Why are the first few weeks of the year in PR land so crazy busy?
Well, any company which truly wants great PR should be collecting great data. This allows us to release interesting reviews of the previous year, and this can be for both light-hearted consumer media or robust data suitable for B2B and trade media.
Want to know what data-led PR campaigns have kept us particularly busy at the start of 2023?
We planned and released a number of campaigns for our PR clients and here are two key campaigns reviewing the previous year.
Firstly, following our advice, our long-standing client Vet-AI’s app Joii Pet Care reviewed the most popular cat and dog names it was able to capture from its online vet customers in 2022 for consumer media. We then drafted a heart-warming ‘here are the most popular cat and dog names of 2022’ article with tables showing the difference of cat and dog names in 2022 compared to 2021. This was of interest because people love to see how they compare and it reached our key target audience of pet owners who will click and read the article to see if their pets names have made the top 10 list (you’ll notice this story does the rounds each year on the most popular babies names too.)
Proving you don’t need to be a corporate giant to gain the top level media coverage, we successfully placed Joii Pet Care’s story in several places, gaining coverage on Yahoo! News and aol.com. This has supported the business by increasing brand awareness and credibility as Joii Pet Care as an expert in all things pet-related to thousands of readers, particularly pet owners across the UK.
And this approach works for more serious hard-hitting business stories with data to back it up too.
As I write this, we’re still securing targeted business and HR media coverage for Champion Health’s 2023 Workplace Wellbeing report which looks at the wellbeing of more than 4,000 employees last year. There was so much data to sift through, it was a tricky job to pull out the most newsworthy stats and understand what to lead with as the headline. However with my 14+ years PR and marketing expertise behind me combined with my passion for supporting positive mental health and suicide prevention, having seen the shocking rise of employees experiencing suicidal thoughts, my gut told me this was the key line to grab both the journalists and their readers attention and it turns out I was right!
To date we’ve gained 20 targeted pieces of coverage in the campaign’s first week and a bit, plus those all-important backlinks to the report to aid Champion Health’s SEO and our work is far from done yet!
If you want to capitalise on the next new year media frenzy ensure you’re collecting data this year which can be made newsworthy, with a plan confirmed by December so you’re ready to go early in the new year and see the fruits of your labour by the end of January.
Here are some top tips to keep in mind:
- Collect data this year – think about your newsworthy angles in advance
- Ensure you have a data sample of at least 2,000 respondents
- Get your plan confirmed by December -what you’re going to do, what your newsworthy hook is and who will be interested/which media to target
- Warm up your key media contacts early January
- Get it out before the competition
- Set up alerts to track your coverage, competitors and other keywords to find further journalists and continue to add to your media lists
And hey presto, you’ve started the new year with a bang!
Missed the boat this year? There’s still plenty more you can do with data. Get in touch to discuss our PR support further.
