If you work in the marketing and PR industry, you will likely see outstanding PR campaigns featured in the press regularly; some of these campaigns might have even come from you and your PR agency!
Whilst this is great to see, it can sometimes feel overwhelming when it seems like every campaign idea under the sun has already been used by someone else. It could leave you questioning, how can I come up with a unique campaign idea no one has thought of before?
Firstly, if you’ve suffered from brain fog in an ideation session before, you are not alone. Working in the PR industry can often make you feel like you need to be churning out new ideas constantly, but this isn’t realistic, and this could actually mean you’re coming up with ideas that aren’t relevant to your clients brand at all.
Secondly, there’s always a unique idea that hasn’t been touched on yet; it just requires a little bit more research (and patience). With this in mind, our Senior Digital PR Executive, Mollie Haley-Earnshaw, shares eight of Wild PR’s favourite sources of digital PR inspiration:
Answer the Public
Sometimes an idea can be sparked by simply getting an understanding of what your audience is searching for. Answer The Public is a keyword tool that visualises search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in an image called a search cloud. The categories consist of the 5 Ws (who, what, where, when, why) plus ‘how’, ‘can’, ‘are’, ‘which’ and ‘will’. The phrases generated on this tool might just inspire a campaign idea.
Awareness Days
When thinking of important dates in the yearly calendar, people tend to think of the usual…Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Halloween. But did you know that there are days revolving around literally everything, including days like World Toilet Day and World Television day (random, right?). Awareness Days will likely have a date relevant to your client, and it could help form the basis of a unique campaign idea.
Digital PR Twitter
If you work in the digital PR industry, you probably have a work dedicated Twitter account. There are so many great digital PR’s out there, and many of them will share their fabulous work on social media, often getting featured on accounts like Digital PR Examples and Just Digital PR. If you haven’t created a digital PR Twitter yet, sign up and browse the content people are sharing, it might just ignite a genius campaign idea.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a free data exploration tool that helps people better understand what their audiences are interested in. You may have seen many people use Google Trends within a PR campaign to explain when there has been an increase in interest for a particular search term. For our event solutions client, Wild PR spotted a 355% increase in interest for the term “event jobs near me”, which helped form the basis for a digital PR campaign revealing the top ten event job hotspots in the UK.
Information is Beautiful
Some of the best digital PR campaigns are created by taking complex data and visualising them into beautiful graphics, like those featured on Information is Beautiful. From graphics on the gender pay gap to graphics on carbon emissions, you will find many visually pleasing graphics to take inspiration from on this website.
Office of National Statistics
The Office for National Statistics is the UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics and is responsible for collecting and publishing statistics related to the economy, population and society at national, regional and local levels. By analysing data relevant to your client from ONS reports, it might provoke a unique campaign idea. At Wild PR, for our eco-friendly nappy provider client, The Nappy Gurus, we recently analysed UK baby name data to highlight baby names connected to star signs; this secured us coverage on [insert coverage]
Visual Capitalist
Similar to Information is Beautiful, Visual Capitalist covers data-driven visual content focused on global trends, investing, technology, and the economy. Browsing through visuals like this might make you think deeper about how you can present potentially ‘boring’ data to the press, like this visual representation of how much data is generated every minute on the internet.
YouGov
YouGov is a market research and data analytics company, which often provides news outlets with some of its interesting survey results, such as this story on climate change. On the site, you can scroll through YouGov survey results, which could help you develop new survey ideas for your client. You could also utilise the existing results and rework this into campaign content for a client, giving it more value and an interesting story angle.
For more digital PR inspiration, follow us on Twitter to see the campaigns we are creating for our own clients – https://twitter.com/WeAreWildPR