Lancashire County Council
Helping Boost build engagement with business owners
Client:
Lancashire County Council
Sector:
Public Sector
How we helped:
- Communications strategy
- Launch and awareness campaign
- Media relations
- Content marketing
- Social media strategy
- Strategic partnerships
Boost is Lancashire’s Business Growth Hub, providing a range of scaleup, growth and startup support programmes. Since 2013, it has supported more than 14,000 Lancashire businesses, helping them to grow, create jobs and improve communities.
Our brief
Boost’s primary goal is to engage business owners and leaders and drive enquiries by highlighting the range and benefits of funded support, whether businesses are starting, growing, or scaling. Freshfield won a competitive tender in 2023 to help Boost and its stakeholders launch a campaign to engage the business community for its latest phase of funded business support.
What we delivered
To effectively engage business owners and leaders, Freshfield orchestrated a comprehensive marketing campaign across Lancashire. This initiative included content marketing, media relations, strategic partnerships with both private and public sector organisations, a targeted LinkedIn campaign and a flagship business event in collaboration with Lancashire Business View, which brought together local expert organisations.
In the campaign’s first six months, Freshfield’s focused publishing strategy showcased expert advisers delivering Boost support, highlighted inspiring success stories, and featured Boost ambassadors who shared their personal experiences of Boost’s impact.
Freshfield also partnered with leading digital agency Bespoke to revamp the Boost website and execute a search optimisation strategy. These efforts significantly enhanced engagement with individuals searching for business support in Lancashire.
Impact
The campaign launch activity generated almost 100,000 coverage views and over 5,000 impressions on social media. Over a six-month period, there were 455 website enquiries, 181 newsletter sign-ups and over 1,600 LinkedIn clicks via a paid campaign. Between October 2023 and March 2025, there were 2,039 enquiries to Boost from Lancashire businesses.
The campaign was nominated for Best B2B PR Campaign at the Prolific North Marketing Awards 2024.
