Highways Voices 23 - Marketing and PR with Helen Blood

The highways industry needs to improve the way it communicates both internally and externally to the travelling public so it can inform what it is doing and more importantly why it is doing it in a more engaging way.

These are the thoughts of experienced marketing and PR Director Helen Blood of Boundary Marketing & PR - a company dedicated to helping the sector to promote itself more effectively. She was speaking on this week's Highways Voices podcast and said the sector should not be afraid of telling the public what it does well.

"There are of course some really good examples of great communications work in the industry, but we have a long way to go often to get the public on side. It is about informing and engaging and that will encourage users of the networks to do something differently and to behave differently."

But this will only happen if the industry works together, she said. "It's about getting all the right information from the whole supply chain that are going to be delivering the schemes and the consultants that have been involved in designing the schemes and then actually really understanding the reasons behind the project and making sure that we communicate the 'why' factor so the public understand why we are doing something and the reason behind it, we need to be able to communicate that effectively to people, and we need to engage them as well. We need to be able to answer the questions that matter to them."

Ms Blood also said more effective use of technology on the roadside will also help deliver the right message if planned in the right way and there will be more tools at our disposal in the future, "but it is how we make best use of them," she added.

In this episode you'll also hear Paul Hutton and Adrian Tatum discuss the latest news, and find out why Andy Graham, KL Systems and Eloy win this week's "Adrian's Accolade"