Rewind the clock to the time when you were still a fresh graduate. Would you be drawn to a serious recruitment ad with an overwhelming job description? Or would an ingenious recruitment campaign that reflects the company’s character win your heart?
Employees are one of a company’s greatest assets. This holds even greater truth amid the latest ‘competition for talents’ phenomenon. With a growing preference for working as slashers or digital nomads, the struggle to recruit and retain top candidates has become even more intense among corporations.
Now is the best time to rethink your recruitment approach, and recruitment marketing is something worth giving a serious thought.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing involves adopting marketing strategies to promote your company as a desirable employer. Similar to product marketing, the tactics can be as diverse as your creativity goes, from social media advertising to offline guerrilla marketing – just that the ‘product’ you are selling is your own company.
While recruitment marketing is still a new concept in Hong Kong, it has been prevalent for years around the world. OgilvyOne launched ‘The World’s Greatest Salesperson’ campaign in 2010 and invited applicants to sell them a brick. In 2007, Volkswagen hid their recruitment message physically under cars to be repaired targeting skilled mechanics.
Earlier this month, a major bank in Hong Kong initiated an online and offline 24-hour campaign to recruit frontline staff. By answering five simple questions on an Instagram story, applicants could gain a chance to get shortlisted. The unconventional recruitment approach not only appeals to potential candidates but also helps build the bank’s image as an open-minded employer.
Tips to Initiate Your Recruitment Marketing
There is no hard and fast rule to recruitment marketing but a few essential elements can get you started.
1. Think like your target candidates:
Bear in mind your recruitment is not speaking to just anyone, but your target audience, i.e. top candidates. Bright applicants would not settle for less. With more options than an average candidate, they tend to be pickier. Yet, try not to please by saying something high-flown. More often than not, telling candidates what your company truly is would be the best tactic. In fact, emphasising that your company adheres to stringent standards is a selling point, for top candidates are looking for top employers too.
2. Connect emotionally:
You are not offering a job, but a career prospect. Present the company benefits with reasons addressing candidates’ personal needs. Show them you genuinely care. Many corporations sponsor employee’s further education but your rationale behind it could be different (i.e. more meaningful). Trust us, your package will sound even more attractive.
3. Dare to be creative:
Based on the qualities of your ideal candidates, think out of the box and develop tailored approaches to reach out directly to your target candidates. Offline recruitment campaigns, for instance, may give that extra human touch to exemplify your company image. As recruitment marketing is still new in Hong Kong, you have a lot of space to be original.
Final Thought
Recruitment marketing is basically a way to show the world who and what your company is. In other words, you are consolidating your brand identity while looking for prospective colleagues. Be one of the very first companies to impress job-seekers in your industry with an outstanding recruitment campaign and talented applicants will naturally come forward.
Voltage X is keen to create bespoke recruitment marketing campaigns with you. Our integrated strategies encompass online, offline and online-merge-offline (OMO) approaches to engage with your target candidates. Let’s explore the possibilities of recruitment marketing together.
Voltage X has transcended the socio-economic turbulence in the last few years with an integrated marketing strategy. In the midst of COVID-19, Voltage X launched an e-dining campaign with Henderson Land Development since 2021 for three consecutive years with remarkable success.
In 2022, when the local F&B Industry was still largely grappling with the pandemic recession, Voltage X kicked off “E-dining Campaign 2022 – The Art of Gourmet Flavours” to transform the downturn into a rare opportunity to promote dine-in experiences at upscale bars and restaurants.
Capitalising on the second phase of the Consumption Voucher Scheme, the campaign joined hands with 25 participating premier restaurants and bars (from H Queen’s, H Code, H Zentre, and 18 On Lan) to offer HK$400 worth dining vouchers at a mere HK$200. With the aid of Voltage X’s result-driven bespoke solutions, all vouchers were sold out within hours. The following year saw similar success with all vouchers sold out within 5 hours with 28 participating restaurants and bars.
Over the last three years, Voltage X witnessed shifting customer behaviour and saw potential beyond the apparent economic challenges.
Content is still king, so is offline marketing
In a highly digitalised era, it is easy to over-rely on eye-catching presentations and overlook the roles of quality content. Gimmicks may create a one-hit wonder, but outstanding content is what makes goodwill last.
Voltage X considers quality content as an effective means to build and consolidate brand values and culture. Brand loyalty will naturally follow genuine communication. “Constant and consistently good campaigns remain an efficient tactic for a brand to gain exposure,” said Dan Lun, CEO of Voltage X. The Rule of 7 in traditional marketing suggests it takes an average of seven interactions with a potential customer before a purchase takes place. In today’s social media marketing the Rule of 10 or more would ring truer. Excellent content is even more crucial when your brand’s messages are spread in repetition.
Against popular belief, offline retail in Hong Kong is still the mainstream. According to provisional statistics from the Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong’s online sales accounted only for 6.7% of the total retail sales value in June 2023, which is 3.3% lower than June 2022, with the value of total retail sales increased by 19.6%. “In the post-pandemic period, online-merge-offline (OMO) approach is even more relevant,” said Lun. “A one-stop, all-round marketing strategy is essential to trace new clients and retain existing ones.”
In an all-round marketing strategy, public relations plays a pivotal role to align and leverage both online and offline coverages. With consumers getting increasingly sophisticated, brands have to articulate their messages astutely to resonate with their target audiences. Voltage X’s PR team comes in to monitor the process for a compelling and risk-free delivery, while maximising the power of soft-selling through influencer marketing.
What lies ahead for digital marketing?
The rise of Xiaohongshu is changing the social media game in Hong Kong, thanks to the influx of mainland Chinese visitors. In July 2023 alone, out of 3.6 million arrivals, nearly three million came from Mainland China, according to the Hong Kong Tourism Board. In the same month, 4.68 million departures from Hong Kong people to the mainland China were recorded by the Immigration Department. Voltage X has geared up for these shifts by specialising in Xiaohongshu, while connecting with Shenzhen for campaigns targeting Hong Kong visitors.
With volatility becoming the marketing norm, brands and marketers alike have to equip themselves with the fitting tactics. An integrated marketing strategy is no doubt one of them.
Originally published on Marketing-Interactive:
https://www.marketing-interactive.com/voltage-x-employs-integrated-marketing-strategy-to-harness-the-ever-changing-market
WhatsApp: +852 9168 8209
Email: Marketing is all about understanding consumer behavior and decision-making. To create more effective marketing strategies, it’s essential to tap into certain psychological triggers. Here are some of the key factors that may influence buying decisions.
Case Study: Sixes Hotpot
Sixes Hotspot incorporated psychological triggers into their marketing campaign by offering a limited time summer discount that varied based on the temperature. This created a sense of urgency and exclusivity, driving results and increasing sales.
Understanding these psychological factors not just helps create a new PR angle for promoting the business, it can also assist on formulating an effective marketing campaign that showcase your brand’s unique values and messaging.
To start, you’ll need to identify your brand’s unique selling proposition (USP) and tailor your messaging to appeal to your target audience. This can be achieved through customer research, competitor analysis, and market trends. Once you have your USP and messaging, you can begin to incorporate the following psychological triggers into your marketing strategy:
7 Factors that Influence Buying Decisions
- Scarcity
Imposing time limits, limited stock, or exclusive access creates a sense of scarcity, making people perceive something as more valuable and prompting them to act fast before it’s “gone.” - Social proof
Highlighting positive reviews, recommendations, and endorsements from influencers signals that a product is popular and worth buying, giving consumers social permission to buy. - Liking and familiarity
Repetition through consistent branding, jingles, slogans, and promotions makes products feel familiar and more attractive over time. - Authority and expertise
Highlighting credentials, celebrity/KOL endorsements, awards and accolades, positions products as trusted choices backed by legitimate authorities, engendering customer confidence. - Stories
Marketers use stories to create an emotional connection with consumers, tapping into feelings like joy, nostalgia, empathy, and aspiration to make products desirable. - Self-image and identities
People make purchases to express who they are and the type of person they want to become. Marketing that positions products as a means of fulfilling aspirations, ideals, and desired identities will have greater resonance and influence buying decisions. - Habit formation
Marketers build habits through loyalty programs, reminders, defaults, and easy access – making their products the “default choice” that comes to mind automatically.
Incorporate psychological triggers into marketing campaigns
To create marketing that resonates with your audience and drives results, it’s important to segment your audience and tailor your messaging based on the psychological triggers that are most relevant for each segment. Test different strategies, creative elements, and campaigns to see what works best in inspiring purchases, and always measure key metrics to continually improve your marketing approach. By understanding the psychological triggers that drive consumer behavior, you can create more effective marketing strategies that resonate with your audience and deliver results.
Final Thought
At Voltage X, we don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. Our team segments your audience and tailors messaging based on the psychological triggers most relevant to each group. By harnessing the power of psychological triggers, we create resonant marketing that drives results and fosters stronger consumer connections. Ready to dive deeper into the psychology of your consumers and create more impactful marketing campaigns? Let’s create marketing that not only speaks to your audience but also compels them to action.
From media monitoring and personalized messaging to crisis management and predictive analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed how PR practitioners manage media relations, analyze data, and engage with audiences. AI empowers professionals with advanced tools to enhance efficiency, precision, and strategic decision-making. This article explores ways that AI can help transform the PR landscape and its implications for the future of communications.
1. Media Monitoring and Analysis
AI-driven tools have revolutionized media monitoring by automating the process of tracking brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and competitive intelligence. Advanced algorithms can scan vast amounts of news articles, social media posts, and online content, providing real-time insights into public sentiment and helping PR professionals stay ahead of trends and issues.
2. Crisis Management and Reputation Monitoring
AI technologies aid in crisis management by detecting early warning signs and analyzing sentiment during a crisis. With real-time monitoring and analysis, PR teams can identify emerging issues, evaluate public sentiment, and respond swiftly and appropriately, mitigating potential reputational damage.
3. Content Creation and Curation
AI algorithms can generate content based on predefined templates, freeing up PR professionals’ time for more strategic activities. By inputting key information and providing an outline, AI algorithms can produce coherent and engaging text that adheres to a specific writing style or brand voice. These models learn from vast amounts of data to generate text that closely resembles human-written content.
4. Influencer Identification and PR Partnerships
AI simplifies the process of identifying relevant influencers by analyzing social media data and engagement metrics. AI algorithms can match brands with influencers based on their audience demographics, interests, and engagement levels, helping PR professionals forge impactful partnerships and amplify brand messaging.
5. Predictive Analytics
AI’s predictive capabilities empower PR professionals to anticipate trends, anticipate potential crises, and optimize campaign strategies. By leveraging historical data and machine learning algorithms, PR teams can make data-driven predictions, optimize resource allocation, and stay one step ahead in a rapidly evolving media landscape.
Final Thought
AI technology is revolutionizing the PR landscape, providing PR professionals with powerful tools to streamline processes, deliver personalized experiences, and make data-driven decisions. By leveraging AI-driven solutions, PR practitioners can enhance their effectiveness, improve audience targeting, and stay ahead of the competition in an increasingly digital and interconnected world. Embracing AI’s transformative potential is key to unlocking new possibilities and staying relevant in the ever-evolving field of public relations.
Marketing is a crucial aspect of any business, whether big or small. It helps businesses to reach their target audience, build brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales. However, with the emergence of different marketing channels, it can be challenging for businesses to develop an effective marketing strategy. This is where an integrated marketing services agency comes in. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of having an integrated marketing service for your business.
What are Integrated Marketing Services?
Integrated marketing services refer to the use of a combination of marketing strategies to achieve a business’s goals. The strategies could include advertising, public relations, event management, digital marketing, and more. The aim of integrated marketing services is to create a unified and consistent brand image across all marketing channels.
How Can Integrated Marketing Services Help Your Business?
1. Consistent Branding
An integrated marketing services agency helps to create a consistent brand image across all marketing channels. This consistency is crucial in building brand awareness and recognition, which in turn drives customer loyalty and trust.
2. Increased Reach and Engagement
By using different marketing channels, such as YouTube advertisements or Facebook advertisements, you can reach a wider audience and engage with them in a meaningful way.
3. Cost-Effective Marketing
By using a combination of marketing strategies, you can optimize your budget and get more value for your money. For example, instead of hiring separate advertising, public relations, and event management agencies, you can hire an integrated marketing services agency to handle all of these tasks and save costs.
4. Better Understanding of Your Audience
By analyzing data from different marketing channels, you can have a more comprehensive understanding about your customers’ behavior, preferences, and needs. This information can then be used to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
5. Improved Customer Experience
By using a combination of marketing strategies, you can create a seamless and consistent experience for your customers across all touchpoints. This can lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Final Thought
Integrated marketing services can provide numerous benefits for your business. When choosing an integrated marketing services agency, there are a few things to consider. First, you should look for an agency that has experience working with businesses in your industry. This will ensure that they understand your target audience and can develop marketing strategies that resonate with them.
You should also consider the agency’s track record and reputation. Look for reviews and testimonials from past clients to get an idea of their level of expertise and the quality of their work.
Finally, it’s important to choose an agency that you feel comfortable working with. Communication is key, so make sure that the agency is responsive and easy to work with.
We’ve all seen influencers, celebrities and public figures recommend a product and add the source of where you can get one for yourself. It can range from endorsements to try-it-out videos to all the buzz about the latest trend or next big thing. What you’re experiencing is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a company compensates affiliates to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services. With a range from well known brands to ecommerce entrepreneurs, the business knows there’s always more that can be done to make it grow and one way of taking things to the next level is utilising affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a tactic to drive sales and generate revenue that’s beneficial to brands and marketers. Affiliates earn a commission for marketing another person’s company or products and are rewarded a payout for providing a specific result to the retailer or advertiser. The typical result is a sale, but some programs can reward for leads, free trial users, clicks to a website, or getting downloads for an app.
How affiliate marketing works
Affiliate marketing involves referring to a product or service by sharing it on a blog, social media platform, podcast, website, etc. The affiliate earns a commission each time someone makes a purchase through the unique link associated with their recommendation.
There’s 5 ways that affiliate marketers make money: pay per click, pay per lead, pay per install, pay per action, pay per sale.
Pay per click: commission is made in every click on the affiliate link. This method is usually used by big merchants with a goal to build brand awareness.
Pay per lead: affiliate is paid every time someone signs up for something. It’s a popular method because companies use it for sweepstakes, giveaways, lead generation, etc.
Pay per install: payout is earned for every install generated from website traffic. The goal is for app downloads and software installs.
Pay per action: commission is earned for a specific action. Many programs use this model because it’s broad and can be applied to different offers. Can include a newsletter signup, contact request, form submission, etc.
Pay per sale: affiliate is paid for every sale that is made. The most common payout method for ecommerce offers.
TYPES OF AFFILIATE MARKETING
There are 3 main types of affiliate marketing. To better understand these types, can show someone whether or not the product being advertised is just being shown for hype or whether the affiliate genuinely cares/uses the product. The three types of affiliate marketing are unattached, related and involved.
Unattached: no authority in the niche of the product advertising, no connection between marketer and customer, often running pay-per-click advertising campaigns with affiliate links. Unattached can be an added affiliate link via Google Adwords or Facebook Ads.
Related: promote products and services marketer doesn’t use but related to niche, affiliates have an audience (whether through blogging, YouTube, TikTok) and influence which makes them a trusted source for recommending products. Related can be an added affiliate link through a blog, podcast, video, social media.
Involved: recommending products and services marketer used and truly believes in, use influence to promote products and services that followers may actually need instead of paying to get clicks on a banner ad, takes more time to build this type of credibility but is necessary to build a sustainable business. Involved is consistent content, can be through social media and videos with the highest engagement of showing the product and using it.
Pros and Cons of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is about forming partnerships with well-established companies in an effort to share consumer networks and get your brand name out there. With that comes pros and cons of the advertising model.
The pros include: almost anyone can join, there can be multiple affiliates, minimal investment, helps spread brand awareness/reach. The benefits create an incentive for regular customers as well as influencers. With multiple affiliates in the program, reach and engagement can be met in so many different ways.
The cons include: inconsistent results, branding is at risk, potential fraud, can take time to build trust/rapport. High competition can drown out the brand. The possible downside of having multiple affiliates is that the image of the whole brand can be messed up if there isn’t consistent flow and synergy. The most important thing for customers is establishing trust so that there can be loyalty to the brand. Same goes for when trying to attract and gain new customers.
The best way to determine whether or not affiliate marketing is in your best interest, is to make sure that the right affiliates are used. The relationship between the brand and the affiliate can be telling to the audience.
Final Thought
Affiliate marketing is a really good way to drive results and by building brand awareness through the use of this advertising model, the potential to establish a solid foundation is highly likely. The use of partnerships with affiliates using the product and sharing with their followers, is a great engagement opportunity. As businesses and brands need to build credibility and maintain trust, using affiliates is an additional way to cultivate that.
Influencer campaign has been around for decades, but this powerful marketing strategy is now more important than ever to help increase your brand awareness, get leads, and drive major sales!
To get started with influencer marketing for your business, we have 3 simple tips for you to kickstart your influencer campaign.
To get a better insight into micro-influencers, we’d like to share our client, Avobar’s success story first:
Objective: Increase general branding awareness more specifically to increase online presence in a short amount of time.
Action: We selected a number of micro-influencers (between 5K-15K followers on Instagram) and invited them to visit Avobar for a tasting to promote our restaurant offerings, including the signature Matcha Pancakes & Superfood Lattes.
Results: In return, we received a large amount of coverage through Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook and OpenRice, and succeeded in generating brand awareness for Avobar.
And now that you’re convinced, we’ve narrowed down the process into 3 simple steps for you:
Step 1: Define Your Objectives
Decide what the objective of your influencer campaign will be. Are you hoping to enhance your brand image? Drive sales? Or target a new audience?
Step 2: Find the Optimal Micro-influencer
Condense your influencer list to those who engage in topics as closely related to your brand’s products and services. To make this process more efficient, seek help from a PR agency to intervene.
Step 3: Let the influence do their thing
Looking to enhance your brand image? Have your micro-influencer participate in an “account takeover”, or have them write a blog post on your company’s website to generate brand awareness and credibility.
Overall, while incorporating micro-influencers may be worth the investment to enhance your overall branding strategy, we recommend sourcing additional strategies to create an integrated marketing plan for long-term success.
Interested in how we can achieve your marketing goals? Feel free to reach out to us now!