Client Project: National Home Security Month

Marketing Campaign for Calder Security Ltd.

Calder Security Ltd is a Wakefield based security company and I work for them as a freelance Marketing Manager.

National Home Security Month (NHSM) is an annual national campaign, sponsored by Yale, that promotes home security. It takes place throughout October each year. This represented a significant opportunity to position ourselves alongside this national initiative, get behind a really worthwhile message and demonstrate our approach to corporate social responsibility.

National campaigns can be fantastic to ‘piggy back’ for marketers – they attract press coverage, association lends credibility and they capture the attention of the target market. It also offers lots of opportunity to create some great original content. It’s therefore always worth researching campaigns in your own industry or related causes/topics.

I created our own campaign that combined a number of activities over the month of NHSM. This included:

• Weekly original blogs in line with the established themes of the campaign
• An invitation to ‘#AskCalder’ – with questions from customers and other commonly asked security questions. These were answered via our Facebook page
• Registering as an official supporter of the national campaign which gave us credibility and also allowed us to feature our logo and link on the national website
• Guest blogging for the national campaign including a link on the national site
• Social media campaign to support all activity
• Local PR to promote our activities
• Fundraising for the Victim Support charity with a personal donation from the company for every alarm installation and service during the month
• E-mail newsletters pre and post campaign to encourage engagement and share content

Other than my time and the cost of the charitable donation of £600, all activities were cost-neutral. The amount of media coverage, increase in website hits and enquiries during the campaign more than paid for this.

It also allowed us to develop good relationships with the national campaign, Victim Support and some of our peers in the industry. Being able to support the charity was an important part of this as we know first hand how devastating it is to be a victim of burglary and other crimes. All in all it was a very successful campaign and the client was extremely pleased.

You can see a full round up of the campaign on the Calder Security website.