Why Most Businesses Fail at Data-Driven Digital PR Campaigns

Data-driven studies are popular, but so rarely done well! Here's what most businesses miss!

Digital PR has been on the rise ever since we were introduced to AI search because we don’t have too many options left to build backlinks and brand awareness.

And there are many reasons for that:

• Data-driven studies were also found to drive consistent search visibility if you plan them with SEO in mind.

• High-quality assets attract backlinks and brand mentions consistently, when done right. Both are important for search and LMM visibility.

• They build trust and get cited a lot.

• They drive relevance factors and brand positioning inside LLM training data.

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And yet, most of these campaigns fail miserably. In fact, there are so very few examples of businesses doing them right that we don’t even do competitive research for inspiration anymore.

Most of what we see is too mediocre for us to use as a sample of work done well.

Here’s why most businesses fail to make their digital PR strategy work:

1. Too much focus on scaling

Our industry has always been guilty of trying to scale everything to a point when it becomes easy to sell.

As I said before, if it is easy, it is not going to work because everyone can do “easy”.

Scaled PR campaigns fail to capture the attention of truly good publications. Now that many more businesses attempt to do those studies, it is becoming harder to stand out.

Most agencies want to sell more. But it is not about the volume. It is about creating something great each time to attract real signals.

At Smarty.Marketing we spend at least a month brainstorming, researching, and creating assets that have the biggest potential to do well.

2. Not enough time and effort to brainstorm truly great ideas

Brainstorming is the hardest and the most important part of the process. And yet most marketers neglect it. From what I’ve seen, most people simply use ChatGPT to generate idea lists.

I’ve said this before and I’ll die on this hill: ChatGPT cannot come up with something truly unique. It can give you some directions but a good idea needs much more work.

When brainstorming digital PR campaign ideas, we take time to:

• Read relevant subreddits to see which topics trigger active discussions

• Research available data and come up with angles that were never done before

• Look at relevant search queries and questions (We want those studies to be found organically long after it is published)

• Read stories that were done before by solid publications

3. Over-focusing on the wrong KPIs

Businesses tend to over-focus on old metrics. For digital PR, these are usually backlinks.

While we still like and report on backlinks, focusing on the link building aspect of digital PR means you oversee other metrics which are just as important.

For our campaigns, we look at:

• Brand mentions (linked and unlinked)

• Backlinks

• Organic visibility of each campaign

• LLM citations of each campaign

• Overall traffic and sources

• Reddit visibility and activity (how actively each campaign is discussed on Reddit)

This combination of different metrics gives a lot of data for a balanced success evaluation. A campaign may bring just a few good backlinks right away but then it will start driving many more through good organic visibility. This is as good (or even better) than a campaign that went viral (and then died out over time).

If you need help brainstorming, let me know! Data-driven PR is what we have been doing for more than 16 years!