| Case studies
Building brand with a viral digital PR campaign
- 5,334 pieces of coverage, including 5,086 backlinks from top tier international media outlets including Forbes, The Washington Post, and more.
- 150,000 social media posts – achieving a reach of 87 million and over one billion impressions.
- 833% increase in page views YOY
- 2023 Digital Excellence Awards—Best Use of Data
- 2023 Digital Excellence Awards—Best Audience Engagement Campaign
- 2023 Digital Excellence Awards—Best Low Budget Campaign
- The Drum Awards for Digital Industries 2022—Best In-house / Self Promotion
- 2022 UK Search Awards—Best Use of Data (SEO)
- 2022 UK Search Awards—Most Innovative Campaign (SEO)
- 2022 Global Digital PR Awards—Low Budget Campaign of the Year
- 2022 Global Digital PR Awards—Stunt of the Year (Silver)
This is definitely an out-of-the-box campaign, where the results speak for themselves. Yard worked to great timing and sourcing of data which lead to impressive results being achieved.
— Judge feedback for award win, Best Use of Data – 2022 UK Search Awards
Challenge
Yard wanted to reach a wider audience, tap into an important social issue and show new business opportunities the power of data-led campaigns. We always pay close attention to the media and social realm to find opportunities to join conversations with authority and expertise.
Upon seeing Kylie Jenner hit the headlines after posting an image of his-and-hers matching private jets, we knew this was a hot topic of conversation for the general public. We identified a common frustration: whilst ordinary people are consciously cutting back to reduce their carbon emissions, the elite is exasperating theirs. Our Digital PR team quickly came up with a powerful campaign idea that we believed would highlight the scale of the issue.
Action
We scraped data from the @CelebJets Twitter account: providing us with the subjects, the number of flights tracked, mileage and time spent in the air this year. From here we were able to determine the ‘top 10’ celebrity private jet offenders by calculating their estimated CO2 emissions.
Armed with high quality press releases, loaded with compelling data, we outreached the campaign to journalists writing about lifestyle, entertainment and environmental issues. We knew our key findings would connect with people emotionally, helping to propel the campaign through social media, which it did – exponentially.
To provide social media users and journalists with a snippet of the research, we created visual assets to make the information easier to digest.
We also created a landing page on Yard’s site, detailing our full findings, methodology and disclaimers. We carefully selected the correct URLs, headings, metatags and alt texts, in order to improve search rankings and Yard’s domain authority.
Change
- 5,334 pieces of coverage, including 5,086 backlinks from top tier international media outlets including Forbes, The Washington Post, and more.
- 150,000 social media posts – achieving a reach of 87 million and over one billion impressions.
- 833% increase in page views YOY.
- Our report improved Yard’s ranking for the keyword “Yard” from 4th to 1st on Google – for the first time ever.
- On Twitter alone, our campaign spurred over 84,000 original posts and landed us a feature on the trending topics section.