Brief and objectives
Apadmi is a world leader in mobile application development and needed a PR partner to help raise its profile and support its online marketing efforts.
Increasing brand awareness was of major importance for Apadmi to assist with its business growth so we were tasked with creating a PR strategy to communicate the core competencies of the business and position it as the market leader.
Before we came on board, Apadmi’s PR was too tactical, only achieving lower level marketing and regional coverage. They were keen to generate coverage in the bigger technology and marketing titles.
To achieve this – especially within the tech savvy marketing community, we knew this meant going beyond the traditional PR tactics of news, features and addressing major industry issues.
Our objectives:
- Increase brand awareness (organic search) and position Apadmi as industry leaders by securing interesting coverage in top tier tech titles such as Information Age and T3
- Achieve long term SEO benefits by securing high quality links to Apadmi’s website in online coverage
- Build a solid reputation in order to generate and increase leads to the website
Research and planning
We found there wasn’t a B2B company taking the lead on consumer research around wearable technology so saw this as the perfect opportunity to position Apadmi as an industry leader in this field. We wanted the thought leadership research to help the business community understand what the wearable technology industry is capable of, where it’s heading and what customers want. The aim of the research was to also help Apadmi create its own newsworthy content that would run alongside our hardworking press office.
Utilising Apadmi’s in-depth knowledge, we compiled a consumer survey to answer the following questions:
– Do potential customers think wearable technology is desirable?
– Do potential customers think wearable technology poses a privacy risk?
– How can different business sectors exploit wearable technology?
– Which wearable technologies should businesses prioritise?
We chose consumer research because it was more cost effective and we could provide businesses with insights to help shape their future wearable tech app development strategies.
We surveyed 1,000 UK publics in late 2014 via Usurv to obtain findings for the research. We also collated the findings from independent research into wearable technology to discover whether it aligned or differed with our findings to add extra depth to our report.
To ensure the thought leadership content would be targeted at the right people, we also created a database of marketing and tech directors, using Followerwonk and LinkedIn, which Apadmi’s sales team could use to build genuine relationships with.
Strategy and tactics
We undertook the wearable technology campaign as part of a wider PR campaign to generate more highbrow coverage. The strategy focused on using media relations, online PR and digital communications to harness Apadmi’s expertise in mobile and wearable technology.
We conducted innovative consumer research before compiling it into a creative 27 page thought leadership report to inspire businesses to create more desirable apps and devices. The report was professionally designed in a PDF document and also creatively hosted on Apadmi’s website
The report’s content was ‘atomised’ to be spun out across a wide range of media and content channels. We took a targeted approach to distributing the report. The team focused on national technology publications before extending the outreach to other channels like marketing and business.
We publicised the report with three innovative press releases using the most interesting angles from the research including ‘Privacy fears slowing the rise of wearable technology’. The articles offered actionable insights for businesses to position Apadmi as a leader and generate further interest. They were also designed to appeal to digital media, to deliver the high domain authority links which would increase website visibility.
We also secured a number of in-depth features around the report, to position Apadmi’s co-founder Nick Black as a thought leader. These were specifically secured with top tier tech titles.
Content was also adapted for social media to build genuine relationships with customers, blog content, and used for SEO link building. The report was used as part of Apadmi’s marketing and sales strategy and was distributed to the contacts collated by us, and used as part of sales collateral when speaking with new customers.
The innovation for this campaign came from how traditional PR tactics were used digitally. We created stories that resonated with our target audience and would secure high authority links to increase the visibility of the website. We feel that PR Agency One is one of the best in the UK at using PR to increase search visibility. This is evidenced in our supporting content.
Implementation
The campaign was predominately UK based and took place between December 2014 and May 2015 as part of a wider PR campaign for Apadmi. A professionally designed report was launched at the end of January 2015 and hosted on Apadmi’s website to earn links for SEO and drive traffic to the website. For the following four months, content was drip-fed for use as news, features and a wide variety of online content.
Measurement and evaluation
We measured the results by using OneEval, our award winning in-house evaluation system, designed to show the tangible, commercial impact of our work. Using a combination of Search Metrics, MajesticSEO, Google Analytics and Ecommerce Tracking we were able to demonstrate how practically every pound spent on this campaign was used to drive traffic to Apadmi’s website.
Results
- 50 pieces of coverage
- Website traffic up by 129%
- 30 pieces of top tier tech coverage including The Inquirer and T3
- 24 high value SEO links with an average domain authority of 51/100
- Organic search traffic up by 99% year on year
- Social media traffic up 434%
