9 Digital PR Campaign Examples and What Made Them Work

You need press, but whatever you're doing now isn't working.

Your product announcements go out and nothing runs, the pitches about your latest feature go unanswered, and leadership keeps asking why competitors show up in the trades (and in AI answers) and you don't.

Digital PR is the answer! It's how you give reporters a reason to write about you.

It's original research (a survey, an analysis of your own data, or a round of interviews) that you turn into a story and pitch to the outlets your buyers follow. Reporters cover it because it gives them something new to report to their readers — your future customers.

Done right, the results are hard to match.

Reckon's ranking of Australia's best cities for starting a business earned 91 pieces of coverage, and 76 of them quoted its CEO. Hippo's homeowner surveys went from 41 placements in 2023 to 227 in 2025. And one report we ran for a client helped take a product page from 26 to 105 AI Overview appearances in a year.

Below are 9 digital PR campaign examples from finance, real estate, and B2B brands (3 of them are ours, 6 come from agencies who published their results). In each one, the way the team framed the findings did more for the coverage than the topic itself.

Because in every case the data answered a problem the audience had.

What's a digital PR campaign?

It's original research built to be cited. You run a study, turn it into a white paper, blog post, video, or social series, and then pitch the story to the reporters, writers, and podcasters your buyers follow.

Digital PR is the industry's name for it. I call it content-led PR, because the content built on your research does the heavy lifting.

It does the reporter's homework for them: the data's collected, the analysis is done, and the story's ready to drop into a column. (Newsrooms are stretched thin. Reporters remember who saves them time.)

9 digital PR campaign examples

Of our 3, 2 are client campaigns (1 with the name removed), and 1 is from before I started Narrative Bent. For each one, you'll see the study, the framing, the result, and the lesson worth stealing.

1. Acorn Finance reframed homeowner data for contractors

Acorn Finance, a home improvement lending marketplace we work with, sells through contractors, who offer financing to their own customers.

In June 2025, its first survey earned 36 links from 19 sites. The second, a January 2026 survey of how homeowners use AI on home projects, earned 50 links from 33 sites (both counts as of September 29, 2026).

What changed was mostly the pitch.

For the second survey, we framed our findings as upsell and lead-generation intel. If we'd just sent them as "survey findings," nobody would have cared, but once the data was pitched as a way to upsell jobs and find new leads, it connected.

Lesson: Frame the findings around what your audience cares about, even if you surveyed a different group (here, we surveyed homeowners but pitched contractors).

2. A large brand's report lifted a product page in AI Overviews

A large brand that sells corporate swag and custom apparel ran a workplace recognition report with us.

The usual move is to point all the coverage at the report itself, but we pointed 11 of its 18 links at a single product category page instead. Between May 2025 and May 2026, that page went from 26 to 105 AI Overview appearances (full case study).

The page now ranks #1 for 3 search terms with about 52,000 combined monthly searches.

In our experience, a report like this keeps earning links and citations for as long as its data stays relevant. So the money page keeps getting attention long after launch.

Lesson: Pick the page you want to lift before you pitch. A campaign can move a money page, too.

3. Quarterly agent surveys landed HomeLight in the Wall Street Journal

Before Narrative Bent, I helped build HomeLight's organic search program.

Every quarter we surveyed top real estate agents about their markets. (Housing reporters love to talk through the ups and downs of the market).

Though they had plenty of transaction data from the big portals (sales, prices, days on market), they had no insight into the sentiment of the folks working those markets every day.

We had hundreds of agents we could call, so each quarter we interviewed them, wrote up a white paper, and pitched local housing press. And when COVID hit, it was the only study talking to agents whose markets had shut down, and the Wall Street Journal picked it up.

Lesson: Read what reporters already cite, then bring them the piece they keep missing.

4. Reckon's "Startup Cities" ranking

Reckon, an Australian accounting software company, worked with the agency Prosperity Media to rank Australia's 50 biggest cities by how good each one is for starting a business.

They scored 18 factors, added 800+ survey responses from small business owners, and pitched 24 angles to national, regional, and local journalists. Per Prosperity Media's case study, the story earned 91 pieces of coverage. Of those, 76 quoted Reckon's CEO and 73 linked to the campaign page.

Lesson: One dataset can carry dozens of local stories if you cut it by region first.

5. Muval's moving index, made readable

Muval, an Australian platform for booking moving companies, publishes an annual index of where people are moving, and its agency called the earlier editions "dense and difficult to interpret." (Points for honesty.)

For 2025, the team brought in population geographers at the University of Queensland, worked through 400,000+ de-identified move records, and swapped an internal ranking for 2 plain metrics.

Then they tied the findings to cost of living and housing. The case study reports 69 pieces of online coverage and 8% more clicks than the quarter before.

Lesson: If your data's already good, change how you present it before you change the study itself.

6. Hippo's homeowner surveys, run year after year

Hippo, a home insurance company, had run homeowner surveys with Siege Media for years, on topics like winter damage, homeowner regrets, and fixer-uppers versus move-in-ready homes.

By publishing new surveys steadily year after year, it was able to grow its coverage. Per Siege Media's case study, placements went from 41 in 2023 to 124 in 2024 and 227 in 2025. In late 2025, it moved to fewer, deeper surveys that could each carry several stories.

Lesson: Reporters warm up to a source that keeps coming back with something new.

7. Lance Surety Bonds sorted road ragers by car brand and music

Lance Surety Bonds, a surety bond provider, worked with the agency Fractl on a survey of 1,000 drivers about road rage. The top line (88% of drivers admitted to road rage) is easy to skim past on its own.

So the team cut the answers by the car each driver owns and the music they play behind the wheel. Indie fans came out angriest, with 96% saying they'd seen red while driving, and BMW and Tesla were the brands most likely to set other drivers off (A Journal of Musical Things ran with the music angle).

Per Fractl's write-up, the survey earned 77 backlinks from 46 referring domains, including TheStreet and 40+ regional outlets across several states.

Lesson: Cut your data by something readers already identify with, like the car they drive or the music they love.

8. Money.com.au gave reporters a financial adviser to quote

Money.com.au, an Australian online financial marketplace, had a problem: its team was offshore, so there was nobody local for reporters to call. Its agency, The Ideas Suite, brought in Helen Baker, a well-known financial adviser, to be the brand's face in the media.

Her commentary went out alongside consumer and business surveys, money-tips listicles, and whitepapers built to earn links. Per The Ideas Suite's case study, the first 8 months brought 644 pieces of coverage and 91 backlinks, with outlets like the Daily Telegraph, News.com.au, and Business Insider.

Lesson: Data gets you in the door, and a credible person to quote keeps you in the story.

9. Better.co.uk kept digital PR when it cut everything else

Better.co.uk, a UK online mortgage broker, cut its marketing spend by 58.4% during a downturn and kept digital PR as its only organic channel. Its agency, JBH, pitched data-led homebuying stories and expert mortgage commentary, and aimed links at the pages that sign up customers.

Per JBH's case study, 26% of the 52 campaign links pointed at commercial pages. Year over year, revenue rose 60% and cost per lead fell 90%.

Lesson: Tie your PR to the pages that make money, and it holds up when budgets get tight.

Why does the framing matter more than the topic?

Because framing decides whether a reporter can use your data at all.

Ok, sure, the topic matters, and a boring question gets boring answers. But in my experience, the story you pull out matters more, and so does who you hand it to.

A reporter wants a story their readers need, and those readers have problems to solve, so every finding you pitch should help someone solve one. Acorn Finance's homeowner data became a contractor story about upsells. My HomeLight agent surveys became a story about how buyers and sellers felt.

Try this on your own study. For each headline finding, write one sentence that starts with "This helps [audience] decide..." If you can't finish it, keep digging before you pitch.

How many placements should one campaign earn?

For a deep study, 5 to 10 placements is a good result, and zero means something broke (the topic, the framing, or the pitch list). Results swing with the story, the industry, and the outlets, and anyone guaranteeing you a placement count is lying.

Expect less from your first campaign, though. Reporters don't know your brand yet, and a study from a company they've never heard of reads like marketing, so your first campaign is lucky to get any traction at all.

Around the third or fourth quarterly study, that changes: reporters start treating you like a source, and some start coming to you. (Hippo's placements roughly tripled from 2023 to 2024, the same pattern in public numbers.)

Pitch list size matters, too.

BuzzStream studied more than 31 million outreach emails and found that campaigns pitched to 51 to 100 people averaged 12.08 links, while campaigns of 1,000+ emails earned 70% fewer pieces of coverage. BuzzStream calls this correlative, but it matches what we see: a short, researched list beats a blast.

Why do digital PR campaigns underdeliver?

Most campaigns that underdeliver fail in 1 of 3 ways. We've hit all 3 ourselves, usually in a client's first year.

1. Too promotional. Some brands put a thumb on the scale. The questions make the product look good, and the findings match the sales deck. Reporters can tell, and trust the data less.
2. Too niche. A survey about the housing market interests a lot of people. A survey about Boston landlords with 3 properties might interest the Boston Globe. The San Francisco Chronicle won't care.
3. Too safe. Brand research tends to be risk-averse, so it confirms what everyone assumed. If the headline makes a reader say "well, duh," nobody writes it up. Be willing to publish a real point-of-view.

The first one is the easiest to avoid and the most tempting to ignore. Treat your study the way a newsroom would. You choose what to publish, so if a finding doesn't flatter you, leave it out.

Let me make this extremely clear:

If the data is bad for your brand, don't run it. Never bend it.

What's a campaign worth if the press passes?

Even with zero placements, you still own the research. Publish it on your own site, and Google and AI assistants can find and cite it. Then put it to work everywhere else:

• Blog posts that cite your own numbers instead of everyone else's
• Social posts built around single findings
• Sales emails that give reps a reason to reach out (we build these as kits for clients)
• Talks and event slides
• A lead magnet for paid campaigns

One accounting SaaS client of ours turned its AI-in-accounting report into 165 leads for sales. It covered the study in a webinar, its sales team invited prospects and customers, it ran ads around the report, and we sent a few email blasts to its list.

Read the full case study.

Think of it like renting versus buying a house. A trade placement is rented attention that's gone in a week, while the study is equity that pays out as long as the data stays relevant. Earned media is an accelerant that pours gasoline on a good study, but you can build plenty of momentum by publishing it yourself, since social algorithms are good at finding the people who care.

And now that AI can spit out endless generic content, original research is one of the few things a competitor can't copy.

Do digital PR campaigns help you show up in AI answers?

Yes, as long as reporters cite you because they want to. Muck Rack analyzed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and earned media made up 84% of the citations, while paid content made up 0.3% (May 2026).

Google's guide to AI search says its AI features "can show what's being said about products and services across the web." It also warns that "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem." A study reporters choose to cite is the kind of mention Google means.

You can see it in the large-brand example above. As campaign links pointed at one product category page, its AI Overview appearances went from 26 to 105 in a year. That's one page at one client, so I wouldn't treat it as a forecast.

How do you pick a campaign topic?

Start with your buyer and work backward to the story. For our most recent campaign with a large brand, the topic brief ran 32 slides before we got to a single idea.

Here's what goes into it:

1. Set the goal and the buyer.
   Write down what the coverage should do for the business and who it's for. For that brand, the goal was coverage that cites it as a trusted source on one product category, aimed at independent food and drink shop owners with 1 to 3 locations and the regulars who keep them open. We set no link target, because landing the right outlets mattered more than the raw number of mentions.
2. Audit what you've already run.
   We pulled the confirmed links for every related past campaign, which product pages each one pointed at, and the stats earlier surveys turned up. Old data gives a new campaign a baseline to compare against.
3. Study who's already getting covered.
   Look for brands in and around the category that landed the coverage you want, and what they released to get it. Toast's restaurant trends report landed in Axios and local TV, and Canva's design trends report landed in Fast Company. Trade press also picked up expert guides with no original data at all.
4. Find out what the buyer reads, watches, and listens to.
   Ask a few customers if you can, then use an audience research tool like SparkToro. In this case, shop owners read trade publications about twice as often as the average adult, and their regulars read Substack at 1.5 times the average rate. So owner findings go to trade press, and consumer findings go to food media and newsletters.
5. Read the news, then match it to what only you have.
   Look for the stories reporters keep coming back to, like prices, openings and closings, the people behind the counter, and design trends. Then list what the brand has that reporters can't get anywhere else, like order data, in-house experts, or customers to interview in every city. At HomeLight, that was agent sentiment next to the portals' transaction data.
6. Write a business case for each idea.
   Every idea we brought had the story (with sources), the research method plus a fallback if the data fell through, sample headlines we'd only use if the data supported them, target publications with their authority scores, and a lift rating from light to heavy. We brought 9, so the client could mix quick starts with bigger swings.
7. Pick with the client's PR team, and plan to run it again next quarter.

Step 5 is where a lot of companies get stuck. They go looking for something only they have, like order data or a well-known expert, and find nothing worth releasing.

Fair enough; most companies are in that spot.

If that's you, the research itself becomes the thing only you have, so treat it as its own product. Give it a budget, a plan, and the same standard you'd hold anything else you sell to. That matters because a reporter won't cover a survey just because your company ran it. The findings have to be worth their readers' time.

Data is the most common hook in this kind of coverage. Reboot Online classified more than 371,000 articles from digital PR coverage. Data campaigns made up 42.3% of the coverage it could classify by type. Surveys made up another 19.3%.

Scorecard: is your campaign idea worth funding?

By the end of the topic work above, you'll have a handful of ideas that all sound good in a meeting. The harder call is which one will hold up in front of a reporter, and you want to make it before you spend money and months on a launch.

The 10 checks below come from the campaigns earlier in this post. Reckon and Lance Surety Bonds pass the one about cutting data by region or segment, Acorn Finance passes the one about helping your buyer decide something, and Hippo passes the one about running it again. In our experience, the ideas that come up empty usually miss several.

Run your idea through the table before you pay for a survey panel. If you hit several red flags, go back to step 5 above and look again at what only you have.

To judge the result: zero placements is a failure, and 5 to 10 is good for a deep study. Your first campaign will probably earn fewer.

Want help planning a campaign?

Start with the scorecard. If your idea passes, you're ahead of most campaigns in those agency galleries.

Full disclosure: content-led PR is one of the things we sell, and I'd rather you run one good study than three forgettable ones. If you want us to look at your idea, or help you find one, talk to us about a content-led PR campaign.