Creating and strengthening an employer brand is an ongoing challenge for every business, especially in industries where employers fight for a limited source of qualified workforce. In such a situation, defending the company’s interests turns into a strategic MarCom mission. So how do you achieve that?
I’ll share some insights from campaigns we have created and run for one of our clients. This large manufacturer is constantly trying to meet their recruiting needs on a seasonal basis. While I’ll refrain from giving away confidential data, I do hope you find valuable information in this article that can be used to improve your own campaigns.
Campaign Goals
Our client aims at recruiting permanent employees, but also extra employees for peak production season. Consequently, the campaigns had to be flexible enough to be adjusted when needed.
Goals were determined according to the number of resumes received in each of the cities we targeted.
Geographic Segmentation
It is important to understand that our client has plants in multiple cities across the province. Their recruiting efforts had to be aimed at well-defined zones surrounding these cities.
Concretely, it means we created one individual campaign for each city. And determined the area around each city based on our audience’s profile. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Are potential employees travelling to work by car?
- If not, is public transit available?
- Is there a direct competitor in the same area?
- Is the population of that area proportional to the budget we want to invest?
These are but a few of the considerations to define the area you need to target. If public transit is available and your audience is unlikely to own a car, make sure the transit is realistic. And if they do own a car, think about the traffic. You could end up targeting an area that’s geographically close to the location of your workplace, but with people reluctant to spend and hour back and forth just to get to work.
These particular details will influence the area your campaign covers.
Audiences
Now, in every city, it is necessary to convey the right message and target the right people.
Things to consider:
- What level of education do you need?
- What interests can these people have, other than work-related stuff?
- And what websites are they likely to visit? Are they likely to look on employment website?
You know your colleagues better than anyone else does. Take the time needed to define particular attributes to target more precisely. Find out what they have in common and focus on this. Why don’t you run an informal survey within the company? That could help you reach the right candidates, but also recruit people who will fit in.
Be careful with all these attributes — you may end up having your ads blocked because your are discriminating based on age, culture or ethnicity.
Landing Pages
Ok, so you’ve sent the right message to the right people. Now what? Our favourite and most effective solution is to create a landing page.
We have made pages especially for these campaigns to send a message that’s coherent with the ads, and to increase the conversion rate.
The wording, the keywords, and the images we use are all used towards achieving a single goal: having the visitor send their resume and apply for the job.
So you need to make it easy for them. Here are some useful tips to increase conversions!
- Stick to as few actions as possible. Remove your menu from the header. Minimize the footer. Hide all the buttons to subscribe to your newsletter or to learn more about your company. Focus on one action: apply for the job.
- Offer to fill out a simple form that asks for the bare minimum. The more fields to fill, the higher the chance of having the user stop and go away. Surname, name, phone, email, resume in attachment.
- Don’t confuse the visitors. Use the same images, wording and keywords you have used in your ads.
There are other “rules” to create a solid landing page. But these few tips are a good starting point.
Sustained Efforts
The success of your digital campaigns resides in sustained efforts. You can’t simply launch a campaign and expect results. Don’t forget to:
- Follow up promptly with the candidates. Your HR people will be solicited; make sure your efforts are aligned.
- Reply to comments posted on social networks, even if (or especially if) they’re negative. Show that, as an employer, you care about what your employees think. Mae sure your social media guru knows about your campaign and your goals.
- Optimize your campaigns! This is an crucial and ongoing process. You need to adjust frequently in order to get the best ROI. People stumbled on your ad for a physical job after searching for an office job? Add exclusions and remove these keywords from your campaign. A city if under-performing while you can’t cope with the number of resumes coming from another? Adjust your budgets to re-balance conversions.
The success of your campaign requires sustained efforts.
Results
So, did it work for us? YES!
Our client’s campaigns have been running for over a year which, in itself, is quite a success!
But numbers don’t lie:
- On the Search Network, our average cost per click varies between $0.51 to $1.25 from campaign to campaign, much lower than the employment sector’s average ($4.20), and about half of all sectors’ average ($2.32).
- Our conversion rate ranges from 4.58% to 7.61%, more than double the average conversion for all industries (2.70%).
- Several hundred resumes have been received by our client. Dozens every week. That’s how you attract potential candidates!
This graph shows how our campaign performed since January 2018. You can see the dip where seasonal demand was lower, and you can tell by the progression we’ve been optimizing at the early stage.
Conclusion
How you project your employer brand matters. In a way, the reputation of your business will drive your campaign. Furthermore, every word, every parameter, every keyword, and every audience must be carefully selected to achieve success.
You want to improve you employer brand? You are actively recruiting? I hope you liked reading this article. Obviously, the ExoB2B team will be more than happy to help you create your own successful digital campaign!
