By The following Bonfire Night Safety Campaign is a case study of my inbound marketing experience using social media at Blueclaw. It was produced as a ‘micro site’ to illustrate how producing good quality ‘useful stuff’ for the web, together with inbound marketing techniques can attract high quality link acquisition, in addition to promoting a good cause at the same time.
Strategy
Target something which has mass appeal, will attract natural high quality authoritative links and will continue to attract links over time every year.
The main keywords “firework safety” and “bonfire night” are too competitive. In order to attract natural links it’s important to be found so that people can naturally link to you. We decided therefore to go after a secondary term which is highly likely to be referenced in articles and blogs.
Google trends for “bonfire night safety”
If you’d like to see the animated version of this guide please visit Bonfire-Night-Safety.co.uk.
Using Social Media to Build Influence & Links
It was crucial for the campaign to use social media platforms to propel the site virally. The main channel used was Twitter as this was a fast-paced link attraction orientated exercise, and the results speak for themselves attracting some excellent coverage;
Subtlly effective CSS3 animation in Bonfire Night infographic – http://t.co/nE9saKWS
— net magazine (@netmag) October 30, 2012
The Twitter account now has a good amount of highly influential followers including; Journalists, Councils, Fire Services, Police Departments, MPs and Charities. This will make pushing the same ‘reusable content’ quicker, easier and more cost effective in 2013.
Here are a few examples of the links which it naturally attracted in the first year (2012)
Click image for full screen shots
ITV News
Yahoo News
Sussex Police
This is Leicester
Stoke City Council
Summary
The project went extremely well, mainly because it wasn’t a commercial website! This was crucial for it to work; in fact, only two people/organisations questioned who we were and why we were doing it? Due to the disorganised nature of the public sector it makes targeting institutions easier than you think!
Editorial calendar
Of course this is just the first year of the ‘micro-site’ – because of the nature of the campaign, it will continue to attract natural links over time, only helping to increase the authority of the site for years to come.
Takeaways – How and why would some link to the site?
Embed infographic
Good question – everyone has different requirements and platforms. Firstly we wanted to target bloggers, and the easiest way was to produce an infographic which could be embedded. However, I identified that this most likely wouldn’t work for larger commercial/corporate websites as that’s just not what they do typically. These types of organisation are more likely to directly link to the website, which is fine as long as the pages aren’t deleted. Having recently had a lovely link deleted for one of my clients from the UKTI website where the whole page was deleted, I’m always looking for new options to hide links deep in sites where they might last longer. Coincidently this content was ported to The National Archive upon where all links are stripped from the content in order to preserve it for the future.
PDF file
I have always liked PDFs – OK, they are duplicate content, but I don’t care when they are on high trust domains. We produced a takeaway PDF resource for schools and institutions to use on their own sites, with a lovely PDF search-friendly link. And we got it on some lovely sites like this one.