The brief

Arbtech is one of the UK’s leading ecological and arboricultural consultancies — a business that provides the surveys, reports and expert assessments that developers, planning professionals and homeowners need to navigate the complex relationship between development and the natural environment. Tree surveys, bat surveys, protected species assessments, biodiversity net gain reports — essential, specialist work that underpins a huge proportion of planning applications across the UK.

The challenge was a familiar one for specialist professional services firms: the audience that most needs Arbtech’s services is a relatively narrow one, yet the knowledge and expertise inside the business has far broader relevance. The brief was to expand Arbtech’s media presence beyond the planning and development trade press — building brand recognition and editorial authority with a wider audience while reinforcing their position as the definitive expert voice in their field.

The approach

The key insight was that ecology and the environment are intensely relevant to everyday people — they just don’t always know it. Invasive species spreading through garden borders. Protected trees that can’t be removed without a survey. Bats in the loft. Badger setts under the garden. Hedgehog highways between neighbourhoods. The natural world intersects with everyday domestic life constantly, and the expertise that Arbtech brings to planning applications is the same expertise that helps a homeowner understand what’s living at the bottom of their garden.

We built a campaign strategy around making ecology relatable and consumer-friendly without losing the technical authority that gives Arbtech its credibility. Stories about garden wildlife, invasive plant species, the rules around protected trees — content that was genuinely useful to homeowners and gardeners while demonstrating the depth of knowledge behind it.

Reactive pitching on environmental news stories gave Arbtech’s experts a platform to comment authoritatively on topical issues — planning controversies, new biodiversity legislation, environmental protection cases that made the news. This gave national and regional journalists a credible expert source on environmental stories that would otherwise go uncommented upon.

The result

More than 600 items of media coverage and 599 items generating editorial presence across 179 new referring domains — a genuine broadening of Arbtech’s media footprint that reached well beyond the specialist planning and ecology press. Consumer lifestyle titles, national news websites, regional press and environmental publications all carried Arbtech content during the campaign.

The campaign demonstrated something important about specialist B2B PR: the most effective route to broader brand recognition isn’t abandoning your expertise — it’s finding the stories within that expertise that speak to a wider world. Arbtech’s knowledge is extraordinary. Making it relevant to people who will never commission a bat survey was the PR challenge, and the coverage demonstrates that it was met.