4 authentic Digital PR examples to inspire your next campaign
If you want consumers to make a genuine connection to your brand, you need to tell authentic stories through your Digital PR campaigns.
Gone are the days when 3D mock ups of fantastical fake products would easily go viral, and the press would talk about it as if it was real. Consumers and journalists are savvier than ever before and can see sniff out overtly promotional PR activity. There’s an aversion to fake news and what is seen as “disingenuous attention-seeking” by brands – who now must really earn the right to be well-received.
And why shouldn’t they? There are so many brands vying for their attention daily, why should they be listening to yours?
I remember my first day training to be a journalist when our tutor had us circle all the stories in print newspapers that we thought came from PRs. We only identified about half of them. The best stories were the ones you couldn’t even tell came from PRs because their stories were so authentic and relevant.
How can you make your digital PR campaigns authentic?
- Be true to your brand – does your brand have the authority to be talking about this? Is it something your target customer would truly care about?
- Define the ‘why’ – why is your brand talking about this now? Why is it important to your customer? If you’re not clear on why you’re doing it and are solely focused on link numbers or coverage, chances are it’s not going to be authentic or relevant.
- Don’t just say it, do it – if you have an amazing idea for a new product, you’re going to have to make it, sell it, and prove that it’s popular. Journalists avoid fake products and may want to test the product themselves so make sure you have samples.
- Solve a problem – build a campaign that shows your target customer that you understand their challenges and goals. If your campaign helps solve their problem, it has a better chance of connecting with them and building trust in your brand and its messages.
- Back it up with data – if your campaign is making a claim or promise, back it up with real data to prove it. It’s not enough to announce that people in the UK see Bristol was the best city for to invest in property, you also need to prove whether it really is. Have property prices seen sustained increased there and what evidence can you find for why this is happening? Opinion polls and surveys can take you so far, but to really be taken seriously you need to dig deeper.
Examples of authentic digital PR campaigns
We’ve compiled a selection of authentic digital PR campaigns and exactly why they worked so well.
Banana Moon – Anxiety Relief Hoodie
What was the idea?
This campaign is one we did here at CreativeRace. We collaborated with personalised clothing company, Banana Moon, to create a hoodie designed to provide relief from common anxiety symptoms.
Why did it work?
- Banana Moon are hoodie experts with the authority to talk about specialist hoodie design.
- The initial design was based on real research and advice from anxiety experts, backed up by scientific studies.
- The Anxiety Relief Hoodie was real product that was for sale on their website. When stock ran low due to demand, they responded quickly by creating more – journalists may be less likely to run product stories if that product is already out of stock.
- They offered samples to journalists in their outreach which led to a good response rate.
- The anti-anxiety features of the hoodie were tested to see if they lowered blood pressure and heart rate of office workers. Even though they were already using scientifically proven techniques, having original data helped put claims to test and gave journalists confidence in the authenticity of the product.
- They responded to the well-documented anxiety pandemic in an authentic way. They didn’t claim to cure, instead helping people alleviate symptoms and drawing attention to the responsibilities of company managers (their target market) to drive awareness of anxiety at work.
- The market research that was undertaken ahead of product design ensured that it surpassed any existing anxiety relief product on the market.
What did it achieve?
- 48+ coverage and links
- Average DA 70
- Coverage on Daily Star, Country Living, MSN, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Bristol Post
- 2.17M estimated views
- 290M audience
- 1.03K social engagements
- Spikes in traffic
- Increase in enquiries
Bodyform – Pain Stories
What was the idea?
An educational hub highlighting the gender pain gap and the myriad of gynaecological issues that cause women pain.
Why did it work?
- Bodyform are known period experts with the authority to speak in this space.
- By lifting the lid on women’s varying experiences of pain, they collated real experiences. They didn’t speak for all women or pretend to know what it was like, creating a very powerful and authentic campaign in the process.
- They created an in-depth pain report which backed up with data the real plight of the problem, looking at everything from the healthcare system to how we measure pain. This gave the press impactful stats and plenty to talk about.
- They created an interactive ‘Museum of Pain’ that you could move around and learn more about people’s perceptions of female pain.
- Their Pain Dictionary was a collation of terms for how women described their pain, such as “torture grips” and “womb daggers”, providing genuine insight for others into how debilitating female pain can be.
What did it achieve?
- 70+ links and coverage
- Covered in Yahoo, Metro, Huffington Post, Vogue
Lickd – Social Salary Calculator
What was the idea?
A salary calculator tool that allows you to input desired salary, outputting an estimate of how many subscribers, followers and sponsored posts you would need to achieve in order to quit your day job and earn that amount.
Why did it work?
- Lickd is a digital platform helping YouTube content creators legally use the music they want to, without losing their revenue to lawsuits. So, talking about content creator salaries was very relevant to their audience and something they would care about.
- Authentic campaigns don’t always have to be about something highly emotive, like anxiety or female pain, as long as you’re authentic to your audience’s needs and desires. Lickd understood that their audience goal was to become a successful influencer and created something genuinely useful for their customers to measure their success against.
- Instead of a standard report that showed you the key data, Lickd made an interactive tool that ensured results were tailored specifically to the goals of the individual.
- Showcasing how many posts and followers you’d need to make the average US salary put the industry into perspective for those outside of it, making it more newsworthy.
- They considered all major social platforms and explained how each differed, resulting in a comprehensive educational guide as well as a fun calculator tool.
What did it achieve?
- An incredible 483+ links and coverage
- Coverage on CNBC, MSN, Yahoo Finance, Daily Mail
Gremlin – Cost of Downtime
What was the idea?
Why did it work?
- Because Gremlin helps companies simulate real outages to become more resilient against attacks and prevent loss of revenue that comes with downtime, showcasing the true cost of downtime for big brands was hyper-relevant to their audience and something they would really care about.
- Using well-known large companies, it hammered home that even the most powerful businesses can be victims of attacks that lead to downtime. It also provided the media with stats for brands that people would recognise.
- The interactive landing page calculated revenue lost during the time the visitor has spent on page, which is an impactful way to illustrate losses and create urgency to protect your business.
- Highlighting losses per minute and per hour made it tangible for anyone to understand the significant losses.
- Creating a supporting guide on why ecommerce sites go down and Chaos Engineering provided useful guidance for their target customer to solve their biggest potential problem, rooting out failure before it causes downtime.
What did it achieve?
- 101+ links and coverage
- Coverage on Medium and Atlantic
If you’re looking to create authentic Digital PR campaigns for your brand, get in touch with our team today.
About the author:
Kira is Head of Digital PR at CreativeRace. She specialises in digital PR and content marketing strategy to drive powerful media coverage, high authority link acquisition, relevant traffic and engagement. Kira is a previous winner of Best Website at the BBC Journalism Awards.
