A year of international success for Viking
Challenge
Viking, part of the Office Depot group, is a major supplier of office stationery and office products to businesses in multiple territories worldwide. As a global brand, one of their key objectives is to increase visibility in international markets through gaining online coverage and links.
Solution
We run content and online PR campaigns for Viking in five markets: the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Austria. This includes international PR campaigns, blogger campaigns and country-specific campaigns. To ensure success across different markets, our mother tongue digital marketing experts identified which niches within that market Viking had strong link opportunities in. This, combined with their specialist knowledge of the market’s interest and news agenda, allowed us to create campaigns which we knew journalists would be interested in. Game of Thrones – Paper Dragon To tie in with the new (and final) GoT series, we commissioned paper artist Andy Singleton to build a 13-metre fire-breathing paper dragon made entirely out of Viking paper. By using Viking’s products in this campaign, we were able to build links directly to the category page from websites across all five markets. International Shakespeare Week To coincide with International Shakespeare Week we ran a blogger box campaign, sending bloggers boxes filled with stationery that could be used to create their own Shakespeare-inspired art. Blogger campaigns are an important part of the Viking strategy as it allows us to highlight their key products and get links back to category pages. Office Romance One of our target publication niches is HR and business. To gain coverage in this sector, we conducted a survey looking at romantic relationships in the workplace to get stats on how many workers had had office relationships, and then worked with a psychologist to get tips on how to handle these types of romances professionally (as well as what to do when they fail). International Pen Pal Day To mark World Letter Writing Day, we collaborated with bloggers across all five markets, matching up those who we thought would get on well based on their interests and blogs. By providing them with Viking stationery, the bloggers were able to build friendships with their new pen pals and learn about their culture, without resorting to digital communications.
Results
We are proud to announce that the work we have done for this client has been shortlisted for The Global Search Awards in the Best Global SEO Campaign category. Across all five territories, we achieved 1,595 pieces of coverage, of which 1,242 contained links (987 followed links). UK: 701 coverage, 503 links Germany: 327 coverage, 287 links Netherlands: 252 coverage, 195 links Italy: 133 coverage, 109 links Austria: 182 coverage, 148 links. The dragon took ten days to build, and ten hours to install, but the time spent was worth it: the campaign achieved 265 pieces of coverage and 120 links, reached over 6.75 billion online readers, 9.89m coverage views, and 31.3k social shares. We also improved performance for the keywords Printer Paper, Copy Paper and A3 Copy Paper which were targeted in the campaign: Printer Paper moved from position #4 to #1, increasing monthly searches by 6,600 Copy Paper moved from position #3 to #2, increasing monthly searches by 1,000 A3 Copy Paper moved from position #5 to #1, increasing monthly searches by 320. 265 pieces of coverage 120 links 31.3k social shares International Shakespeare Week This campaign achieved 81 pieces of coverage with 76 links across Germany, Austria, Italy and the UK. Office Romance We achieved 121 pieces of coverage with 96 links across Italy, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. International Pen Pal Day The campaign received 70 pieces of coverage with 66 links across each market.
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