Unbroken Britain
The Client
Provident are a home collected loans company, part of the Provident Financial Group. Provident pride themselves on putting their customers at the heart of their business and have been doing so since 1880.
Provident offer cash loans from £100 to £1000 over a range of repayment terms, which they provide through a face to face service which many customers may not get with other lenders.
The Challenge
In order to deliver improved SEO visibility we needed to demonstrate to users and search engines that providentpersonalcredit.com is the expert in its field, and increase the trust of the domain, Provident partnered with Edit to plan the PR campaign ‘Unbroken Britain’.
‘Unbroken Britain’ was a concept we created to demonstrate how neighbourly the UK’s communities are. We planned to conduct a survey inviting respondents to rate areas across Britain for elements such as safety, levels of gossiping, and how polite they are.
Using this local data, we planned to create an interactive visual tool showing how areas across the UK are ranked for these attributes. This data would be displayed in an asset hosted on Provident’s site as a source for journalists to link to directly.
The Strategy: Unbroken Britain
The asset displayed these attributes by location on a map, which allowed us broad a scope when outreaching to the press, and helped us to create location specific headlines.
Furthermore, the ratings system was highly effective in capturing the interest of the media, as cities were ranked by their ratings and competed for the best position for key attributes by location.
This allowed us to create impactful headlines such as: ‘London least friendly city in the UK’ and ‘Worcester is the UK’s happiest city’.
Our previous outreach experience working within ‘hard to market’ industries, with clients such as City Index, has allowed us to build personal contacts with national and finance media. This relationship also enabled us to set up exclusives with Business Insider for the Provident campaign launch.
Since initially launching in September 2016, we have run the campaign biannually (every March and September). The re-runs have added another dimension to the campaign, allowing us to compare the data to the previous results to see whether opinions have changed. The campaign ran for the third time in September 2017.
As the campaign has now run four times, we have firmly established the press interest, with journalists waiting for the latest version of the report to launch.
The Results
Post campaign Provident:
- Holds 51 per cent market share within the “doorstep loans” sector
- Ranks 2nd for “doorstep loans”
- Appears in Google’s answer box for this term (on the occasions Google chooses to display it)
Following the Penguin 4.0 update, the providentpersonalcredit.com site saw consistent visibility increases as links were re-crawled by Penguin. These organic results include:
- 91 per cent increase in visibility following penguin 4.0 rollout
- Organic Traffic is up 42 per cent Y/Y
- 31 per cent increase in leads Y/Y
- 23 per cent increase in organic revenue
So far, Unbroken Britain has delivered 93 links and 56 separate pieces of coverage. With notable mentions including BBC and Business Insider, The Metro, Timeout, and this article shared by a politician.