Water Good Idea: Six Successful Digital PR Campaigns We’ve Created for the Bathroom Sector

With a few awards under our belt with our client Tap Warehouse, who won both the ‘Best B2C SEO Campaign’ at the European Search Awards and the ‘Best Search/ Marketing Campaign’ at the Northern eCommerce Awards, it’s fair to say that we’re pretty successful at creating content and running successful Digital PR campaigns for the Bathroom sector.

We also just happen to work with their sister brand, Drench, and are driving some extremely impressive results across the board.

But you’re probably wondering “how?” and “why should I care?” Well, luckily for you, we’re going to show you how to avoid that sinking feeling when you’re asked to create something for what would appear to be a difficult sector, providing real-life lessons on how to make a splash.

Scroll on down to discover our most successful bathroom sector campaigns below – revealing why they were a success, what backlinks they gained, as well as our top tips and lessons learnt…

Our Digital PR campaigns for the Bathroom Sector:

Campaign: Top Trend Predictions for the Bathroom in 2021

There’s no denying that Drench is an exciting brand in the bathroom sector. They’ve sold luxury bathrooms for all budgets for over 30 years and proving to be extra popular on Pinterest and Instagram, thanks to their swoon-worthy products and expert use of UGC.

What was the campaign? We decided to use their expertise and transform it into a trend prediction piece for the New Year (just gone). To make our campaign truly unique, we asked them to provide us with their 2020 sales data, taking extra note to highlight which particular products have seen the biggest increase, and using their success to the big hitters for the coming year.

We then conducted extensive research into changing consumer habits, such as Brits’ desire to bring the outdoors in since spending the majority of the past year indoors, and used this to create the trend predictions, which Drench validated. As part of the campaign, their in-house interior expert provided commentary on the trends.

What success did the campaign have? It’s safe to say that the hard work and analysis for this piece didn’t go down the drain, with the guide picking up links from the likes of Stylist, House Beautiful, Your Home Style, Yahoo Style, Red Online, Real Homes, Grand Designs, Ideal Home and many more..

Top tips for success:

• Use sales data or other customer insights to create a unique campaign that no one else can replicate. This will also help build credibility.
• Utilise the experts in the business. We added expert commentary within our client’s business to validate the data, so if you have people within your business who can do the same, don’t let their insights go to waste.

Campaign: The Stages of Relationships: Bathroom Edition

Whilst it’s important to create aspirational content, such as the above, you should also look to create more headline-worthy content that will help journalists gain more clicks. Usually, one of the journalist’s main KPIs is to keep the reader on their site for as long as possible. One of the ways you can do this is by creating content that shocks the reader and makes them want to share it on their social account. Just as Gary Lineker did with this campaign.

What did we do? In order to create shock content would drive social shares and, of course, relate to readers, we decided to ask Brits when they reached certain relationship milestones in the bathroom – from sharing towels, leaving the door open, and everything in-between.

We knew we’d get some interesting stats from the survey results; however, we were surprised to find that over half (56%) of Brits share a towel with their partner, causing poo particles to be spread. Loo, sorry, who knew? Of course, this ended up being the headline that caught the attention of journalists, and with that, came lots of coverage and links…

What success did the campaign have? All in all, this showstopper, shocking campaign gained Drench close to 200 links (as well as the tweet from Gary Lineker, which gained 21,700 likes). This includes the likes of Daily Star, Men’s Health, Mirror, Yahoo Style, The Sun (twice) and many more…

Top tips for success:

• Think outside of the box when it comes to ideation. What shocking stats can you create whilst still link to the relevant product?
• A good tip is to work backwards when creating a campaign that focuses on a survey. What headlines do you want for outreach? And how do you get these (in an ethical way)? Ask those questions…
• Take your interesting stats further, by linking them to a (relevant) ‘problem’. Our survey found that 56% of Brits shared a towel but it was only by conducting further research that uncovered the problem with this.
• Be prepared for a campaign to really kick off once a celebrity tweets about it. They end up doing the outreach for you.

Campaign: Brits Unhygienic Bathroom Habits

After the success of the last campaign, we knew that shocking stats worked and, therefore, created a similar campaign for Drench’s sister brand, Tap Warehouse.

What did we do? Usually what happens in the bathroom, stays in the bathroom… until now. This time we asked Brits to be honest about their bathroom habits, proving that are more unhygienic that they seem…

Amongst our stats, we uncovered that almost 1 in 3 (31%) women wipe the wrong way – increasing their chances of contracting a UTI. We had this confirmed by a health expert at BUPA, who kindly provided us with a unique quote.

Again, this was stat was used as the main headline for many journalists who decided to cover our research. We also found it easier to outreach this campaign as we’d already formed a relationship with the journalists that had previously covered the ‘The Stages of Bathroom Relationship’ campaign.

What success did the campaign have? This campaign alone gained Tap Warehouse 223 backlinks, including Metro (twice), The Sun, Mirror (twice), KBB, regional publications (twice), Yahoo Style and many more.

Top tips for success:

• If a campaign worked the first time, don’t be afraid to recreate something similar but with enough difference to gain interest.
• If a journalist covers your campaign and you create something similar in the future, email it over and ask if it’s of interest since they covered it the first time. Chances are they’ll say ‘yes!’ and you’ll be on your way to forming a relationship, too.
• Always work with an expert – whether it’s within the business or an external one – who can help build credibility for the campaign. Try to find people with accreditations, or from a household name, as we did with BUPA.
• When creating a survey, always put your most interesting questions (that are likely to be headlines) at the beginning of the survey. Sometimes, survey respondents drop-off as they progress but you want the most answers for the ‘most likely to turn into a headline’ questions.

Campaign: 10 Ways in Which You Can Clean Your Bathroom Using White Vinegar

However, it’s important to note that sometimes, you don’t need big-boy data in order to create a high volume of backlinks. Sometimes, it’s as simple as looking out for what journalists are regularly discussing, and creating a reactive piece, relevant to your brand.

What did we do? Naturally, throughout the pandemic, cleaning has become a prominent topic for journalists, with ‘top tip’ pieces making the rounds.

Combining with the fact that many Brits are trying to budget better than ever, we decided to create a simple listicle, which highlighted 10 ways in which you can use a natural cleaning product (white vinegar) to clean your bathroom.

What success did the campaign have? We picked up links from Metro, House Beautiful, The Sun, Ideal Home, Country Living and more. And all in a couple of hours work. Not too shabby, considering this was a simple press release and wasn’t hosted on our client’s website.

Top tips for success:

Pre-pandemic, big content marketing pieces were the key to success, and while they’re still integral, the past year has taught us that simple, easy-to-consume listicles – which align more with traditional PR tactics – can create amazing results when done right.

This includes:

• Only create listicles in which you have clear authority and expertise to offer.
• Ensuring that the tips are ‘new’ and nothing that journalists have seen before.
• Analysing news feeds, tweets, journo requests and more, whilst looking out for general topics that seem to be on the increase.

Campaign: The UK’s Most Popular Paint Colours Around the Home

Here we have another campaign which was created based on social listening.

Why did we do it? We created this campaign a couple of months into the pandemic, when Brits were bored of making banana bread, and instead decided to get creative with DIY. Again, with many Brits trying to budget, we decided to focus on paint as it’s a simple way to upgrade your home without having to invest too much.

So, with this in mind, we conducted research into the most popular paint colours for both a budget brand (Dulux) as well as a more high-end brand (Farrow & Ball) – as a means to not paint people’s budgets with the same brush.

We then analysed the average UK Google Searches for each paint colour, for each room of the house, uncovering very tired eyes after extensive research but also… the top five most popular paint colours for each room.

What success did the campaign have? It was picked up many relevant home and interior publications including Ideal Home, Real Homes, House Beautiful, Country Living, Good Housekeeping and many more.

However, as it was also a timey piece for people that aren’t usually interior aficionados, lifestyle press picked it up too, including Metro, Stylist and more.

Top tips for success:

• If you’re going to delve into UK Google Searches data, remember to make it unique. Many national publications have an internal SEO team who conduct their own primary research every day, so you need to ensure that your data-led campaigns can’t be created by them (or would take too long for them to create) as journalists are notoriously tight on time.
• When creating trend-focused content, try to think of your target reader, and keep them in mind. We had two, so that’s why we focused on both a high and low budget paint brand.
• When creating an interior-related piece, make sure to add relevant stock imagery into a Dropbox folder for the journalist to make their life easier.
• Journalist’s LOVE this kind of campaign as it’s simple enough for them to copy and paste, saving them time.

Campaign: The True Realities of Getting Raunchy in the Shower

And finally, we have a campaign that is a bit more risqué but still gained Drench some fantastic results…

What did we do? This campaign was created on the basis that we’ve all spent nearly a full year locked up at home, which has meant that some people’s love lives with their partner may have dried up a smidge.

So, in order to encourage more steamy sex, we surveyed Brits about their previous shower sexcapades – revealing their top disappointments, top injuries, and the most common interiors likely to suffer breakage from bonking in such a slippery room…

From this, our research found that of those who have had shower sex, a staggering 44% have hurt themselves, with almost 1 in 5 (19%) falling over whilst getting frisky.

We also found that Brits really like to put ‘put their back into it’ with 28% of the injuries revealed being back-related – the most common injury.

But despite these hurdles, we wanted to highlight that shower sex is definitely something worth pursuing. There’s just a certain knack to it.  So, we asked an online sex expert how to overcome nation’s most common pet peeves, before revealing how to have safe sex in the shower. This acted as a solution to the problem we uncovered on behalf of our client.

What success did it have? We’ve picked up many links for this piece, including the likes of Daily Star, Red and Women & Home to name a few.

Top tips for success:

• If your client is happy for you to create a more risqué idea, run with it as this is quite rare, but remember to keep any content creation tasteful.
• If your stats uncover a problem, work with a credible expert to reveal the solution.

And there we have it – six of our most successful digital PR campaigns for the bathroom sector. I hope you found them helpful!

If this all sounds like the expertise you need, give us a shout and we can have a chat to see if we can help!