Reactive campaign achieves 180+ links for national card retailer

Founded in 2009, Funky Pigeon is a leading online retailer of personalised greetings cards and gifts for a diverse range of holidays and events.

The Challenge

As Funky Pigeon faced a highly competitive industry, Impression was tasked with developing a creative digital PR campaign that would drive traffic and coverage from high quality websites and publications to enable them to grow their online visibility.

Funky Pigeon sought to drive sales and awareness towards a particular area within their domain. At the same time, Adele announced her long-awaited album ‘30’ which made international headlines. We used this as an opportunity to raise awareness of our client. Due to the short-lived relevancy of reactive PR, we had to plan and execute our strategy within 1 month (October – November 2021).

Our objectives were broken down into owned and shared goals. Owned goals are those we can directly influence, while Shared goals are those we can impact alongside other channels. This framework allows us to think strategically about how best we can impact our clients’ wider business goals.

Owned objectives

• Drive links to a specified area of the domain.
• Achieve an average domain rating of 50+ from all links gained

Shared objectives

• Achieve SERP position 1-3 for agreed focus keywords
• Across an agree keyword set, increase total ranking positions by 50

The Strategy

We utilised a product stunt approach to generate relevant, high-quality backlinks to help drive qualified traffic and to increase the brand’s visibility among its target audience.

Hot off the press, we took advantage of the opportunity to create an innovative and unique campaign in reaction to the announcement of Adele’s long-awaited album ‘30’, which made international headlines. With songs based on her recent divorce, we knew that this album would be emotionally charged.

With this in mind, we set out to create a whole new range of ‘break-up’ cards with Funky Pigeon’s internal team as well as encouraged them to create a new subdomain on the site where these cards would be featured. This process required close communication, collaboration and trust with our client.

The cards would appeal to those who have recently gone through a breakup as well as Adele fans awaiting the new album. Its uniqueness targeted a new type of support among friends and tied into something we knew would achieve mass headlines and tonnes of social media coverage.

One of the major challenges we faced was time and relevancy. With the new album releasing on the 19th November, we only had one month for ideation, creation and conduct outreach. We identified the release week as the best window of opportunity to achieve meaningful results, this meant outreach would be conducted over a short four-day period. Beyond these dates the story was no longer relevant.

In order to make the best use of our outreach efforts, we targeted high quality domains and press that are both of relevance from an SEO perspective or from a customer point-of-view. Specifically, our media lists comprised lifestyle and music press.

The Results

In only four days of outreach, we achieved:

• 183 links to the agreed target area of the domain
• 56 average DR across a total of 183 links
• #1-3 positions achieved for focus keywords
• Rankings for related keywords within the agreed area of the site increased by 71 positions (42% above target)!

Placements in publications such as:

• Metro (89 DR)
• Indy100 (77 DR)
• Her.ie (71 DR)
• Wales Online (82 DR)