THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 3

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 3 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: Digital PR Learning Resources You May Have Missed From October

BuzzStream: Journalist Requests: How to Find Them and Respond for Coverage

Verve Search: How to use data analysis for PR campaigns (and our favourite tools for it)

Search Engine Land: Google November 2024 core update

Connectively: HARO/Connectively is shutting down

Tom’s Guide: Apple Intelligence Mail summaries in iOS 18.1 will help tame your inbox — here's how it works

Linking Out Loud Podcast: Where does digital PR fit in a broader brand strategy?, with Stephen Kenwright

Linking Out Loud Podcast: Choosing the right digital PR strategy for your client, with Thea Chippendale

Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: Four ways you can effectively repitch a campaign

Moz: How To Prepare for the Future of SEO: 17 Tips From Lily Ray

The Guardian: Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X

Google Slides: Introducing a refreshed library of high-quality Google Slides templates that elevate your presentations

SEOFOMO News: A new site by Aleyda Solis for trending SEO news stories

Work PR: Utilising Data To Bring PR To Life - Part 1

Work PR: Utilising Data To Bring PR To Life - Part 2

seoplus+: Pitch Perfect: Quality Over Quantity Wins in Digital PR

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

1️⃣ If someone covered your campaign:

1) say thank you

2) now is a great time to ask any questions you may have about their schedule, what type of content they're looking for in the future, etc.

2️⃣ How to find what Christmas content top news publications are likely to cover - look for what they covered last year.

My favourite tool for doing this is Ahrefs' Content Explorer.

Head to the tool and search for your topic, for example "christmas markets".

Content Explorer then shows you a list of webpages that have mentioned your keyword(s) within your date range.

Where it is SUPER useful for Digital PRs however is the News filter that allows you to just analyse mentions of your keyword(s) by news publications. This gives you an idea of not just the level of media interest in a topic, but also when that interest will spike - perfect for planning your outreach schedule.

From all of this data, you can then start researching the type of stories that got published last year. This will help guide your content ideas for this year.

You can also apply a site: filter to your search, which will allow you to see the different type of stories related to your keyword(s) that a specific publication has covered in the past.

If you don't have Ahrefs, you can still do all of this within Google, it's just a bit harder to export any sort of data analysis or apply certain filters which is why I prefer using Content Explorer.

3️⃣ The links you build from Digital PR are great but they’ll have minimal impact if your Tech SEO is shit, especially if you have a large website. It will reduce the potential impact on rankings but also limit how much referral traffic is able to convert (now or later).

4️⃣ Don’t neglect podcasts when it comes to your outreach list. They can provide amazing exposure for your content to a very targeted audience and often provide a backlink in the show notes.

5️⃣ Sign up to your competitor’s newsletters. This is a great way of snooping on what they’re up to and finding inspiration for what you can do based on what they are/aren't doing. If you're worried about them seeing your email, create a Gmail and forward it to your work email.

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 SmartAsset US Paycheck Calculator

Using the average income for each State in the US is a great starting point, but if you want to go a step further with your analysis, this tool by SmartAsset is a source of data. Based on your salary and which State you live in, it will calculate how much of your salary you pay in tax, and what your actual take home pay is.

2️⃣ ONS: Which skills are employers seeking in your area?

If you have any UK clients, the ONS is a goldmine of data sources, with hundreds of new ones added each month. This one that I found is an absolute beauty! It’s a tool that shows the most advertised jobs/occupations in each UK local authority area. When you click on the Publications link, you’ll find a really great page where you can look up in depth analysis for the most in demand skills in each area, as well as the UK overall, along with a link to download the full dataset. So many great angles you can take with this dataset!

3️⃣ Met Office UK Climate Averages

A very handy tool from the UK Met Office that shows the average climate over a 20 year period at a regional or even town/city level (they’re technically called local climate stations). Goes into much more detail than just temperature, to also include hours of sunshine, days of frost, days of rainfall and average wind speed.

4️⃣ National Cyber Security Index

A tool that measures the cyber security capacities of 56 leading countries based on a number of different factors. The comparison between different countries is interesting, but where I think the real value comes from is the detailed breakdown of each metric that you can find by clicking on each country in the index.

5️⃣ Average Finder

Find the average sale price of items on eBay. A great resource for working out items that are the most valuable on the second hand market. The tool will show you the average price but also the highest and lowest price, which you can also filter by country.

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 Celebrity Christmas Recipes: Whose recipe costs the most time and money? by Uswitch

📊 14 RDs DR 50+

We’re not far away from Christmas season now so I imagine a lot of us will already be thinking about festive themed campaigns. Almost every brand wants to create Christmas themed content which makes it really difficult to find unique angles that can cut through the noise and land coverage during a really busy period.

I really like this campaign from 2021 by Uswitch that took a creative twist on the Christmas meal angle by looking at celebrity chef recipies and which cost the most to put together, and which take the longest to cook. Finding a popular topic and then attaching a celebrity angle to it is often a good recipe for success (pardon the pun).

2️⃣ If Kids Designed Holidays by lastminute.com

📊 3 RDs DR 50+

I wanted to share this one for a few different reasons. First of all, I love the creativity and emotion behind this idea from lastminute.com where they got kids to create drawings of what their dream holiday would look like, and then turned the best ones into 3D illustrations. I know ideas like this often struggle to work but I do feel like I see less variety in content produced within the Digital PR space compared to a few years ago.

Second - I think this is a great example of content that has been produced as a Digital PR campaign with the main aim of building links, that can go so much further. This type of content can also be fantastic for other marketing channels such as socials, newsletters, and more.

And finally, if you click the campaign url on the coverage I linked to, you’ll notice that it goes to a 404 page. One of the quickest wins you can achieve when working with a new client is checking for broken backlinks and old campaigns that now go to a 404 page. At least 6 good quality follow links here that basically got chucked in the bin when someone removed the page and didn’t add a redirect in 🥲.

3️⃣ Remake My Day by Casumo

📊 3 RDs DR 50+

Based on ahrefs’ data, this campaign didn’t do huge numbers (these numbers are never perfect though so it may have done much better), but I love the concept and it’s one that I think definitely has legs to be a successful campaign if redone (it’s nearly 2 years old from what I can tell).

The campaign looks at how movie remakes compare to their originals, in terms of audience views and box office success. Good concept, strong dataset, and an amazing landing page! Casino brands are hard to find that sweet spot for in terms of relevance meeting wide audience appeal, but campaigns like this are a good example of pulling that off in my opinion.

4️⃣ Tool Theft Hotspots in London by Herts Tools Co.

📊 5 RDs DR 50+

For this campaign, Herts Tools Co. used FOI requests to find out which areas of London had the most tool thefts reported. What I like about this is how it’s hyper-focused to just London. I think sometimes when we produce maps campaigns we end up collecting so much data that most of it never actually gets used. By instead just focusing on London boroughs, you get just as many top angles to outreach, but in a way that can help to fit within a more restricted campaign budget.

This is also another great example of how just looking at top line reporting metrics can be misleading. 5 RDs DR 50+ is pretty good for sure. But 14 follow links from DR 30+ sites sounds a lot better! Nearly all come from super relevant trade sites as well, really showing the value that these less stylish and lower DR titles can have to your SEO growth.

5️⃣ Branded in Memory by Signs.com

📊 147 RDs DR 50+

An all time classic to end on this week. I imagine this campaign was both a lot of fun to work on but also a massive ballache at times. Signs.com got Americans to draw 10 famous brand logos from memory to see which features of the logos were best remembered. Some are stunning recreations, others… less so.

This campaign was a huge success with 396 RDs in total, 147 DR 50+, and 155 follow links DR 50+. A really great example of creativity helping a “boring” brand to create content that has a wider mainstream audience appeal, that genuinely had a huge impact on the SEO growth of Signs.com. 24% of the site’s total RDs DR 50+ come from that campaign page, likely having a huge impact on the site earning thousands of monthly clicks from keywords such as “custom signs” and “signs”.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 3. 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 🙂