THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 54

Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 54 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.

Press Gazette: Dubious experts deployed by MyJobQuote published more than 600 times in UK press

Aira: What is Digital PR? From strategy and tactics to measurement

The Drum: Digital PR is the way to win over LLMs

Off The Record: How to Get Your Stories in Journalists’ Christmas Baskets This December

Off The Record: Housing Journalism: How PR Pros Can Land Stronger Media Coverage

Motive PR: Best Christmas PR and marketing campaigns

Go Fish Digital: How to Build Evergreen Digital PR Campaigns That Keep Earning Links

NOVOS: Why PR is Now the Key to Training ChatGPT on Your Brand

Shakira Sacks on LinkedIn: Here are my top three tiny tweaks that will make a pitch stand out in the inboxes that are still open over the next few weeks

Stephen Kenwright: Small print with big impact

Google Trends: Year in Search 2025

Google Search Central: Introducing social channels in Search Console

Aleyda Solis: Top Black Friday Organic Search Traffic Winners & Trends in 2025

Search Engine Journal: Google Confirms Smaller Core Updates Happen Continuously

BuzzStream Podcast: What Makes a Compelling Survey Idea? with Talker Research’s Rick Maughan

The PR Hotline: How to Find Your Voice in PR, Build Authority and Confidently Step into Leadership Roles w/ Saskia Starritt

The Digital PR Summit: Tickets now on sale - April 22nd 2026

BuzzStream: State of Digital PR 2026 Survey - responses needed!

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

1️⃣ Know your target audience inside out. Then you’ll know exactly what sites they visit, what topics they engage with, and what they are motivated by. Once you know this your job becomes a lot easier.

2️⃣ Trying to stay on top of the news as it is breaking can be tiresome and quickly lead to fatigue. You don’t need to be on top of all the news, just the relevant news to you and your clients. Use tools like Feedly and Alerts tools to create your own tailored news feeds.

3️⃣ Looking for links for your campaign? Also monitor links pointing to other sites covering your campaign and see if you can get them to update the link to your campaign as the original source.

4️⃣ Your outreach success is relative to your objectives, budget, time you can invest in the campaign, scope of the target audience for the content and a lot of other things. One thing it's not relative to is the extreme highs that people celebrate in public.

5️⃣ Pitching to international Journalists in the UK or US? Remember that it's not just currencies and measuring systems you have to change but also spellings of certain words. Some words can also have different meanings to UK vs US journalists.

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 Pinterest Predicts 2026

The annual Pinterest Predicts report was released yesterday which is always a huge hit with PRs. The report has so many different uses for campaign planning and production whether it be inspo for campaign topics, spotting trends to create expert commentary stories around, better understanding audience behaviour, finding seasonal trends, and of course, the data points themselves.

2️⃣ Digital 2026 Global Overview Report

The 2026 edition of Data Reportal’s Global Digital Report recently came out and includes an incredible amount of data and insights on how people use the internet and social media. The report is based on global data but there are also versions for virtually every country available too. Also a really great report for understanding online audience behaviour.

3️⃣ 2026 World’s Best Cities Report

The World Best Cities Report is an annual ranking of exactly what it says on the tin, the best cities in the world. The report is a classic index based on 33 different metrics which you can read about here. As well as being data that you could include as a metric in your own index campaigns, the methodology page is also a great source of data inspo from the different 33 ranking factors that are used.

4️⃣ FinanceCharts.com

FinanceCharts is a similar site to CompaniesMarketCap.com which I’ve shared previously and is a fantastic resource for finance data on companies around the world. While there is a lot of overlap between the two, FinanceCharts is another great site to keep bookmarked and to bring to ideations if you’re looking at finance or business topics. The site has some great reports around finance metrics for companies such as share prices, market cap, profits, dividends, and much more.

5️⃣ U.S. Job Cuts Announcement Report

This report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas has some really interesting data analysing publicly announced job cuts in corporate America. The data is split by industry as well as states which could make for a great ranking factor in work and business based indexes.

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 happiest cities and states in the United States by HouseFresh

📊 67 RDs, 25 DR 50+

With many campaign ideas there’s often more than one way of executing the concept you have in mind. The happiest/best places to live is a fairly common concept. However, just because the idea isn’t massively unique itself, that doesn’t mean that your execution of the idea can’t be unique. There are a number of different ways you might see a story like this produced, it could be via life satisfaction scores, a survey, or sentiment analysis of online posts. Here, HouseFresh (who do a lot of really cool data campaigns) have used a facial recognition tool to analyse the facial expressions of Instagram posts that are geo-tagged to locations around America.

In doing so they’ve created a methodology that’s not only unique but also catches the attention of the reader in a more intriguing way than just “we surveyed…” would, while also having the benefit of producing a much larger sample size than other formats may be able to provide, something that is really important when analysing data at a regional level.

I also really like how transparent and detailed they are with explaining the methodology of their data collection, and how they’ve differentiated between posts which have the biggest smiles vs ones that are the “happiest”. A really great example of what is possible with data campaigns when you go the extra mile combining your data collection with a healthy dose of creativity.

2️⃣ Holiday 100 by Google

📊 196 RDs, 74 DR 50+

One of my favourite starting points when trying to come up with campaign ideas that will really connect with your target audience is to list different pain points that they might have and how your brand can present helpful solutions to those problems. This is a really great example of that.

For the last two years Google has produced their Holiday 100 list - a collection of 100 of the top trending products on Google Trends, launched each year in November just in time for the holiday season. Obviously not everyone will have the luxury of having a brand like Google where anything you create will be newsworthy, but this is a great example of how any brand can utilise their own internal data in a creative and genuinely helpful way that can be used to position themselves as one of the top brands that customers associate with specific topics, as Google have done here when it comes to online shopping.

3️⃣ The Cost of Getting Your Driving Licence in Every State by EZLicence

📊 11 RDs, 9 DR 50+

Speaking of creating content that is genuinely helpful for your target audience, this next campaign by EZLicence is another good example of that in action. In this campaign they’ve researched how much learner drivers have to spend before they get their full licence in each state of Australia, covering the cost of a provisional licence, driving lessons and tests.

It’s interesting that the average learner in Australia takes approximately 6 one-hour driving lessons. Apparently the average in the UK is 45 hours of professional driving lessons plus 22 hours of private practice. Comparing stats like that across different countries could make for an interesting campaign idea. I really like the interactive elements on the campaign page too that enhance the storytelling aspect for users.

As well as earning links on some of the top regional news publications in Australia, the campaign page which has only been live for a few months already ranks for over 200 keywords and earns nearly 400 monthly organic sessions.

4️⃣ The Best Cities for Solo Female Travellers by InsureMyTrip

📊 99 RDs, 34 DR 50+

Continuing the theme of campaigns that serve as a genuinely useful tool for a brand’s target audience, this index campaign from InsureMyTrip is another great case study of how content can be helpful as well as earning great PR coverage. Here, they’ve created an index ranking the best cities for women to visit when travelling on their own.

The index covers eight different ranking factors and I like how they’ve split the metrics equally between those that cover the best tourist spots and data points relating to female safety. This helps to make the index easier for readers to understand but also allows InsureMyTrip to break cities down by each individual category as well as the overall final ranking.

This is an annual campaign that InsureMyTrip update each year, and I like how they’ve now incorporated comparisons to previous years’ rankings to show how cities are improving/declining. After the first year, the campaign page had 27 referring domains, which is of course pretty good going. But by revisiting the campaign each year, the page has grown to 99 referring domains now, adding sites such as BBC News, Forbes and The Telegraph that didn’t cover the original index but have done so in subsequent years. I know I probably say this almost every issue, but for those of you who are new here - update your index campaigns each year, especially if they get results the first time round!

5️⃣ This House Does Not Exist

📊 222 RDs, 54 DR 50+

The great thing about producing PR campaigns for me is that there are so many different ways to produce something that gets results. For the last few campaigns we’ve focused on stories that help to solve pain points that your target audience might have. Another format that I like is “cool shit gets links”, and this is one that falls into that category.

This House Does Not Exist is a really cool project that with the click of a button instantly creates a super realistic image of a modern house. A lot of these “cool shit gets links” examples tend to come from content creators that create stuff “for the love of the game” so to speak, more so than brands producing them as part of their PR activity. But I do think there’s a opportunity for more brands to utilise content formats like this because the results speak for themselves - over 2,000 backlinks from 222 total referring domains including sites like New York Times, Architectural Digest, Wallpaper*, and Fast Company.

And that’s a wrap for Issue 54. 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 🙂