Case study: Harry Fairclough

Harry Fairclough was a construction and civil engineering company with a 120 year history as a leader in regeneration across the North of England. They had always relied on their technical expertise and competitiveness on cost when it came to winning new tenders but were increasingly being put under pressure to demonstrate the quality of service to prospective tenderers.

Building working, living and learning environments since 1898

Engage Comms was brought on board in 2012 to act as an extension of the Harry Fairclough business development team, creating a communications culture from within. Our role was to create engaging content that told the story of what they do to prospective clients in a wide range of targeted sectors and we could regularly be found donning our hardhats and high vis vests, visiting sites across the North of England and interviewing the experts from architects to engineers.

The fully integrated content marketing support that we delivered on an ongoing basis for Harry Fairclough included:

• Production of multimedia case studies for use in tenders and other marketing materials. We visited sites, spoke to the project experts, understood everything from the technical specification to the way in which the team built relationships with the local community and captured and presented this in a non-technical and engaging way.
• Project specific site blogs and websites. On flagship projects we developed compelling digital content to showcase the project to key stakeholders, kept local communities updated and provided an opportunity for local businesses to get involved/partnerships to be created.
• Ongoing employer branding which included thought leadership blog content that was shared across a number of different platforms to promote the diversity of projects being delivered by the HFC team and demonstrate the career opportunities that were available within this dynamic business. This improved the quality of recruitment, retention and employee engagement.
• Social media training. Key members of the team were trained in how to use LinkedIn to maximise the power of their networks and build relationships that would allow them to win more, higher value contracts. This also helped to streamline the business development process, saving time and money.

We also developed and launched a new responsive website, complete with a careers section tied to an employer branding and internal communications programme we rolled out to help the firm recruit and retain the talent it needed to grow.

We won awards for our work with Harry Fairclough including ‘Best Use of Digital’ and ‘Best Community Relations’ campaigns at our industry awards, CIPR Yorkshire & Lincolnshire Pride in 2014 and 2016 respectively. Read the winning entries here: http://www.cipr.co.uk/sites/default/files/40259830.pdf and https://www.cipr.co.uk/sites/default/files/Engage%20Comms.pdf