Taking a UK startup to Slack competitor

Element
400+

SoV increase

30

pieces of high-value media coverage in national news outlets

50+

pieces of tier 1 coverage

Our challenge

Element, Europe’s answer to the most popular global communications tools, competes with the darling collaboration tools of lockdown – Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams.

Unlike its competitors, Element’s European founders believe private data should remain private. It’s a complex narrative, at the intersection of all our private and professional lives. Office-based one day and working from home the next, COVID-19 saw organisations struggle to keep teams connected in their new ‘working from home’ environments. Element uniquely solves collaboration problems which stem from the remote working trend.

Element issued Positive with a clear objective: gain coverage for Element’s launch in high-value titles, read by those aligned with issues Element solves.

Our response

Ahead of a formal PR launch, Positive suggested Element carry out in-depth social listening to help understand the core issues organisations face with collaboration tools on a day-to-day basis. Using the findings of the social listening exercise, Positive worked with Element to create a manifesto detailing the issues with massive centralised vendor ecosystems, and how Element’s decentralised technology helps individuals and organizations retain privacy. This asset was used as a central piece of content for PR and lead generation.

Positive’s approach to Element’s PR is incredibly proactive. Whether it’s proactively trendjacking privacy issues with market leaders WhatsApp and Signal, to crafting high-value case studies detailing how Element keeps the internal communications of the French government and German military secure, every day is different.

The results

When Positive began working with Element, it had a 8% Share of Voice. Today, thanks to Positive’s hard work it enjoys a 41% share against its competitors, a leading position. Positive’s work on the PR and lead generation activity also secured Element 125 high quality Marketing Qualified Leads, which converted to 15 Sales Qualified Leads.

In just eight months, Positive took this totally new brand from launch to plucky underdog with over 30 pieces of high-value media coverage in national news outlets such as the Financial Times and the BBC, as well as investor-interest publications such as TechCrunch. This coverage has increased Element’s Search Engine Optimization value, resulting in record users which have surpassed 20 million worldwide and are used by Element’s sales teams to prove Element is a major contender to market incumbents.

Positive secured exclusive launch day coverage with Sifted and gained placements for key customer stories. Element is used by the German military and the French government; both were successfully pitched to Tier 1 media, while maintaining a good cadence of coverage in key Tier 2 tech titles such as The Register, Verdict and ZDNet. Prospective investors contacted the Element leadership team directly after a second Financial Times article.

Element