THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 48

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 48 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

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The latest guest contribution on the Digital PR Tips blog comes from Ben Eaglestone, SEO & Insights Specialist at Energy PR

Why Branded Search is the Gold Standard of Digital PR Measurement

Want to contribute a post of your own 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.

Here is the latest Digital PR news and resources from the last week that you might have missed.

Sourcee: Digital PR Resources - Essential Resources for PR Professionals

BuzzStream: How Much Does Digital PR Cost in 2025? (Survey)

Tribera: The Death of the Press Release? Why Your PR Campaign Isn’t Getting The Results You Want

Cision: How to Manage PR Client Expectations

Get Featured: When it’s OK to use AI - and when it’s not

JBH: What “Expert” Really Means to a Journalist in the Age of Fake AI Voices

JBH: Digital PR: Extinction or Distinction?

Neomam: Writing is Thinking

Go Fish Digital: How Visual Storytelling Turns Digital PR Campaigns Into Link-Building Powerhouses

Six Chillies: We're offering a FREE inspiration session to THREE teams

Emma Malcolmson on LinkedIn: How you can make sure your clients stand out in an ai-ridden expert commentary crowd

Gemma Flinders on LinkedIn: If you are struggling to think of campaign ideas for clients, use search parameters

Louise Parker on LinkedIn: If I'm getting really stuck with building a media list, especially outside of the UK, this is what I do

Andrew Bloch on LinkedIn: How to see Your LinkedIn Social Selling Index score

Press Gazette: Daily Mail invests heavily in creating content for Tiktok and Instagram

BuzzStream Podcast: How to Survive and Thrive in Digital PR in the GEO Era with Fractl’s Kelsey Libert

BuzzStream Podcast: Why SEO, PR, and Content Must Finally Work Together with Stacker’s Tamara Sykes

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

1️⃣ Use Google and Talkwalker Alerts to monitor when topics associated with your previous campaigns start trending again. This is the perfect opportunity to outreach it again and get another cycle of links out of it.

2️⃣ If your campaign has already received some coverage and you're moving on to another round of outreach, incorporate the headlines that were used in that coverage into your subject line.

3️⃣ A Journalist has seconds to pitch your story to their editor. That's how quick they should be able to explain the story, the hook, and the relevance to their readers from your pitch.

4️⃣ Struggling to think of ideas? Just start writing something down - literally anything. Random words connected to your topic. Your brain is building momentum and eventually you'll have so many dots in front of you that your brain will start connecting something together from them.

5️⃣ Don't use WeTransfer. You never know when a Journalist may want to go back to your campaign and download your assets.

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 WHO: Road traffic death rate by country

This dataset from World Health Organization is one of many great datasets that they have which are perfect for global index campaigns. This one looks at the number of road traffic deaths per 100,000 people in every country around the world. A nice simple dataset but one that has a lot of storytelling opportunities, especially when combined with other related datasets.

2️⃣ U.S. Mortgage Rates Archive

This site is a fantastic resource if you have a finance or property client based in the U.S. that are eager to produce data-led campaigns. This page has an archive of weekly mortgage rates for 30 year fixed rate and 15 year fixed rate dating all the way back to 1971. You can quickly export each week’s data into a csv file but the tool on the page is also very useful for getting a quick overview of the data and to brainstorm potential ideas.

3️⃣ Expedia

Many PRs over the years have encountered TripAdvisor’s legal team when launching campaigns that use data from their site (even though it’s publicly available…). Many also haven’t though which makes the question of if it’s worth using TripAdvisor data a tricky one to answer. My response is usually that I would use it as more often than not there’s no issues and there usually only ever is if your campaign is a hit, at which point its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission and you can either change the data source or redirect the campaign page and say you pulled it (all of which is likely happening after you’ve already earned some great coverage).

Sometimes however depending on the client/brand you’re producing a campaign for, it’s easier to just not take the risk, in which case you need an alternative data source. Expedia isn’t as good as TripAdvisor as a data source for PR campaigns but it is still a very viable alternative. The reviews data is definitely much more limited but Expedia works great as a source for finding the number of attractions in a city (as linked above), which you could then also use as a seed list to get reviews from Google Maps instead.

4️⃣ Dataset of 64,000 Recipes

I like to think that some of these datasets that I share could also have real life uses for people and not just for PR campaigns. This Kaggle dataset is a good example of one that could be both. Someone has curated an archive of over 64,000 recipes into a csv file that is nicely tagged up into categories, ingredients, number of ingredients per recipe, and the number of steps in each recipe. Could be a really useful dataset for creating content around the simplest recipes for beginners, or the most flexible ingredients for example.

5️⃣ Roller Coaster Database

This one definitely falls into the category of random niche finds, but niche datasets can be great for sparking more creative ideas. As a database it’s extremely well put together. From the nav bar at the top you can find pages documenting world record holders for the fastest rides (155 mph!!!) and which have the most inversions, as well as a breakdown of roller coasters in every country and continent. There’s also search pages where you can lookup specific information not just for roller coasters, but also amusement parks and company info.

Annoyingly the site doesn’t seem to load with the newsletter tracking part of the url so just delete that bit or copy rcdb.com straight into your browser.

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 Cities Where Traffic Causes the Most Stress by Fleet Logging

📊 25 RDs, 13 DR 50+

Surveys are often the go to resource for campaigns where you want to use audience insights as the main focus of your storytelling. Surveys can be great assets but they can also be quite expensive. They’re not the only option that we have at our disposal for gathering audience insights data that can be used for PR campaigns. Social media data from sources such as Twitter, TikTok, or Reddit can also provide amazing insights with the cost being more of a time cost than a financial one.

This campaign from Fleet Logging is a really good example of how this type of data can be used to produce some interesting storytelling opportunities. By analysing over 57,000 tweets with the word traffic in, they used the TensiStrength tool to measure the stress level of the tweet, matched with the geolocation of the tweet to reveal the states and cities where traffic causes the most stress.

The great thing about collecting audience insights via methods like this is that you can work with a much wider sample size which can then give you more angles to break the data down by. For instance, this campaign looked at both the U.S. and UK, which is a great example of finding a great methodology and then getting the maximum benefit from it by creating a campaign that can be replicated across different markets for even bigger results.

2️⃣ The biggest fake influencers on social media by Fasthosts

📊 78 RDs, 43 DR 50+

This next campaign is another really good example of finding a methodology that has the ability to create loads of unique angles to outreach, something that is really important to factor in when creating hero campaigns that have bigger budgets, and therefore demand bigger results. For this campaign in 2021, Fasthosts analysed the celebrities with the highest percentage of fake followers on Instagram. They’ve called the campaign fake influencers but I don’t think that title really fits with celebrities. It would fit really well however with actual influencers to discover which have the fakest following that they’re basing their value on.

With celebrity angles like this there’s opportunities to create relevant stories for pretty much any sector - Football, Basketball, Music, TV & Film, Business people, and many more. With a relatively small amount of extra research you can turn an idea like this into multiple smaller campaigns. Although they haven’t done this from what I can see, this is also another great example of a campaign that could easily be replicated on an annual basis, with the comparisons to previous reports providing you with even more data points you can use to create stories around.

3️⃣ The Bill of Health by Go Compare

📊 212 RDs, 196 DR 50+

I love campaigns that are a bit different to the norm that we create within the Digital PR circles, and this is a great example of how different campaign formats can help you to produce not just some really interesting stories, but some really unique ones too. Here, Go Compare have created this fantastic calculator tool that works out how much you cost the NHS. The tool itself is really well put together with the landing page design looking amazing. The tool is really interesting just to have a play about with to see the costs of different types of medical appointments.

As well as being a massive hit from a link building point of view with linking domains including Daily Mail, The Sun, and a huge Newsquest syndication, the page also drives nearly 12,000 monthly organic sessions. Campaigns like this that can do more than just earn links really are worth their weight in gold when it comes to showing the value of your work to clients or your bosses. “how much have i cost the nhs” has a MSV of 26,000 and Go Compare have created the perfect tool to eat up that search interest. It’s also created branded search interest with “gocompare nhs calculator” at 200 MSV.

4️⃣ The British train station car park index by Veygo

📊 57 RDs, 56 DR 50+

Our next campaign was originally launched in 2019 by Veygo who created the British train station car park index to reveal which train stations have the most expensive car parking. This is another campaign that has the ability to give you such a big number of angles that you can turn into stories using the regional data - you’ve got the overall list that will appeal to Nationals, but then for each region you can also rank the most expensive car parks in the area that regional publications cover, for example, the most expensive train stations to park at in London, Manchester, etc.

Campaigns like this get repeated on an annual basis, usually by a different brand each time. Which means that there’s always coverage to be earned for some brand from a campaign idea that you have the luxury of being able to see how it has been covered in the past. It does also create what is for me a huge opportunity for a brand to really own formats like this as an annual report that they update each year.

This not only has the benefit of stopping other brands benefiting from the same idea in future years, but is a brilliant way of really establishing topical authority (assuming the idea is relevant to your brand and their target audience), not just with search engines but with your actual customers too. The chances of a brand being consciously connected with a piece of content after just one iteration is small, but it starts to rise in bigger steps each time you earn coverage from the same concept.

5️⃣ The cars most featured in video games by Carwow

📊 30 RDs, 17 DR 50+

Campaigns that find a way to connect two popular sectors together often seem to work really well when it comes to earning a strong number of links. This campaign by Carwow that reveals which car models are most often featured in video games is a great example of that in action, really seamlessly creating a piece of content that will have appeal not just to car fans, but video game fans too. The campaign uses data from Internet Game Cars Database, revealing that the most featured car make is Ford, shown in 8,707 games, and the most featured car model is the Volkswagen Beetle which is in 337 games.

Proving the point about how connecting two sectors together can increase results, the campaign earned links from gaming sites such as The Gamer and Gaming Dose, and car sites such as HotCars and MotorBiscuit (who made a great headline with “This Bug Is a Feature: The Surprising Car That's in More Video Games Than Any Other”). The campaign also earned international coverage in countries such as New Zealand and Spain, thanks to the global popularity of both cars and video games that aren’t tied to a specific region.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 48. 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 🙂