10 Yetis Insight Blog - A Piggybacking PR Case Study

Sometimes, the very best PR activity is totally unplanned. A spur-of-the-moment reactive story can deliver results that are ten times better than a meticulously planned campaign. This week, we had one of those light bulb moments that rapidly led to better media coverage than we ever hoped for. The key to reactive or "piggybacking" PR, as it is often referred to, is speed. And no, I don't mean the hard, illegal stuff.

You have to bear in mind with any big breaking news story that there's going to be a queue of PR people as long as a piece of string vying for the attention of journalists; wanting and hoping that it'll be their client comment that the reporter chooses to use. So, you need to be really, really quick and among the very first to respond to whatever news it is that you're attempting to piggyback on.

We wanted to share our latest piggybacking PR activity with you in the form of a case study, in the hope that it might offer some insight into best practice when it comes to reactive public relations. This is a really simple but very effective way of generating exposure for a client using a newsworthy hook that's already out there on the media's agenda.

The Client

The client that we executed this piggyback PR activity for was online travel agency www.sunshine.co.uk

The Story

The news that we chose to react to was the story of Jon Platt, a 44-year-old father from the Isle of Wight who refused to pay the £120 unauthorised absence fine when he took his daughter out of school during term time for a holiday to Florida. The case went to court and he won, as his daughter's attendance was otherwise pretty perfect. The media coverage of this case was vast, because it could mean that the government rethinks the laws surrounding term time holiday fines. As sunshine.co.uk specialises in family holidays, this news could have a big impact on the travel agency's target demographic. Therefore, it was an ideal story to piggyback on.

The Reactive

Mr Platt's High Court victory was announced on Friday 13th May, so we advised sunshine.co.uk to keep an eye on holiday bookings and searches over the following weekend to see if the data team could spot any trends that could be attributed to the news. On Monday 16th May, sunshine.co.uk sent us the key findings from the weekend, which included the following:

• 88% increase in family holiday bookings for breaks that would fall during school term time, compared to the previous weekend
• 92% increase in searches for family holidays to be taken during school term time, compared to the previous weekend
• 32% decline in family holiday bookings for breaks that would fall during the school summer holidays, compared to the previous weekend
• 45% decline in searches for family holidays to be taken during the school summer holidays
• According to bookings, the first week of July and last week of September 2016 were when most parents planned to take their children out of school for a term time holiday

Once we had this data, we were able to pull the findings together into a press release, complete with a quote from the travel agency's managing director Chris Clarkson. We distributed the story to key travel, education and consumer journalists, as well as parenting press.

The Results

After the press release was circulated on the afternoon of Monday 16th May, the results were quick to appear and continued to roll in over the following days. The first piece of coverage that appeared was on the travel trade website TravelMole, which was quickly followed by another online piece on the Daily Mirror's website. That was it for the Monday, but we kept monitoring for coverage over the following days.

At the point of writing this (the morning of Friday 20th May), we've had a total of 35 pieces of coverage; 26 online pieces, 5 print pieces and 4 radio mentions on BBC programmes. When analysing the print coverage, 4 pieces were in national newspapers and only 1 was in a local newspaper. When analysing the online coverage, 11 pieces were on national news websites, 3 were travel trade, 3 were on local news websites and the rest were a mixture of English-language overseas websites and education or government sites.

As sunshine.co.uk is web-based company, we're always looking to help improve the search engine optimisation of the site by securing high quality links within online media coverage. PR for SEO is a big part of what we do for a lot of our clients and we really understand the importance of gaining follow links (the kind Google pays attention to) on websites with a high domain authority (DA - SEO tool Moz's scoring system for sites, out of 100). Within the online pieces of coverage we secured off the back of this reactive, we achieved 15 links, with the domain authorities ranging from 18 right up to 100 and ten of the links had DAs of 50 or above. Of all the links, 11 were follow links (great according to Google) and only 1 of those was an affiliate link (which Google pretty much ignores).

All in all, the campaign was a great success; highlights included The Guardian, The Times and Daily Mail and Daily Express (all in print and online), as well as ITV online, MSN, Yahoo!, Telegraph.co.uk, Mirror.co.uk, Wales Online, The Scotsman and BBC Radio 5Live. Some of the cuttings can be seen on our results page.

We're still hoping for more coverage for this reactive PR story over the weekend, so keep an eye on our results page for further clippings updates.

TLDR? Well, to summarise, here are my top 5 tips in brief for reactive/piggybacking PR...

1.Act fast - as mentioned earlier, you need to be among the first to get your comment or data out when you see something that you or a client can react to

2.Don't be boring - a few words stating the obvious from your client just won't cut the mustard. A reactive PR story needs to either offer insightful data/statistics, authoritative comment that perhaps goes against the grain and differs from what the rest are saying, or content that journalists will find hard to ignore.

3.Be thorough - although speed is the key to a successful reactive PR story, don't move so quickly that what you issue to the media is littered with mistakes. That will be damaging for your client's brand and could impact the relationships you have with journalists.

4.Be relevant - make sure that the story you're sending out as the client reactive is actually relevant to the story you're attempting to piggyback on. Tenuous links won't work.

5.Targeted approach - look for journalists who have already covered the story you're reacting to, as they obviously have an interest in it and will probably be the most likely people to write any follow ups relating to the story. You can also use social media to give your reactive comment or story a broader reach, using #prrequest which some journalists follow on Twitter to see if anyone is looking for comments, information, data or general reactions.