The brief
Having just undergone a re-branding exercise, Illingworth’s brief to Highland was to embark upon a wide reaching PR and social media campaign to raise awareness of the company and its services.
As a relatively small clinical research organisation, which has been established for more than a decade, Illingworth Research and its sister company ResearchNurses.co were keen to raise their profile in an industry that is dominated by less than ten major players worldwide. This would involve demonstrating to multibillion pound clinical research companies, as well as smaller clinical research organisations (CROs), that they were as capable of providing an equally, if not better, and more tailored service than many of the traditional multinational organisations.
The campaign
Highland ran an integrated PR, marketing and social media campaign which focused on ensuring greater recognition and brand awareness for the companies, including positioning them as ‘thought leaders’ and ensuring that their name was seen by current clients and prospects at every opportunity. To achieve this objective Highland assessed a range of communication channels that would reach the widest but most targeted audience possible.
The campaign therefore took an integrated approach, including the pro-active generation of thought provoking content and issues related news through press releases, opinion articles and commentary, placement of this material in targeted media outlets, the production of bold and eye-catching advertisements and the use of social media channels to draw attention to all the PR and marketing activity.
Campaign impact
Through the issue of press releases and feature placement significant coverage was obtained in key target publications, none of which the company had featured in before.
Highland also undertook a review of both companies’ websites. This improved persuasive architecture and navigation and enhanced search engine optimisation which resulted in a significant improvement in both website rankings.
Advertisements, written and designed by Highland and then positioned in targeted publications, resulted in more than 100 leads.
The pro-active use of social media channels has certainly helped to spread the word to influential journalists, academics and senior members of clinical research organisations. Many have become followers, retweeted comments, news items and blogs, positioning Illingworth Research and ResearchNurses.co as ‘thought leaders’. Over a one-month period, Highland was able to increase targeted/influential followers for the companies by around 20%.
