Employee branding campaign -webinar summary

I hosted Rona Susel, from Rapyd, to talk about her recent recruitment marketing campaign.?

Many marketers, self-included, are now required to conduct such campaigns and support HR recruitment departments. For many of us “HR Marketing” or “referral marketing” is a new activity. Rapyd is a B2B Global Fintech as a Service company, Head of global marketing programs, supporting also HR.?After the company’s series E (400 millions$) there was a lot of pressure to grow quickly- and that demanded the recruitment of 200 developers in the local site.

The first challenge- Not many people knew who Rapyd was? How to elevate it to top of mind?

This is even more exuberated since there’s a talent crunch, and the battle for each employee is fierce. Companies have to establish their brand while competing with companies such as Google and Amazon- we cannot out pay them, or buy more media… so how do you convince people to come work for you? How to make them developers connect with the brand?

Rona’s first step was to speak with HR, devs, and team leaders. They said that people want to be part of something big, be able to feel a part and influence, work on the latest tech. This led to the understanding that employees need to be front and center in the recruitment campaign. She then spoke to B2C marketers and ad people. These people have experience in reaching a wide audience and working on ATL marketing.?

Rona identified the right provided (without an advertising agency). She clicked with a branding agency and (FIRMA). Rona bought all the media directly. They had no time to strategize- the simply proposed three campaign types- Rona decided on combining real employees with smart, snappy, syntax (code-like) text. The design was using the brands’ colors, logo, and font, in addition to Clever/ snarky text, aimed at engaging the target audience (mainly developers)- so it uses code/ syntax.?

Her main challenge was harnessing the people within the company- to create the right copy and visuals that would be appealing for the audience. The decision was made to feature actual employees as “poster boys” of the brand.?

There were 10 slots for people from within the company to appear on billboards, but many more wanted to participate- so the real challenge was to pick the most appropriate personas (and not to persuade people to appear). It also created a buzz within the company that we later leveraged for gaining additional exposure on social media- we ran “mini-challenges” where all employees participated and were asked to take a selfie adjacent to the sign and post it online. We then saw who got the most posts.?

Doing this campaign under lockdown was even more challenging- everything had to happen under COVID restrictions, including building a makeshift photo studio and styling renting when all stores are closed.

Once live- the employees were ecstatic. The campaign also caught the media’s attention and got some mainstream coverage.?

Naturally- these types of campaigns are expensive. You will be fighting with retail brands for media and billboard space (Think CocaCola or Toyota). You also need to consider that in order to be effective the campaign needs to run for several weeks over a large geographic area (in Raypd’s case- most of Central Israel). Some seasons are cheaper than others, but in general, such campaigns can cost millions of Shekels.?

If you can’t afford such a massive campaign, think about where to focus your efforts (SentinelOne once bought all the billboards outside unit 8200 headquarters, and aggressively advertised it was looking to hire talents).

Also- now that you saw what Rona’s done- try not to imitate it too much. People like novelty, so another “happy, smiling employees” campaign will be seen as just that. Be bold, try something new and surprising.

As for KPIs- Rona said that the campaign was successful. It generated both measurable results (amount of CVs received) and intangible ones (buzz, media attention and general “coolness” now associated with the brand).

Rona said that she’s now working on her next big campaign (spoiler alert- it’s NOT going to be another billboard campaign, so be ready to be surprised!).?