Viral Media Relations for Folly Farm

Strategic Media Relations – The First Retirement Home for Sloths

Challenge

Folly Farm is home to 450 exotic animals including lions, penguins, meerkats, giraffes and sloths. A retained PR and social media client of over a decade, our aim is to keep Folly Farm front of mind when people across the UK are planning family days out.​

With the changing media landscape, it was becoming harder for us to generate news coverage for day-to-day milestones at Folly Farm, so we knew we need to be more strategic in our approach. We knew stories which anthropomorphise animals – giving them human traits – capture the imagination so we looked for a human angle on Folly Farm.​

We heard a sloth was joining the enclosure and it was even older than the current sloth, Tuppee. This immediately felt like the right story. We decided to anthropomorphise this story by making Folly Farm a retirement home for sloths.

Solution​

Our strategic media relations team recognised that the majority of our coverage was likely to land online, we made sure the headline used was as clickable as possible: ‘This Pembrokeshire zoo has started a retirement home for sloths’.

Alongside the press release, we commissioned photography and collated raw footage which we packaged up and issued to the media to create their own social videos which increased our organic reach on social media. As we received coverage, where possible, we contacted media publications to add backlinks, improving SEO ranking when searching for sloth-based merchandise.

Results

  • 162 pieces of coverage (Nov – April) across 145 outlets
  • 26,906,912 ​opportunities to see
  • 169,000 shares of LadBible article and 50k Facebook
  • 23,677,918 total audience reach