100Green Digital PR Case Study | Grow your own Christmas Dinner

How growing your own Christmas Dinner helped grow the 100Green Brand

100Green are the UK’s only 100% green gas and renewable electricity supplier. Their attitude towards climate change is always one of hope and positivity. Their target audience is homeowners with a desire to contribute to environmental sustainability.

Honchō knew they had to reach a wide audience, whilst steering clear of doomsday-esque content that sustainability news can often focus on.

What better way to achieve this than to give tips on how people can have a more sustainable Christmas by growing their own festive foods!

Our Digital PR team was able to create engaging, educational, evergreen content which has earned 236 pieces of coverage so far and continues to yield results throughout the year.

Christmas Digital PR Campaign Case Study - 100Green

CHALLENGE

In summer 2023, Green Energy UK had to rebrand in its third decade, due to a threatening lawsuit from another UK business with a similar name.

As such, 100Green was born and needed support with building their new brand identity, so engaged Honchō’s Digital PR team to create educational content with sustainability at its heart.

Our goal was to:

Find relevant topics that would appeal to a wide audience
Create a campaign that provided journalists with an evergreen hook
Produce a linkable asset to support diversifying their backlink profile and improve share of search

We created ‘Grow Your Own Christmas Dinner’; a campaign designed to advise consumers on how to have a more sustainable Christmas. We knew this piece would provide something educational and informative to earn coverage and connect with readers, which would result in the new 100green brand gaining visibility that wouldn’t have been possible without Digital PR.

100Green - Case Study Goals and Challenges

STRATEGY

Topical relevancy is critical to achieving campaign success. We attained this by surveying 2000 Brits and found that a resounding 61% were interested in having a greener Christmas - and we had the solution to help them achieve this!

Created content and visual assets showing the best times to sow, plant, grow, and store Christmas dinner vegetables to have them ready for Christmas Day. We also worked with farmer, Russell Parkins of Dane End Christmas Tree Farm, to add authority and expert commentary.

To give our story a bit more welly, and since educational, sustainability-based content was one of the objectives, we also calculated the environmental costs of Christmas dinners to tie into the modern rejection of Christmas overconsumption.

We found that the average Christmas for four people causes 23.75kg of CO2.

When looking at all Christmas-celebrating British households: the equivalent of 3.6 billion miles driven - enough to go to the moon and back 7.592 times!

STRATEGY

Our technical SEO strategy was underpinned by the ultimate goal of improving the user experience and making it super easy for search engines to crawl, index and rank content.

Our immediate focus was to get the basics right and achieve excellence in building strong foundations, using our knowledge of the automotive landscape. Once the performance of the site was significantly enhanced, it was time to unlock more advanced strategies.

PERSONALISED EXPERIENCE

We built a feature which allowed users to see a more personalised used car inventory, dependent on their location or where they were accessing the website from.

With a constantly changing inventory and new cars being sold and uploaded all the time, we created an automated solution to manage and ease the process. When new pages are added with listings, they now just automatically populate with unique content that is aligned to the users’ questions and interest for the specific model.

We aligned user needs with the taxonomy. Based on our extensive research of the automotive landscape, we identified new opportunities within the used car search results. Benefits to the end customer from these developments are that they can refine their search and find the right car model for their needs.

We optimised the CDN caching set-up, allowing us to enhance the performance of the site significantly.

RESULTS

The beauty of this campaign is the huge range of angles it gives us to work with throughout the year including the times to sow your veg, the carbon output and the festive hook.

These are the results we’ve achieved so far, but they will continue to…grow:

Increased brand awareness through 236 pieces of media coverage from top-tier news sites including The Herald, The National, Country & TownHouse, The Northern Echo and Oxford Mail.
Earned 235 high authority backlinks, contributing to organic performance and improving 100Green’s search engine rankings.
This campaign was seen by over 44 million people across all coverage.
Diversified backlink profile by increasing referring domains 43%, which has resulted in improvements across the sites Domain Authority, Domain Relevancy and Trust Flow scores.
Contributed to improving the client’s Share of Search; increasing it by 67% in just a few months.

Anyone in marketing will appreciate how hard it can be to create a constant flow of engaging content. The team at Honchō have become an extension to our team and are just as enthusiastic about our business as we are. They quickly understood our tone of voice, values and appetite to create fun, relevant and educational content and have brought our brand to life in a series of creative campaigns. The Christmas dinner campaign is an aspirational piece that anyone who takes pride in preparing for Christmas dinner will relate to – but also provides attainable and practical sustainability tips that anyone can take on board. That’s the key to Honchō’s campaign successes; a positive mixture of content that captures people’s imaginations yet allows everyone to feel good by taking something away that can really make a difference to our planet