Using data in your digital PR campaigns will help to boost your brand visibility, trustworthiness and authority. It means your projects will appeal to both journalists and potential customers, increasing the chances of gaining backlinks and placements in a variety of publications.

 

Two types of data-driven digital PR

When talking about data-driven digital PR, people often refer to two different types. 

1. Data that you can track to judge PR effectiveness 

Instead of having no strategy at all, you're able to develop a more unified digital PR approach that provides results based on real data by utilising all of the accessible data. The heart of data-driven digital PR is keeping track of how well your strategy is doing. You can do this by tracking views, engagements and click-throughs by using tools such as Google Analytics. 

You can also analyse where media placements perform best and determine the best times to outreach for optimum visibility and engagement. When you put all of this information together, you'll be able to create a digital PR campaign that is a lot more effective.

2. Data to use within your digital PR campaigns

Using data and statistics in your press releases will elevate your digital PR campaigns. When you have actual data to back up your concepts and ideas, your brand is given more credibility and viewed as a trustworthy source. Some examples are great places for reliable data are: 

• Gov.uk
• World Health Organisation
• Google Public Data

Including consistent, trustworthy data improves the quality of your campaigns and will mean journalists are more likely to pick it up. This assists you in establishing solid long-term partnerships with these journalists and even publications as a whole.

As well as this, by accessing raw data, scraping it and looking at it from different angles, you’re sure to produce genuinely interesting campaigns. Instead of rehashing old ideas that everyone has already seen, brand new data is exciting and appeals to a wide range of people. 

 

Benefits of using data in your digital PR campaigns

Scraping and analysing raw data takes some time and can add hours to your campaign length. So, why should you bother? Take a look at the benefits of using reliable data in your future PR campaigns: 

• Beat your competitors 

If your competitors are constantly putting out campaigns that lack the foundations of a good data-set, they’re bound to be left behind. Put yourself in a journalist’s shoes, would you rather cover a story that has a dubious methodology and statements that do not have any facts behind them or a campaign that has data to back the claims?

These data-driven campaigns will earn you links in authoritative publications and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry. 

• Form connections with journalists

Providing journalists with regular and reliable data will help to build up stable, long-term partnerships. This symbiotic connection will mean they have a steady stream of content and they’re more likely to publish your campaigns with internal links to your site included. 

When gathering and analysing the data, keep in mind that a journalist is putting their name to your campaign, so they will be making sure all of the findings are factual and reliable. 

• Come up with unique ideas

Surprisingly, coming up with ideas that aren’t based on data but are still interesting to journalists is harder than finding angles in figures. Accessing raw data will mean you’re one of the first to see it and so have a headstart on being the ones to break news. 

Try it out for yourself, take a dataset and present it to your team. We’re sure they will have come up with multiple good ideas within 10 minutes. 

• Make your campaigns irresistible 

Campaigns that are unique, interesting and appealing to a wide selection of individuals are irresistible for journalists. After all, they want that story to take off as much as you do. 

If you have the data and campaigns that journalists want then you hold all the cards. You can ask for a link as credit for the hard work you put in which will help your other SEO and content marketing efforts. 

 

Sourcing reliable data

Sourcing high-quality datasets to build your upcoming projects on will mean your content is trustworthy and accurate. Here are some ways you can make sure the data you use and send out in your digital PR campaigns is reliable and strong: 

• Check to see if you have the latest data - To produce credible campaigns, you must check that your data is the latest version and that no other findings have been published that contradicts your point. If not, you run the risk of being questioned by journalists and publications. 

• Remain consistent - Maintaining consistency is another important component of using data in your digital PR campaigns. This means you will need to employ standardisation techniques to guarantee that your data is as accurate as possible, especially if you’re using a variety of sources or metrics.
   
• Create a strong methodology - A strong methodology is key in proving the credibility of the piece. This is where most journalists will verify whether a campaign is worth their time. It also because it boosts the transparency of your data collecting, making your brand more trustworthy.
   
• Account for all limitations - Make sure that your approach takes into consideration any limits in your procedures, as well as any data that you have chosen to discard. For example, if certain countries were left out of a worldwide study or answers disregarded in a survey. This should be accompanied by a detailed explanation of why this was done and how it hasn’t had a detrimental impact on your research. 

Learn more about how to ensure that the data you collect is high-quality 

So, whilst the importance of using data in your digital PR campaigns is great, making sure these findings are as accurate as possible is even more vital. Without verifying sources, removing bias and presenting consistent data, the chances of your campaign getting picked up are narrow. 

 

Need Help Collecting Primary Data?

At uStats.org, our team of highly qualified data analysts are on hand to assist brands with the creation of well-researched, authoritative and original datasets. So, if you want primary data for your next campaign without the hassle, email us today at info@ustats.org.