THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 45

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 45 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.

Jade Denby on LinkedIn: Digital PR Resources Cheat Sheet

Saskia Fryer on LinkedIn: Key PR Dates for October

Grace Tranter on LinkedIn: What's happening in October for digital pr opportunities?

James Rundle (Wall Street Journal Reporter) on LinkedIn: PR friends, here’s a quick guide to pitching me

Gabriella Sheerin on LinkedIn: What I’ve learned after 2 years of drafting and pitching human interest stories for a client

Ahrefs: The 50 Best PR Pitching Opportunities in ChatGPT

Cision: How to Pitch Journalists and Get Results: 8 Media-Approved Tips

Ahrefs: How to Monitor and Win Brand Mentions in AI Answers

Press Gazette: Express was newsbrand with most Editors’ Code breaches in 2024

The Digital PR Podcast: Why AI Is Failing the Creative Industry w/ Joe Goulcher

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Show Up in AI Results with Relevance Engineering with Mike King

Want to contribute a post to the Digital PR Tips blog? If you have an idea for a topic that you want to write about, please fill in this quick form here.

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

1️⃣ When reporting on the links your campaigns have earned, look up if it's the first time you've earned a link from that site. Then you can show the extra value of that link by showing that it's either a link that has helped to close a link gap with a competitor or extends a new link gap in your favour.

2️⃣ When searching for coverage of your campaign, also use searches that don't include the brand name. By always including the brand in your search you won't find any uncredited coverage. Search for phrases such as the subject line you used and key stats or quotes included in your release.

3️⃣ Link targets not based around data and benchmarks are just hopes and dreams. If you’re setting link targets make sure you understand where your numbers have come from and why.

4️⃣ The worst performing points in your data make for a great angle just as much as the top of your list does, especially if you're looking at regional/country data and you can reveal not just "the best..." but also "the worst...". Be careful however, that ranking "the worst..." doesn't create any negative issues from a storytelling and brand point of view.

5️⃣ It's super important that your methodology is clear and makes sense to Journalists and the average reader. To check it makes sense to people outside of your Digital PR bubble, show it to friends and family, or even people in different teams such as SEO, and ask them to explain it back to you. Make a note of the things they miss or don't understand and aim to simplify or remove them from your research.

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 Gross Value Added per hour worked and number of hours worked by UK local authority

This annual ONS report is a really good dataset for ranking which UK cities have the most productive labour economies. This is a great way of weighting datasets such as the number of jobs or number of hours worked per region to provide more reliable data. Here, labour productivity is measured by output per hour worked to calculate the gross value added per hour worked worked in each UK subregion (which basically includes every major city in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). A good potential resource for index campaigns.

2️⃣ Companies House

Those that love to be a bit nosy among us (or as I prefer… curious) in the UK will be familiar with having a late night snoop at Companies House. There are loads of different ways that Companies House data could also be used for PR campaigns. For example, you can view the filed accounts of any public company, collect a list of companies registered in a specific location, find how many companies in a region have dissolved during a specific time period, or just analyse a list of company names.

3️⃣ UK areas with Gigabit capable broadband

This next ONS dataset details the percentage of premises within all of the local authorities that have coverage from a gigabit-capable service (download speeds of 1,000 Mbps or more). This is a really useful dataset for indexes in particular, giving you a quick and simple to understand figure relating to which places have the best internet speeds.

4️⃣ Intellizence - Largest Mergers and Acquisitions Deals

B2B campaigns can sometimes be difficult to find unique data-led campaigns ideas for. One data point that can provide lots of different stories while being very relevant is data on mergers and acquisitions. Intellizence is a site that does a great job of listing all of the latest M&A deals from the past year that can be a good starting point for lots of analysis ideas. They also have a paid API product for more historical datasets too.

5️⃣ Stock Analysis by Industry

Another great example of a data source for B2B campaigns is stock data. Stock Analysis has a lot of data that could be used for data campaigns, and I especially like this one that provides stock data grouped by 145 different industries. With lots of individual data points such as market cap, dividend yields, profit margins, and total revenue, there’s a lots of data-led insights that could be produced using this data.

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 world's most expensive sweet ring by Taylor & Hart

📊 37 RDs, 15 DR 50+

This campaign that Taylor & Hart produced back in 2021 was such a cool example of how to do Product PR in a creative manner. When you see a campaign that makes you go “aww shit that’s cool” you know you’re on to a good idea. Sometimes the most creative ideas are actually really simple ones in execution, but more complex in terms of the path that our creativity has to go down to get to our destination. As kids we probably all had moments wearing Haribo jelly rings as actual rings or giving them to our school crush on the playground at lunch. Taylor & Hart leaned into that playful nostalgia by creating an actual Haribo inspired engagement ring.

What makes it work so well is the emotional response that it triggers with people and that’s what makes it newsworthy. Journalists want stories that will trigger emotions and spark engagements. Nostalgia is a super powerful emotion and a really great thing to play into when thinking about the storytelling component of your campaign. Launching the campaign around Valentine’s Day also helps to give it a topical angle making it even newsworthy and giving Journalists another reason to cover the story.

I’m also a big fan of stories that utilise the “world’s most expensive…” format as Taylor & Hart also did here. It adds another layer of storytelling and emotional psychology to the idea, while also producing an engaging and eye-catching addition to any headline. The impact of that can be seen with most of the campaign’s top linking coverage referencing the price in their headlines.

2️⃣ The Top Female Founder In Every Country by Business Financing

📊 49 RDs, 25 DR 50+

This next campaign is a great example of a really well executed map campaign. Business Financing used Crunchbase data to research the most valuable female founders in every country around the world. The beauty of map campaigns like this that make them work well as Hero campaigns is that they naturally provide lots of different angles that you can create outreach opportunities around. You have a unique story for every individual country, especially if you can also create a top 10 list for each country from your data, as well as being able to break the data down by the top founders in each continent.

As is the case with any PR campaign however, the key to earning media coverage lies in the storytelling element of the campaign much more so than the format. Basing the story around female business owners provides a topic with a great combination of both evergreen and newsjacking angles. It’s a topic that isn’t going to fade out of relevance after a few months, and also a topic that will have regular trending moments where the piece can be relevant and re-pitched to tie in with trending stories that Journalists will already be writing about. It also has the female business owners angle which helps to make it more impactful from a emotional response point of view, and add an extra layer of relevance to a specific target audience.

3️⃣ The websites that suffered from the most outages by Tooltester

📊 70 RDs, 33 DR 50+

When you’re validating a campaign idea you’ll likely be thinking of potential headlines that you can create with your content. Campaigns that are based around celebrities, athletes, brands, etc, are a great way of naturally creating eye-catching headlines as readers will instinctively click on headlines that reference topics they have a personal interest in. This campaign by Tooltester is a good example of using that psychology. Here, they ranked the top websites in the U.S. and the UK that experienced the most outages over a 12 month period to reveal the most unreliable websites with the most down time.

Data studies like this are also a great way of creating unique stories for multiple media sectors from one format by splitting your overall list up into individual categories. For example, the campaign earned coverage not just for the overall list, but also for the top social media and top gaming sites with the most the outages.

4️⃣ The Slowest Cities by Moneybarn

📊 31 RDs, 20 DR 50+

Next up, we have a campaign from Moneybarn who revealed the UK cities and countries that are the slowest to drive in. The campaign is an index that uses six ranking factors such as average speed, traffic delays, road maintenance, and more, to create an overall slow traffic score. The great thing about index campaigns that make them work so well for bigger budget campaigns is they naturally provide lots of different angles to work with. For example, as well as the overall index score being a story for not just the slowest cities, but the fastest cities too, each individual ranking factor can also be used as a stand alone data point.

Moneybarn here have also gone a step further and extended the idea to rank the top countries around the world, as well as the top cities in the UK. To make it work they’ve tweaked the methodology for the global ranking based on the availability of various data points. This is a great example of how to make your ideas work harder and justify the bigger budgets that Hero campaigns will have, and therefore require you to produce bigger results from the campaign too. And based on the backlink profile it was a great addition for this campaign as it actually has more top linking domains from the Netherlands than in the UK.

On the topic of getting more value from a good idea, Moneybarn have also done something that I’m a big proponent of and that I’ve referenced in different campaigns across the last few issues in particular. They’ve updated the index again with fresh data in future years to help create new stories from the same idea. Great campaign ideas that produce results are hard to come up with, so when you do run a successful campaign, make sure you’re finding ways to either update the campaign with fresh data, or using what made the previous campaign work and applying them to future campaigns for that brand too.

5️⃣ The Sleep Routines of 50 Successful People by Online Mattress Review

📊 28 RDs, 19 DR 50+

This week’s final campaign is one that’s bit different but I think it’s an interesting example of thinking outside of the box when it comes to the research aspect of producing campaigns. For this campaign released in 2020, Online Mattress Review researched the sleep routines of 50 famous and successful people from a real mix of industries and eras to compare and analyse how many hours sleep they get each night.

A research idea like this is likely quite time consuming with the time needed to source not just reliable and credible sources for the information, but also fact checking and second sourcing the data. The campaign is also another good case study of the value of being able to split your data up across different industries, with sites such as Inc.com, and Entrepreneur using the comparisons to business people such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, and sites like The Sun and Essentially Sports focusing on athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo and Dwayne Johnson.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 45. 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 🙂