The challenge
Watches2U is the UK's largest independent online watch retailer. Founded in 2002, it is an official stockist of brands including Michael Kors, Radley, Emporio Armani and Marc Jacobs, and buys direct from manufacturers rather than through middlemen.
Online, the watch market is crowded with department stores, marketplaces and the brands' own websites. To win customers through search, Watches2U needed its site to carry more weight online, and a vital part of that was earning links from publications that matter every month of the year, not just in the run-up to Christmas.
Our approach
We built the campaign on what Watches2U knew that its rivals didn't. Its in-house watchmaker became a go-to source on spotting fakes and on which old pieces had quietly become valuable, from 1980s Casios to the Swatch release that sparked chaos and arrests in city centres.
Data did the heavy lifting. Freedom of Information requests to police forces revealed which luxury watches are stolen most and how few are ever recovered, a story that ran in the Evening Standard and City A.M. and was followed up regionally as far as Doncaster. Doctors added a health angle on sleep tracking and smartwatches, while gift guides kept the retailer in front of shoppers at Valentine's Day, Father's Day and Christmas.
Every idea was judged on one question: would a journalist link to it? That is what Digital PR meant here, choosing stories that earned a citation back to the retailer's site, so each placement added to its standing in search rather than fading as a one-day headline.
The outcome
Over 14 months, marco/richards earned Watches2U 395 pieces of coverage, an average of 28 a month, and 380 backlinks from publications with an average Domain Authority of 70, reaching a combined audience of 14.6 million.
The spread mattered as much as the total. National newspapers, City A.M.'s business readers, parenting and tech titles and regional dailies all ended up pointing to the same retailer, and as Watches2U's COO says below, its organic search visibility grew alongside the coverage.
