Maintaining interest in these stunning homes was achieved with powerful property PR

What your business does is pretty amazing, right? But how do you keep reminding potential customers just how great you are? Find out how we helped one client to avoid the fatigue factor and achieve incredible sell-out success

THERE’S only one wee problem with stuff that is genuinely amazing – and that’s a fickle public rarely think anything is amazing for too long.

After an initial period of awe, amazing products, services and experiences pretty quickly become merely eye catching, before drifting towards ordinariness. In a worst case scenario what was once amazing can even become “meh”.

So how do businesses with amazing products avoid that inevitable slump into public indifference? How do you defy the trend for an easily jaded public to lose interest long before they should?

We faced exactly that challenge while helping our client CALA Homes (East) to keep attracting attention to its Trinity Park development in Edinburgh, which had been around since 2011 and still had 25 units to sell.

Now the CALA team has just celebrated the sale of the final property – making the development an amazing £52 million sell out success story. Here’s how public relations played such a crucial role in that.

Without a doubt the Trinity Park development is amazing – a beautiful setting, a range of stunning homes inspired by the architecture of the nearby New Town, while boasting the benefits of modern life and technology.  All of that underpinned by CALA’s reputation for creating properties that constantly increase in value, while always remaining popular with buyers.

Yet when we started working with the luxury home builder in 2014, the development had already been up and running since 2011 and CALA faced the challenge of keeping Trinity Park “fresh”, particularly after the initial sales rush.

Staff realised that an inevitable ‘fatigue factor’ had kicked in, resulting in dwindling viewer interest and concern over rehashing the same messages. Likewise the influential property media was starting to lose interest after reporting on multiple award wins and a wave of early sales success.

So CALA challenged our public relations experts to come up with a creative-yet-consistent campaign of media and influencer outreach to ensure the development received the right amount of exposure, at the right time.

When we celebrated the sale of the final plot at the 91-property Trinity Park development last month, we knew it was down in no small part to the inventive and invigorating PR success we delivered over the previous 14 months – which saw us smash the media coverage targets set.

So how just how did we do it? Here’s the Holyrood PR guide to delivering sell out success:

1 – STORY SPOTTING

Every client of Holyrood PR benefits from our blend of insightful story spotting to find the most interesting and eye catching story hooks.

Like our story telling how the apartments in the development were so roomy they were perfect for older buyers downsizing from family homes elsewhere in Trinity. We explained how the apartments offered them the chance to keep much-loved signature items of furniture and other belongings that would be too big for other downsizing moves.

Likewise we successfully showcased the final penthouse by urging would be high rollers to get a peek at the lifestyle on offer – while surprising many by revealing that the penthouse was available via part exchange.

We also whipped up media interest and attracted a raft of interested potential buyers by cleverly positioning the site as the latest addition to Edinburgh’s most exclusive postcodes – a bona fide “Millionaires Row” to rival some of the best-known addresses in the city.

And we also delivered some clever wordplay which helped deliver even more media coverage by explaining how a number of the properties had been inspired by traditional New Town mews properties – but with a thoroughly modern twist. Both the client and the media loved our headline – We are Not A Mews (But Owners Get a Property to Smile About).

2 – MEDIA RELATIONS

Those great stories were the ideal platform to help us build the best possible relationships with the most important journalists for CALA Homes – the key national property writers in the national media.

As well as offering up useful, interesting and well-researched story ideas, we also constantly checked with those writers about upcoming features and how we could help make their lives easier.

On top of that we also organised site visits and saw writers from publications as diverse as  Scottish Woman, The Scotsman and Edinburgh Life Magazine visit the site, giving them a chance to see it for themselves and to remind them just how amazing it was.

Between June 2014 and June 2015 we divided media outreach activity between the launches of each of CALA’s varying properties at Trinity Park – these ranged from Mews Townhouses to apartments, Georgian Villas and Penthouses.

3 – CREATIVITY AND CLEVER THINKING

Beyond the traditional media we also encouraged CALA Homes to think differently – and persuaded to hold the company’s first ever “Bloggers Event”. It took place at the stunning, £1 million Cumberland Showhome – and we billed the January event as a “New Year, New Home” gathering.

It gave lifestyle, property and interior writers a background to the property and its style inspirations, recognising that Scotland’s large and influential blogging community had not been previously synced with the property market.

Want to learn more about working with influential bloggers? Check this full breakdown of our CALA blogger event and also read how we delivered an amazing blogger event for an Edinburgh restaurant, reaching an audience of four million.

The event, which also featured Jeffreys Interiors, champagne, nibbles and goody bags, generated immediate results and instantaneous coverage on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook. On Instagram alone, photos of the Cumberland Showhome reacher more than 45,000 followers.

Each attending guest remained active on Twitter with many using the hashtag #CALA Cumberland. Huge numbers of social media users were reached, more than 100,000 in just 24 hours – with all activity coming from the all-important Edinburgh and surrounding area.

CALA staff believe there was a direct correlation between the buzz created by the blogger’s event and the sale of the Cumberland property shortly thereafter.

The Trinity sell out success story is just one example of how our incisive PR skills help our wide and diverse clients. See for yourself the huge range of businesses we work with by visiting the clients section of our website – by clicking any of the logos you will be taken to that client’s dedicated and individually-branded client hub.

You don’t have to be a glossy consumer brand like CALA Homes to enjoy powerful PR. Check out our Sexy PR guide on how we’ve delivered amazing PR success for technical and unglamorous clients in a huge range of sectors.

Don’t miss out – it’s easy to find out how affordable public relations could help transform the fortunes of your business

 We’d love to help your business unlock all the benefits that come with a well-run, inventive and colourful PR campaign, so give us a call and have a chat.

You can get us today on 0131 561 2244 or take a few seconds to fill in the short form below and we’ll get straight back to you.