We’ve talked before about the benefits of newsjacking campaigns and, when done right, can lead to brilliant placements. Although reactive campaigns are spontaneous and unplanned by nature, our digital PR team will always leave time in their calendar for a spot of newsjacking.
Typically, reactive campaigns will be responding to breaking news and trending topics, but there is room for forward planning. Looking at international days and annual events will open up a wealth of potential campaign topics and give the digital PR experts more time for creative ideation.
This is exactly what we did when tasked by our client, money.co.uk, to brainstorm reactive campaigns to be linked to some of their inner pages. Scanning the news and highlighting key days in the calendar has led to a whole host of high authoritative links.
Prior to starting this campaign, the digital PR team created a specified reactive calendar for the pages the client had asked us to target. The calendar included upcoming entertainment releases, royal events, national and international days, and official data releases from ONS and Eurostat. This allowed us to pre-plan our PR ideas so that we were certain to coincide with the news cycle at the time. Despite this, we still kept an eye on the latest news on a daily basis so that we were ready to jump on anything that was genuinely reactive.
Once the relevant days were selected, the team was able to brainstorm ideas for planned reactives.
For example, it had been widely reported that Harry and Meghan were due to step down from their royal duties around the beginning of March. This led to the creation of our campaign "How Harry & Meghan could earn money after they step down from royal duties".
Despite the announcement coming at the end of February, it was very easy for us to provide valuable content as we had the ideas set in stone. Throughout March, more news articles were released about the topic and, as a result, it was continuously spoken about in the press; this allowed us to continually re-outreach the piece and gain more than 25 pieces of coverage.
The pre-planning that went into the Harry & Meghan campaign allowed us to react swiftly to the sudden announcement. All placements gained led to an average DA score of 75, indicating a strong presence across powerful sites.
This worked in a similar way for a lot of our reactives – two of the four most successful reactives were pre-planned in this way.
Our overall goal for these reactive campaigns is to ensure heightened coverage to Money.co.uk’s inner pages with relevant placements across national sites and industry-specific news anchors. As these inner pages include links to other areas across the site, we’re ensuring ‘link juice’ is distributed across the site. And since the start of March, we’ve done just that - achieving over 100 links to their site from these campaigns combined.
Our most successful reactives:
◾ How Harry & Meghan could make millions following their royal split, experts explain – 27 placements
◾ The Most Common Cleaning Mistakes You're Making, Experts Reveal! – 20 placements (still being outreached!)
◾ YouTube Royalty: Fans Reveal What They Want From Kate and Will – 12 placements
◾ Star Wars Day: The Hidden Star Wars Destinations to Visit – 11 placements