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Using Digital PR to Build Global Awareness and Organic Growth for Immerse Education
How we drove international media coverage and high-authority links to support organic growth.
357
media placements built over 12 months
65%
increase in organic traffic
55%
increase in referring domains
The Brief
Immerse Education came to Kaizen as a fast-growing provider of summer school programmes for ambitious 13-18 year olds, operating across some of the world’s most prestigious university cities – from Oxford and Cambridge to Toronto, Sydney, and Singapore. And their biggest challenge was visibility.
The Plan
With programmes running globally and a target audience of students and parents spread across multiple markets, they needed a Digital PR strategy that could build genuine awareness far beyond the UK, and lay down an organic foundation strong enough to support long-term growth.
Immerse Education’s audience is dual-facing: students exploring their university options and the parents making decisions alongside them. A single-angle approach wouldn’t reach both. We needed campaigns that felt native to the way students actually consume content – engaging, shareable, and genuinely useful – while also generating the kind of authoritative, linked coverage that would move the needle on SEO.
We built a strategy combining hero campaigns with reactive, trend-led angles, each designed to travel across the markets where Immerse operates. Geography was central to every creative decision. Rather than defaulting to UK-only outreach, we mapped campaign angles to Immerse’s key locations, ensuring that international coverage wasn’t an afterthought but built into the brief from day one. The focus throughout was on link quality, not just volume – targeting high-authority publications that would deliver both brand reach and lasting organic value.
Spotlight Campaigns
Friendliest University Cities
Timed to coincide with the period when students are researching their options, we built an index of the friendliest university cities in the UK and around the world, scoring destinations across factors including dining and entertainment density, cultural amenities, safety, green space quality, and happiness scores. The format gave local journalists clear regional hooks, and gave students and parents genuinely useful decision-making content – a natural fit for Immerse’s positioning as a trusted guide to the university experience.
Universities Producing the Most CEOs
Designed with international reach in mind, this campaign ranked universities globally by the number of CEOs they’ve produced – a headline-grabbing angle with strong appeal to ambitious students and their parents. Crucially, it was built to land beyond the UK: the campaign secured coverage on McGill University’s own website, a Canadian institution and one of Immerse’s key programme locations, demonstrating the kind of market-specific relevance that generic outreach can’t achieve.
Most Photogenic Universities
A lighter, highly shareable campaign built to capture student-facing titles and social-native audiences. By ranking the world’s most photogenic university campuses, we created content that sat naturally alongside the editorial voice of publications like The Tab – exactly the titles Immerse needed to reach students at the point they’re dreaming about where to study next.
the results
The campaign delivered 357 media placements and 62 links over the 12-month scope, with an average Domain Rating of 60 across placements. The organic impact was substantial: referring domains grew by 55% and organic traffic increased by 65% over the same period – a clear indication that the link quality, not just the volume, was doing its job.
Why It Worked
Index-style campaigns were the right vehicle for this brief. They give journalists data-driven stories with built-in regional angles, which made it possible to target outreach across multiple markets simultaneously without rebuilding campaigns from scratch for each territory. The McGill placement was a proof point for that approach – not a happy accident, but the result of designing campaigns with international geography at their core from the outset.
The mix of campaign types mattered too. The CEO rankings gave Immerse reach into aspirational, parent-facing media. The photogenic universities campaign opened doors with high-traffic student titles. The reactive layer kept the work aligned with what journalists were already covering throughout the year. Together, they served both sides of Immerse’s audience without flattening either. And by staying focused on link quality throughout, the activity built something that outlasts the 12-month window – a stronger organic foundation for a brand with global ambitions.
