Reactive Campaign Achieves 180 Links for National Card Retailer

As Funky Pigeon faced a highly competitive industry, Impression was tasked with developing a creative digital PR campaign that would drive traffic and coverage from high-quality websites and publications to enable them to grow their online visibility.

The Challenge

Funky Pigeon sought to drive sales and awareness towards a particular area within its domain. At the same time, Adele announced her long-awaited album ‘30’ which made international headlines. Impression used this as an opportunity to raise awareness of their client.

Due to the short-lived relevancy of reactive PR, they had to plan and execute their strategy within 1 month (October – November 2021).

Their objectives were broken down into owned and shared goals. Owned goals are those they can directly influence, while Shared goals are those they can impact alongside other channels.

This framework allows them to think strategically about how best Impression can impact their clients’ wider business goals.

Owned Objectives

Drive links to a specified area of the domain.

Achieve an average domain rating of 50+ from all links gained

Shared Objectives

Achieve SERP position 1-3 for agreed focus keywords

Across an agreed keyword set, increase total ranking positions by 50

The Strategy

Impression utilized a product stunt approach to generate relevant, high-quality backlinks to help drive qualified traffic and to increase the brand’s visibility among its target audience.

Hot off the press, they took advantage of the opportunity to create an innovative and unique campaign in reaction to the announcement of Adele’s long-awaited album ‘30’, which made international headlines. With songs based on her recent divorce, they knew that this album would be emotionally charged.

With this in mind, Impression set out to create a whole new range of ‘break-up’ cards with Funky Pigeon’s internal team as well as encouraged them to create a new subdomain on the site where these cards would be featured.

This process required close communication, collaboration, and trust with their client.

The cards would appeal to those who have recently gone through a breakup as well as Adele fans awaiting the new album.

Its uniqueness targeted a new type of support among friends and tied into something we knew would achieve mass headlines and tonnes of social media coverage.

One of the major challenges Impression faced was time and relevancy. With the new album releasing on the 19th of November, they only had one month for ideation, creation, and conduct outreach.

They identified the release week as the best window of opportunity to achieve meaningful results, this meant outreach would be conducted over a short four-day period. Beyond these dates, the story was no longer relevant.

In order to make the best use of their outreach efforts, Impression targeted high-quality domains and press that are both relevant from an SEO perspective or from a customer point-of-view.

Specifically, their media lists comprised lifestyle and music press.

The Results

In only four days of outreach, they achieved:

183 links to the agreed target area of the domain
56 average DR across a total of 183 links
#1-3 positions achieved for focus keywords
Rankings for related keywords within the agreed area of the site increased by 71 positions (42% above target)!

Placements in publications such as:

Metro (89 DR)
Indy100 (77 DR)
Her.ie (71 DR)
Wales Online (82 DR)

About Impression

Impression is a multi-award winning, Digital Growth Agency. They define and deliver integrated digital strategies that transform their clients from market players to market leaders.