Amplifying the impact of the Growth Hub
through strategic communications
The Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Growth Hub offers expert support to local businesses, self-employed people, and not-for-profit organisations. Whether it’s guidance, connections, or funding, the goal is simple – to help businesses and the people behind them to work smarter, grow stronger, and feel more confident about the road ahead.
The Growth Hub has already made a big difference across the region. But to reach even more people, they needed a way to share the impact of their work in a way that really resonated.
The challenge: turning individual stories into a campaign with collective impact
The Growth Hub’s core service – a free business review – is flexible, personal, and effective. But its real strength lies in the outcomes: the businesses that have grown, adapted, and flourished after receiving support.
Our job was to create a campaign that brought those outcomes to life. It needed to feel grounded and authentic, reflect the diversity of the businesses involved, and resonate with different audiences, especially those who hadn’t yet engaged with the Growth Hub.
Action: building a people-first storytelling campaign
We started with a Discovery workshop to truly understand their audiences, their needs and motivators. From this session, we created a set of audience personas to help tailor messages, content, and campaigns to specific audience needs. Knowing what their audience values enabled us to create content that resonated and was on the right marketing channels.
We worked with the Growth Hub to map their key audiences (including political stakeholders) ensuring content and messaging landed with the right people, in the right way.
First, we focused on storytelling as a tool for connection. We worked closely with the Growth Hub team and business support providers to develop a campaign concept that was both celebratory and authentic. We wanted to be able to ask business owners about the highs and lows of running a business – the highlights, the challenges and their next steps for growth.
We interviewed a range of business owners from across the region. Their stories formed the basis of 11 case studies, each capturing the personal journey behind the business and the impact of Growth Hub support.
The real value for the Growth Hub was our ability to unlock access to business stories using our experience and relationships. We connected with businesses and the business support services directly to set up interviews and curate compelling stories. This freed up internal capacity within the Growth Hub team, allowing them to stay focused on delivery.
The next step was to maximise opportunities within the Growth Hub’s existing content plan of paid-for and partnership content. We mapped out our stories and topics to create campaign materials across their paid, earned, shared and owned channels. This involved working with trusted partners at Business Cornwall, Reach and Corker Media.
We completed the project by project managing a video podcast studio booking, inviting business support services to come and share information about their programmes going forward. This involved tight briefing and project management to make best use of time and resources.
All of this was underpinned by a clear evaluation framework to measure engagement and track enquiries – keeping the campaign focused and outcome-led.
The result
- Tailored audience personas to inform communications going forward
- Communications strategy including campaign concept and evaluation matrix
- Set of 11 case studies and pictures, packaged for use online.
- Tailored content calendars, offering content to accompany each case study for social media channels.
- Managed 8 paid-for content bookings with partner media
- Support with recording video podcast content with 5 business support services
Crucially, the campaign helped demonstrate the Growth Hub’s offer. It showcased real people doing brilliant things, with support from a team that understands the heartbeat of local business.
