Vitis PR had a successful 2022 and had the same team in place for the whole 12 months – some of whom have been with Vitis PR for well over a decade now – but also maintained our client portfolio from 2021 – many of our clients have also been with our agency for over 10 years.
The team kicked off last year with a brand new project with a client in the home tech space who came to us for promotion of its work with a Scottish local authority to roll out IoT connected devices in social housing to boost resident safety, security and wellbeing. The Vitis PR team drafted a press release for this smart home project roll out news and a case study too, for pitching interviews to national news and broadcast outlets, including STV.
We also spent time in Q1 2022 creating PR plans for our existing clients and welcoming back a French-based ETL client, which we launched a series of product updates, alerted media to upcoming events and secured coverage for and articles based on research it had conducted with media including Computer Weekly, Insider, Help Net Security, Enterprise Times and Business Information magazine.
Making the most of annual days – such as World IoT Day and World Supply Chain Day in April and World Smart Home Day in October – gave us the opportunity to maximise coverage for relevant clients with editorials based around those days, promoting our clients as thought leaders and experts, sharing their insights and knowledge. Our embedded software client secured coverage of their predictions for all three of those annual day examples with IT Supply Chain, Canadian Manufacturing, EMS Now and IoT Business News, to name just a few.
Spring and Summer didn’t provide us with any period to slow down or relax as we won new client projects to work on.
One was a US-based client we had worked with previously promoting its new product launching on Indiegogo, which Vitis PR has achieved coverage of with media such as Wired, GQ, Top Gear, Stuff magazine, Pocket-Lint, BikeBiz, Cycling Weekly, The Times and Daily Express. The company came back to us for help in promoting the availability of the new product and we immediately secured media reviews using samples with T3 and BikeRadar.
The BikeRadar reviewer was so impressed by the new e-bike that he also covered it as that media’s “Bike of the Week”, which the client was ecstatic about.
Another new project was an Asian company expanding its portfolio to encompass a new air purifier. Now we all know that the spotlight on healthcare and healthcare technology has never been fiercer, thanks to COVID, but with this product coming along later than other similar products, we took a slightly different angle and targeted leisure, travel, parental and consumer technology media instead of healthcare titles.
In addition to securing five reviews for the five samples provided, the Vitis PR team also negotiated and set up six competitions with Good Housekeeping, Country Living, Prima, House Beautiful, Men’s Health and Women’s Health for readers to win their own air purifier. The six competitions had over 72,000 entries, and this promotion was supplemented with press release coverage announcing the product launch and the reviews too.
A new US-based client also came to us because of Vitis PR’s reputation working alongside international agencies to support their clients. The US PR agency selected our team to raise awareness of the US company, which works in the digital experience management field, with our UK media contacts.
Just some of the successes Vitis PR secured for a new client were bylines with HR News, Beta News, Digitalisation World and media mentions in Forbes plus interviews and podcasts with e-Channel News, DigiDay, Digitalisation World and TechTalks.
The summer also saw us taking on an ERP survey for our software client. The survey asked wholesale and distribution businesses about factors impacting their profitability so, to maximise coverage potential, the Vitis PR team suggested sharing the individual sector results separately with those sector media and then combining all of them into one overall release and article for targeting the tech and business media with.
This was a huge success, with 23 pieces of coverage secured from the survey results with vertical media across the retail, catering, building, lighting, healthcare and electrical sectors, such as Retail Times, Internet Retailing, Catering Insight, Building Design and Construction, Lighting Insight, Building Better Healthcare and Electrical magazine - plus wholesale specific titles including Better Wholesaling and Electrical Wholesaler.
We work as part of an international network and were tasked with generating UK and English-speaking European coverage for a merger of two tech training firms. Our colleagues in Poland co-ordinated the project which included several European countries. We distributed the press release and supported this activity with 10 original thought-leadership articles around themes that illustrate the need for Central European technology specialists, and how current technology training is failing to provide the number of people to meet growing demand for computing specialists.
We had a solid year for awards too. Examples include our embedded electronics client winning at the Elektras again, and one of the team members of our EV smart charging client successfully reaching the finals of the BEAMA young engineer awards.
We are always passionate about women in technology, so it was great to gain strong coverage for a client around International Women in Engineering Day 2022, with tips from an engineer on how to get into the industry.
As well as client work, we also continued to manage Techsparx to share the innovation and progress of the tech sector in the Midlands and North regions of England.
The end of the year brought with it the frenzy of trends forecasting and predictions. Our clients offered their insights into what 2023 would bring across the cyber security, IoT, AI, EV and data fields. Our Geneva-based cybersecurity client’s CEO achieved his legal PhD in Q4 and we alerted all media to his ability to provide comment on breaking news around data breaches and cyber threats and attacks from both a technical and legal point of view.
We are now heading into 2023 with an already - exciting January!
