How to win at digital PR in the home sector

Key considerations in home and property communications

The home and property landscape can move extremely quickly.

Consumer behaviour changes with the seasons and latest trends, and those can emerge overnight through social media. Whether it’s red-carpet-inspired looks or the latest viral home hack on TikTok, it’s not uncommon for a new trend to take off within hours.

That means your communications need to balance long-term strategy with agility and responsiveness. A campaign planned six months in advance still needs room to react to viral trends and changes in consumer sentiment.

Competition for coverage is fierce, particularly in national media and top-tier lifestyle publications online. We all know how inundated journalists are. To stand out, your strategy and campaigns need a clear angle, strong supporting material, and genuine relevance to both your brand (there’s little SEO benefit without this), plus consider what audiences are actually interested in.

How to enhance social proof

Social proof is strongest when coming from highly relevant or similar peer groups to the target audience. Seeing relatable evidence for a behaviour can help a social proof message cut through the noise and target the relevant group. In behavioural science, this is known as tailored social proof.

Online marketplace recommendations are built around this. Prompts like “customers like you also bought this” or “recommended for you” create immediate and relevant appeal, often making them more persuasive than generic social proof.

Another way to increase the effects of social proof is by making it dynamic. Dynamic social proof means updating it in line with real, or near real, time. It works by emphasising momentum. People are acting now, so the product feels popular, relevant and time sensitive.

Real-world examples of this include online product prompts such as “15 shoppers are viewing this item”, or Netflix’s “Top 10 this week”.  Not only do these messages increase the appeal of products, but they can also motivate quick action in order to avoid losing the product or missing out on the hype.

Developing a successful digital PR strategy

The most successful campaigns start with clear objectives. Is your goal AI visibility, backlinks, new referring domains, or driving traffic?

Every part of the campaign should connect back to that.

Once objectives are established, it’s important to identify the stories your brand is genuinely able to tell, as well as how often you want to tell them. A good home and property digital PR strategy will consider a consistent flow of proactive communications, plus plenty of room for reactive content.

In this sector, audiences are receptive to a wide range of content, including:

• Seasonal trend commentary

• Expert-led advice pieces (especially around DIY and cleaning)

• Consumer research and surveys

• Real-life homeowner stories and real-home photo shoots

• Styling inspiration and how-to content

Alongside proactive campaigns, reactive digital PR should also form part of the strategy.

Monitoring the news agenda and jumping on relevant conversations quickly can secure high-quality coverage opportunities that would otherwise be missed.

Over the last few months alone, we’ve produced reactive commentary for leading interiors business Blinds2Go around topics including Wuthering Heights, the new season of Rivals, and January snowfall. All of which secured high-quality linked coverage. We’d always recommend planning for the next six months, identifying upcoming moments that you can ‘trendjack’ such as awareness days, TV show or movie releases, and award evenings – but be prepared to jump on unprecedented viral trend moments too. Setting up news alerts and being active on social media can help you with this.

The importance of relationships

While a solid strategy is paramount, don’t dismiss the value of relationships in this sector too. This is something many digital PRs overlook.

Most home and property journalists will build a bank of experts they can reach out to when researching stories for quick comments. You want to be on those lists.

Plus, understanding what journalists in this space are looking for, and what they’re not, is incredibly valuable when pitching press releases.

At Leopard Co, our press office team has years of experience, and we still believe that taking journalists for coffee has its place as much as pitching them a solid story does. This is what makes us stand out when it comes to our digital PR services. When you can do both effectively, that’s where you win.

We’d recommend building a list of all the key home and property titles, plus the journalists who write in this sector for national papers, lifestyle magazines, and regional publications. Then, think about how you can begin to build a relationship with them. Is it meeting face to face, connecting on social media, or engaging with the content they produce?

It takes time… but these connections are invaluable.