Improving the overall Domain Rating for SumUp using Digital PR campaigns across multiple EU markets

SumUp were aware that they needed to improve their overall backlink profile in terms of volume and quality to compete with their competitors.

Our key objective was to increase the number of backlinks from top-tier finance, retail and lifestyle publications across their key European markets to help elevate their presence in the market.

We created three campaigns for SumUp: Consumer Demands, Entrepreneur Hours and Cashless Society, and the latter two campaigns were particularly successful in the UK and Spain respectively.

 

Entrepreneur Hours 

We surveyed 540 business owners around the UK to get a better understanding of what it takes to reach entrepreneurial success. We also shed light on the financial challenges, issues, and benefits that come with setting up and running a business to help budding entrepreneurs. Some of the key statistics from the survey that the press focused on were: 

• Over half of entrepreneurs (54%) have a profitable business between year one and two
• Nearly 20% of business owners still aren’t using technology within their company
• The biggest challenge for entrepreneurs is a lack of time to make their business succeed 

We also ran the same survey to German, French and Italian entrepreneurs, gaining localised responses, allowing us to create unique content in each market. 

 

Consumer Demands

The second campaign we looked at explored the most in-demand local businesses across all four territories, broken down on a city level. This was determined by analysing the cities with the lowest level of business supply (the number of registered businesses) vs the highest level of consumer demand (Google search volume) across 25 different business niches. Our research found: 

• Across the whole of the UK, carpet cleaning, beauty salons and events planning were the top three most in-demand local businesses
• In Italy, the top three were beauty salons, bakeries and record shops
• Florists, libraries and barbers were the top three in-demand local businesses across France
• Within German, catering, tailors and retail trade took the top three positions 

 

Cashless Society

SumUp also wanted to run a test campaign in the Spanish market. After the pandemic, there was debate around whether Spain was adopting a cashless society, so we decided to delve into this a bit deeper. Our research explored metrics such as the number of citizens with debit and credit cards, the number of unemployed people and the number of senior citizens. Results revealed: 

 

• Vitoria-Gasteiz is the city least dependent on cash
• Córdoba, Seville and Granada are the cities most dependent on cash

With these three campaigns across five major European markets we built 100 pieces of coverage, including 64 links with an average domain rating of 57. 

The quality links we built for SumUp resulted in an overall Domain Rating increase of 7, moving from a DR of 73 to 80 and helping to close a considerable competitor gap for the brand. 

UK – 36 pieces of coverage, including 16 links, average DR of 58

DE – 8 pieces of coverage, including 7 links, average DR of 71

IT – 18 pieces of coverage, including 13 links, average DR of 50

ES – 18 pieces of coverage, including 13 links, average DR of 59

FR – 20 pieces of coverage, including 14 links, average DR of 53