Digital PR Case Study | U.S. National Parks Safety Index
This is a summary or a brief overview of the story we are about to tell.
In can contain multiple rows.
THE BRIEF:
Outdoor clothing brand KÜHL wanted to boost their backlink profile and 'create a love affair with their target audience', particularly those passionate with hiking and camping.
Our goal was to secure backlinks in outdoor and travel publications that spoke directly to our client's audience, as well as in national and regional publications.
THE STRATEGY
Diving into news trends, we discovered that when it came to outdoor activities and places, the most frequently discussed topics were incidents, so safety was among the main concerns of our audience. In response to this, we wanted our idea to address the concerns about the dangers in U.S. national parks, the hub of outdoor adventures.
We compiled a list of all national parks across the U.S. and then analyzed them based on seven criteria — total deaths, missing people, search and rescue missions, park ranger presence, proximity to hospitals, trail alerts, and visitor data.
For each criteria, we gathered data from trustworthy sources, such as the National Park Service and U.S. Department of the Interior. After analyzing it, we were able to establish how safe national parks were and compiled a list of the safest and most dangerous U.S. national parks.
We outreached our findings and assets, using personalized pitch emails for each publication type we aimed to be featured in.
THE RESULTS
So far, the campaign has received 90+ links from extremely authoritative publications, including New York Post, USA Today, FOX News, Men’s Journal, Daily Mail and Yahoo!. We also successfully reached our goal of securing backlinks in outdoor and travel publications that spoke directly to our client's audience, such as The Travel, Thrillist, Explore.com.
Furthermore, our U.S. National Parks Safety Index started to be picked up naturally by the media (and even competitors) as an official database for this topic.
