A big part of what we do as a PR agency is to make sure our clients are in the news, and sometimes we do this by piggybacking off of what is ‘hot’ or popular in culture at the time.
(We could have chosen any number of campaigns we’ve done for Bidvine (this Pokemon Go campaign, from before we rebranded, springs to mind!).
In early 2017, the hit musical La La Land was dominating the headlines with the general public reaction to the film and how many awards it had won. When something like this happens, it gets our PR brains thinking – how can our clients benefit from this trend?
Our client Bidvine.com, a local services marketplace that has a number of professional services on its platform, (including dance teachers) was the obvious choice for a La La Land themed campaign. We asked Bidvine.com to look into how many people had enquired about dance lessons since La La Land premiered, and sure enough demand for dance lessons had increased by 129%!
We realised there was a real story in this and wrote a release outlining the results of Bidvine.com’s internal research. To give the campaign some ‘meat’ and to drive those all important links we suggested that Bidvine.com run a La La Land themed dance class, where members of the public could learn the routines from the film – people would simply have to register their interest via the site.
This worked well for Bidvine.com because not only did it encourage journalists to link to the site, but enabled them to gauge interest to see if putting on a dance class would be worthwhile. We gained significant coverage in the preliminary stage of the campaign, securing dozens of pieces of coverage including big outlets like Time Out and Grazia.
The response from our initial PR agency outreach was huge – Bidvine.com received thousands of registrations! We received very positive feedback from the media as well – journalists were excited about the class and wanted to attend themselves, so we got cracking on making it happen.
Within a couple of days we had a venue and dance teacher booked and journalists from the London Evening Standard, The Sun, Women’s Health and The Independent attending, as well as hundreds of members of the public who had registered interest.
The dance class was a huge success and resulted in coverage on The Independent, London Evening Standard, The Sun’s showbiz section, Bizarre and many other outlets.
The campaign was great at driving customer engagement, registrations, traffic (traffic to the music teacher page was up 300%+) and conveying exactly what Bidvine.com does as a business, as well as pointing some great high authority links in the direction of the site.
Here’s the Sun’s video, having filmed some of the class:
https://www.facebook.com/danwootton/videos/634351876759439/
All in all, a very successful PR agency campaign!