How We Earned 500 Linking Domains with Digital PR for a B2B Comparison Platform

Disclaimer: This is an example of a campaign of ours that went viral; earning links from hundreds of publications around the world over a week. This isn’t the normal performance from a campaign (if only), but a great example of how a great story can perform at scale.

Comparisun is a B2B comparison platform that helps small businesses to get advice and recommendations on the best services and products they need to thrive; from POS systems and credit card processing solutions to business insurance, loans and more.

As a start-up looking to rank for competitive B2B search terms in the US market, we quickly established a considerable link gap between Comparisun and key competitors.

In order to drive organic growth in rankings and traffic, we needed to build quality links, at scale.

But B2B link building is hard to do, at scale.

You see, most commonly, even using digital PR as a link building strategy, stories and tactics in the B2B space often focus around tightly targeted stories. These are a great way to build the right links, but taking a focussed approach on narrow markets means that it’s often hard to scale link acquisition.

We knew we needed to build editorial links at scale, and needed to leverage a campaign strategy that helped us to achieve this.

Our internal campaign target was to earn links from 20 unique domains.

The world is yet to have it’s first trillionaire…

Just think about that for a moment. That’s a scarily high amount of money.

That said, our idea came from an announcement that Microsoft had joined Apple and Amazon as having a valuation of $1 trillion or higher.

What if we were able to predict when they’d be joined? As well as figuring out which individuals would join the club the quickest?

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Our target hit list of publications to land links from included Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur and more. Essentially, those that linked to our clients competitors and that we identified in a link gap.

That said, we also had an issue of scale in the link gap.

Working with a growth-hungry client, we needed to build authoritative links from the right publications, those where their audience of SMEs and business owners consume content, but also close the link gap.

We launched The Trillion Dollar Club.

Using data on the value of the world’s most valuable companies on the New York Stock Exchange, as well as the net worth of the world’s richest individuals from the Forbes billionaire list, we analysed the data and calculated the average yearly % growth over the last five years and then applied this rate of growth for each future year to try and predict how the value will change.

Ultimately, we used historical performance to predict when we’d see the world’s first trillionaires and who they’re the most likely to be.

We found a surprising headline (who doesn’t want to know when we’ll see trillionaires and a bigger batch of trillion dollar companies) that would help us to touch a wider group of publications than many B2B campaigns do, whilst retaining a core focus to the client’s audience.

B2B money is the core topical alignment, and we leveraged ‘big money’ to drive hard-hitting headlines.

We couldn’t have predicted the results.

This campaign originally launched in September 2019, earning links from 32 domains across the first active promotion period.

We were happy, the client was happy.

The campaign, at this stage, earned links from Entrepreneur, Yahoo, Business Insider, CEO Today magazine and more.

We exceeded our initial goal of earning quality links from 20 or more domains.

Fast forward to May 2020.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, news broke that Jeff Bezos’ net worth had increased by $24 billion in the space of two months.

This is crazy big money.

We saw an opportunity to revisit this campaign (something that we regularly do) and pitch it back into the press off the back of the announcement.

There was never a better opportunity to reveal the expected timelines for us to see the world’s first trillionaire.

What happened next we could never have anticipated.

We hooked the campaign into the breaking news, updating the projections as to when Jeff Bezos is expected to hit trillionaire status.

We were quietly confident that we could add another 10 to 15 linking domains; a great level of added value on a campaign we’d pretty much wrapped up months ago.

A week after the news broke, we’d seen the campaign linked to by almost 500 publications, with more than 100 additional pieces of unlinked coverage.

To deliver this level of links across a B2B campaign is a testament to the strength of the story.

Our daily monitoring of the news meant we could quickly react to a hot topic and pitch in a campaign that was already live and ready to send back out.

However, the real success comes down to the strength of the story. We launched an accessible story, with a surprising headline, that meant we could pitch into top publications and benefit from organic coverage alongside this.

Consistency is the key to success with digital PR from an SEO perspective, however when we’re able to earn such a volume of great links, we’d never turn this down.

The campaign, to date, has earned coverage from publications including Vice, Forbes, Business Insider, Vox, CNBC, Mirror, Market Watch, Huffington Post, Fox Business, The Hook and many, many more.

Publication	DR	Link
Forbes	93	View
Entrepreneur	91	View
Vice	91	View
The Sun	89	View
The Week	83	View

The campaign also caught the attention of Bernie Sanders on Twitter…