Nuki Smart Lock: Benelux PR campaign

What we did

If you were looking for an easy to install and user-friendly smart lock for your home, you have probably come across Nuki. This Austrian company launched its first smart lock in November 2016, which launched in the Benelux in April 2017. Since this official launch in the Benelux, youEngine has been working together with Nuki on its PR campaign in both the Netherlands and Belgium.

Challenges

The smart home market in the Benelux has been dominated by well-known brands since the start. When people think of voice assistants, they think of Google Assistant and Siri. When they think of smart lighting, the Hue brand from Philips comes to mind and when they think of smart doorbells, Amazon’s brand Ring pops up. From the start of our PR campaign, we wanted to create the same top-of-mind status for Nuki and smart locks.

Nuki was a pioneer in the smart lock market. They created the first smart lock that people can install themselves without any technical assistance and that does not require changing the cylinder. Our first challenge was pitching this innovation to our database of Dutch and Belgian tech media, so their reviews could convince smart home enthusiasts.

Over the years, the smart lock market continued to grow and competitors appeared. Especially in 2021, this gave us the additional challenge of maintaining the top-of-mind status we achieved. Through an influencer campaign that included interior influencers and a project with Dutch news outlet Trouw, we managed to introduce Nuki to new audiences we hadn’t reached before.  

What our client got

Since the start of our PR campaign and review program, we have been seeing almost exclusively positive reviews of the Nuki Smart Lock and it’s successor, the Smart Lock 2.0. The amount of clippings from media has increased steadily year over year and we are currently averaging 150 clippings annually. Additionally, over 70% of those clippings are from Tier 1 media. At the moment 10 influencers have given their seal of approval to Nuki’s products too and that number continues to grow as well. Finally, our project with the Dutch news outlet Trouw in consisted of four different online articles that benefited from the outlet’s reach of over 338.000 people.