Digital PR is a powerful marketing channel. When done well, its benefits include building relationships with key journalists and obtaining features both online and off across relevant publications.
Newspapers and magazines especially are notoriously difficult to obtain feature in, especially if you want to encourage them to link to your website too (links have SEO benefits). They therefore respond far better to press releases and editorial features than to any other link building technique, meaning your business could reach a much wider audience than ever before through employing the principles of PR.
This is something our client Company Check recognises. You may remember them from the Business Census earlier this year which was covered in the likes of Forbes, International Business Times, Yahoo News and lots more. They’re the UK’s most used premium source of business data, accessed by more than 3 million users each month who use the site as part of their due diligence processes. We’ve been working with them for more than a year now to help them improve their brand visibility and push traffic to their already very popular site through the promotion of data driven news stories.
An unexpected win?
This weekend, Leicester City won the Premier League. A fantastic accolade for the Club, which has achieved ‘zero to hero’ style success over the past few months, far exceeding anyone’s expectations. Well, we say that…
It was a couple of months ago now that we spotted Leicester’s meteoric rise and the PR potential it held. We started preparing a story which would promote Company Check as a provider of clever business analysis, hooking onto what we knew would be a very popular news story.
We wanted to show how the success of the football club could impact its economic growth. We therefore used Company Check data to analyse Bournemouth, another town which experienced unprecedented sporting success, looking across a wide range of business statistics to find our story. We eventually found it in the rate of business growth experienced in the town, which went well beyond the national average in the years following their Premier League promotion.
Of course, we can’t guarantee this business success was caused by the football, but we can highlight the correlation. We found a similar study based on Swansea after their sporting success, and our story was born.
Backing up the data with high authority quotes
To further substantiate the story, we spoke with a professor at Sheffield Hallam University’s sports industry research centre, who had previously reported on the effects of sporting success on a region’s growth. He kindly reviewed our analysis and backed it up with his own quote.
We then took the story to Leicester City Council and obtained a quote from their director for growth there, which provided us with another relevant and high authority quote.
With all of this prepared, we simply had to wait until Leicester won. When that day finally came, our PR team sped into action and we sent our press release to our pre prepared list of press contacts, spanning business, national and local press. So far, the article has been picked up by City AM, Business Zone, The Business Desk and we expect lots more (the story has only been promoted this morning).
The benefit of this is that Company Check is receiving a boost in traffic and brand awareness amongst its business audience. Further to this, new links to their site help to boost their authority and support their already strong search rankings.
Digital PR lesson – be prepared!
The lesson here is that digital PR is all about preparation. Every month for Company Check, we’re promoting one story while preparing another. It’s a system that is built on the assets our client has and one which has proven time and again to deliver results they can be proud of, and which bring new leads and therefore custom into their business.
You can read the Leicester City press release over on the Company Check Hub here:
To find out more about digital PR and what it could do for your business, get in touch today!
