Case Study
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.
We ran content and digital 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 in 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.
This work for Viking and Office Depot was shortlisted at 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).
To tie in with the 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.
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:
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.
This campaign achieved 81 pieces of coverage with 76 links across Germany, Austria, Italy and the UK.
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).
We achieved 121 pieces of coverage with 96 links across Italy, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.
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.
The campaign received 70 pieces of coverage with 66 links across each market.
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