How link-building moved heycar into the fast lane

How link-building moved heycar into the fast lane

The Brief

In the hugely competitive online automotive market, visibility and awareness is everything. Competing with big spending rivals Cinch and Cazoo meant challenger brand heycar had to fight smarter. Having been the retained PR agency for 18 months, heycar now challenged Democracy to 'raise the bar' with a stretch target for backlinks generated through earned PR that would support their long-term organic traffic ambition.

In 2020, we generated a total of 34 backlinks for heycar through earned PR coverage. In 2021, that KPI was lifted to 500! Challenge accepted...

Think

heycar is a trusted expert when it comes to buying and selling cars.

Feel

Reassured that heycar will let me quickly and easily find the car I want. And buy it.

Do

Retain heycar front of mind when in the mindset to research or purchase my next car.

Results

To scale this Everest, Democracy had to think different and be ambitious. How did we do it? There was no magic solution, more a combination of creative and hard working tactics. By utilising existing on-site tools that heycar had built, making more of internal spokespeople and data, devising standalone outreach campaigns that had digital link-building at their heart and ensuring every piece of comms linked back to the heycar site, it meant our hard-working press office were able to keep the stretch link total ticking over all year - passing it just two weeks before the end of 2021.

Standout campaigns were the FA Cup sponsorship, the car seat chooser and the Christmas lights competition. The monthly commentary on the industry's new and used car sales figures gave us regular opportunity to newsjack. This was supplemented with exclusive data around electric vehicles and second hand car prices.