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 its key objectives is to increase visibility and international coverage in global markets through gaining online coverage and links.

 

The strategy

 

We ran 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 native-speaking digital marketing experts identified which niches in that market Viking had substantial link opportunities in. This, combined with their specialist knowledge of the market’s interest and news agenda, allowed us to create campaigns we knew journalists would be interested in, leading to international coverage for the brand.

This work for Viking and Office Depot was shortlisted for the 2020 Global Search Awards in the Best Global SEO Campaign category.

The results (June 2018 – June 2019)

 

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 2020 Global Search Awards Finalist logo.

The highlights

Game of Thrones – Paper Dragon

 

To tie in with final Game of Thrones series, we commissioned paper artist Andy Singleton to build a 13-meter 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:

A photo of a paper dragon sculpture, based on an idea from Game of Thrones. It was created by Andy Singleton and was used for digital PR campaign by Search Laboratory digital marketing agency.

  • Printer Paper moved from position #4 to #2, 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

 

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.

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).

We achieved 121 pieces of coverage with 96 links across Italy, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

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.

The campaign received 70 pieces of coverage with 66 links across each market.

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