Our Gloucestershire PR Expertise: 7 Brands We've Helped Build

As one of the UK’s leading PR agencies (that’s been operating for almost 30 years), we’ve worked with hundreds of brands both nationally and internationally. But as we’re based in Cheltenham, we’ve also helped a huge number of Gloucestershire businesses flourish and grow.

We’ve worked with some of the region’s largest employers like Spirax Sarco and Capita. We’ve supported much-loved local retailers like Just Fabrics, household name Stagecoach, through to smaller specialist companies like employee benefits platform Rippl, luxury eco garden furniture manufacturer Oxleys and highly specialist property experts, Ridge & Partners. And just about everything in between!

Some of the south west-based companies we’ve helped include:

• Spirax Sarco
• Capita
• Rippl
• Kingsbridge
• Kiwa
• Ridge and Partners
• Stagecoach
• Tarren Productions
• Just Fabrics
• Oxleys
• The Spring Centre

Our work for these companies not only reflects the sheer breadth of experience and expertise in our team, but also the variety of comms services we offer. To show you what we mean, here’s a small snapshot of our work for some of Gloucestershire’s finest brands.

Local transport company, Stagecoach West was adding 14 new state-of-the-art buses to its Gloucestershire fleet. The investment was the largest influx of new buses in recent years to the area, and it wanted to use the occasion to create interest and buzz among local residents.

As media advisors for the Stagecoach West team, they turned to us for help. We suggested a good way to inject fun into the story was to run a campaign calling on the local community to name the buses.

As you can imagine the suggestions that came in were varied! From historical figures and silly puns through to local personalities.  Fortunately no Busy McBusfaces were put forward…

From the 200+ suggestions a shortlist of 14 was created and a public vote followed. There was then a big reveal of the new buses emblazoned with their new names.

The whole campaign generated masses of local interest – 15 pieces of coverage, 5 broadcast interviews, 1.1m people reached, 1700 votes and 14 stellar names for the buses. And this all fostered a real sense of ownership of the buses among the Gloucestershire community. Job done!

Hydrogen is a hot topic, and Kiwa was involved in a report exploring the feasibility of converting the UK’s gas transmission network from natural gas to hydrogen.

But bigger and better-known organisations like the Department of Energy and Climate Change (now DBEIS) and KPMG were also contributing to the report. They risked stealing all the limelight.

So Kiwa asked us to help. They wanted us to redress the balance and position the business as the hydrogen thought leader, underline the central role Kiwa played in the project and secure lots of media coverage. The coverage needed to be in highly specialist media – to help reach Kiwa’s potential customers. But they also wanted coverage locally, to further boost the company’s reputation as a local employer.

Using our technical know-how and immense media contacts, we set to work securing opportunities for Kiwa’s experts.  We achieved ‘Viewpoints’ in: The Engineer, Energy World, Gas International, H&V News and PHAM News. We also secured interviews with: Gas World, Utility Week, greenbusiness.co.uk and reached Kiwa’s local community with coverage in Cotswold Life and The Gloucestershire Echo.

Gloucestershire-based events company Tarren Productions runs the West Midlands’ biggest consumer Christmas event, Winter Glow.

Although it was entering its third year, it was still relatively unknown among many local people. And with new events being launched by competitors, the community had no fewer than 8 other events to choose from.

So we were called in to help Winter Glow outgun the competition, and establish it as the ultimate festive event.

Firstly, we made sure the event was featured in all the ‘what’s on’ lists. We then issued a series of news stories during a long event build up. The stories were a mix of factual and fun – and they even included us hosting the show’s first ever Santa’s Elves auditions! Working far out from the start of Winter Glow gave us plenty of chances to get on peoples’ radars and into their diaries.

To add even more impetus, we then overlaid all of this with an influencer programme, identifying and working with over 100 of the most influential family and lifestyle content creators in the key catchment area.

These influencers did ticket giveaways during the show’s preceding months and attended a VIP reception on opening night which included a free go on all the key attractions.

Rock solid reviews, lots of content and social sharing from the 100 swiftly followed. The PR results say it all. 246 pieces of coverage, 6k web referrals, 8 million online coverage views, 164 links secured and importantly a 33% share of voice amongst the top 8 local events.

Spirax Sarco was updating its website and wanted to completely refresh the content. In particular it needed a brand-new way to explain its highly technical products. This was not only a huge task – it had an immense number of products – but it also required fresh thinking. The products are complex and technically advanced. They couldn’t be dumbed-down, but still needed to be explained in a more engaging way.

With clients like GE and Innovate UK on our roster, we’re highly experienced at talking about sophisticated engineered products and complicated industries. We’re also skilled at writing content that’s optimised for the search engines.

So it was ‘full steam ahead’ for Energy’s expert, technical writers. They interviewed Spirax’s subject matter experts and then wrote engaging, optimised web content about products such as steam traps, clean steam, heat transfer solutions, isolation values and flow metering & controls. The new website was a huge hit.

Rippl wanted to increase its website performance, grow its brand awareness and generate lots of good quality traffic to its site, fuelling its sales pipeline.

Our digital PR team started by analysing Rippl’s site, market, target audiences and its competitors. We found that although HR is a topic full of human interest, all the competitors were talking very boringly about it.

So we decided to be discernibly different with our approach. We created far more imaginative media stories about important HR and employee benefit issues. For instance, we conducted research and identified the number of job ads that outlined statutory benefits as if they were perks.

Another story looked at the new workplace expressions taking hold in UK offices – from “acting your wage” (putting in the right amount of effort to reflect your salary) to “woliday” (working on holiday).

The media loved this fresh take and the coverage rolled in. 55 pieces of online coverage in just five months to be exact! Including in The Times and leading industry press, such as theHRDIRECTOR.

58 new backlinks were secured too – from 21 unique referring domains. These links helped give a 14-point boost to Rippl’s website domain authority. The campaign also led to a surge in keywords Rippl is now ranked for. We got it into the top 100 results for over 1,400 new search terms and onto page 1 for 8 priority keywords.

“Our website has seen its biggest growth to date. Our domain rating, backlinks and organic traffic volume have all increased significantly. This is such an incredible win for us and so a huge thank you to the Energy team for all of your work to date, it’s fantastic to see this pay off in growing both our SEO and brand footprint. Our Leadership Team is super impressed, and we’re really excited for what else is to come.”

Hannah Wiltshire, Head of Marketing at Rippl

Everyone in Cheltenham knows Just Fabrics as the place to go for wonderful fabrics. But the company was expanding its offering to something completely new.  It was launching The Academy, an online platform for at-home sewers who want soft furnishing and upholstery courses.

As an online offering, Just Fabrics needed to spread the word way beyond its usual local fanbase. So we adopted two tactics to support the launch. We delivered comprehensive media relations, especially targeting Christmas gift guides, getting journalist reviews and of course issuing news about the Academy.

Next up we worked with influencers creating the Just Fabrics Ambassador programme, partnering with 5 top influencers in the craft and home interiors space.

The results included 15 pieces of coverage in leading women’s titles such as Prima, Period Living, English Living and Cotswold Life. While the influencers achieved over 68,000 impressions for their content and a 14% engagement rate.

Tewkesbury-based Kingsbridge specialises in insurance for contractors, tradespeople and small businesses.

It came to us as it wanted to raise awareness amongst key audiences and cement its position as a thought leader on the crucial issue of IR35, which was coming up to its 1^st anniversary.

Kingsbridge already had plans to do some research and launch a white paper on the topic – but to be effective we needed to ensure the media spanning a whole host of industries – IT, oil & gas, renewables, engineering, banking & finance, creative industries, recruitment and accountancy – would be interested.

As a first step we reviewed the proposed research, advised on what would work for the media it needed to impress, and we then wrote the white paper. This ensured the strongest news hooks were front and centre in the activity.

While this work was under way we contacted every journalist who had written/spoken about IR35 to determine their content plans for the anniversary, as we wanted to put Kingsbridge in the frame for commentary opportunities. We outlined a Kingsbridge expert spokesperson who could help with their needs, detailing their experience and expertise. And to whet appetites, we trailed the research findings which were coming down the line.

Tailored news releases on the research and white paper were issued for each market. To maximise take up, we offered exclusives to some key media such as the FT and tailored bespoke features to others.

Almost 30 critical media titles including the FT, Construction News, Global Banking & Finance Review, The Global Recruiter and HR magazine carried our content. We secured 267 downloads of the whitepaper and people coming to the Kingsbridge site on the back of our media activity spent typically 6 minutes on the site – a 40% increase on the average.

Whether you’re a Gloucestershire business that sells to consumers or a highly technical company that sells B2B, we can help.  So get in touch at susannah@energypr.co.uk to find out more – after all, we’re only down the road. We’ll put the kettle on!