Good quality data should be an asset every digital PR strives to achieve within a campaign. This, coupled with ideation, a smart team and strong media relationships can make for a very powerful digital PR campaign.
Yet, data can be a minefield. We know it can appear over facing and a little ‘scary’, but it’s important to get to grips with what is out there and readily available for us, to help achieve impactful results.
Here at Smoking Gun we know what a good idea looks like, and we love getting into the nitty gritty of data.
We’ve compiled four of our favourite, go-to data sources to really make your digital PR campaign pop…
Client sales data
We’ll start with the most obvious, but having access to a clients sales data can throw up a wealth of insight which can prove to be invaluable for digital PR campaigns. Every website has data of some kind, and sometimes it’s just about looking at it a little differently, and giving it a PR spin.
Chat bot functions can be particularly useful, when looking at trends and understanding what customers might be searching for at a particular time – this insight can then feed into your data-led digital PR newsmaking.
Reddit is a social network like no other, throwing up discussions, visualisations and data on almost every topic you can think of. It’s great for ideation and inspiration for your digital PR campaign, and it also helps with new business proposals too.
Spend some time on the platform getting to know its functions – it can appear overwhelming, but like anything, once you get to grips with it, it becomes much easier to navigate.
Office of National Statistics
ONS is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics and it covers a wealth of topics such as employment, UK population and inflation to name a few.
This is a hugely reliable source of free data, whether you need a quick stat to add to a current release, or you’re basing a whole digital PR campaign around a report they issue.
A contact at the Daily Telegraph told us that they sit down and go through ONS release reports every week, so always be one step ahead, and do your research.
Desk Research
This is where all those years at university pay off. No need for a trip to the library, just a laptop, a cup of tea and some brain power.
We ran a campaign for a client looking at driving laws that drivers may not know about and could be breaking. This required extensive desk research, but the results were exceptional with high tier coverage across a number of national publications.
These data sources are just scratching the surface, there are many more out there. If you’re just starting out with your digital PR campaign, then remember to consider data at ideation stage – does your idea work with the data you have, or does it need tweaking to ensure it’s as factual and newsworthy as possible?
If you need a helping hand, then don’t hesitate to contact us at Smoking Gun.
