TRAFFIC
there are many other techniques we
could incorporate in our strategies, such
as newsjacking, infographics, expert
commentary/insights, client PR/marketing
activity, competitions, and freedom of
information acts.
Evaluation: How do we
measure digital PR?
Figure 1: link trends for ‘hard-to-market” sites
Link trends
Interestingly, over 2017, we have spent
some time looking into link trends in
hard-to-market areas. This is mainly
based on the links that we have been
building for our clients in the past. This
is extremely useful as it allows us to spot
opportunities within certain publications
and help us to decided who we will be
targeting for our campaign in line with
our audience research.
As you can see from Figure 1, the
biggest opportunity would be with regional
media. Having said this, when creating
your strategy for your client, I would
suggest adding a regional element that
would appeal to cities around the UK.
Example campaigns
Below, there are a few examples of
campaigns we have worked on in
hard-to-market areas, which have used
creative techniques to gain links and raise
brand awareness.
Ladbrokes: How well do you know
your team?
After speaking to many sports journalists,
we realised that most of them only covered
sports player news. Taking this onboard,
we realised we needed to create our own
sports-related news by creating a quiz that
would yield unique data.
The “How well do you know your
team?” quiz tests football fans’ knowledge
of their teams to see how well they really
know them, and ranks them in a league
table according to the average score of
each club’s fans.
This achieved strong results, with over
47,000 plays, 60 links and coverage, and
over 2,000 social shares. As the quiz
outputted unique data, this provided us
with great PR hooks to outreach with,
and was extremely shareable across
social media.
Ladbrokes: Wimbledon blogger event
Another technique that we can use to
gain links is an event for fashion and
lifestyle bloggers.
A great example of where we have
done this for Ladbrokes is during the 2015
Wimbledon Tennis tournament. Near the
end of the championship, we decided to
hold a Wimbledon-themed event, where
we held a series of games and served
Instagram-worthy catering and drinks.
The event received high levels of
engagement on social media, and
afterwards the bloggers wrote posts about
their experiences, linking back to our
campaign page. This was a great way of
diversifying the back-link profile for the
brand and achieving great social media
engagement too.
Other PR techniques
We’ve spoken about quizzes, surveys/
data visualisations, and events; however,
After our campaign is complete, it’s
great to look back and see what we have
achieved. One way we can look at this
is by using Google Analytics to see what
our links have achieved in terms of traffic
and conversions.
We may have hit our KPI, but I always
think it’s worth looking a little bit deeper to
find out what our links have actually done.
Once we’ve looked in Google Analytics
to see how much traffic and how many
conversions our links have driven, as
well as the visits we’ve achieved to our
campaign page, we can also see if we have
affected brand awareness and reputation.
We can use social listening tools to see if
we have improved sentiment, but also see
if the conversation around the brand has
increased or improved at all.
To conclude, I think it’s safe to say
there are many ways that we can engage
with our target audience in hard to market
industries. However, we need to make sure
we are creating campaigns that target wider
conversations surrounding our brand,
so we can gain traction within today’s
crowded media landscape.
WILLIAM HOBSON is
digital PR strategist at
Branded3. Will manages
the digital PR activity for
a range of clients across
the travel, fashion and fi nance
industries. Coming from a
background in traditional PR,
Will applies those skills on a digital
element to all campaigns.
iGB Affi liate Issue 63 JUN/JUL 2017
37