Name: BitJam
City: Stoke-on-Trent
Website: bitjam.org.uk
As a director of a new technology firm BitJam, I knew that we’d need a little extra help with PR and marketing. In early 2014, our team released a brief for a PR campaign to generate interest in our R&D space known as The Innovation Qube and recruited specialist technology firm Stone Junction to help us.
Before the campaign we knew we’d need to work really hard to make education providers and the wider business community aware of the exciting work that happens at the Qube. Along with our PR agency, we developed a two-pronged strategy based on an official open day for the launch of the Innovation Qube.
The local community, education providers and media were invited to attend an awards ceremony in the morning and a networking event for businesses was organised in the afternoon. The PR strategy included a student tech competition to create hype around the event, press releases, guest blog posts, email marketing e-shots and live tweeting on the day. In one day the event generated 333,136 Twitter impressions as the result of 196 tweets from attendees and media.
The event was opened by the Lady Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent and resulted in a visit from the shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt. The campaign delivered a 7,520% return on investment. It provided us with more than £235,000 worth of high-profile sales leads and we’ve currently converted more than £131,000 of that amount and counting.
Carl Plant is technical director at BitJam
