Don’t Scrap It Yet: Smart Ways to Reangle Your Data-Led Campaigns
A data-led digital PR campaign can be a story gold mine, providing so many possible headlines, angles and sometimes statistics. However, they don’t always stick. This can be for multiple reasons – it could be as simple as timing (maybe a similar story has just gone out before yours, or maybe it’s summer and a lot of journalists are out of office), it could be that the data isn’t solid enough or from reliable sources, or it could be that the angle just isn’t quite right. If it’s the latter, then pivoting your idea could be a great option. Without spending too much time, you can come up with a new angle or methodology to land wins for your story. Let’s talk about how.
Consider Turning Your Angle Upside Down
We often start with a clear cut picture in our heads of the data we want to look at and create a story from for a campaign, which often ends up with headlines along the lines of “the best XXX”. These are great and often work well. But sometimes, a campaign may be overdone or too recently covered, so where do you go from there when you have your full data set? You can try turning the angle upside down, and take the opposite approach of what you set out to do – for example, the best to the worst, instead of looking at the top results in your data, look at the bottom results instead.
The same can be said of the opposite approach. Sometimes we may be pitching a negative story, and realise that this isn’t being taken very well, so we can flip the data and put a positive spin on it – for example, take “these are the noisiest cities” to “these are the quietest cities”. Negative stories can sometimes be tricky to pitch as media outlets may want to stay away from them depending on the context, for example in areas like travel when overtourism is a huge topic, journalists may not want to add to the already prevalent negative stories. Putting a positive spin instead can be a great way to reangle your current data set without changing the research.
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Repurpose or Reangle Your Data
If you’re working with a data-led campaign such as an index ranking, then you could have multiple angles all within one data set. If you’re pitching an overall ranking that isn’t hitting, why not look at your individual factors for potential stories in there?
For example, let’s imagine you’ve done an index campaign about the best cities for remote workers, but someone else has just released the same campaign as you were about to start outreach. What you could do is look at your individual factor rankings, such as wifi speeds, nomad visas, rental costs etc (whatever data you decided to look at), and use these as different angles for outreach, potentially even on a regional scale. Maybe Malaysia has the best priced rentals,
Target New Markets Using Excel For Quick Pivots
This is another great approach that is great for clients targeting multiple markets and involves mainly outreach tactics, instead of changing the research or angle. Sometimes, we create data sets specifically with one market in mind (such as the UK), but we then realise that, actually, it’s relevant to journalists further afield too. Campaigns can be pivoted to appeal to not just one market but a whole new media industry (as long as the market is where your client is looking for coverage!).
A good example of this was our recent campaign for a travel client. We were looking into hidden travel costs for Brits travelling to Europe this summer, to target the UK media specifically. The research was complete, and we started to ideate about how we could target the US with our next campaign. We quickly realised that the hidden costs we had just researched in the UK weren’t just specific or relevant to Brits, but also to Americans visiting Europe too. All we had to do was convert the data from British pounds to US dollars, so we used a quick excel function and voila, we had a whole new market and angle to target.
Look At The Timeframe
If the data you are working with has been sourced over a specific time period, but still isn’t catching the attention of journalists, you could consider changing the time frame to show different results. For example, if you have a year’s worth of data and are pitching this alone, it may not be enough for a journalist to create a story from. However, if you extend your time period to cover 2 years or more, you can then consider adding in stats like percentage change over time, which could open new doors for journalists who could look into reasonings behind these changes etc. It doesn’t have to be in years either, it could be changes by season, or even month-on-month. Whilst this can be a little more time consuming research wise, it’s a useful way to identify new opportunities for angles and appeal to journalists with more convincing statistics.
Pivot To Regional or Local Angles
Similar to the “Repurpose or Reangle Your Data” point, if you have a location specific campaign then you can easily consider outreaching to regional or international publications. This often allows you to target smaller, more niche publications which may be more likely to cover your data if the story is relevant to their local readers. As mentioned above, this is only relevant if the regional or international publications you are targeting are relevant to your client and where they want to see placements.
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Conclusion
A stalled campaign doesn’t have to be a wasted one. When we’re trying to get results for our clients as quickly as possible, it can be tempting to just throw a campaign out the window when it doesn’t work and start from scratch to try and get some quick wins. But with some thought and different actions, we can pivot the data and present a new angle to journalists that will resonate with them, hopefully avoiding the need to think of rushed, new ideas and preventing the loss of hours worth of research.
