The challenge

Cuckooland sought support from Impression’s digital PR services to help build the brand in front of its key target market - parents. In a bid to support wider SEO efforts, the digital PR team was tasked with building targeted top-tier links back to the ‘kids bed’ section of the site, while assisting with increasing keyword visibility for the selected terms.

The client was open to creative ideas, which was helpful from a campaign point of view. But, from experience we knew that working in this sector and area of news, one that is concerned specifically with child wellbeing and parenting - offering advice on child wellbeing from a big brand can often come across as disingenuous to consumers. 

So, we knew that we needed to get creative in how we positioned Cuckooland in front of this area of press and also its potential customers. We planned to do this by:

• - Creating newsworthy content that fits in with the theme of sleep and childcare.
• - Creating an asset that would gain high-quality links from quality domains that were appropriate to the customer, ensuring that all links passed to content in the ‘kids beds’ silo of the site.
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The strategy

We wanted to touch on subjects through our work that both relate to the brand and the consumer, this meant having to select stories that didn’t lean too much into topics the brand was unqualified to talk about, whilst still making sure we stayed relevant. So, we looked into sleep, but being a kids bed supplier we didn’t want to appear too salesy - especially when targeting national press.

Sleep impacts all of our lives and can be a common problem for families, especially when kids complain of nightmares, or struggle to go to bed without complaints or even manage to sleep through the whole night.

So, thinking outside of the box, we arrived at the question ‘how do you get children to sleep?’ - lullabies of course. But, what makes a lullaby exactly that? And do any of the current chart hits resemble the same thing?

We set about finding the most common lullabies to create a top ten list, using Spotify data. Once we had our top ten, we worked out the significant properties of each song, found the most common elements until we had our ‘perfect lullaby formula’ - all of the most common aspects of these top ten classics. With a formula, we worked through recent chart hits to find a match, and collated our top ten ‘modern day lullabies’. 

With the backing of a music expert at Durham University and a childcare expert, we removed the worry around Cuckooland offering advice that could seem disingenuous and stuck to what we knew using research we collated. 

With U2’s ‘One’ topping the list, among others like Taylor Swift, Stormzy etc, the news was interesting to those without children, with children and with no interest in kids beds at all - it had mass appeal and many angles. National press, local news and parenting press responded well to the story. 

The sleep theme was one we retained into the next campaign, as we approached Halloween. We know nightmares are also an issue for children and perhaps rife at Halloween. So, we launched a new product, a magic ‘anti-nightmare’ mist for parents to rid a room of monsters and ghouls before bed time. Again, we sought expert comment in the form of a child behavioural psychologist to comment on the likelihood of a mist helping to prevent nightmares and why it could work. 

The product was quirky, easy to replicate at home for parents - we even drafted a seperate blog to link to explaining how to make the ‘potion’. All of the activity addressed a problem and positioned the client as experts in the field and as a trusted, caring source for parents, perfectly meeting the brief.  

The results

The ‘sleep campaign’ overall was a real success and its results can be directly attributed to the amount of national consumer coverage it received. The client now has those evergreen resources and has started to build a real reputation in the field of sleep, which for a brand that sells kids beds is priceless. We have since replicated the lullaby campaign for Christmas songs most likely to send your child to sleep on Christmas Eve, proof that the concept is timeless and can keep on giving.

With more than 110 links in targeted and relevant titles with an average domain rating (DR) of 61 across a range of new domains, including The Sun, Yahoo, The Metro, The Mirror, Mother & Baby and the Irish Post to name a few.

105+ new links to our client’s site

DR:63 - average rating of new links