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News Article ————

Our nomination for Best Low Budget Campaign marks our first Northern Digital Awards nomination and the first nomination for Add People’s Digital PR team.

Author image Published by Sue Johns-Chapman
Published Date 13.01.2025

About Add People

Add People has been working with small and medium-sized businesses for decades, providing services that run the full spectrum of digital marketing. Our service has always focused on bringing the highest quality work at a more affordable price to allow smaller businesses to access the same success as larger brands.

As part of this, our SEO team has developed from a 15-strong group of generalists to a 30+ team of specialists in on-page content, Digital PR, UX and customer service. By providing an SEO service where clients get access to this range of specialised disciplines, we’ve been able to create hard-hitting campaigns that make a real impact.

The Digital PR team at Add People focuses mainly on fast-acting, expert-led campaigns to make the most use of our clients’ smaller time budgets. But, we don’t let this limit our creativity. For all of our clients, we’re constantly thinking of the best way to throw their brand into the midst of national conversations with the resources we have, which is what has led us to be nominated at the Northern Digital Awards.

The campaign

Many of our clients’ monthly retainers are below the threshold for a low-budget campaign but the client that has earned us this nomination really challenged what we could achieve with the time we have.

Working with a business offering bespoke, luxury UK tours, we knew that getting cut-through in the travel space would be difficult for an unknown brand. With just a handful of hours per month to deliver, we decided to take advantage of an established brand to give journalists a recognisable hook.

We worked with our client to create a custom tour that visited some of the UK’s most revered Wetherspoons locations, dividing the route into a North and South tour.

The tour features such sites as:

  • Owner Tim Martin’s favourite carpet
  • Home of the brand’s “best flight of stairs”
  • Britain’s “poshest Spoons”
  • The Cheapest Spoons in the North

Once we had created an authentic travel experience referencing a widely known aspect of British culture that many tourists wouldn’t particularly be aware of, we shared the story exclusively with a journalist from LadBible, knowing that this would be the ideal audience for the story and also that it would capture the attention of other journalists when it was published.

Including a range of pubs from across the country also allowed us to create unique pitches for local journalists that extended the reach of the campaign even further.

Spending around 15 hours across 2.5 months, the campaign generated 71 pieces of coverage, including 38 links. Through a 575% increase in referring domains, ranking keywords grew by 300 and organic traffic increased by 400%. The client reported a significant increase in enquiries, both across the new Wetherspoons tours and their existing UK tours.

What the team has to say

Speaking of the nomination, Damon Culbert, Add People’s Digital PR Manager said, “It’s really satisfying to see this work being recognised at the Northern Digital Awards. Our work with SMEs is hugely important and this category is where we shine so the nomination was a great validation of that.”

Add People’s Associate Director of SEO, Toby Dean, said, “This nomination is a real testament to our ability as an SEO team to deliver great campaigns at the lower end of the market. We have spent a lot of time perfecting our specialist delivery model so I’m sure this will be the first of many Northern Digital nominations.”

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