Best use of Digital PR: Driving test awaits
Agency: Maze Media
Client: Adrian Flux
Award: Best use of Digital PR, 2023: Bronze
Brief
As one of the UK’s largest specialist motor insurance brokers, Adrian Flux has become best known for its passion and expertise around four wheels - especially those within niche markets. To help the company continue to grow and become a nationally-recognised brand, PR & Outreach is being used to help take its name to a wider audience.
As part of a larger strategic plan, those efforts focus on several key areas of business as well as taking advantage of other projects that could allow current or potential customers to be marketed to - be it directly or indirectly.
Several ad-hoc and low budget content-led PR campaigns have taken the Adrian Flux brand to a wider audience, further enhancing its reputation while increasing visibility across the UK.
In late October/early November 2022, the aim of a new campaign was to create something that could engage with learner drivers, their parents, and members of the general public by producing readable content around a newsworthy topic. The Driving Test Centre Waits campaign was created.
The objectives were as follows:
1 - Increase Adrian Flux’s desire to become a national brand by getting placements in newspapers and/or online across the UK
2 - Gain backlinks via placements or link building efforts to drive traffic back to Adrian Flux’s website and support attempts in raising its domain authority (59 at the time of the campaign)
3 - Ensure related engaging content that creates added value for PR pitches is discoverable and brings users to the client’s websites
This campaign had to be turned around quickly and at low cost - hence the decision to use pre-existing retainer time - to provide maximum ROI on what was, in essence, a small PR campaign.
Solution
Driving test centre waits and delays for getting lessons have remained on the news agenda since an initial backlog was created by the first coronavirus lockdowns in 2020. This presented an opportunity for Adrian Flux to get in on the act and take its name into inboxes with a number of regional pitches and press releases about the topic - namely the length of time it took to get a driving test at centres across the UK.
The aim of these would be to drive traffic back to a wider report that could provide added value and increase the chance of backlinks being secured while getting the brand name in front of readers and journalists who wouldn’t necessarily be aware of the company.
A freedom of information (FOI) request was all it took to obtain the data required - as well as plenty of patience and speedy analysis to repackage those results in a readable and easy-to-digest manner.
A member of the content team worked closely with our PR and outreach expert to ensure what was being produced was as PRable as possible to strengthen the chances of the campaign being a success.
The decision was made to place the copy entitled: Revealed: The driving test centres with the shortest waiting times on Adrian Flux’s Learner Driver site. This content hub provides helpful information to those looking to get on the road, and their parents, while also promoting several aspects of the company’s insurance offering for young drivers. It was a better suited host than the other hubs or general blogs that are available.
Key points and stats were pulled apart to produce an easy-to-read report that was made visually appealing thanks to the design team’s involvement.
Thirteen separate pitches, including one national hook, were then quickly turned around, signed off and outreached to newsdesks and inboxes in the North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, East Midlands, West Midlands, South East (including London), South West, East, Scotland and Wales.
These were the areas covered in the FOI results and allowed localised hooks to be produced such as Young drivers in Wales are enjoying the shortest wait to get a driving test in Great Britain to pique interest.
Due to the time sensitivity of the information provided, we completed the campaign, from FOI data landing to the final outreach follow-ups, within a three-week period.
Results
All three objectives for the driving test centre waits campaign were successfully achieved.
High-profile placements include coverage in:
Yahoo! News (DA 94)
The Scotsman (DA 90)
The Yorkshire Post (DA 78)
A total of 95 placements were secured across the UK, 82 of which were online, eight on radio and five in print.
They were gained in the following regions:
East: 1
West Midlands: 2
National (titles): 4
North East: 10
South East: 11
Scotland: 13
East Midlands: 14
North West: 18
South West: 22
Placing localised and separate angles in front of the right eyes saved journalists having to find their own hook and, no doubt, helped secure the cross-regional nature of placements.
One successful countrywide-angle pitch into the National World motoring editor Matt Allan took this campaign to new heights as he also rolled that content out across all of the company’s 60-plus regional websites as well as its eponymous title. The pitch was interesting enough for him to want to tweak some of the content by adding his own extra information, getting designs produced to support the articles while linking back through to the main report.
A total of 82 backlinks was a phenomenal success given they were all achieved without paying for the privilege.
This shows the strength of the added value that was provided by teasing a local/smaller release with a link, and brand mention, being secured as a result of a full report sitting on the Adrian Flux domain. This ensured less time was required to try and force backlinks to be added at a later date once a placement had been secured.
With the company’s DA sitting at 59 at the time of the campaign, the average DA of those 82 placements matching that number would have enhanced and increased the website’s reputation with Google.
Placements and backlinks on several considerably higher DA websites will ultimately have also had a long-lasting effect in supporting our ongoing SEO efforts to improve Flux’s rating.
The placements, and backlinks, no doubt performed wonders for Adrian Flux but the content held up on its own merits too.
Total traffic to the campaign landing page of 26,760, including 17,541 who arrived via organic search, shows how discoverable it was and how the links would have contributed as a significant ranking factor.
The content was also engaging because the average time interacting with the content was one minute and 43 seconds, 41 seconds higher and 66% more than the average. A total of 8,600 users (32%) scrolled to the bottom of the page and read more than 75% of the content which is impressive given that most people would have got to their region’s information before then and it’s 10% higher than the average scroll depth for learner driver hub articles.
Please see the supporting document for further results and analysis behind the campaign.