How to Use Data to Supercharge your Digital PR Success (Case Study)
Data can be a powerful tool for many aspects of your digital strategy, digital PR included. In fact, you can use data to transform your digital PR campaigns and drive quality links. We explore how we used public domain data to develop a compelling campaign that earned links in top tier publications, including the likes of Sky News, Huffington Post and Daily Mirror. And if you’re looking to do the same, we also offer our top advice for using data to supercharge your digital PR success.
What’s in this article?
- Key takeaways
- Case study: turning data into a PR campaign
- Why should you use data for your digital PR campaigns?
- Top 5 data sources for digital PR campaigns
Key takeaways:
- Journalists love unique data with interesting angles, so we recommend using this to your advantage to gain quality coverage for your stories.
- Leveraging data can provide added credibility to your stories and position your brand as a thought-leader in your industry.
- There are multiple ways to source data, such as using your own website, social insights, and public resources.
Case study: turning data into a PR campaign
Learn more about how we turned raw data into a successful PR campaign for our client, Your Overseas Home…
Defining the campaign objectives
Your Overseas Home is a property website for people looking to relocate or buy a second home abroad. The website offers a wealth of informative assets to help home buyers in their property purchase journey, as well as listing thousands of properties in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus.
For the past six years, Your Overseas Home has undertaken research to reveal the true cost of living in some of the most popular move-abroad destinations – but they’ve always found it difficult to disseminate the information and get the projects the attention they deserve.
With this in mind and in the context of the cost of living crisis that has been gripping the UK and world more generally, we worked to produce The Overseas Cost of Living Index 2023, with the aim of increasing brand awareness and driving backlink acquisition from top-tier media.
“I’ve been doing this cost of living index for 6 years. I’m so pleased we finally have an agency that gets it the publicity it deserves!”
Christopher Nye, senior editor at Your Overseas Home
Understanding our audience
Your Overseas Homes’ clients and readers are generally in their 50s and 60s. They have bought and sold homes, paid off mortgages, enjoyed dozens of foreign holidays, rose to the top of their careers, and have grown-up children. They’re experienced and knowledgeable with life savings. They are also adventurous, energetic and up for a new challenge.
But because the main aims of this campaign were to increase brand awareness and encourage backlinks from top-tier media, we also wanted to target the average consumer who was interested in and reading about the cost of living crisis more generally, as this campaign offers real and genuinely insightful data.
Implementation and creativity
To meet the brief and secure quality, relevant online coverage and links, we produced The Overseas Cost of Living Index 2023, launching it at the start of the new year.
We researched and compared the cost of everything from staple items like bread and milk, to furniture, car hire, petrol, train tickets, coffee, newspapers and even books and video games. We used this data to see which European countries offer the most value for money.
Covering seven of the most popular countries to move abroad, this index includes Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Cyprus, and Greece. Unlike similar indexes, The Overseas Cost of Living Index 2023 reveals the cost of setting up a proper home abroad and living there long term, rather than just the cost of a short trip or visiting temporarily.
So, as well as looking at the price of everyday staples like milk and a loaf of bread, The Overseas Cost of Living Index 2023 also compares typical prices for decorating materials, furniture, electricals, hiring domestic cleaners, and more.
Our results and coverage
Our data-led campaign saw great success and gained 34 items of coverage with an average Domain Rating (DR) of 55. This included 22 links overall and 12 ‘follow’ links, which equates to a 69% link to coverage rate.
We earned coverage and backlinks from high authority media sites in the UK and abroad including:
- Sky News
- Huffington Post
- Daily Mirror
- Rightmove
- The Sun
- The Scottish Sun
- Yahoo! News
- Metro
- Daily Record
- Daily Express
- Greek City Times
- Le Petit Journal
Why should you use data for your digital PR campaigns?
Leveraging data can be an excellent way to supercharge your digital PR stories and improve their success rates, earning you more coverage. Here are some more benefits of using data for your digital PR stories:
- Identify a unique angle
- Support your claims
- Build a compelling story
- Create accompanying infographics
- Spark a conversation
- Improve domain authority
- Build lasting journalist relationships
1. Identify a unique angle
Data can help you identify unique and interesting angles for your stories. By looking for patterns, trends and insights in your data, you can come up with a newsworthy angle that is relevant to your target audience, and that no one else has thought about before!
2. Support your claims
Using data can bring a sense of reliability to your story and help you build trust with your readers, and the journalists covering your story. This can make journalists more inclined to cover your story.
3. Build a compelling story
Incorporating data into your pitch can make it more compelling and increase the chances of it being picked up by journalists. Data-driven stories are often more interesting and informative, and can help position your brand as a thought-leader in your industry. Telling a story with your data will make it more memorable and help towards building brand awareness.
4. Create accompanying infographics
Infographics are a visually appealing way to present data and can help make your story more engaging – they are also ‘shareable’ on social media! By presenting your data in a clear and digestible format, you can help your audience understand your story better, so it is more likely to resonate with them.
5. Spark a conversation
Data can be used to present a story in a thought-provoking way, which encourages your audience to share their thoughts and opinions, creating more of a buzz around your story.
6. Improve domain authority
Data is not only a key trust point for readers, but search engines, too. Using reliable data sources signals to Google that you are an authoritative site, which can increase domain authority and have a positive impact on rankings and website traffic.
7. Build lasting journalist relationships
Outreaching to journalists with high-quality data-driven stories can help you become a go-to trusted source for data, and they may be more likely to get in touch with you for future stories or contributions. Learn more about building PR-journalist relationships.
Top 5 data sources for digital PR campaigns
There are a number of different source you can use to gather data for your digital PR stories, including:
1. Your own data
Your own data refers to any data that you have collected or generated from your own marketing, website or sales activities, such as website analytics, email marketing metrics, online sales or enquiries. By analysing this type of data, you can gain insights into the behaviour and preferences of your target audience and use this to build a story. For example, you may notice some of your product sales peak seasonally, a certain demographic prefer certain products, or certain products sell more in particular locations. Although on the surface, this information may not seem like much, when inspected more closely, there might just be a story to tell!
2. Survey data
Survey data is collected by asking a group of people specific questions to gather their opinions and attitudes towards a particular topic or issue. This kind of data can be collected using various methods, such as in-person interviews or online questionnaires. The great thing about surveys is that you can formulate your own questions and ensure you get a comprehensive picture of the story you’re trying to tell. It is also excellent for collecting first-hand insights, original ideas and multiple perspectives.
3. Public domain data
Public domain data is any data that is freely available to the public and can be accessed without restrictions. This includes government data or industry reports, for example YouGov, ONS or Statista. You can use public domain data to draw insights into industry trends and consumer behaviour, which can then be used to inform your PR stories. It is particularly useful for identifying emerging trends and can be used to create innovative stories, which have the potential to even go viral.
4. Social media data
There are plenty of insights readily available on social media, using data points such as engagement metrics (likes, shares and comments) , hashtags, geotags and more. Social media is a fantastic tool to use for creating stories about ‘the most instagrammable X’ or influencer follower growth, for example.
5. Search engine data
Search engine data is another free source of data that is generated from search engines, such as Google or Bing. Using various tools, such as Google Trends, you can uncover the topics or keywords people are searching for online. For example, you could identify the top search terms related to certain industries and use this insight to fuel your stories.
See our list of the best digital PR campaigns to find out how we use data to create killer campaigns. And if you like what you see, why not check out our Digital PR services or get in touch to find out how we can help you replicate these incredible results?
