Shipshape Media Engagement

Dangers and Desires

Following our work developing her brand’s communication strategy, Veronica Araujo wanted to highlight the brand’s new positioning statement of ‘lifelong learning’ through the power of media engagement.

However, the team at Lloyd’s Maritime Academy had limited experience of proactively working with the media. They needed to leverage the knowledge and insights of industry professionals to create maximum impact, but how? The natural choice was to appoint EC-PR, with whom they had previously worked with to achieve great outcomes.

Design

Focused on highlighting the brand’s new positioning statement of ‘lifelong learning’, we curated a PR programme that would help to increase awareness of Lloyd’s Maritime Academy’s extensive training portfolio and engage with maritime professionals.

Campaign delivery

• Identify and target key media outlets.
• Distribute news releases.
• Create case studies.
• Secure feature articles.
• Gain exclusive one-to-one journalist access.

Key media outlets

The team at EC-PR have developed a deep understanding of media in the maritime sector over the past two decades. We have worked with countless trade journalists in the industry, cultivating strong relationships across a broad range of media outlets.

This meant we were well placed to home in on the journalists and influencers that would help elevate Lloyd’s Maritime Academy out of the darkness and shine a light on the brand’s new ‘lifelong learning’ message.

Once we had created our list of the ideal people to approach, it was time to amplify Lloyd’s Maritime Academy’s offer.

Feature articles

Limited resources to develop new content meant that Veronica and her team were keen to draw on EC-PR’s strong technical writing capabilities.

Our years of experience in the sector enabled us to quickly identify the editorial ideas needed to resonate with the Academy’s target audience. We created a series of informative feature articles that positioned Lloyd’s Maritime Academy as experts in professional development, while addressing the concerns and interests of their target audience.

Case studies

Working with two ​​former students of Lloyd’s Maritime Academy, we created two case studies that were distributed to relevant media.

Each case study outlined the students’ individual experiences of the courses they completed, including the reasons why the Academy should be the ideal choice for other professionals looking to develop their skills.

Exclusive journalist access

Building awareness in the media landscape can be a challenging prospect – it relies heavily on reaching journalists who are often inundated with information and emails from brands all vying to be heard.

Industry events and exhibitions are an ideal chance to capture journalists’ attention. For the maritime sector, a popular annual event is London International Shipping Week, where many of the industry’s key players, influencers and journalists are in attendance.

We saw the event as the perfect opportunity for us to arrange interviews between members of the Lloyd’s Maritime Academy team and journalists on a one-to-one level, creating an ideal platform for the team to highlight the brand’s lifelong learning message in more detail.

Distinction

During a 9-month PR campaign, we secured 36 pieces of coverage in industry-specific press, of which 80% were featured in media outlets with a domain authority (DA) score of more than 40.

Our generated coverage resulted in an overall impact score of 301,000, giving authority and credibility to Lloyd’s Maritime Academy’s offer and helping to increase awareness of the ‘lifelong learning’ message.