Clientversary: The Green House Hotel

Sunny Bird PR is celebrating its two-year clientversary with The Green House Hotel and what a year it’s been! Over the past 12 months, we’ve secured 66 pieces of coverage in a plethora of prestigious titles such as The Daily Telegraph, Time Out, The Independent, Country Living, National Geographic Traveller as well as key wedding magazines, reaching more than 7 million people!

Having introduced the hotel to the wider consumer press and travel publications during our first year of PR activity, this year The Green House Hotel wanted to focus on securing long-form press reviews in targeted consumer publications as well as increasing its wedding bookings by securing more articles in the sought after wedding press.

With the Bridal press being notoriously hard to place articles in without advertising spend, the team came up with creative concepts which would be guaranteed to get press. To do this, we worked alongside the hotel to launch the UK’s first ever Vegan Wedding Package, allowing brides and grooms to design their wedding around sustainable principles.

The package was inspired by the nation’s growing vegan population which now includes more than 3.5 million people and the increasing space dedicated to a vegan lifestyle in newspapers, magazines and online. To create the package, we reached out to vegan suppliers, from Fairtrade dress designers to cruelty-free make-up artists and created an extensive list of suppliers the hotel’s wedding planners could use to ensure the day was beautiful as well as kind to the environment.  The Vegan Wedding Package includes a fully vegan à la carte menu as well as Fairtrade UK flowers which don’t need importing therefore reducing the carbon footprint of the wedding. By creating a first-of-its-kind package, we created something new which journalists were interested in which resulted in coverage in publications including Bride, Your Wedding Magazine, Wedding Ideas, The Kind Bride, Vegan Living, Veg News and The Independent to name a few. In total, the team achieved 19 pieces of coverage for the Vegan Wedding Package which reached almost 2 million people!

To ensure the hotel was front of mind for loved up couples year-round, we conducted a second campaign capitalising up on the success of our previous Carbon Wedding campaign. SBPR worked with Bournemouth-based carbon counting company Count On Me to work out the carbon cost of a honeymoon in Thailand, America, and at The Green House Hotel. Honeymoons in Thailand and America worked out in excess of 15 tonnes of carbon compared to just 0.5 tonnes for a stay at The Green House Hotel. We pitched these facts and figures to key journalists along with a case study of a couple who had honeymooned at the hotel to secure future coverage. The Carbon Honeymoon campaign was featured six times across the wedding publications including double page spreads in Your Wedding Magazine, Green Union and To Have and To Hold.

Throughout the year, the team also organised press trips to truly highlight the hotel’s USPs as a sustainable holiday destination. We invited journalists from respected titles including The Daily Telegraph, Metro.co.uk, Red magazine, Women’s Health, My Weekly, The Ecologist and The Wharf magazine to stay and dine at the hotel. Each of the journalists explored the sights of the local area and dined at the award-winning fully sustainable hotel restaurant, the Arbor restaurant, during their stay to get the full hotel experience, resulting in long-form reviews and features read by millions.

It’s certainly been an exciting year working with The Green House Hotel over the last 12 months, and with lots of new developments happening at the venue the team cannot wait to get started on this year’s PR activity to ensure the hotel stays at the forefront of sustainable hospitality!

6 Top Tips for Creating a Killer PR Strategy

The importance of developing a strong public relations strategy is probably something you’ve heard a lot, but what exactly is a PR strategy, how does it work and why is it important?

A PR strategy is essentially a plan of action to ensure your campaigns are well coordinated and delivered on time to ensure maximum impact for your brand. As an agency, we believe that a strategic plan can be the difference between make or break and is something you want to get right.

There are a lot of elements and steps involved in executing an effective PR campaign, from writing press releases, securing imagery and pitching it to the right journalists in time for the correct issue. It is the strategy which helps coordinate this to make sure everything runs smoothly.

At Sunny Bird PR, we create strategies for all our clients to ensure your brand or business is appearing in the press and is seen by your target audience year-round.

Here are our six steps to a fool-proof strategy:

Outline your objectives

First and foremost, outline your objectives. What do you want to be achieving through PR? Do you want to drive website traffic, increase sales or boost awareness? It’s important to make your objectives specific and measurable so you can tailor your campaign towards achieving them and monitor when they’ve been achieved. It is these objectives which will define the tools and tactics needed to implement your PR plan.

Define your target audience

Identifying your target audience is crucial if you want to be positioning your brand in front of them. Who do you want to be discovering your brand, product or service? What media do they consume, where do they spend their time and who do they talk to? Understanding who you are communicating with is crucial as it means your tactics can be targeted to resonate with a specific audience.

Research the media

This part is absolutely key. Once you’ve identified your target audience and what publications they read or websites they visit, devour that media! Find out who the journalists are, what they are writing about and identify any space where your brand might fit. This activity will help you start thinking creatively about how to position your brand to certain publications and what key messages will be most important.

Decide on tactics

Next up, you need to determine which tactics will best achieve your PR goals. For example, if you’re a fashion brand, you might want to sell more clothes by having your latest collection featured in a plethora of women’s magazines or you might want to make your tech start-up more appealing to investors by commenting on a topical debate.

There are endless tactics at our disposal depending on the objective ranging from distributing a press release to social media campaigns and organising events. Having established your goal and target audience it will be easier to assess which tactics will be the most effective in conveying your brand messages to them.

Leave yourself enough time

Now it’s time to start implementing a timeframe. This timeline can take any format you choose so long as it works for you, be it an excel flow chart or your everyday diary. This involves thinking strategically about time. Break down projects into smaller achievable tasks, decide who will do them and when by. By allocating time to tasks, you can organise your time and realistically evaluate how much time you want to dedicate to PR each month and what can be achieved in that time.

It’s also very important to consider deadlines for publications. Magazines and newspapers will have very different deadlines depending whether they are published monthly, weekly or daily. It’s imperative to identify what titles you are approaching and when they will need the information by. Generally, we advise six months in advance for the monthly titles, meaning if you would like your product appearing in December Christmas gift guides, you need to be reaching out to journalists in July.

Remember, your timing strategy can be as detailed or as vague as you like, but the important thing is it’s achievable, no deadlines are missed and it keeps you accountable week-on-week.

Set KPIs to measure results

Finally, we recommend setting yourself some targets or ‘Key Performance Indicators’ to give you something to aim for and measure the output of all your hard work. At Sunny Bird PR we set ourselves KPIs to achieve for every activity, whether that’s increasing Instagram followers or placing a certain number of articles in the national press.

Monitoring success can help you work out what tactics have been successful and what to try next time. A solid strategy will help you better understand your target audience, communicate your key messaging and most importantly grow your business!