Changing the narrative around women in construction

As a female co-owned and female majority marketing agency in the male-dominated construction industry, here at Harris Creative we recognise our unique position to shine a light on women’s experiences in a way few others could. We always celebrate Women in Construction Week and this year, we wanted to showcase the breadth of opportunities the sector has to offer through putting the experiences of our own team and women across our client base front and centre.

Services

Creating conversation

Lack of diversity across the construction sector remains a key challenge to overcome, and despite industry-wide efforts to tackle this over the years, there are still a series of contributing factors to the low number of women in construction. One of the main challenges is misconceptions about the types of roles available in the industry and with this in mind, we chose to launch a social media campaign highlighting the many career paths available across the sector.

With the conversation around diversity at its peak during the annual Women in Construction Week in March, we chose to launch an organic social media campaign during this period for maximum reach and engagement.

In order to communicate the key message of the campaign – the varied nature of roles within the construction industry – three women working across different departments at Harris were selected to take part in a video discussing their personal opinions and experiences. This video content was shared every other day during Women in Construction Week, supported by specially-designed graphic carousels posted on the other days to ensure social media content was consistent yet varied.

The carousel posts featured similar themes to the video content, but from the perspective of some of our female clients. Each provided insight into their experiences and career paths, aligning with Women in Construction Week’s ‘Keys to the Future’ theme.

The social media campaign was supported through inclusion in our monthly social media newsletter, the Harris Social Stream, and our monthly e-shot, the Harris Connection. Our PR team also summarised the campaign in an SEO-optimised blog, posted on our website after Women in Construction Week and subsequently shared on social media.

The results

March 2024 was a standout success for our social media channels, achieving an 84 per cent increase in unique impressions on LinkedIn, demonstrating that our content was reaching a wider audience. Our Women in Construction Week campaign also led to an increase in website clicks on LinkedIn in March, which remains our highest number of clicks so far this year.

The campaign also proved to be a successful tool in cementing our position as a thought leader in the construction industry, and since the campaign’s conclusion, we’ve received a number of new business enquiries.

Through tagging our clients on our carousel posts, we were able to boost our clients’ social media profiles, and we’re also proud to have achieved a less tangible but more important goal: positioning ourselves as champions of the talented women we work with every day.

Back to our work