THE DIGITAL PR OBSERVER NEWSLETTER ISSUE 8
Hey everyone. Welcome to Issue 8 of The Digital PR Observer Newsletter.
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
The latest Digital PR jobs
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.
Digital PR Tips: My Digital PR Wishlist for 2025
Digital PR Tips: How Digital PRs Have Changed Their Strategy in 2024
Digital PR Tips: My Favourite Christmas Campaigns
Famous Campaigns: The top 50 creative brand marketing campaigns of 2024
Prowly: PR Trends 2025 Report
FATJOE: How to Create a Winning Link Building Plan in 2025 (That Actually Works)
BuzzStream: How I TRIPLED Organic Traffic in 12 Months By Focusing on Value, Not Search
The PR Insider: How to Secure Last-Minute Christmas Press Coverage for Your eCommerce Brand
Correct Digital: A Beginner’s Guide to Digital PR
Propellernet: How Propellernet’s Digital PR Team Turned Data into Viral News in 2024
Isa Lavahun: 15 Winning PR Predictions and Strategies You Need to Know for 2025
LoftTalk Webinar: How to Get The Most Out of Your Marketing Agency in 2025
Search Engine Land: Google December 2024 core update rolling out now
Five quick fire Digital PR tips to help make you better and more efficient at getting SEO results via Digital PR:
1️⃣ If your content isn’t adding anything new to the conversation, it’s not newsworthy. If your contribution isn’t unique it’s unlikely to get any pick up. Find where your expertise fit into a missing piece of the conversation.
2️⃣ When you conduct a link gap analysis for your site, make a note of the big publications in your industry that are linking to your competitors but not your site. Then study what type of content those sites are covering so you can deliver them relevant content to reduce that link gap.
3️⃣ If your campaigns gets a bunch of dodgy looking links, the vast majority of the time you don’t need to worry about disavowing them in Search Console. Google will just ignore them and they won’t do any damage.
4️⃣ If you're running a campaign and anticipating driving a lot of new users to your site, consider what on site changes you could make to help keep these users on your site and convert them into customers, e.g. updating your copy, optimising internal links on landing pages, promoting new customer discounts, highlighting reviews, etc
5️⃣ With obvious exceptions there are very few hard and fast rules when it comes to outreach. Some think emojis help, some don't. Sometimes you just gotta trust your gut as you start to learn the preferences of individual 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 Mavin.io
In one of the earlier issues I shared Average Finder, a tool that shows you the average selling price of different items sold on eBay. Mavin is a similar tool built on the same basic concept. If you’re looking at more of a category level than a specific product, Mavin may be a better alternative. A great tool for potential content ideas but also a great one if you’re looking to find out how much value your old collectables may be worth (or unwanted presents 👀).
2️⃣ AllTheRooms
The analytics section of AllTheRooms has some fascinating data about the rental market in local areas. It says global data but I’m not sure how expansive the dataset would be in every country. However, the ones I’ve tested in UK and US look like very valuable. You need to pay to unlock some of the data, and anything past the last three months, but the $49/month plan is probably all you need.
There’s loads of data but for an overview you can get data on how much properties in any postcode/zip code are being rented out for, and how popular the rental market in that area is, both now and over time.
3️⃣ Ask A Manager 2024 Salary Survey
This survey by Ask A Manager has some amazing insights on salary details for a whole range of sectors in the US. Over 13,000 responses that’s broken down by state, remote working status, experience, education, gender, and race.
4️⃣ Ask A Manager 2024 PTO Survey
Another amazing research project by Ask A Manager, this time looking at how many days off work different sectors get each year. The vast majority of the responses are US based with some from Canada too, but probably not a large enough sample size for any country outside the US. Really interesting insights whether you use them for content or just to benchmark against for your own role.
5️⃣ Euonia
This last one is a bit of a weird one. It’s a database of words that don’t translate to anything else in other languages. Interesting to have a look through (I’ve barely ever heard of any of the English ones) and could be a cool project for a languages brand to look at which languages have the most “untranslatable” words.
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.
Since it’s the festive season, I’m focusing on Christmas themed campaigns here this month ☃️
1️⃣ The Cost of Christmas Past & Present by musicMagpie
📊 12 RDs DR 50+
Such a cool nostalgic trip down memory lane. This campaign by musicMagpie lists the most popular Christmas present every year from 1970 to 2020, and looks at how much presents from previous years would cost in modern money, and what percentage of our income we spend on Christmas presents each year. A really cool data led piece full of nostalgic memories!
2️⃣ Bounty bars removed from Celebrations tubs in trial by Mars Wrigley
I absolutely loved this PR stunt by Mars Wrigley to “remove” Bounty bars from Celebrations boxes. Everyone has that one chocolate that they hate in selection boxes, and the Bounty bar is the epitome of the “give these to the one weirdo who likes them”. They’re divisive and everyone has an opinion on them, the perfect recipe for a PR stunt!
The campaign itself was really clever in its execution, cause of course they weren’t really removed. It was part of a trial at a limited number of supermarket stores. But none of that really matters when it comes to creating a PR campaign like this, which for Celebrations, is all about getting people talking about their product and creating a favourable brand impression during the Christmas shopping season.
Celebrations know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to Bounty related PR stunts. They also regularly do limited edition Bounty only Celebrations tubs, and this year, very cheekily made the first three days of their Advent Calendar, all Bounty bars.
3️⃣ £750 Christmas Crackers by Harrods
A really underrated campaign format that I often see work well is taking a product and creating a crazy expensive version of it as a PR stunt. Obviously it has to be for the right brand, but Harrods definitely fits into that criteria. Here they created Christmas Crackers that cost £750. Bit out of my price range. For many brands, doing this during a cost of living crisis would seem a bad move, but if anything, it feels like it makes it even more of a story, and Harrods are a brand that can get away with something like this.
In my Digital PR 2025 Wishlist post, I talked about how I’d love to see more creativity from Digital PR campaigns next year. I think this is a great example of creative PR that doesn’t have to be a massive budget campaign with big OOH activations. The campaign got amazing coverage on sites like TimeOut, The Mirror, Evening Standard, and more, but is a classic example of how creative PR campaigns like this can leave money on the table without that SEO focus to also earn backlinks from all of that coverage.
4️⃣ Sleigh Another Day - East 17 Doorstep Tour by Ring
📊 16 RDs DR 50+
God I love this. Ring (the company that makes doorbell cameras) gave people the chance to have East 17 turn up and sing on their doorstep, in a campaign magnificently titled “Sleigh Another Day”. When I say I want to see more Digital PR teams taking risks with their creativity, what I really mean is I want to see more silly concepts like this.
Unfortunately though for Ring, they built all the links to the booking form on DesignMyNight’s website rather than their own. Ooops! Could their SEO team could take the pain?
5️⃣ The 3 Way Cracker by HANX
📊 0 RDs DR 50+
I love the creativity of this campaign by HANX, creating a 3 way Christmas Cracker as a cheeky creative take on polyamorous relationships. If you saw the campaign at the time you might remember it as being one that did really well and got loads of coverage.
Except, it kinda didn’t. No backlinks to the campaign page and no traditional press coverage from what I can find. But it got loads of coverage on sites like Campaign Live and Creative Brief. A good reminder that just because you see a cool creative concept that gets loads of shares on LinkedIn, doesn’t necessarily mean it will translate into a lot of PR coverage on sites that the brand’s audience are reading.
6️⃣ How much Christmas Songs make on Spotify each year by “Nofollow Designs”
I wanted to add a bonus one to the final round up of Christmas campaigns. This is actually one that I did myself back in 2020 for a totally made up brand called “Nofollow Designs” (lolololol), analysing how much Christmas songs make each year on Spotify. And it got covered on Variety! Still one of my favourite links that I’ve ever built.
The point of why I wanted to share this one outside of a little humble brag, is that literally any brand can get great PR coverage and backlinks, as long as they have an interesting story to share. Even if the brand is a made up one and the website looks absolutely god awful.
In this section, you’ll find some of the latest Digital PR roles being advertised. If you’re currently hiring for a Digital PR role and want the position advertising here, you can add it using this form.
Likewise, if you’re looking for a new Digital PR role and are happy to have that advertised, drop me an email and I’m happy to give you a “looking for work” plug in this section too!
Position: Digital PR Executive at AddPeople (Agency)
Location: Altrintcham, UK
Remote/Office Split: 2 days a week in office
Salary: Up to £30,000
How to Apply: Jack.jolly@addpeople.co.uk
Position: Campaign Manager at Shout Bravo (Acquired by Incubeta) (Agency)
Location: Manchester
Remote/Office Split: 2 days a week in office
Salary: Up to £40,000
How to Apply: hello@shoutbravo.com
Position: Digital PR Executive at Shout Bravo (Acquired by Incubeta) (Agency)
Location: Manchester
Remote/Office Split: 2 days a week in office
Salary: £26,000
How to Apply: hello@shoutbravo.com
And that’s a wrap for Issue 8. See you again in a couple of weeks after the holidays 🎄
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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
The latest Digital PR jobs
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 🙂
18 December 2024
