4 Successful Tactics to Drive Brand Activation for Global Employment Platforms in 2023

Summary

Reaching the HR leaders your business needs can be difficult, particularly with HR departments under mounting pressure to recruit and retain talent as-is. Therefore, evaluating the purchase of an international recruitment service often gets pushed further down the to-do list, despite its unique and impactful value for businesses.

This article explores four key insights that INFUSE has gained from a recent demand program for an international employment platform to activate brand awareness and increase its global outreach.

Use these four insights to guide your own strategies for driving engagement from target HR leaders with your services.

The state of the global remote work market

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented lockdowns, which have forever shifted work and candidate preferences toward a remote-first model. Layoffs took the B2B world by storm in 2020, and in the next year The Great Resignation made recruiting and retaining talent a major challenge, which still plagues HR leaders to this day. As layoffs became the norm once again at the end of 2022 and start of 2023, this cycle will likely continue.

Studies show that remote work is a big expectation by talent when applying for a job: the Pew Research Center reported that given the choice, 60% would work remotely. In addition, 37% of technology professionals would take a pay cut if it means they can work remotely (Global Workplace Analytics).

This has resulted in a double-edged sword scenario, as remote working offers organisations the ability to potentially expand into global talent and fill the skill gaps present in their business. However, on the other hand, hiring in this manner also presents its own unique challenges, particularly for organisations looking to build remote teams across the globe, without the requisite international infrastructure.

Tackle objections and generate awareness for global employment platforms with demand generation

In a world where talent is demanding remote work, and businesses are still suffering from a talent shortage, it only makes sense to prioritise remote hiring.

This is where global employment platforms, including Employers of Record (EORs) and Professional Employer Organisations (PEOs) come in, meeting the demand for high-quality talent regardless of geographical constraints whilst simplifying compliance with local legislation and taxes.

However, despite its countless benefits, many HR leaders still have not made the jump to hiring internationally, due to capacity and concerns about adequate compliance and maintaining organisational culture when partnering with a global employment platform.

Demand generation campaigns can address objections, increase awareness, and boost interest to position your services as the top solution for when prospective buyers make the shift to searching for talent globally.

Why demand generation can boost sales
for global employment platforms

To solve common concerns and pain points to secure lasting demand, global employment platforms need to showcase the benefits of their services to buyers and how they address the following HR issues:

Recruiting and onboarding talent across geographical locations, all while maintaining a brand style and adjusting language for different cultures and expectations of team members.
Complying with labor laws, which are complex and vary entirely from one country to another—with hefty fines for businesses that fail to comply.

In other words, your business needs to build trust by assuring prospects that your recruitment platform is fully compliant and will not cause future problems.

Demand generation campaigns are primed for building a solid foundation of trust for these reasons:

Long-term: Demand generation is continuous and focuses on driving engagement and brand awareness over an extended period of time, allowing organisations to gain the trust of prospective buyers. This goes beyond classic lead generation to create lasting relationships and value for businesses.
Authoritative content: A key element of demand generation is the timely sharing of relevant content with target accounts. This not only boosts brand awareness, but also expertise and greater trust from audiences as a result.
Omnichannel outreach: The most effective demand generation campaigns engage buyers where they are by utilised an omnichannel approach that caters to their preferences.

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brand activation and demand among your target accounts

At INFUSE, our omnichannel approach consists of 8 elements:

Incorporating these eight elements, INFUSE Demand Strategists identified the following media preferences of HR professionals to create an enriching omnichannel experience:

Social media: LinkedIn, the most utilised social channel by HR professionals searching for talent, was the main focus of this campaign.
Email: Prospects were nurtured via multiple email touches and sent timely messages to engage with relevant content (such as eBooks and reports) as they engaged with previous content and demonstrated buyer intent.
Ads: Relevant assets were promoted to already engaged prospects on social media via display ads and sponsored posts, directing them to landing pages to custom-tailored content for their unique pain points.
Content syndication: Articles were published via ITCurated, our proprietary content distribution network with a global 138+ million decision maker audience, to engage already identified, Ideal Client Profile (ICP) prospects for the client.
Media formats: Reports, eBooks, case studies, and checklists were identified as the preferred content types by HR professionals via surveys and metrics collected before and during the campaign.

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4 successful demand generation tactics
with a global employment client at INFUSE

Below are four verified insights from a 2022 INFUSE demand generation program crafted for a global employment platform, which generated demand by targeting buyers across 22 industries.

#1 Create 'practice-focused' content

Content that is 'practice-focused' delivers the most engagement. For example, the INFUSE demand program included a webinar featuring a high-level talent management expert, as well as a 'future-oriented' playbook.

In general, content should contain actionable and easily applicable advice that is highly-specific to your target audiences. Be sure to share the value proposition of the content in the title for a more powerful hook, e.g. '5 Tactics for Retaining High-Quality Talent'. Deploying a variety of content formats as part of your demand campaign is also recommended, to best suit a wider range of preferences.

Other high-performance content types for the global employment client:

Recent trends and advice by experts
How-to’s, playbooks, and steps to solve problems
The 'bigger picture' and the future outcomes of a solution
Finer details on how a tool can improve daily performance

#2 Address the specific pain points
of HR directors

The campaign focused on HR directors (over 25% of total engagement), as they are the key decision makers on a buying committee for a global employment platform.

Therefore, content was conversion-optimised and custom-tailored to resonate with the pain points of this persona, which includes the 'practice-focused' content mentioned above. To effectively answer the needs of its target audience, this content was also styled with relevant language and published in their preferred formats, resulting in high engagement rates.

These are the top pain points of HR directors that INFUSE identified:

Helping their business, partners, and clients acquire high-quality talent globally
Implementing processes to onboard international talent
Identifying sensitive international labor laws to assure compliance
Boosting team member engagement with a distributed workforce
Establishing a work-life balance and monitoring flexible work hours
Training teams for cybersecurity

Based on results from this campaign, the INFUSE Demand Strategists recommended these content topics for global employment platforms:

Best-practices for global business expansion
How to identify the best partner for international expansion
Compliance blind spots to keep an eye on
Employee experience
Hybrid work
Talent acquisition and advice for hiring remote contractors
Onboarding and offboarding
Turnover

The better your content speaks to the specific pain points of your buyer personas, the better it will perform, generate demand, and ultimately, support future sales opportunities.

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#3 Promote social proof

The most high-performing content also included quotes by HR experts.

Relevant and trustworthy sources as social proof are essential to establish brand authority and build trust with your target audience. Therefore, be sure to support ads and lead magnets with testimonials and quotes from leading figures in the HR industry to showcase your brand’s expertise and help to create a stronger relationship with prospective buyers.

This insight demonstrates the importance of having a brand evangelist campaign as part of your long-term demand generation strategy. Creating a committee of brand evangelists can be invaluable for regularly gathering social proof as well as establishing rapport for when you need experts to both comment on your content or participate as guests in webinars. Investing in this strategy can allow you to quickly develop expert content whilst also building on the value of clients who are suitable.

#4 Develop separate campaigns
by industry and company size

Getting granular with the targeting of campaigns and their various elements, channels, and content will ensure high levels of demand performance. The challenges of an HR director at a startup, for example, are completely different from those of an analyst at a traditional business going international for the first time.

Therefore, to truly resonate with HR decision makers, launch campaigns per industry, and if possible, filter by company size (large, medium, or small).

For example, in the INFUSE campaign for the global employment platform, Business Services and Finance industries represented most of the targeted buyers. As our Demand Strategists noticed this trend, both sectors became the focus of demand generation efforts to drive activations and achieve the client’s ROI goal.

Conclusion

As the market for global employment platforms continues to grow as the pandemic eases, now is the optimal time to create demand generation campaigns to resonate with HR leaders and keep your solution top of mind for when they decide to recruit internationally. Effective demand strategies are also integral to securing positioning ahead of your competitors.

Use the four verified demand generation tactics from this article as a foundation of what to prioritise in your next campaign: starting with 'practice-focused' content that speaks to the biggest challenges of HR leaders today when recruiting globally.

Remember that whilst demand for global employment platforms is skyrocketing, a majority of your audience may not be fully knowledgeable on how these platforms function, as well as their compliance with labor regulations and effectiveness to hire talent quickly when the organisation needs it most.

Therefore, consider investing in your demand generation content and strategies to boost awareness and interest, as well as to handle common objections and assure HR leaders that your recruitment service is a safe investment for achieving and exceeding their goals.

TOGETHER, LET’S BUILD AN HR-FOCUSED DEMAND GENERATION PROGRAM THAT EXCEEDS YOUR KPIs

With a team of 1000+ across the globe, power your growth with Demand Strategists that achieved ROI and exceeded expectations with global employment platform clients.

Reach the team at [email protected]