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Category: Awards

Marketing Campaign winner First Base

 

First Base Employment scooped the Marketing Campaign of the Year Award at the Gloucestershire Business Awards last October. We take a look at the story behind First Base and the marketing campaign which secured the award for them.

Key business points:
  • First Base Employment provides recruitment support service
  • The business was founded in 1997 in Stroud by Tricia Hay
  • Their vision from the beginning was to provide honest and ethical recruitment services with a people first approach to business.
The winning entry:

With a minimal marketing budget and no marketing department, First Base Employment is not only achieving their goal of communicating effectively with their target market – they were asked to partner with The Gloucester and Cirencester Growth Hubs to present workshops to growth minded businesses on how they developed and actioned their marketing campaign!

The recruitment industry has a poor reputation with many employers and job seekers and as such employers tend to react negatively to approaches by recruitment consultants they don’t know.

A marketing campaign was devised to target new clients matching the ‘dream client’ profile in sectors in which they have in depth experience and work well with. The entire team got involved with the campaign with the aim of building trusted relationships with employers by creating personal ‘brands’ for themselves.

Research highlighted that the target audience are looking for reliable, responsive and well connected recruitment partners – this part of the campaign was called ‘TLC’ (thinking like clients). These qualities were demonstrated by generating and sharing high quality and useful client focused content which included; a regularly updated educational blog, self-produced video blogs, free-to-attend seminars and content email updates.

Every team member became a brand advocate, meeting potential clients at selected networking events. Social media accounts were set up to share content and telephone follow-up calls were made only to contacts where there had been some engagement through social media or at events.

The results included an email open rate which is 20% above the industry norm, a 300% increase in click through rate to their website, a four-fold increase in five star Google reviews, feedback that First Base is a trusted brand and its staff are becoming ‘famous’, and of course new clients!

 

First Base Employment logo