The formats we keep coming back to.
Most of our digital PR campaigns fall into five families:
- Data studies. We analyse a dataset and publish findings a reporter can build a piece on. The craft behind these sits on our data-led PR page.
- Surveys. Commissioned polling that puts a fresh number on something people already argue about.
- Indexes and rankings. Comparisons of places, products or sectors that hand every regional desk its own local line.
- Seasonal hooks. Planned months ahead around the moments journalists have to cover anyway.
- Reactive commentary. A spokesperson answering the day's news at speed, which is expert comment doing campaign work.
A good programme mixes them, because no single format survives every news cycle.
From idea to coverage, stage by stage.
Take a garden furniture retailer as a worked example. Insight: their sales data shows rattan orders spiking whenever a heatwave is forecast. Angle: Britain buys its summer three days before it arrives. Asset: a short data piece with regional splits, a quotable spokesperson line and clean methodology notes. Pitch: consumer and lifestyle journalists who cover retail trends, approached individually, plus regional desks with their local numbers. Coverage: the pieces that publish, logged with links and reach.
The example is anonymised but the shape is real, and it is the same five stages whatever the sector.
What separates a campaign that lands from one that dies.
Campaigns die of vagueness. The ones that land have one clear finding, a headline a sub-editor could lift without rewriting, and a spokesperson willing to say something with edges. They also respect the reader: a survey built to flatter the client produces a story nobody wants to file.
Before we pitch anything we apply the unsentimental test: would this get opened, and would it get filed, if it arrived from a stranger. If the honest answer is no, the idea goes back in the drawer and a better one comes out.
Timing is half the job.
A strong story pitched in the wrong week is a weak story, so we plan digital PR campaigns around the news calendar: seasonal pieces briefed months out, data studies held back from budget days and by-elections, survey fieldwork timed so the findings are still fresh when the pitch goes out. Embargoes give long-lead desks time to prepare without losing the news moment.
Reactive commentary is the hedge. When the diary story gets crowded out, a fast quote on the day's news often rescues the month.
What you see at the end of the month.
Every campaign closes with a plain report: coverage secured, where it published, which pieces carried links, and what we pitched that did not land, with our honest reading of why. No padding, no vanity metrics dressed up as strategy.
If you want a feel for how these play out in practice, our campaign examples guide walks through the archetypes without the confidential bits.