SGPR was tasked by business psychology and wellbeing experts Robertson Cooper and its Good Day At Work brand to promote their Conversation event to potential industry attendees through a national media campaign.
The Good Day At Work Conversation is Robertson Cooper’s signature calendar date. Held annually, the idea is to bring together leading practitioners from the HR and wellbeing worlds, and the result is much more than your average personnel conference.
Aiming to be interesting, fun, different and engaging, unique presenters and interactive formats took attendees well beyond the realms of mere chatter, delivering dialogue that was relevant, useful, and memorable. The theme of 2017‘s event, which took place in March, was Future of Wellbeing and the keynote speaker was former-Downing Street Press Secretary Alastair Campbell.
Here’s what we were asked to do, and what we did, to increase visibility and pull off this great B2B PR campaign…
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Objectives
Our key objective was to drive ticket sales for the event among HR practitioners and gain press coverage about the date and the work that Robertson Cooper does overall.
As part of this, we were asked to place interviews with speakers in relevant media outlets, making sure the event was mentioned within the final articles.
Strategy
SGPR had a three pronged strategy to gain press coverage:
Exploit media relations before the event detailing the day and its keynote speakers to help drive tickets sales.
Get HR media to attend and interview speakers on the day to create in-depth features for trade titles that mention the event and the Good Day at Work brand.
Build a story around the event to give it more media appeal, lifting it off the HR pages and into more mainstream publications.
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Implementation
We began by drafting and issuing a press release on the event with details of speakers and the day’s sessions, sending this to key HR trade media in order to garner interest from those that work in the sector. The press release was also used to invite press to the conference.
After this, Smoking Gun used Robertson Cooper’s Good Day at Work report (first released in 2016) to create fresh, newsworthy angles around the subject of wellbeing at work, generating wider media interest than just trade titles alone.
Two stories were created; What kind of worker are you? – a typologies feature defining the key characteristics of different people in the workplace; and Is your manager ruining your day?- a feature focussed on how managers can affect employees having a ‘Good Day at Work’. The story included qualitative data from a survey conducted by Robertson Cooper and insights from business psychologists.
Finally, our staff attended the event, setting up HR media interviews with speakers, including Alistair Campbell and John Amaechi, both in advance and on the fly.
Results
Smoking Gun PR secured three major pieces of coverage before the event – contributing to tickets completely selling out. We secured four media attendees from titles such as HR Grapevine, HR Magazine and Changeboard, and interviews took place on the day resulting in eleven pieces of immediate coverage and a further six in longer lead media.
Our angles from the report took Robertson Cooper out of the trade media into wider consumer outlets, securing full page coverage in the London Evening Standard on the day of the event, complete with quotes from sponsors and details of the event. The work typologies story appeared in The Sun Employment pages in the same week of the event.
Coverage so far has reached over 2,890,159 people, with a cost per thousand of £2.40.
100% of coverage contained the Robertson Cooper brand name.
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