For Balsam Hill, driving UK growth during the crucial holiday season meant reaching new audiences by thinking beyond the product and elevating the core message of joy. The result was "Top of The Tree", an ambitious, integrated campaign designed to engage everyday customers and Christmas lovers up and down the country.

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The Strategy

Our approach centered on building a robust toolkit that could bridge social engagement and traditional media, built on three pillars:

• Social-First UGC Engagement: Centreing a Christmas tree-decorating competition on social channels to capture user-generated content from real people and creatively-flared influencers. We used video and still assets to ensure the competition felt big, momentous, and shareable.
• Celebrity Ambassador Integration: We knew traditional earned media often views brand competitions as "too self-serving". To ensure authentic, newsworthy messaging, we partnered with TV personality Laura Whitmore to unlock high-tier interview opportunities and secure titles we otherwise wouldn't reach.
• Data-Driven News Generation: We fuelled the PR engine with omnibus research to give the media compelling reasons to talk about the brand. By highlighting data-driven stories like the “Bathroom Tree” microtrend and the "best date" to put up a tree, we successfully captured editorial interest across various beats

The Results: Recent Wins

The campaign successfully merged social scale with high-tier media credibility, culminating in localised features celebrating the competition winner to close the season.

• 35 Pieces of Coverage: Secured high-impact placements, including a brilliant strategic win in The Sunday Times, alongside targeted features in The Sun, Good Homes, Joe.co.uk and The i
• National Authority: Achieved a highly authoritative average DA of 79, demonstrating our success in reaching top-tier national titles.
• 313 Competition Entries: Successfully drove deep, active participation from the target audience.

The Impact

• Brand Visibility: The campaign delivered a massive digital footprint, generating 1.21M social views, alongside 359K online views.
• Audience Engagement: Fostered highly active community participation, recording 4.4K engagements across platforms.
• Traffic Generation: Successfully drove audiences to take action, resulting in 11.5K direct link clicks.

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