A Pest Control Company Strikes Punny Gold By Exploring Which Sports Fans “Bug” People The Most

The Goal

Insight Pest Solutions is a pest control company with locations serving customers in cities all across the United States. Several years ago, Insight Pest Solutions partnered with our digital PR agency to achieve the goals of:

• Improving their backlink profile
• Driving more organic traffic to their website
• Optimizing their website for search
• Increasing brand exposure

To successfully reach these objectives, it was essential that we create interesting and engaging content that we could tie back to pests, insects, and the pest control industry.

Given the public’s general aversion to bugs and other creepy-crawlies that Insight Pest Solution deals with regularly, finding fun and palatable angles for content creation was both critical and resulted in a slightly higher degree of difficulty than creating campaigns for clients in other industries.

The Strategy

Over years of collaboration, Go Fish Digital and Insight Pest Solutions explored many different angles of pest control and insects, producing campaigns touching on topics such as fears of spiders, insect-borne diseases, and edible bugs, to name a few. One running theme of those ideas is that they all deal with pests and bugs in a literal sense. Having exhausted many of those literal avenues, we looked to explore more metaphorical “pests” for a new campaign, paving a totally new avenue for Insight Pest’s content campaigns.

The GFD team came up with the concept of surveying sports fans to find which other fanbases “bug” them the most. The campaign’s insect-based wordplay served well to quickly and easily convey how and why the sports-based content made sense as a content piece produced by a pest control company.

Sports content is something that is in constant high demand, as sports fans are always looking for news and information on their favorite teams and players, with most major leagues being newsworthy year-round, even in their offseasons.

Being able to incorporate sports content into Insight’s link-building strategy was a prospect that excited the GFD and Insight teams. If it succeeded, we knew the strategy of asking fans what “bugged” them about their favorite pieces of entertainment would open up the entire world of pop culture as new ground to explore for future campaigns.

In an attempt to gather the best, most comprehensive data possible, we decided to use the social media site Reddit as the primary source of survey responses. Reddit is a site that allows users to make and join specialized sites called subreddits, with each subreddit focusing on a specific topic.

Unique subreddits exist for different sports as well as subreddits dedicated to specific teams, with each of those sites counting thousands of self-identified fans as subscribers who regularly check the sites for news relating to their favorite sports and teams.

We created a survey using Google Forms and then posted it to the subreddits dedicated to every sport covered in the survey (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, college football, and college basketball) as well as the subreddits for every single professional team in the leagues covered. All told, the survey was posted to over 130 unique subreddits, with each post explaining the purpose and requesting any interested fans give their opinion.

The Results

Coverage Outlets

The survey proved popular among Reddit’s sports fans, with 12,826 individuals filling it out. This kind of sample size proved hugely beneficial to the campaign, as having such a large number of responses helped to legitimize the results as well as giving our promotional team an eye-catching number to use in their outreach efforts.

The campaign was covered on multiple CBS affiliates across the country as well as nationally-recognized sites such as brobible and Barstool Sports. The campaign blog post was also one of the five most popular pages on the entire site during the promotional period and the overall most popular page for Insight Pest on social media in that same time period.

As a long-term SEO benefit for Insight Pest, this campaign also earned a featured snippet from Google for the term “sports fans that bug [you] the most.”

These results allowed Go Fish Digital and Insight Pest Solutions to create further campaigns focused on more pop culture topics such as social media television shows (e.g. The Bachelor behavior that bugs you the most), using the survey format to find what kinds of things fans and users find that “bug” them the most about those topics.

This campaign also helped to expose the Insight Pest Solutions brand to a wider audience while also strengthening the overall backlink profile of the company site, helping them to build positive momentum towards their overall SEO goals.