The Dos and Don’ts of Christmas Advertising

Have an excellent guest post from Alexsia Louca - Senior Account Manager at OME - so here goes Alexsia...

It’s the campaign you have been planning for (and for some clients dreading) since the last campaign finished. It comes around every December and yet every year it is the same struggle that every retail company faces – the hiring of the Christmas temps! *Cue scary music, people running away in a mad panic and screaming*

Now that this year’s campaigns are slowly coming to an end, here at OME we have compiled a little list of Dos and Don’ts that we thought could come in handy when it comes to Christmas 2019. (Yep, we are already talking about next year’s advertising!)

• Don’t leave it to the last minute – If you’re hiring for staff to start near end of the year, you will want to start advertising early to mid-September at least - your competitors may have already started their advertising and already collecting CVs from eager candidates (not to mention they will be thinking of the busy periods retail will face such as Halloween, Firework night etc!) which you will not want to miss out on. It is worth a big blast to start your campaign with added exposure to different audiences throughout this time so you are constantly seen by an active and passive audience!

• Don’t make it hard to apply – Remember candidates will be wanting to work for your company but will also be applying for other roles at the same time meaning they will want to apply easily and quickly as possible. The longer candidate journey of viewing role your advert to submitting an application is, the easier it is for an application to drop off and for the CV to never be submitted due to long application processes. Try looking at your process and seeing how you can make things easier for your candidates to apply.

• Don’t make job titles too complicated – This one we see quite often – we understand companies have strict branding and will want to have job titles that are on brand and want to stand out from the competitors (for example:- Sales Elf, Santa’s Assistant, Rudolph’s Delivery Driver etc etc…) HOWEVER!! The harder you make your job to be searched for the lower down your role will appear in the search results when a candidate is searching for a role. To put it simply, think like a candidate – If they searching for Sales Assistants, chances are they will be typing “Sales Assistants” in a search engine!

• Do your homework – It is worth searching online to see what your competitors are advertising, where they are doing this and how! This will give you a great idea as to how and how not advertise your roles when it comes to your next campaign.

• Do add keywords and benefits! Remember keywords in job descriptions do help boost your roles up in the search results, so for example if you cannot change your job title to be more suitable then at least add in those keywords to make sure your role is relevant to what a candidate is searching for and if you cannot guarantee a permanent a position to work at your company, then do sell them the benefits as to why they should come and work for you temporarily (especially if you are giving them staff discount to help with their Christmas shopping!)

• Lastly… Do come and speak to us if you need advice on what kind of job titles to use, copywriting to make sure your advert sends out the right message to candidates or even something simple as what is the average salary that is being advertised for similar roles – this is the kind of information that we have either learnt along the way or can research for you to make sure you Christmas Recruitment dreams really do come true!

Thanks Alexsia - my only additional comment is Please, Please, Please DON'T use crappy Xmas based puns (see certain Alexsia examples above) - otherwise guaranteed appearance on Naughty List.

Life's a Pitch (and OME wedding bells)

This is a personal take - I really don't like pitching for business and I don't think I (or we) as a business are actually very good at it. I think I can talk a little more about this - having won a few recently so its not sour grapes I don't think.

So why are we so bad (IMHO)?

1. We don't have a new biz team or even person - so we have to fit it into our day job - and as we all know pitching is super time consuming. And your current clients really ought to take priority.

2. The process doesn't showcase our strengths particularly well. We are all about saving money, improving results, effective media, lots and lots of sometimes small improvements, great service. Now they are powerful things but they don't always display well in a presentation to 4 strangers (indeed they can be quite dull things to talk about in the Beauty Contest). We rarely (if ever) present creative and that is sometimes the currency in this format.

3. As for the RFP documents - well they are horrible (sometimes necessary) and if we are going to do more - we have to employ someone to perform this function.

4. I really, really hate losing. In front of client, the team and any partners I smile and laugh along and make funny throwaway comments about - "their loss" or "better off without them" - and we carry on with OME client business. I then silently sulk for a week (fortnight....). the sulk definitely lasts longer than the ephemeral pleasure of the victory.

As I always mention (sorry)- we are blessed by this amazing referral network of clients (past and present) who go out of their way to recommend us in and the OME team are incredibly well regarded and connected people that pitches are far less frequent than a warmer intro into a client and opportunity to show them what we can do.
But we are the size now where we need to have multiple routes to the market so we'll still be in there swinging over the next year.

And finally the most important news item is that I had the pleasure of attending Chloe (OME head of media) wedding to the beautiful Amy last month - congrats to them both and looking forward to the London celebration next week!