Who cares?

Changing jobs from the public to the private sector has been a massive eye opener to me. I feel that I have not only learnt a lot, but now have a combination of transferable skills and the ability to work in almost any industry. You see your old work place very differently when you have something to compare it to. I can understand why the temptation to stay working in education could be very great and one of my concerns with moving to a FTSE 250 company was that work would be all about profit and lose it's humanity. After all, while marketing can at times be a strain on someone's morals at least selling courses you believed in and seeing the happy faces of graduates made it easier to sleep at night!

Personally I cannot understand how anyone can work at a company where they don't believe in the product it offers/sells? This is something which was at the forefront of my mind when we started to discuss Kier's latest (and my first ever!) campaign and I felt that it would be great to take the great work that has recently been done on the brand one step further. Kier's tagline is 'Together, we make our world work better' which I really like as it sums up why we are a company about whose product and services it is actually easy to care.

A mock up of a campaign visual
for our website homepage

Having now met a number of staff from the service divisions I was really struck by how what they all did made a real difference to the communities in which they work. I hadn't even given any thought to the fact that there are people up at 4am everyday to fix urgent problems with the waterways and bridleways. Naturally we decided it would be great to focus a campaign on these real people who work hard to just make our world work and to give them a forum to tell their story.

With this we hit on the idea of '#KierHeroes'! A series of short videos with individuals from different areas all giving an overview of their job. It was then up to us to get out and about filming them and taking photos in order to gather as much feel good content as possible. I have put together a full campaign plan running up until May where we can slowly seed each video alongside a full online campaign. Part of this will be trying to leverage our social media channels to really see what sort of content works for our myriad audiences (we already know that our LinkedIn audience are very different to our Facebook one). I've also introduced the idea of building a landing page to try to get some meaningful statistics on website usage with built in conversions.



I've decided to use the opportunity of having some great new content to also launch a few new channels, Instagram and a company blog. The latter is something I've been working on since I started and I already have a full schedule in place but this campaign seemed like a good opportunity to tie everything in together. Surely every good digital marketer likes the opportunity to re-use content when they can?!

So there you have it - this week is the go live and we're all excited to do some online testing and learning as well as to shout about the great work the company does. Also, and importantly for me, the process of pulling this content together has now given me that real reason to care about what I do (as someone once said to me 'you can't teach people to care!') meaning whatever outcome we see from it the process has already been as rewarding as any potential success.