The challenge

Raisin is an international online savings platform, which launched in 2018 and is based in Germany. After our successful Digital PR activities for their UK market, Raisin came to Rise at Seven to help improve their backlink profile across multiple European markets.

In 2018, Raisin also launched their platform in the Netherlands. 3 years later, still fairly unknown in this country, Raisin’s goal was to build brand awareness and increase their search rankings. We came up with a Digital PR strategy to make this happen: part of this was creating a campaign that would spark a debate in the Netherlands around the housing market, a highly relevant topic in the country due to their housing crisis. The goal was to get the Dutch press mentioning Raisin.nl as a savings platform whilst generating links to boost organic rankings. Since we are goal-diggers, you can guess what happened next

The idea

A bidding war, endless queues for viewings and ever-rising house prices. The Netherlands is facing a serious housing crisis. The small country even makes it into the top 10 of the fastest rising house prices in the world. The tight housing market means that people wanting to start climbing the housing ladder are extremely limited. Whereas before you could consider the type of house, the number of rooms and the neighbourhood, the choices now are minimal.

Because of this, many Dutch house buyers will have to move to the other side of the country to find their dream home. What you get for your money depends on the region in which the house is located. Would you rather live in a 1 bedroom apartment, but in the middle of Amsterdam? Or a villa with 5 bedrooms and a swimming pool in Groningen? Rise at Seven created a data-led campaign revealing what you can buy with half a million euros in different cities across the Netherlands.

Our data team analysed the houses for sale in each city to find the answer to the following questions: in which Dutch cities  do you get the most for your money and where the least? Our creative team produced the assets visualising the data in Raisin’s branding, while our Dutch PR team then created a story based on this data and outreached it to the press

The results

To target regional publications for our campaign, we developed a city-based index report that was quite comprehensive. As a result, journalists were required to link to Raisin's website to access the full study, which led to us successfully obtaining 20 follow links from high authoritative publications as well as media coverage from both regional and national publications such as de Telegraaf, De Gelderlander, Dagblad van het Noorden and Omroep Brabant. The campaign was also covered by AD.nl, the news platform with the largest online reach in the Netherlands. Additionally, our story was published by Business Insider, a popular finance and business publication. The campaign page also appeared 88,8K times in search results with 1,27K users clicking through to Raisin’s website.