to be more relevant to your target publication.

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 Box Office Mojo

Box Office Mojo is an incredible resource for data on box office sales, and the level of detail you can find data by is fantastic. You can find box office figures down to a daily level, by genre, studio, and by country too. Box Office Mojo also has a lot of their own reports to save you time such as the total box office figures for franchises and which franchises have done the biggest numbers over their whole series of films. They also have a calendar of upcoming movie releases which can be useful for planning reactive opportunities.

2️⃣ Rainbow Map

Rainbow Map is an index of 49 European countries that has some great data on the laws and policies that have a direct impact on LGBTI people’s human rights. The site is really user friendly and easy to navigate through the 76 different data points. You can view the best countries for each individual metric, as well as easily analyse all of the data points for a specific country. If you’re planning any LGBTQ+ campaign I definitely suggest having a look through the data points available on Rainbow Map.

3️⃣ U.S. Real Estate & Property Data

This is an incredible resource that Attom have put together providing a comprehensive data overview of property information and prices in America. I love finding resources like this that make the data really user friendly to navigate through and analyse on the dashboard itself without having to export loads of csv files. Using the tool you can search for a state, city or zip code and get data on the median house sale price over the last year, the median down payment, the median price per square foot, the average age of homes sold, and much more. This dashboard is so much more than just house sale prices by state!

4️⃣ US Baby Names

The latest US Baby Names report was released this month, and we know that Digital PRs love a baby names campaign! Olivia and Liam have both been revealed as the top US baby names for the 6th straight year. The US Social Security Administration makes analysing the most popular baby names and trends for specific names really easy with this dashboard. Without exporting any data you can quickly see the top 5 baby names for each year dating back to 1925, as well as for each decade, the top names by state, and a year by year breakdown for any name that you search for.

5️⃣ 2025 Global Trade Outlook and Statistics

The 2025 edition of the World Trade Organization’s Global Trade Outlook and Statistics report came out last month. The report offers great insights and analysis into the top exporters and importers around the world, including the leading countries for commercial services and digitally delivered services, all summarised in a handy Excel file that you can just download.

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 Is Fast Food Affordable Anymore? Here’s How Menu Prices Have Changed Over the Years by FinanceBuzz

📊 656 RDs, 299 DR 50+

I’ll often mention how effective combining two topics can be when analysing these campaigns that do big numbers, and this is a really great example of how impactful that can be. Here, FinanceBuzz have analysed the inflation of fast food prices over a 10 year period to reveal which fast food restaurants are increasing their prices at the fastest rate, with the research finding that McDonalds prices have spiked the highest, doubling their prices compared to a decade prior. Using the national inflation rate as a benchmark is also a really great piece of analysis to provide the average reader with an easy to understand bit of context to make the data even more shocking and newsworthy.

The campaign page is also extremely well put together. I love the interactive tables that show you the price increases for specific menu items, and the advice section using their internal experts is a great way of showcasing the brand’s knowledge and expertise on finance topics. Comparison points are so valuable for turning your data into news stories. Sometimes however, previous data points aren’t always available. In some cases Wayback Machine can be your friend. This is what FinanceBuzz did in this campaign, by running the data source urls through Wayback Machine to find the versions of the page from 10 years ago to provide them with their comparison points.

2️⃣ Where are illegal vapes most being sold in the UK? by Vape Superstore

📊 105 RDs, 61 DR 50+

Coming up with campaign ideas for a vaping brand that are not only super relevant to the brand but also favourably position a vaping brand is so difficult, but this campaign from Vape Superstore does a really great job of achieving both of those things. For this campaign they sent FOI requests to each UK council to reveal where in the UK the most illegal vapes are being sold.

FOI requests when utilised creatively can be a goldmine for unique data that creates newsworthy headlines, and also provide you with lots of great regional data points too. For this request, Vape Superstore analysed which councils had seized the most illegal vapes, how many businesses were reported to be selling illegal vapes, and how many illegal cigarettes were seized. For clarity, most of the referring domains are from a big National World syndication, but getting that much PR coverage for a story that I would argue positions a vaping brand in a pretty favourable way from a brand pov, is a big win in my book!

3️⃣ Best Cities for Millennials by Nestpick

📊 121 RDs, 65 DR 50+

Index campaigns have been a Digital PR staple for a long long time, and this is an example of a successful one from back in 2018. For this campaign, Nestpick ranked 110 cities around the world based on which are the best to live in for millennials. Combining a range of different metrics together into an index can produce some cool data analysis, but what really counts are the stories that the data enable you to pitch to Journalists. The millennials hook and the timing of the campaign in 2018 were both key to earning links from over 100 referring domains for Nestpick.

I think sometimes with index campaigns we can get a little carried away with the amount of ranking factors that we analyse. As you can see from the table below, there’s A LOT of data crammed into one table, that honestly isn’t all that user friendly for most people to read through. As a general rule of thumb, I think 3-6 metrics is plenty. If you do want to utilise a bigger dataset, I would suggest grouping them into categories. Which is what Nestpick have done, but making your campaign assets as user friendly as possible and avoiding cramming too much data on to them should always be a key consideration when producing your campaign page.

4️⃣ The Most Watched Dogs on TikTok by Money.co.uk

📊 20 RDs, 8 DR 50+

In this campaign from Money.co.uk., they’ve ranked the most watched dog breeds on TikTok. I’m always a fan of using social media data and trends as a starting point for a campaign idea as a lot of the time you can get really interesting data very quickly. While expert commentary is usually the go to format for campaigns based on social media trends, this one is a good example of how to use social media data for a data-led insights campaign idea.

The idea in execution here is relatively simple. All that’s been done is a simple search for hashtags of different breeds on TikTok. From that search you can quickly see the number of views each hashtag has. Data like this can help you create some interesting stories, and takes literally seconds to source for each hashtag. The campaign also added some extra insight into which Dog Influencers could make the most per sponsored post on TikTok - again, another data point that provides a lot of value but is very quick to research.

5️⃣ Vet Issues Urgent Warning to Dog Owners Over Viral ‘Lemon Slice’ TikTok Trend by Everypaw Pet Insurance

Not all campaigns need to be data-led insights or creative formats like stunts or Product PR in order for them to be effective. Aim to understand what problems your target audience are looking to solve, or what questions they’re searching for answers to, and use your experts to provide those insights. For example with pet owners, they are always on the lookout for information on how to best care for and look after their pets, meaning that there’s a big opportunity to earn PR coverage from Reactive PR tactics such as expert commentary.

This is one of many really good examples of how you can use experts such as Vets for pet brands to not just earn coverage and backlinks, but really showcase your expertise and authority if you have relevant internal experts, or enhance your brand image and perceptions by providing valuable content to your target audience via the use of external experts.

Here, Everypaw Pet Insurance used expert commentary from their in-house Vet to react to a TikTok trend that could be dangerous to dogs. It’s a great example not just of using expert commentary to earn coverage and build your brand, but also how to capitalise on social media trends as part of your Reactive PR strategy.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 28. 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 🙂