‘Heroes’ marketing campaign nominated for Public Service Communications Excellence Award

We are delighted to announce that our ‘CCS Heroes’ marketing campaign has been shortlisted for this year’s Public Service Communications Excellence awards.

CCS Heroes was launched in 2018 in response to in-depth research about perceptions of the organisation amongst current and potential customers. Based on this insight, the team worked to put a face to the CCS brand to help build engagement and trust with our customers. 

Andrew Pemberton, Director of Marketing & Communications at CCS, said:

The campaign included digital advertising, brochures, and newsletters

This innovative campaign put our colleagues and customers front and centre as ‘heroes’, showing how effective and efficient public sector procurement can deliver great outcomes for the taxpayer, and world-class frontline services for citizens the length and breadth of the UK.

The campaign has enjoyed considerable success and I am delighted that the team’s hard work and creativity have been recognised in this way. We look forward to joining public sector communications teams from across the UK on 5 November to hear the final results.

The campaign, the largest ever run by CCS, helped to increase awareness of the organisation to as high as 81% amongst its target audience and is set to generate an estimated £21.7 million of additional savings for our public sector customers in 2019.

At the heart of the campaign was our ambition to position CCS as authentic, easy to use and approachable. But the challenge didn’t end there. CCS has ambitious plans to help deliver big increases in savings for the public sector and we needed to be able to cut through the crowded marketplace and reach more public sector bodies than ever before to achieve it.

How we did it

Working closely with colleagues across CCS and our agency partners, we revamped our campaign microsite, digital ads and event materials as well as updating our key messages and developing a content strategy that was tailored to our targeted audiences.  

Delivering our message to the thousands of potential customers across the public and third sector was no mean feat. We used the widest possible range of owned and paid-for marketing and comms channels to maximise our reach and engagement, including monthly sector-based newsletters, emails, blogs, case studies, videos, whitepapers, social media activity, webinars, brochures, digital and press ads. We also worked alongside key partners and other government bodies such as the Department for Education and Government Digital Service to support the marketing activity. 

Outcomes

Thanks to the hard work of colleagues across CCS, we were able to achieve a number of significant positive outcomes over the 12 month campaign period:

• Increased awareness of CCS and its key products/services amongst our target audience. Our digital adverts were served millions of times across targeted social media platforms and websites, helping to drive 84,000 visits to our campaign website and increasing overall awareness. By the end of the campaign 81% of our target audience across the wider public sector were aware of CCS.
• Increased engagement with CCS content and colleagues. We engaged with over 6,500 potential customers through our events programme and achieved excellent levels of engagement with our content across key channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter and email. 
• Generated significant new business leads and digital registrations. We generated almost 7,000 additional leads and new registrations on our digital tools across the campaign. Based on typical rates of savings and commercial benefits against current market comparators, we estimate that these represent an additional £21.7 million of savings for CCS customers.

The winner of 2019’s Public Service Communications Excellence awards will be announced on 5 November.