A Personal Finance Website Creates Career-Focused Princess Illustrations, Earns 165 Backlinks

The Goal

Simple. Thrifty. Living. (STL), a personal finance website geared toward offering expert financial advice to everyday people, sought out our digital PR agency to achieve the following goals:

• Diversify their backlink profile
• Improve visibility in search results
• Increase brand exposure and awareness
• Drive more organic traffic to their site

To reach these objectives, our content team developed a plan to create a campaign centered around female empowerment in the workplace. We focused on this because we identified it as an important ongoing conversation and news topic. Knowing this, we were confident that it would be of interest to journalists and the general public.

To include a clickable pop culture tie-in, we envisioned a series of illustrations that reimagined popular fictional Disney princess characters as modern-day career women. This way, we could generate valuable backlinks from high-authority websites and bring relevant referral and organic traffic.

The Strategy

In order to achieve our goals of creating illustrations that would both resonate with people and warrant news coverage, our team came together to brainstorm, imagine, and research the profession for each of the featured princesses.

Because we wanted the princesses to have strong careers that also fit their story, we identified personality characteristics and key story elements for each princess. Part of this process included watching or rewatching the movies, listening to the songs, and reading story summaries. From there, we determined which jobs would fit each princess.

Writing the descriptions of the princesses took even more detailed research. We knew that the descriptions had to offer explanations of why we chose a particular job for each princess, but we also wanted to make sure they weren’t just dryly stating the details.

To help achieve this, we included references to the movies in each of the descriptions, often using part of a line from the associated films or songs. Nearly every piece of coverage used parts of these descriptions, and many used them as the only copy in the article.

The high-quality and detailed illustrations included in the campaign were done by our graphic design team, who used a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, oftentimes sketching out the design by hand before transferring it to the computer. The content team coordinated with the designers on what elements to include and what clothing and accessories the princess should be depicted wearing.

The Results

Coverage Outlets

This campaign vastly outperformed the goals that were set for it. It received coverage and links on some of the biggest sites in the world, such as ABC News (owned by Disney), Today.com, Buzzfeed, Business Insider, and many others. Additionally, due to its evergreen nature, the campaign continues to pick up coverage and drive social shares along with traffic to the client’s site.

This campaign for Simple. Thrifty. Living. won two awards at the 2018 U.S. Search Awards: Best Use of Search – Finance and Best Use of PR in a Search Campaign. Overall, it more than achieved the goals of gaining high-quality backlinks, driving traffic to the company’s website, and garnering social shares.