How Greenies Leads the Pack With an Innovative PR Marketing Strategy

Greenies, a leading brand in pet care, has revolutionized the way it markets its products, ensuring that pet owners can easily find and choose the healthiest options for their furry friends.

In this blog, we’ll explore how Greenies achieved phenomenal success through strategic marketing and how you can apply these lessons using Similarweb’s powerful SEO tools.

Fur-midable organic traffic

Greenies has made a significant shift from paid to organic traffic. At the beginning of 2023, Greenies heavily invested in marketing, leading to:

• 2.6 million visits from organic search
• 2.2 million visits from direct traffic

This strategic move reduced the company’s reliance on paid search, showcasing a healthier approach to budget allocation. The result was a slow decrease in paid ad spend and an increase in organic traffic.

The impact of organic growth

By focusing on organic growth, Greenies not only saved on ad spend but also built a sustainable traffic source. Their organic visits grew by 739%, reaching 2.7 million. This shift highlights the importance of balancing paid and organic strategies for long-term success.

Barking up the right tree: Building a robust backlink profile

The Similarweb Backlinks Analytics tool indicates that a significant factor in Greenies’ organic growth is its impressive backlink profile. With 3,980 referring domains and 67,930 backlinks, they have secured links from top-tier publications like Business Inside, New York Times, Globe Newswire, and ABC News.

Why is this important, you may ask? Google considers backlinks from notable publishers as high-value, translating to higher rankings for your website. For Greenies, this meant high-value traffic that facilitated organic growth.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world: Meet the canine dental crisis

In August 2023, Greenies used creative PR to market their dog dental products by highlighting what they called a ‘canine dental crisis’. This innovative campaign aimed to enhance the brand’s backlink profile and garner significant attention for its core offerings.

Specifically, Greenies partnered with renowned American fashion designer Christian Siriano to raise awareness about the canine dental crisis. Siriano designed a matching “HOUNDSTOOTHLESS” trench coat for both dogs and their owners. This inventive digital PR approach yielded remarkable results:

• Natural links from high-traffic domains such as wwd.com, licenceglobal.com, usmagazine.com, and more
• A Traffic spike of 112.9% in August
• New audience engagement through growing referral traffic

Tail-wagging results: Dominating the SERP

Since pet owners generally treat their pets as family members, Greenies has successfully humanized its product names, making a deep connection with its audience. They rank for keywords like “anti-inflammatory for dogs” and “probiotics for dogs,” owning the entire SERP for terms like “pill pockets for dogs.”

What you can learn from Greenies’ success

Greenies’ marketing strategy offers valuable lessons for any brand looking to improve their online presence and drive traffic. Here are some key takeaways:

1. Creative digital PR: Utilize unique and engaging PR campaigns to build natural backlinks. Partner with influencers or notable figures to create buzz around your product. For Greenies, collaborating with Christian Siriano led to high-quality backlinks and increased traffic.
2. Humanizing product names: Connect with your audience by using relatable and descriptive product names. Instead of using technical terms, choose names that resonate with your target audience’s everyday language. Greenies’ success in ranking for terms like “Anti-inflammatory for dogs” and “Probiotics for dogs” showcases the effectiveness of this approach.
3. Influencer partnerships: Expanding your reach through influencer partnerships can bring in valuable referral traffic. Influencers can introduce your product to new audiences and lend credibility to your brand. Greenies’ collaboration with Siriano is a prime example of how influencer marketing can drive significant results.
4. Holistic search approach: Integrate SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) strategies for comprehensive growth. Relying solely on one marketing channel can limit your potential. Greenies balanced organic and paid strategies, initially focusing on organic growth and later boosting paid search efforts to maximize visibility.
5. Keyword targeting: Smart keyword targeting can help capture traffic from competitors and expand market reach. Greenies’ strategic bidding on “chewy cat food,” a competitor’s branded term, allowed them to attract new customers and broaden their product range.

Unleash your marketing potential with Similarweb

Greenies’ success story showcases the power of creative digital PR, strategic keyword targeting, and a balanced approach to organic and paid traffic. By leveraging Similarweb’s digital marketing suite, you, too, can gain insights into your competitors’ strategies, track high-performing keywords, and optimize your marketing efforts for maximum impact.

Ready to boost your marketing success? Try Similarweb’s powerful tools to uncover fresh search data and drive new traffic to your website.

Here’s how you can easily do that with our platform:

• Unpack rivals’ strategies down to keyword and page level in real-time.
• Track your keywords, competitors, and the SERP itself.
• Perform a total SEO analysis with backlink and site audit tools.
• Rely on the freshest and most powerful search data (SEO and PPC) available

For more marketing insights and a comprehensive understanding of your competitive landscape, book a demo with one of our data experts.

Photo by James Lacy on Unsplash.

by Darrell Mordecai

Darrell creates SEO content for Similarweb, drawing on his deep understanding of SEO and Google patents.