THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 33

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 33 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: 6 Million Subject Lines Analyzed: What Actually Gets Journalists to Open

BuzzStream: How to Evaluate a Site and Journalist for PR Outreach [20-Point Checklist]

Motive PR: How To Use PR To Launch A New Product To Customers

PRmoment: Things I wish I knew when starting in PR

Advanced Web Ranking: Google CTR Stats – Changes Report for Q1 2025

Linking Out Loud Podcast: Using Digital PR To Improve E-E-A-T Signals w/ Hollie Hines

BuzzStream Podcast: Digital PR in the UK vs US [Part 2] with Will Hobson

TechSEO North Webinar: Technical SEO for Digital PR - July 17th at 4pm GMT

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

1️⃣ How to find campaign inspiration within your field - If you've seen a campaign a competitor has done that you thought was cool, pop their domain into your backlink tool of choice and either look at the most linked to pages or their highest DA/DR referring domains. If they've done one cool campaign they've likely done lots others. Also bookmark their blog to keep up to date with any new content they post.

2️⃣ Reddit is a great source for brainstorming ideas and finding topics that are about to explode before they start trending on a bigger scale. Find relevant subreddits for your brand/client and make a habit of keeping up to date with what’s hot within them.

3️⃣ Medium is a goldmine of hidden gem data vis content. Head to Google and search site:medium.com followed by relevant keywords and see what comes up. Also try with keywords like "map that shows" to discover content using specific formats.

4️⃣ Your brain has its most new thoughts when its relaxed enough for neural pathways to form which allow us to make new connections between individual thoughts. That's why it's essential to rest your brain before any ideation session, and why our brain is often at its most creative before going to sleep, taking a walk, having a shower, etc.

5️⃣ Its the story that sells, not the format.

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 ONS: Public opinions and social trends

On a monthly basis ONS releases these amazing UK audience insights from their Opinions and Lifestyle Survey. They include social insights on a wide variety of topics such as how people feel about their current financial stability, changes to financial situations in the past month, feelings of personal wellbeing and loneliness, if people think that children of today will have a better future than the current generation of adults, and the percentage of adults that have worked from home or travelled to work in the last week, with data dating back five years. Lots of really great data points and audience insights from these reports that are released each month.

2️⃣ U.S. Census: Age Demographics by State

The U.S. Census site is a goldmine of audience insights data, and I love how user friendly the site is for building your own reports that can combine multiple datasets together. This report here is a great breakdown of age demographics by state and by gender, that comes in 5 year age ranges rather than the usual 10. These can be great for providing more accurate data insights for your campaigns, creating audience personas, or weighting results by the population of a specific age group in a state.

3️⃣ U.S. Census: Households by Presence of People 65 Years and Over

Another very useful U.S. Census dataset here. This one details the number of households in each state that have someone aged 65 and over living in the house, broken down by the amount of people living in the house and if it’s a family or non-family household.

4️⃣ Global Historical Emissions by U.S. State

This dataset from Climate Watch details the greenhouse gas emissions in each state from 1990-2020. With this data you can reveal the states with the highest emissions, the biggest growth/drop in emissions, and you can also filter the results by per capita and per GDP of the state which is very useful too.

5️⃣ The World’s 50 Best Bars

The World’s 50 Best Bars is actually an annual list of the top 100 bars around the world. As well as being a great guide to see if there’s any bars in your area or in places that you’re travelling to, it could also be a great reference point for any culture-based index campaigns as a ranking factor.

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 Most Hated Brands in Every Country by Rave Reviews

📊 174 RDs, 75 DR 50+

Unfortunately these type of data-led campaigns using sentiment analysis of tweets are a lot harder to put together with the same level of quality these days (thanks Elon!), but it was very much a campaign format that produced some great audience insights. This is a really good example of the format in full effect from Rave Reviews who in 2021 used SentiStrength to analyse how positive or negative tweets about the world’s top brands were, revealing the most hated brand in every country.

The graphics are amazing and I love how the list of brands has also been broken down too by industries such as gaming and tech, as well as including more of a deep dive into a longer list of brands for key markets like the UK and US. Which as you can tell from the links the campaign earned, paid off with many of the stories covering those specific maps rather than the lead map ranking the most hated brand in each country.

2️⃣ Kids Design Their Dream Bedrooms by Angies List

📊 51 RDs, 21 DR 50+

This campaign from Angies List is a really sweet one. They asked kids to design and draw their dream bedrooms, and then used their talented graphic designers to bring the kids’ drawings to life, as you can see below.

It’s another campaign format that’s best years are probably behind it, but one that I think can still be a valuable storytelling device in the right context. The key being the story that the format helps you to tell, not the format itself being the hook of the story. I like this campaign as an example of the format helping the campaign to tell a story that hits on an emotional level, which is why it did so well, landing links on sites such as Daily Mail, The Sun, Metro, and House Beautiful.

3️⃣ The Global Liveability Index 2025 by Economist Intelligence

If your index campaign has it’s own Wikipedia page breaking down the annual rankings that’s a pretty big flex! Obviously having The Economist name behind it is a big help, but it does go to show (albeit on an extreme scale) the high potential that index campaigns can have when you really invest in them and update them each year. The Global Liveability Index ranks 173 global cities for their quality of life based on assessments of stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure, and has been running since 2013.

The 2025 version of The Global Liveability Index has just been released, with Copenhagen ranking on top. Even though it’s less than a week old, the online coverage of it is huge, with the brand value of the index itself basically earning it instant coverage as soon as it’s released. And it’s a huge link building success too, with the last four editions of the index all earning over a thousand links on 400+ referring domains, and “global liveability index” having a monthly search volume of 1.4k.

4️⃣ Drain Nation - Which apps drain our batteries the most? by Uswitch

📊 104 RDs, 55 DR 50+

I like this idea for a campaign that Uswitch produced in 2020 analysing which of the most popular apps drain the batteries on our phones the quickest. Unfortunately the methodology on the landing page isn’t very clear but it looks as though it was done by researching how many different permissions each app requires. I like this as an example of a data-led campaign that doesn’t take a huge amount of time and money to produce (something like this could be covered in less than a day) but still produces some really valuable and unique insights.

I’m also a big fan of campaign pages that include an FAQ or help and advice section. This can be a really great way of helping the page to rank better for relevant keywords, while also allowing the brand to showcase strong E-E-A-T signals and build trust with the user reading the campaign page by showing that they are a trusted brand that knows what they’re talking about on the topic at hand (or as SEOs call it, topical authority).

5️⃣ Coronavirus hits pet industry by GoCompare

📊 67 RDs, 50 DR 50+

This next campaign produced by GoCompare back in 2020 during Covid times, is a really great example of how you can use a blend of Reactive PR tactics with data-led insights to produce a campaign that hits a nice blend of hitting a topical story in a way that has enough angles and a long enough period of relevance to be a big success.

It’s not totally clear from the landing page how GoCompare have sourced the cost of buying a dog, but the comparison points to show how lockdown increased the demand for people wanting to buy a pup, and therefore the price, is a great piece of data analysis that’s not just interesting but also newsworthy. The breakdown by popular breeds and average insurance prices are also a great touch for added analysis and brand insight with the use of internal data.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 33. 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 🙂