The White Room is now running the press office for landscape gardening brand Outdoor Creations. The company operates across the South of England and the award-winning team delivers stylish and affordable gardens. The White Room secured interest from targeted regional press and within the first month, the PR team negotiated three pieces of coverage in key titles.

I read this week that IPC are launching a new website next month targeting the home interest market. This site will not carry a magazine brand but will contain original content. It will link to their magazine sites Ideal Home, Living Etc and Homes & Gardens, which generate two million page impressions per month between them. Here at The White Room, we have looked at putting our clients onto the IPC ‘All things home’ website but we did not find it not particularly user friendly. It just did not give the quality search results you would expect.

I really hope IPC gets this new website right. There is a void online for a decent home interiors website where you can target quality UK home owners. We have many clients who would benefit from a better online presence. I’m looking forward to seeing the new site.

Advertising will always play a key role in marketing, but we have recently seen many clients cutting back on classified and display media spend. It’s important to address what you want your advertising to achieve, whether it is to generate sales leads or build brand awareness.

PR can also be an effective way of getting valuable exposure and generating sales leads. This is true for Ben Smith of Lighting Web who cut back on his classified advertising after generating impressive sales leads from PR. Ben comments: ‘I am so pleased with the results achieved by our lifestyle PR campaign that I have stopped all classified advertising. As soon as our product is featured in high-end interiors publications such as Elle Decoration, Sunday Times Style and Stella Magazine we see a direct response to sales almost immediately. In fact, we can hardly keep up with the demand for our Hurley Floor Lamps since the product was featured in the Sunday Times Style Magazine last month.’

We also have a client Black Orchid who recently sold 10 £2000.00 chairs off the back of two pieces of PR we obtained in the home interior press.

A brand building advertising campaign is also underway for our client Mercury who sell high-end range cookers. Within two months they have seen an increase in sales, even meeting targets. This is great news but it very early days for a brand building campaign to start working. So why has this worked for them? There are less people advertising which means you stand out, their dealers are delighted they are advertising and are working with them to support the campaign and old enquiry’s from people who almost bought are now coming back. The big message that comes across is confidence in the brand and product. Like a lot of things we are purchasing in today’s market there are great offers to take advantage of and this includes media buying.

The guys behind the annual Elle Decorations Collections named Poliform as one of the ‘Best Brands’ in the industry. To mark this announcement, Poliform was awarded a double page spread to display their latest designs. The article showcased the Park Sofa designed by Carlo Colombo, the Onda Bed designed by Paola Piva and the Gaston armchair designed by Vincent Van Duysen. The Gaston was labeled by Elle Decoration as the Dream Purchase.