THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 30

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 30 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.

BuzzStream: New ListIQ Chrome Extension

Cupid PR: Link Reclamation Isn’t Dead – You Just Need to Ask (Nicely)

Vuelio: The ever-changing landscape of news and what this means for PRs

Get Featured: When is the best time to send a pitch?

Wild PR: Digital PR metrics that matter

Ahrefs: Almost Half of Google Searches Are Branded. Here’s Why That Matters

TechRadar: How does ChatGPT actually know what to say? Here's how the AI generates its answers

Francessca Reynoldson on LinkedIn: 60+ digital PR hooks for your June calendar

Mark Rofe on LinkedIn: One of the most underrated aspects of PR is how you write and format your press release

Veronica Fletcher on LinkedIn: How to reverse engineer outlets

The Digital PR Podcast: Rethinking Link Building in Digital PR w/ Stephanie Finch

Digital PR Explained Podcast: Andrew Hirschfeld on Why The Bar Is Higher for PRs Pitching Freelance Journalists

Manchester DM #7: Thursday, July 3 · 5:45 - 9pm (free tickets)

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

1️⃣ Looking to expand the reach of your campaign using Reddit? Linking direct to the campaign page might look too promotional, but linking to the first piece of linking coverage you picked up will achieve the same result while looking less like a marketing post.

2️⃣ Working on a global search volume campaign and targeting links in a certain country? Break that data down by state/region and you've now got so many extra angles for both national and local press.

3️⃣ The more data you collect, the more angles you have. The more angles you have, the more stories you have. The more stories you have, the more sites you can outreach to. The more sites you pitch to the more coverage you're likely to earn.

4️⃣ There's a fine line between your data being super detailed and too complex for your target audience to understand. Sometimes you may need to dumb it down a little to your own despair so that it is easier for your target audience to understand and connect with.

5️⃣ Use Google Trends to create well rounded in-depth stories rather than just X is being searched Y% more than Z. Trends is great for quick to put together data but keep in mind that it's a free and easy to use tool and many publications are also using it internally now.

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 Video Games Sales Dataset

This Kaggle dataset has so much great data on video games sales. The dataset covers 64,016 titles released from 1971-2024, and includes metrics such as the number of worldwide sales of each video game, console, publisher, genre, release data, and critic score. Some great insights that you can pull from this dataset on the best selling and best rated video games split by a lot of different categories.

2️⃣ Letterboxd Movie Dataset

This second Kaggle dataset offers similar insights, but this time relating to movies. This dataset is a scrape of the The Letterboxd Movie Classification Dataset for over 10,000 movies. There are a number of different sources to collect movie review/ratings data from, and using a variety of them to get an average can give you even stronger data analysis. This one includes the total number of ratings, number of 1*, 3*, and 5* ratings, how many users are “fans” of the movie, how many watches of the movie have been logged, and how often does the movie appear on user-curated lists on Letterboxd.

3️⃣ ONS Quarterly personal well-being estimates

Every quarter, ONS releases UK personal well-being data, and the latest quarterly dataset has just been released in the past week. The survey grades the UK by their current life satisfaction, how worthwhile life feels, how happy people are, and how anxious they are, and also includes breakdowns by age group, gender, and region, with comparisons dating back to 2011.

4️⃣ Dog Breed registration statistics

The Kennel Club publish quarterly updated reports on the number of dog registrations in the UK broken down by dog breed. The registration statistics are available for each quarter of the last year, and each year for the last decade, and cover essentially every dog breed. They also have a cool analysis of the most vulnerable native breeds that have the lowest number of registrations. The reports are in PDF format which isn’t ideal, but the information in them is really great if you have a pet themed campaign in mind.

5️⃣ Weather & Climate

There are a lot of different sites that offer historical stats and data on weather metrics in different countries and cities, and Weather & Climate is one of my favourite for the amount of metrics that it has available for a wide number of cities. Metrics include the average day and night temperature for each month of the year, the number of rainy days, hours of sunshine, average wind speed, and much more 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 6 Feet Covers

📊 159 RDs, 65 DR 50+

Sometimes link building can come down to “create cool shit and people will link to it”. That definitely feels as though it has become less and less the case over the last five years especially, but it is generally a good mantra to work towards as a Digital PR. “6 Feet Covers” definitely falls into the category of “cool shit”.

Back in the days of COVID and social distancing when we all had to keep six feet apart from each other, somebody on the internet decided to reimagine what album covers would look like with social distancing measures enforced.

I think sometimes there’s a fear within the Digital PR space of taking creative chances with content ideas like this. Which I totally get as I’m in the same camp. But links from 159 sites including Fortune, Buzzfeed, and Maxim show that even content like this on an extremely basic free Wix page that almost definitely hasn’t been pitched to Journalists, will still be found and shared across the internet if it’s interesting enough (and gets shared somewhere with a big enough audience to get the ball rolling).

2️⃣ Hire a hunk to help you move house by My Baggage

📊 18 RDs, 14 DR 50+

Digital PR is really bloody tough these days, and the knock on effect of more competition, tighter budgets, and a lot of other things, has been a shortage of more outside the box creativity. I really like creative campaigns like this that are a bit silly and a bit quirky, but work because they stand out and get people’s attention. There will always be a space for silly little PR stunts, but only the ones that are really good.

I really like this example that My Baggage did back in 2021 where they allowed people to order hunky removals services men to help you move into your new home. The execution is pretty basic. Some good promo shots and a straight forward landing page. Which is all it needs to be. I think the idea is the guy is supposed to look like The Rock but he looks more like Vic Mackey off The Shield to me. The campaign landed links on sites such as Screenrant, CBR, and CinemaBlend.

3️⃣ The Hi-Vis Test by Leasing Options

📊 59 RDs, 56 DR 50+

Continuing the theme of lesser used campaign formats, this Hi-Vis test by Leasing Options is a cool example of creating an interactive game for a Digital PR campaign. The Hi-Vis Test shows you a series of traffic pictures, one with someone in high visibility clothing, and the other not, to prove to you with your own eyes how much easier it is for drivers to spot potential hazards when they’re wearing high visibility clothing.

I always say pick the format to suit the idea rather than picking the format and then the idea, but if you do have an idea that suits the format of an interactive game, and you have the budget to produce it, they can be a great way to help get across the storytelling component of your campaign. This example did really well in terms of the number of links it generated, although it is worth pointing out that all of them come from one big Newsquest syndication. Focus on the positives from a PR point of view though, and not the glass half empty mentality from an SEO angle.

4️⃣ The Naughtiest and Best-Behaved Dog Breeds by Protect My Paws

📊 58 RDs, 43 DR 50+

This next campaign from Protect My Paws is a great example of how social media data can allow you to produce some compelling insights and form the basis for a successful campaign. Here, Protect My Paws have analysed the number of Instagram hashtags for each dog breed associated with good or bad behaviours, for example, #gooddog and #cleverdog vs #baddog and #naughtypuppy. They then compared the number of hashtags for each breed to see the percentage split between the well behaved hashtags and the naughty hashtags.

In terms of the execution from a data point of view, something like this is very simple to replicate. To get Instagram hashtag data, literally all that you need to do is search for the hashtag and the app tells you how many posts exist for that hashtag. What I like that this campaign has done however, is taken the data insights from each post a step further and also scraped the posts geotagged with a location to reveal which countries and US States have the highest percentage of good vs naughty hashtags.

This part of the research is a bit more complex to collect, but it definitely adds an extra layer to the story told by the campaign, as well as giving you those much sought after regional angles that are so great for securing coverage on regional news sites. That data split by countries helped the campaign to earn backlinks in the UK, US, Australia, and even in Romania!

5️⃣ The Doggy Daycare Report by Money.co.uk

📊 9 RDs, 5 DR 50+

The final campaign in this week’s issue comes from Money.co.uk and looks at the cost of doggy daycare around the world. If you’re looking at running a campaign that compares and ranks different countries, using a filter of just looking at OECD countries is a good way to limit down the scope of your research without missing off major countries that would be considered a glaring omission from your study. Obviously it’s great to look at as many countries as you can, but we all have a budget for our PR campaigns and that just isn’t always possible. Plus, a lot of the time you end up collecting data for the sake of data on countries that you won’t be outreaching to. Looking at OECD countries gives you a nice manageable number of 38 countries while also having some sort of criteria for selecting certain countries and omitting others.

The campaign researched the number of doggy daycares with Google My Business listings in each country, and then analysed their cost relative to the average annual income in each country. I think the number of daycares per country would be a lot more interesting if it was filtered by per capita rather than just having America on top because any rankings that end up with the biggest places on top always just feels a bit useless to me.

But the data analysing the daily cost and what percentage of the average annual income for each country gets spent on daycare costs for your dog is a lot more interesting. The data also helps to give you multiple angles to rank different countries as the best and worst, by looking at which countries have the most expensive and cheapest costs overall, but also which are the highest and lowest percentage of the average income.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 30. Same time again next week ✌️

Found this useful? You can sign up to receive The Digital PR Observer Newsletter in your inbox each week for free by clicking the button below.

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 🙂