How We Achieved Editorial in Coveted Wedding Media
THE BRIEF
The Green House Hotel in Bournemouth came to us with two objectives; the first to gain editorial in the wedding media and secondly to raise the profile of the hotel.
THE CHALLENGE
Our challenge was to achieve coverage in the wedding media. Due to its unique audience the wedding media provide precious little in the way of free space for brands trying to get a glimpse of the limelight and our challenge was to do just that.
THE SOLUTION
As we always do with new clients and new challenges, we researched the market then sat down as a team to work on our strategy. One of the golden rules of PR is finding something new to speak to journalists about; they need new news for their readers. With that in mind we assessed the unique offerings of a wedding at The Green House Hotel and unsurprisingly it was their green credentials that set them apart from the herd when it came to wedding venues.
The next step was, how do we make this into a story? We worked with a Bournemouth-based organisation called Count On Me who counts carbon for a living with the aim of reducing companies’ carbon footprint. Using their formulas and spreadsheets we could then accurately work out the carbon footprint of a wedding at The Green House Hotel. That however wasn’t enough; we still needed to make it topical and relatable. To make our story topical we calculated the carbon footprint of the royal Kate & Wills’ wedding to create a comparison and an interest angle. And the best way to make a story relatable is by using case studies so we sourced three; one couple who had a luxurious wedding in Ibiza, another couple who had a more modest wedding in Dorset and our third couple who got married at The Green House Hotel. The carbon footprint was worked out for each of the case studies which gave a fair mix of comparisons for The Green House to be held up against. As our final asset we researched the most popular wedding destinations and calculated like for like carbon comparisons for each.
To pitch this story out we researched each wedding title as well as journalists in mainstream publications that had featured weddings and contacted them with an individually tailored pitch suited to each of their titles or style of writing.
THE OUTCOME
Our hard work paid off with this campaign and we achieved an incredible 11 pieces of coverage in wedding titles reaching over 100,000 of The Green House Hotel’s target audience. Alongside an impressive collection of wedding coverage, the Sunny Bird PR team has also secured over 60 pieces of hotel coverage in just 6 months averaging out to a huge 10 pieces per month. The coverage achieved reached over 2.5 million readers and included reviews and roundups and has an advertising value of over £96,000!
