Search
PR
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Social
Transforming Lovehoney’s Trust Flow With Sexual Happiness Content
We created campaigns around sexual happiness and sexual health to work around the challenges presented by Google SafeSearch and drive traffic to Lovehoney's UK site.
251
Pieces of coverage
222
Total Links
62
Average DR
The Brief
Lovehoney came to us wanting to improve overall organic visibility and brand awareness through Digital PR and Social. But the category created structural barriers most brands never face. Google SafeSearch suppresses adult content at a network level, meaning organic visibility could disappear entirely regardless of on-site optimisation. Third-party retailers like Amazon were outranking Lovehoney on their own category terms. On top of that their core product pages were underperforming against competitors, and Lovehoney needed a partner who understood both the PR and SEO dimensions of the problem.
The Plan
Our angle was to create campaigns that could earn coverage in mainstream publications without ever needing to lead with the product. Working closely with Lovehoney’s internal SEO team, we developed six campaigns across the health and wellness niche – concepts like ‘Bedroom Disasters’, which explored which cities are most prone to sex-related injuries, and ‘Sex Myths’, which surveyed Brits on gaps in sex education. These gave journalists a story they could pitch to their editors without hesitation, with Lovehoney as the expert source rather than the subject.
We also identified a specific opportunity around adjacent product categories, that could surface in search without triggering the same SafeSearch filters suppressing core product pages, directly targeting the PLP keyword gap against competitors.
Our strongest focus was on expert commentary and smaller, more targeted angles to hit key publications at pace.
Spotlight Campaigns
How to Talk to Your Partner About Progressing Your Relationship
Tied to the Netflix release of ‘The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On’, which looked at couples with misaligned goals, we worked with a sex and relationship expert to come up with top tips on how to talk to your partner about progressing your relationship and communicating your desires.
These included:
- When you’re talking to your partner about progressing your relationship to the next level, Annabelle says it’s important to remove any notion of ‘winning.’
- Learn to listen – more often than not we are guilty of spending time during deep conversations waiting for our partner to finish their sentence, so we can start ours.
- Trust, intimacy and security are the three key areas to take into consideration when determining if it’s the right time to progress your relationship.
Workplace Romance Advice
During season five of ‘Selling Sunset’, we saw the start of Chrishell Stause and Jason Oppenheim’s workplace relationship. Off the back of this, we partnered with Ness Cooper to provide top tips for managing workplace romances.
These included:
- Talk to HR or check your work policy
- Keep personal relationship discussions at home
- Avoid flirting too much in front of other work colleagues
the results
Overall, we hit 110% of our KPI by obtaining 46 follow links out of over 250 pieces of coverage. We landed in some amazing top-tier publications such as The Sun, The Metro, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, to name a few.
Through this activity, we also saw an average increase of 4 positions for core PLP keywords and put Lovehoney in front of a potential audience of 909M.
Why It Worked
The adult category punishes any strategy that leads with the product. What worked for Lovehoney was finding the human story adjacent to it – cultural moments, relationship dynamics, survey-led insight – and letting mainstream media carry the brand into spaces it couldn’t reach directly. Journalists could cover the story without covering the category, and that distinction made all the difference.
