Every two years, the Swiss construction industry comes together at Switzerland’s biggest building trade fair, Swissbau. Zurich-based PR and communications agency open up has supported the Swissbau team with media relations and online content creation in relation to this year’s event.

In its 25th year, Swissbau has repositioned itself, moving away from the classic trade fair model to become a content and networking platform. One of the aims behind this move was to enhance the event’s relevance through increased content. With this in mind, the lead agency for the repositioning, thjnk Zurich, brought Swiss PRN partner agency open up on board in 2017 to help develop and implement a content strategy.

Once the strategy was signed off, open up came up with new concepts for media relations as well as content creation for Swissbau’s newsletter and its various social media profiles. It fleshed these out by collecting industry-relevant content and writing specialist texts for the newsletter, the blog, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The agency also manages the social media channels and communities. In its media relations work, open up placed industry-specific topics in the mass media and assisted with content for a number of media cooperations.

“As part of the Swissbau team, open up is instrumental in shaping Swissbau’s communications. The people there know their craft well and understand what the hot topics in the construction industry are,” said Maximillian Grieger, Head of Communication at Swissbau.

Swissbau is one of the largest building trade fairs in Europe. Held every two years, it is the key meeting point for the Swiss construction industry, bringing together some 1,000 exhibitors and more than 100,000 visitors over five days in Basel. Besides the fair itself, the event and network format Swissbau Focus and the special show for digital transformation, Swissbau Innovation Lab, are also part of Swissbau.