Introduction

For us, it was important to use a strategy that placed our expertise at The Cask Connoisseur to clearly distinguish our brand from our competitors whilst also creating a campaign that was interesting to all, as well as driving organic links and traffic to our website. 

The issue with Digital PR (DPR) is how do you prove the results? Whilst we can clearly see when we gain links and brand mentions, the question is how to measure results in real time to demonstrate increased brand recognition and sales. 

In order to achieve this, The Cask Connoisseur developed an indirect methodology through the use of social media metrics that potentially could solve this problem. In order to prove proof of concept, The Cask Connoisseur did the following: 

Objective 

Using a basic website and providing information of interest to journalists and other outlets, can we obtain publicity, brand recognition and demonstrate recognition of expertise (proxy for increased sales). 

Could a similar campaign for a commercial company achieve similar success for brand recognition and increase sales which would be the purpose of such campaign. 

Strategy

We created a social media index to rank the 144 distilleries in Scotland and targeted our outreach to regional and national publications, alongside travel, drink and lifestyle niches. Our team initially did a desktop search to identify all whisky distilleries in Scotland currently in production, then scored each based on their social media reviews and online presence. 

We then provided journalists a list of the top ten distilleries, ensuring tailored press releases were created alongside the original, to maximise suitability for each relevant publication. The initial round of outreach was conducted in March, with continued outreach and follow ups done over the next four weeks.

Results

47 pieces of coverage (The total number of online, offline and social clips). This included, The Daily Record (DA 86), The Scottish Sun (DA 86) and Yahoo News (DA 94)  to name a few. 

The following metrics are what we have achieved from the 47 pieces of coverage:

• 510K estimated views (This is a prediction of lifetime views of coverage, based on audience reach & engagement rate).
• 51.9 million audience (This is the combined total of publication-wide audience figures for all outlets featuring our coverage).
• 1.13K engagement (This is the combined total of likes, comments and shares on social media platforms).
• Average DR 58 (A 0-100 measure of the authority of the site coverage appears on. Provided by Moz).

The final result for The Cask Connoisseur website were:

• 600% increase in our website traffic during the period of the campaign.
• 8 journalists/outlets subsequently reached out with further media requests needing expert commentary.
• 20% increase in social media recognition. 

Discussion

The results clearly drove traffic to our website, as well as achieving natural organic links on relevant and high quality websites, helping us expand brand awareness of The Cask Connoisseur. 

This increased traffic declined slowly after the campaign ended, highlighting the need to provide continuous brand awareness through insightful campaigns, helpful data and interesting commentary. 

The goal of any campaign is to promote brand awareness for future sales and increase current sales. As with traditional PR it is easy to measure changes in sales volume during the campaign. 

We demonstrated increased brand awareness through further commentary requests and increase in social media recognition.

Where the difficulty lies is measuring the effect on brand awareness, as the published articles are not necessarily about your product, only using your brand as the source or providing comment. The two proxy measurements of success that The Cask Connoisseur uses are the social media ranking between peers which is collated monthly and the quality of referring domains. 

The advantage of DPR is it will support and complement your usual sales strategy by using channels and topics that can be related to the business but reach a wider audience due to the diversity of topics that can be used. 

If you’d like to discuss how we can help your business grow please contact us.