A Content Goldmine: Using Internal Data Sources for Digital PR 

At the Nottingham Digital Summit 2024, Tank digital PR account director, Rebecca Peel talked to visitors about leveraging business data to deliver a story that media publications can’t help but share! This blog summarises her insightful talk.

What is Digital PR?

By now, most people know that a key goal for content is to rank on Google. Also, that if you want people to land on your page, there are many content based and technical aspects involved. Most businesses are aware of on-page SEO tactics such as keywords and internal linking from page to page. However, one of the most important factors is external links – which is where digital PR comes in. 

Digital PR is a hybrid of PR and SEO. Just as traditional PR uses multiple channels to achieve media coverage, digital PR also utilises the marketing tactics of SEO to get good quality external links to your website pages.  

Getting a Page to Rank With Backlinks

Let’s say a company wanted to rank for “indoor houseplant” on its main commercial page (shown here in pink).

It would aim to make sure other pages on its site included sub-topics that relate to it such as “How to care for my houseplant”, “How often should I water my houseplant?” or “Which houseplant is right for my room?” linking back to the main page – all key to internal linking structure. These are represented in the illustration in green. 

In blue, we see campaigns that are also held on your site and just as important for internal links bringing users back to your main page.

But one of the most important ranking factors is getting external links back to these blue campaign pages which we call backlinks.

Data-Driven Digital PR

It’s becoming harder and harder now to get external links from press and media sources, as general awareness of their importance increases. You need to be able to give them a story with a new angle or hook.

Most of the time a great story is built on gathering a load of data and turning it into a story. In fact, there are 277 data-led stories published every single day in the UK – according to our analysis using Google news as a source in September. Suitable data is usually categorised as either qualitative or quantitative and further split into the following four sets:

Qualitative data such as gender, hair colour, ethnicity

Ordinal data, also qualitative, has natural ordered categories such as 1st, 2nd, 3rd, school grades, or economic status 

Discrete data is exactly quantifiable and could show the number of students in a class, workers in a company or goals scored in a football game

Continuous data is quantitative and could take any value such as height, weight or speed, and could change over time

Of course, journalists themselves are also cottoning on to this method and even executing it themselves. So, how can we give them something that stands out and they feel a need to share and are inclined to link back to?

People Love Neatly Wrapped Data

Many businesses have jumped on the back of the “Spotify Wrapped” concept that collates data from customers and displays it back to them in a creative way they actually enjoy seeing. A couple of other companies wrapping content in this way are Monzo which shows “how you spent your year, as told by your bank” as well as national statistics and industry insights. 

One Tank employee found out they were in the top ten buyers of chicken sausages in the UK!

Tinder can show you data surrounding your swipes and likes and other such data that maybe you don’t want to see but can’t help exploring.

Key to these is that they are based on original, internal data that does not need to be sourced from outside and is not widely open to external parties – like journalists. And this is exactly the content “goldmine” you’re sitting on.

A Digital PR Goldmine: Original and Internal Data

Businesses have heaps of data. If you’re working in a business, start to have a think about what data you could use. Most companies have email or sign-up data, or data from survey respondents. If you’re working on behalf of a business, take a look at what your client has and can share with you.

Tank ran an analysis with one client after finding out it had internal data from 2000 surveys that it was sitting on but was unsure of its value. This data is something no one else had access to, and we used it to create a report full of industry insights, building a story around it.

Data with a Human Interest

A story that works best is based on data that people can’t help but look at, and usually falls under these categories:

Consumer Trend Data
Think about trends like “drinks sold during the England game at UEFA Euro 2024”. It’s easy to get if you’re a pub till software provider, and also interesting for consumers, hospitality press and national press alike. 

Products in Demand 
Can you find a correlation between a hot topic and data you have in your goldmine? Just like M&S did when it announced a spike in UK waistcoat sales after England manager Gareth Southgate wore one.

Comparable Data
If you are operating in multiple areas, you might find data to compare regions or industries. You could build a story that pits one or two datasets against each other or create a visual map. 

Search Increases
If you’re seeing a spike in data such as search volume around certain topics, really take a look at why there’s been an increase. Is it to do with popular culture trends? Or an international day? What’s the hook? Who would find that data interesting? 

Finding Your Data Content Goldmine

You’ve likely got more data than you realise. Even if it is low in volume, it’s niche and no-one else has access to it; therein lies its power. That being said, there are a few things to keep in mind when selecting data to transform into a story.

If you’re using your data to add relatable insights around current events, you really need to get your data on time and out fast. For one hospitality client, we were given the data in the morning surrounding pint sales data during the Euros, and analysed it, and turned it into a press release within four hours. Journalists are time-precious so we have to make sure that we’re working to their timelines – they’re not waiting on us. 

When identifying trends in your niche, let the data speak for itself rather than trying to start, push or even steal a trend. The trend should be informed, authentic and develop naturally from your data.

Your data should help you to become a reliable source for press. If you get it right and the data is reliable, press contacts will come back to you. 

Raw Data Can Be Intimidating 

When sourcing data, think about what problems customers face and create a data brief. A structured data brief should help you get structured raw data to start with. Clean, accurate data and the methodology here is also just as important, especially if media partners want you to prove the reliability of your data and accuracy of the story you’re telling. Work together with other colleagues or your digital PR agency to make sure you’re reading the data accurately.

Once you’ve got the raw data you can start to find patterns to build a story that you would personally want to read in the news. That’s your hook. That’s not to say you should eliminate data that might not be relevant, in fact it’s better to pull as much data as possible. You may find additional trends for further content pieces. 

Playing around with the dataset(s) may take some time. Finding a pattern and considering what the angle is requires some analysis. However when you dive into it, you could pull multiple hooks that will form the basis of really good content that impresses media partners who will in turn publish the content and link back to the page you’re trying to push. 

What Story is Your Internal Data Telling?

Your business is sitting on a content goldmine just waiting to be used for digital PR. Gathering and analysing your internal data will help you find your story and newshook to give the press something they are happy to share with external links back to you as a source.

Google should then reward you with organic rankings if it sees publications regularly providing relevant and reliable external links (backed up by quality content) to your site.