Public Relations for Digital Reality

CCgroup was tasked with helping Digital Reality in EMEA grow its brand awareness in the core technology and data centre media, and with directly contributing to sales lead generation in vertical markets, including financial services, IT, telecoms and healthcare.

Challenge
Digital Realty is a global leader in data centre and colocation solutions. Digital Realty needed CCgroup to support the business by building relationships with influencers in the media and analyst community across its priority markets. Digital Realty’s PR programme had two distinct audiences – journalists and analysts with technical understanding, and then those from vertical industry publications whose interests lay solely in the non-technical business benefits that Digital Realty could provide.

CCgroup therefore had to provide different messages to different audiences, without losing sight of the ultimate goal of supporting the business’ pipeline.

Creative
With CCgroup’s understanding of Digital Realty’s industry, business and the media, CCgroup developed a media engagement strategy by creating content that positioned Digital Realty as innovative, insightful and informative. In essence, as thought leaders. The content produced ranged from press releases, opinion articles, feature commentary and rapid response comments, and also marketing collateral such as blogs, advertorial content, white papers and newsletters.

Through a close working relationship with the client, CCgroup was able to create content drafts self-sufficiently in order to reduce the time burden on Digital Realty spokespeople. Importantly, CCgroup was able to help translate Digital Realty’s core messages into vertical markets, creating and finding relevant media opportunities for each individual sector. CCgroup also supported Digital Realty’s SEO efforts by placing close attention to target keywords and landing pages in its content production.

Results
As relationships with key journalists, publications and analyst houses were developed throughout the different sectors, including IT and telecoms, CCgroup was able to secure a consistently high level of media coverage every month.

One notable achievement was in February 2014, when CCgroup handled the media and analyst activity for when Digital Realty and Rackspace ‘broke ground’ on a new 130,000 square foot data centre facility in Crawley, West Sussex. Taking advantage of Digital Realty’s growing profile over the preceding months, the ground breaking day was a media success, with Henry Smith, the local MP for Crawley, attending the event along with key media, analysts and other industry influencers.