The Power of Trend Campaigns in Your Digital PR Strategy

Creating a solid Digital PR strategy is a crucial, and important part of brand building, as well as enhancing your overall online brand visibility.

Of course, at the heart of Digital PR is crafting strategic, well planned and relevant Digital PR campaigns for our clients, but, there may be times where brands can offer valuable insight on upcoming or trending stories, whether that’s a viral social media post, some recent news, or a national holiday.

So, how exactly do you do this? Ding ding! The trend campaign has entered the chat!

What Are ‘Trend Campaigns’?

A trend campaign in Digital PR can be many things. This is a campaign that can tie into trending news and social media, but is slightly different to a reactive campaign because we can often forecast these trends and events. 

For example, we know Christmas occurs at the same time every year, so we created a trend campaign for one of our carpet clients on ‘how to clean spilled candle wax on carpets’ during the festive period. 

Other examples could include a celebrity wedding, a TV show starting, weather-related news, and other seasonal events such as Easter or Halloween. The possibilities are endless - as long as it’s relevant to the brand.

Trend campaigns are:

• Informative - It’s important to offer real advice and insight to a trending topic or question, and you can do this through compelling statistics, and expert commentary.

• Newsworthy - Whether it’s a seasonal trend, a response to a spike in online searches, or simply some useful information, why should the press cover your story?

• Beneficial for EEAT - We’ve heard so much about this term, but EEAT is so important when it comes to the content you produce. Standing for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, this is a framework used by Google to assess the quality of website content, and decide if it is credible and relevant.

• And Appealing to Journalists - Whilst the content you produce in your Digital PR campaigns has to be appealing to your readers, it also must be appealing to journalists who may cover the story, especially if it taps into current keyword trends, and is useful, relevant and content that will peak human interest at the time.

At Honchō, we actually used to call trend campaigns ‘quick wins’. However, we decided to change this name.

Let’s face it, nothing in Digital PR is ever really ‘quick’, and trend campaigns still contain research or data, copywriting, creating media lists, and pitching. So let’s stop naming them quick wins, unless you have super powers.

What Is The Difference Between A Trend Campaign And A Reactive Campaign?

Besides trend campaigns, there are other types of Digital PR campaigns that could be utilised, such as reactive campaigns. 

With a reactive campaign, your brand has to be the first to jump at the opportunity to speak on a topic, or, be one of the first to bring it up. A good example of this is creating a campaign around current news, such as the spring budget announcement, or DVLA policy changes, for example.

However, as mentioned, a trend campaign is typically surrounding forecasted news, so these can be planned in advance, making these two types of Digital PR campaigns slightly different, but still containing the Digital PR benefits your brand needs.

The main thing to remember when creating Digital PR campaigns is that your brand has to have the authority to talk about the topic. You wouldn’t expect a gambling site to create a campaign around hay fever…would you?

How Can Trend Campaigns Help My Business?

At Honchō, trend campaigns are a no-brainer in our Digital PR strategy, and we like to do at least one per month for our clients.

This means that throughout the production of our larger hero campaigns, we can ensure that our clients have a consistent stream of content on their site, as well as a steady flow of links and coverage. See below for some of our Digital PR examples for trend campaigns:

Faith In Nature - Seasonal Hair Loss

In our work with Faith in Nature, we carried out topical research to understand common trends and issues faced by consumers in their niche. We then identified a seasonal trend that got people talking - winter hair loss.

We set out to show them why our advice was worth sharing by surveying the general public to get to the root of the haircare challenges faced by everyday people. Through this we were able to uncover that sadly 3.5 million adults across the UK suffer from seasonal hair loss, and 1 in 10 Brits find their hair is more brittle in the winter months.

These surprising statistics were enough to get a journalist's attention, but then we had to give them the “why?”

So, we created a series of ethical tips after carrying out interviews with Faith in Nature, as well as hair care expert, Nosheen Choudhry who provided expert commentary which added authority to our story.

Within four weeks of working with Faith in Nature, including time for ideation and research, this simple campaign delivered impressive results, with brand awareness increasing through 22 pieces of media coverage from top-tier news sites. As well as this, we achieved brand mentions in The Sun (four times), The Scottish Sun, The Express (twice), The Daily Star and many more.

As a result of our unique and helpful visual assets, this Digital PR campaign earned 12 high authority backlinks which will contribute towards improving organic performance, and overall, Faith in Nature’s search engine rankings, with the campaign seen by over 15 million people.

Eflorist - The Bleach Hack

Another example is our work with Eflorist, and after browsing Instagram, our Digital PR team discovered an Instagram Reel that was getting quite a bit of attention, detailing a hack which involved using bleach in your flowers to make them last longer. 

Knowing that this would be a rising trend, we wanted to be the first to create an informative campaign detailing the use of this hack.

To craft this trend campaign, we included details of the viral hack - including the number of views, as well as expert commentary in order to explain the science behind it with Eflorist’s very own Flower Expert, David Denyer.

We also identified the cost of a bottle of bleach, enabling us to target journalists with headlines such as ‘This 70p hack will ensure your flowers last longer’.

This campaign achieved results which will leave a long-lasting impact, such as increased brand awareness through 207 pieces of media coverage from top-tier news sites, including The Sun, The Irish Sun, The US Sun, and The Express.

The trend campaign also received 203 high authority backlinks which contributed towards improving organic performance, improving Eflorist’s search engine rankings, from sites including The Mirror, The Express, Yahoo! News, The Herald and The National.

And as well as this, the trend campaign diversified Eflorist’s backlink profile by increasing referring domains by 22.3% - resulting in improvements across the sites’ Domain Authority, Domain Relevancy and Trust Flow scores, as well as Share of Search; increasing it by 19% in just a few months.

Group 1 Automotive - Daylight Savings Time Changes

Finally, we created a trend campaign based on daylight savings time changes, and how this could potentially affect drivers for our automotive client, Group 1 Automotive.

Whilst many new cars will automatically change the time on your car clock for you, there are many that still don't—which could leave drivers confused about the true time on the road.

And if the time is incorrect in our vehicles, where do we naturally look next? A phone or smartwatch. However, using a phone whilst driving a car is a criminal offence , and can land you a £200 fine and 6 penalty points (or an instant ban if you’ve been driving for under two years).

As such, we created a trend campaign with tips on how to change your car clocks, alongside research which found that approximately 11,500,000 drivers in the UK don’t ever change the clocks in their car, and could risk receiving this penalty.

The campaign achieved 32 pieces of coverage from news publications such as The Mirror, Yahoo! News, and MSN, alongside 13 high-quality backlinks to Group 1 Automotive’s site.

And the good news with this trend campaign? It’s evergreen, so we can continue to outreach it when daylight savings time changes occur every March and October, allowing us to build more authority and brand awareness for the client

The power of the trend campaign is not one to be underestimated, and by incorporating these into your Digital PR strategy, you can create a huge impact on your overall brand awareness, as well as improve on your SEO results.

Contact Us

To hear more about how Honchō can help your brand with our Digital PR services, contact us here: https://honchosearch.com/pages/contact-us