"Working with PR Volt has dramatically expanded our PR outreach and coverage in a short period of time, helping us reach new markets and audiences critical to our brand awareness efforts. PR Volt has played a huge role in helping Sphero become a recognized name in the educational technology field.”
Situation
Before Sphero joined forces with PR Volt, they were handling their PR internally. They built their content strategy around 3 or 4 product launches per year, because they didn't have the capacity for much more than that. They were getting frustrated because they had big goals for their PR efforts but couldn’t seem to get there on their own.
When they decided to look for a PR partner, it was at a time when the company was pivoting more heavily toward the education space and wanted to build greater brand awareness and authority among educators and administrators. They also wanted to increase traffic to the website to boost sales and establish a robust SEO backlink network.
When they met with PR Volt, Sphero really liked the real-time reporting and analytics that the PR Volt app could provide, which was one of the reasons they ultimately chose to work with PR Volt over traditional PR agencies.
Program & Strategy
The strategy PR Volt came up with for Sphero took a two-pronged approach. For each campaign, there was a pitch targeting thought leadership for education and specific trades like cybersecurity, engineering, and robotics. On the other hand, there was a separate pitch from the same campaign that was more product focused and geared towards shopping channels and parenting segments.
In the campaigns launched by PR Volt, competitive monitoring was used to identify journalists covering other similar brands. When targeting the gifting segment specifically, they incorporated keyword monitoring, especially around the gift giving season to find journalists writing roundups where Sphero's products might be a good fit.
One technique that PR Volt used to get their pitches noticed was to incorporate keywords from Sphero's SEO research into the subject lines of email pitches. Just by doing this one thing, open rates skyrocketed and Sphero started seeing additional PR coverage across many different media outlets.
Results
It wasn’t long before Sphero started gaining new media coverage from major outlets like CNET, TODAY, Good Housekeeping, ZDNet, Best Reviews, Mashable, and TechCrunch.
Here are some of the highlights of their results thus far:
- Over 12.6 million impressions received from coverage generated by PR Volt
- Over 200 media leads generated
- Features in Gizmodo, The Verge, EdTech Digest, Fatherly, Wirecutter, Motherly, Essence, SPY
