Helping 7,000 business leaders access essential business support during the pandemic

Boost is Lancashire’s Business Growth Hub, one of 37 Growth Hubs in the UK. Boost is led by Lancashire County Council and provides a range of funded services and programmes. It has supported over 14,000 businesses, helped create over 3,500 jobs while adding over £100m to the economy since 2013.

Our brief

Freshfield has been the outsourced marketing communications partner for Boost since 2013 and has worked on a plethora of campaigns, but none quite as significant as this.

In March 2020, the UK entered lockdown and the business community was plunged into crisis. Business owners and leaders in Lancashire were facing an unprecedented challenge. The need for swift and helpful business support was more important than ever.
Freshfield was brought it to work with the Growth Hub’s leadership team to devise a strategy and campaign to temporarily reposition Boost from growth support to providing essential help for worried business owners and managers.

What we delivered

With a predicted lockdown potentially days away, we held a Fresh Eyes strategic meeting with senior Lancashire County Council representatives, which saw the creation of an #AskForHelp campaign within days.

Given the huge attention around the pandemic and lockdown, it was essential we created a simple yet powerful message that could cut through the noise and we felt #AskForHelp achieved this while still representing the supportive nature of the Growth Hub.

With the campaign theme in place, our design and content studio created a campaign logo and a series of marketing assets to support the marketing efforts. A dedicated #AskForHelp hub was created on the Boost website to house content created by the Boost team, central government, and private sector business support providers from the fields of finance, HR, law and accountancy.

We also agreed a paid-for partnership with Lancashire Business View magazine, which saw the rollout of a series of webinars and a dedicated online content hub.

The campaign launched on the first day of the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown and focused on engaging with those people who run businesses. The launch prompted an immediate response from people running businesses who engaged with Boost’s Growth Hub team to seek advice and support.

Impact

The #AskForHelp campaign resulted in over 7,000 businesses owners contacting the Growth Hub to seek advice. A record number of unique web users visited the Boost website between March and June 2020, with the campaign gaining an online readership of 8.31 million.

The #AskForHelp campaign won Best B2B Campaign at the Northern Marketing Award 2020, was Highly Commended at the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA)’s National Awards 2021 as well as being Highly Commended for a string of other marketing awards.

Throughout the campaign, Boost’s coronavirus response was commended as being among the best from any UK Growth Hub.

Discover more about Boost at www.boostbusinesslancashire.co.uk.