How to do your own digital PR on a budget

If you're part of a marketing team or run your own business, you've likely been curious about digital PR.

Without the help of an agency, digital PR can seem daunting at first - but here's the good news: it's possible to do on a budget.

I speak from experience. Despite having zero experience and a very limited budget for my first few campaigns, I still managed to succeed.

In this article, I'll take you through methods to do everything for free, as well as share some affordable tools that can make your life easier.

Building media lists for digital PR on a budget

The main cost of digital PR comes from expensive media databases. However, if you're on a tight budget, you can build a media list for free through manual research.

Here are the basic steps:

One: Identify recent news stories similar to your target.

You can use Google News to search for topics related to yours. For example, if you're planning to pitch expert commentary in the auto niche, look for stories that have quoted similar experts.

Alternatively, browse publications you'd like to be featured in and find similar stories.

Two: Identify the author.

This is straightforward - most articles display the author's name, so simply make a note of it.

Three: Find and verify the email address.

This can be time-consuming. If you're lucky, the email address will be in the author's bio. If not, you can:

Check their social media
Search on Google
Try a free email lookup tool (e.g., Rocket Reach)
Make an educated guess

Once you have the email address, you need to verify it (especially if you've used an email lookup tool, because these can often be incorrect). You can verify email addresses for free using tools like BounceBan.

Here is a more detailed explanation of building media lists for free, and here are some useful methods for finding emails for free.

A Time-Saving Tool

If you have a small budget, I highly recommend investing in one of the more affordable media databases available.

Building a manual media list is time-intensive, and you likely won't find as many contacts as you would using a media database.

JournoFinder is a budget-friendly option with a regularly updated database. You can search for relevant stories as mentioned above, and steps 2 and 3 are handled automatically.

All emails on your media list will be verified, preventing inbox bounces. You can get more information and sign up for a free trial here.

Journalist outreach on a budget

After creating your media lists, you'll need to send the emails.

For small lists, you can send emails manually. For longer lists or if you want automated sending, you'll need an email outreach tool.

Hunter.io is an excellent option for DIY digital PR outreach. They offer a generous free tier (as of writing) for sending emails, and if you're only running one or two campaigns at a time, you shouldn't exceed their limits.

Note: If you're using a new email address or one you rarely use, you'll need to warm up the account to avoid being marked as spam. I've personally used warmupInbox.com or Instantly.ai, though several free alternatives are available.

Creating the campaign and data collection

Expert commentary and reactives

Expert commentary campaigns and reactive campaigns are the bread and butter of low-budget digital PR campaigns.

They generally cost very little to set up because they rely on your expert knowledge, and there's no need to worry about complex data collection or data pages.

The expert commentary campaign format is very popular in the U, but less common in the USA.

In the USA, reactives related to celebrity news or trends are your best bet.

Data campaigns

If you're planning a data study, there are lots of free/cheap and easy-to-access data sources:

Utilise internal data

If you have any internal data within your business, consider if you can use it to create a newsworthy story.

Keep in mind that the newsworthy element is important – you need the story to be a conversation starter that appeals to a wide range of people.

If you have a niche business, such as a window replacement business, data on 'cities where most people get their windows replaced' isn't going to cut it. It's too niche.

Free and public data sources

If internal data isn't an option, there are lots of free, publicly available data sources out there such as government websites you can use.

The issue with this option is finding the data sources.

If you have a study idea in mind, you can search Google for related datasets, or ask an AI tool (I find Perplexity to be best for this task) to suggest data sources you could use.

Or if you're just looking to browse what kind of data is available, we have a useful list of over 50 free data sources you can get access to if you scroll to the bottom of this article.

Freedom of Information requests are another way of getting free information (we also have a guide on this here).

Surveys on a budget

You will see a lot of stories based on surveys, which are generally expensive to run.

But there are a few ways you can do them on a budget.

If you have an existing audience either via an email list, a social media following, or via visitors to a website, you can use them as your survey audience. You can offer an incentive for them to fill out the survey if needed.

A caveat of using an existing customer base is that your sample won't be representative of the general population. So it's best to focus on surveys where this doesn't matter (i.e., more subjects rather than serious ones).

You can also utilise communities like Facebook groups. This is easier to explain with an example:

Time2Play ran a study called: 'Is Disneyland getting too expensive?'.

They found an active Facebook group and posted offering the potential to win a $100 Disney World voucher for filling out the survey. Genius and very effective.

Manual collection and scraping

Collecting data from regular sites, such as reviews from TripAdvisor or prices from an e-commerce site, is a great way to get 'original' data or data for an index-type data campaign.

Sometimes you can collect the data manually without too much effort. But if you're after a lot of data, you can save time by either employing a VA to collect the data for you (we did this when we wanted to collect tweets from X), or use an online scraper such as Instant Data Scraper, Octoparse, or Apify.

All these options have free trials you can use for a one-off campaign.

Scraping can be overwhelming at first if you've never used one before - but YouTube can be really helpful and these tools are set up to be user-friendly. We also have some tutorials to get you started here.

Top Tip: Data collection can quickly get very complicated. Try to keep it simple for your first attempt, and if you spot yourself spending hours trying to find and collect data without getting anywhere, then consider cutting your losses and trying a different angle.

Tools to help with digital PR on a budget

While it is possible to do a digital PR campaign completely for free, spending a small amount of a few tools can make the process much easier and more efficient. 

Here are the tools I recommend.

Ideation: Campaign archives (JournoFinder 600+ campaign database, Digital PRchive, PR Insider campaign list)

Data collection: Scrapers (Instant data scraper, Apify, Outscraper, Octoparse)

Media list building: JournoFinder (a lightweight media database), BounceBan (for verifying emails)

Outreach: Hunter.io, warmupinbox, instantly.ai