Cruise118 – being reactive and reliable, reaching new audiences and boosting SEO ranking through PR activity

Cruise118.com is one of the UK’s leading cruise travel agents and is part of the world’s largest cruise retailer. The PR team worked with Cruise118 to develop campaigns to promote selected cruise lines including Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines.

Alongside cruise line-specific campaigns, the team worked on increasing brand awareness around Cruise118 with reactive PR activity.

The campaigns have strengthened the wider SEO strategy and directly impacted SEO results, increasing organic traffic, share of voice, and organic rankings.

As requested in the brief, this project required a heavy collaboration with influencers. We collaborated with over 55 influencers on the campaign across Cruise, Travel, Food and Lifestyle affinity categories.

The influencers taking part in the campaign were fully briefed and provided with campaign materials to create original content to share with their audience. Participants were sent a Mediterranean inspired food hamper along with a branded apron and printed recipe cards. The influencers created social media content to share the campaign and competition with their audience. All content included the campaign hashtag and where relevant links to the campaign microsite.

The Lights Camera Cruise campaign aimed at showcasing that there is a NCL cruise to suit every personality type, encouraging a new to cruise audience to book a cruise. Cruise118 briefed us with creating an influencer led campaign, targeting travel and lifestyle influencers.

The objective to create a fun campaign that appealed to a wide audience was at the heart of our planning. A quiz was developed to match people to a NCL cruise best suited to their personality and what they look for in a holiday, appealing to a wide audience whether you’ve cruised before or not. The quiz highlighted that there is a NCL cruise for everyone which could prompt people who have never cruised before to try it. 

This campaign also included a social media competition based around sharing holiday snaps and memories for a chance to win a prize, this aspect extended the reach of the campaign.

This campaign had strong SEO value. Over the duration of the campaign, the cruise118 landing page saw a 18.61% increase in users and a 34.32% increase in new users. The NCL page also saw an increase of 55.74% in users, 41.11% increase in new users and a 59.52% increase in sessions. 

The influencers we collaborated with produced high-quality content across social media and blog content which resulted in:

Alongside influencer based projects, we work on additional campaigns. We work to produce evergreen content that can be tweaked and outreached multiple times. This is a great way for the client to get the most out of their money and can be very effective with the travel industry as we see similar trends in what journalists are writing about each year.

An example of this is creating a campaign around ‘reasons to book your cruise early’. We worked with our cruise client to devise five ways you can benefit from planning your holiday early. This was picked up by the Express (DR 93), reaching an audience of 32.5M and getting an estimated 88.6K views. 

Another example is our campaign around ‘tipping etiquette abroad’. The topic of saving money on holiday is one we see each year but many angles have already been covered. We came up with creating a data led campaign around how to save money on unnecessary tips by researching each popular tourist destination and finding out what their tipping etiquette is. This campaign got picked up by Manchester TV (DR 36) who also shared it on their Twitter account. This coverage reached an audience of 1K and was viewed by an estimated 130 people.

The digital PR team also works on reactive PR activity, looking for additional opportunities to gain coverage in publications aside from running campaigns. Reactive PR is a strategy used to gain backlinks and engagements by responding to the trending news cycle when your client aligns with the topic or can add expert insights to the conversation. 

Using tools like sourcebottle, Google alerts and Twitter, the PR team keeps in the know about current events in the news and specific requests from journalists looking for opportunities to get their client extra coverage. 

The reactive PR space has changed a lot over the last few months and it’s becoming increasingly competitive to get your clients words published. Therefore it’s absolutely essential for the Flaunt PR team and the client to work together to be the quickest and first to respond. Below is an example of when the reactive PR strategy has paid off and resulted in some top tier coverage. 

We came across a request on Twitter from a journalist looking to speak with cruise experts on ‘how to choose the right cabin’. We immediately contacted the journalist and our cruise client and put together a compelling pitch in a very tight time frame. This activity resulted in coverage in the Express (DR 93), reaching an audience of around 32.5M and getting an estimated 88.6K views. 

Another example of reactive PR landing fabulous links for another travel client is gaining coverage following reactive activity around valentine’s day. We spotted a journalist looking to speak with a travel expert on romantic travel destinations, with valentine’s day just around the corner. We jumped at the opportunity and sent over a great pitch using data from a recent survey to determine the top five romantic cruise destinations which landed coverage in World of Cruising (DR 44). This piece of coverage  reached an audience of around 156K and got an estimated 17.3K views.