Making waves with hard water, hard times PR campaign

Harvey Water Softeners

Project Overview

Our talented Herd pitched up at Malton Food Festival with a campaign set to make waves.

We attended with Harvey Water Softeners, part of the Culligan group (a US based global water treatment company), to highlight the benefits of switching to softer water in your home. The campaign was a great success and drove some impressive results.

“Hard water, hard times”. This was the key message we created to showcase the effects of hard water to the Nation, demonstrating the impact it has on the home, along with the savings you could make by switching to softer water.

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Results

A selection of key statistics from this project:

1,000+ On-site & off-site conversions
25+ High authority, relevant links
10k+ Visits to campaign landing page
385 New leads generated

The Brief

Harvey Water Softeners, a Culligan company, launched their water softening products in Hull, York, Doncaster, and surrounding areas on May 16th 2022.

This launch posed the perfect opportunity for Herd to support with driving awareness and demand through content that engaged the target audience; causing a splash in affluent areas.

Harvey Water Softeners wanted their audience to have a good first impression when discovering the brand.

Our aim was to ensure Harvey were front of mind when people thought of water softeners.

Our activity needed to promote their core product, the HarveyArc. The brand had a well-oiled machine when it came to ‘Action’ moments – but earlier stages in the consumer journey were less of a focus.

The launch posed a huge opportunity to demonstrate how content and creative campaigns could be used for future expansion.

Key Objectives

Drive traffic and generate, leads from potential Harvey customers in Hull, York, Doncaster and surrounding areas
Build awareness of Harvey and their product offering by gaining links and coverage to digital PR campaign pages on their website
Build brand awareness and traffic by putting Harvey in front of their target audience at a relevant event in their target areas

It was great to work on this campaign end-to-end, seeing our vision come to life, and enjoying the interaction at the event.

Our 'hard water, hard times' message was really well received, and we can’t wait to see how we can make this campaign go global!

Leah Archibald, PR & Content Executive, Herd

How we did it

With the cost of living being a hot topic, we thought it was a good opportunity to ‘test the water’ and see how much money could be saved if residents in hard water areas switched to softer water.

Data revealed how you could save on your shopping bills, utility bills, detergents, as well as appliance maintenance, and repairs.

We analysed this data and got to work on creatives. On the Harvey website, we developed an interactive map highlighting the savings in each hard water region of the UK.

Awareness content was also key to this campaign, so we planned and produced 10 blog articles that would be published in the 10 weeks leading up to the launch event.

Offline, we designed and created pull-up banners, flyers, and made sure we had all the branded materials needed for an event. This included a new gazebo, branded rubber ducks, and more merchandise.

We bridged the gap between offline and online by ensuring our print material had a QR code that could drive people to our onsite content, featuring our interactive map.

The event attracted 50,000 people, and it was great to see high levels of engagement with the Harvey stall. We ensured there were interactive elements so people could see the damage hard water has on household appliances and even our pipes!

The Yorkshire public were shocked and definitely more aware of the damaging effects of hard water (and how to prevent it) as a result of our campaign and attendance at the festival.

Project Highlights

1

Creative on-site content

Content is king - through in-depth research and data analysis we created engaging landing page assets.

Our development team created an interactive map allowing users to hover and highlight soft water savings in each region of the UK.

2

Print media

Our design team pulled out all the
stops with visually engaging and informative flyers, and a pull-up banners to display the ‘Hard water, Hard Times’ campaign messaging for the in-person event.

3

Social media management

Leading up to the event, our social media experts pulled together supporting social schedule that raised awareness of our attendance at the event.

During the three days of the event, Herd shared posts across all social channels for further brand exposure.

4

Event management

Our PR team made sure the event was a huge success, with end-to-end event management.

We liaised with the organisers to ensure we had all of the demo equipment, the right branded merchandise, giveaways, and limited time offers to entice attendees to engage at the festival, booking a home demonstration.

5

Campaign syndication

Through our existing press relationships, we were able to generate high quality coverage before the event.

Following the event, further local coverage was achieved, with results from the day.

6

Engagement & reach

Malton Food Lovers Festival attracted tens of thousands of people from across Yorkshire and elsewhere in the UK.

Over the three days we secured more than 385 leads from people signing up on the day and via our landing page.