January 20, 2023
6 Minutes
Reactive PR consists of outreaching data, content, expert commentary or additional information around a trending or upcoming topic or event.
Some examples of reactive PR that our team have done include adding expert comment to the viral TikTok custard toast trend for meal-plan delivery company, HelloFresh, and jumping on what the Royal Family were seen wearing for CBD and wellness client, fourfive.
The furniture and homeware market has so much scope for reactive opportunities, with new trends arising all the time, changes in the industry, and user generated content going viral on social media, it would be a missed opportunity if you weren’t to add your relevant knowledge to discussions.
So, how do you, as a furniture and homeware brand, find and seek out these reactive opportunities? Well, we’ve pulled together some tools and resources we find useful when looking for news, trends and studies.
TikTok have created an online hub that shows you trends, ads and insights that are currently performing well on the app. It ranks hashtags, songs, creators and videos, helping you find what’s hot right now.
The amazing thing about the hashtag section of ‘Trend Intelligence’ is that you can narrow it down by industry. There’s a home improvement filter choice which is perfect for furniture and homeware brands to find what popular hashtags are relevant to them. As a brand you can utilise this across a lot of marketing channels, but for reactive PR you can use this data as your news hook and provide expert commentary on home improvements, trends and hacks.
TikTok have also released a new Trend Report showing data on why trends are arising, some examples of these trends, creative ideas for marketers and how people can find trends themselves- definitely one to read!
Google Trends is one of the most popular tools the team at NORTH use when it comes to monitoring the news agenda and looking out for reactive campaign opportunities.
It’s free to use and Google provides a training course on how to use it efficiently. Simply search for relevant furniture and homeware topics such as ‘japandi’, ‘bedroom’ and ‘sofa’, and see what people are searching for around these topics.
To make Google Trends even more useful, and find loads more data from the trending topics, you can download the Google extension, Glimpse. It adds actual search volume, forecasted trajectory and related long tail keywords. You can also set up alerts for certain topics too.
You can also see trending topics and real-time search trends in the home and interiors search market, so you can be on the ball with spotting reactive opportunities.
👉 Glimpse
Anyone who is looking to update their home, or is simply interested and inspired by interior design, will use Pinterest. And because of this, it’s a useful place to look when finding trends.
Now, Pinterest has made it really easy for you to find trending topics in different categories and countries. It’ll show you what’s trending currently, what’s been trending in the past and even has their own ‘Pinterest Predicts’ report that analyses searches to predict trends for the new year.
There are so many different hacks for narrowing down your Google search to specific content. A simple Google search can be used to find what’s in the news and so forth, but narrowing your search down can help you find super relevant stories to pitch as reactive work.
If you use quotation marks around words in search, this tells Google this phrase HAS to appear in the content. For example, our reactive team like to use “new study” or “study shows” to find any new research that can be used for reactives.
Similarly, you can search specific sites using colons. If you’re looking to find specific home and interior research on Mintel for example, you could write ‘homeware site:mintel.com’.
These hacks can help you refine your search so you don’t feel overloaded with information and websites!
Our data journalist loves government and data websites and is always on the ball when looking for new data we can use in our reactives.
There are thousands of publicly available datasets on the internet, which provide a ton of information at the touch of a button – for free. They can be a good place for your own data inspiration or for some readily available data you can use in reactive content.
YouGov is a great place for reactives, and can be narrowed down by interests and industries, meaning your furniture or homeware company could look at what people are interested in, and how they feel about certain things happening in the home and interiors market.
Similarly, if you’re looking to do a bit of B2B reactive content, you could look to market research websites like Mintel to find new research that your in-house expert could comment on.
👉 YouGov
👉 Mintel
Try out some of these helpful tools next time you’re looking for reactive PR opportunities in the home and interior space. If you’re looking for a hand or just want to learn what digital PR is all about, browse our digital PR services or get in touch!