Founded in 1784, BNY Mellon is one of the longest-standing financial institutions in the world. We have evolved in many ways since our founding, but our commitment to the innovative spirit of our founder, Alexander Hamilton, remains the same.
BNY Mellon has significantly refined its Campus Strategy and Pipeline Development function over the past few years as a commitment to deliver best-in-class global internship and analyst programs. To generate increased awareness of these campus programs, strengthen recruitment efforts among college students/recent college graduates, and attract top-quality talent to the firm, we initiated our first ever social media campaign: #BeBNYMellon.
The #BeBNYMellon social media campaign launched in September 2017 to align with the Fall recruitment cycle and encourage the college student demographic to consider BNY Mellon during their internship or job search. We wanted to highlight our offerings in a simple, streamlined and visually appealing manner, while encouraging students to #BeBNYMellon. We linked social media posts directly to BNY Mellon's career quiz and our refreshed campus careers page to drive traffic to these sites while increasing applicant volume for 2018 programs.
A final objective of this campaign was to have a clear, consistent and concise way for current employees to spread the message about our campus programs and promote further organic brand awareness through their respective networks. We believed that the concept of #BeBNYMellon would not only resonate with prospective applicants, but also encapsulate the full value proposition of our newly designed campus pipeline programs.
The concept behind #BeBNYMellon encourages students to be all that they can be while becoming part of the BNY Mellon organization. We show students that BNY Mellon's culture of learning, development, innovation and career mobility could allow them to fulfill their full potential – starting with our Summer Analyst Program designed specifically for rising college seniors who are looking to get an inside view into the financial services industry. Through careful content creation and promotion, plus a strategic implementation plan on when and how social media posts would be pushed out via Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, we would be able to generate buzz around BNY Mellon offerings.
Thinking holistically about how to best attract high-potential college students to BNY Mellon, we first decided to obtain thoughts and ideas from our campus program participants who would be able to provide first-hand insight. To do this, we had our Corporate Marketing team partner with six highly engaged campus program participants and alumni who expressed interest in helping to enhance our brand awareness. This approach allowed us to leverage their creativity and unique vantage points to supplement the perspectives of our marketing professionals. Their opinions helped develop social media posts, which highlighted various global and social components of a career at BNY Mellon that would excite students about the possibility of joining the firm.
Embedded in this broader campaign were numerous facets that highlighted ways in which individuals can embrace the #BeBNYMellon concept. The Campus Strategy and Pipeline Development Team leveraged insights from current research issued by Deloitte, PwC, Glassdoor, Universum and several other organizations that identify which attributes make employers most attractive to early career talent. We reviewed prevalent themes, which included career progression, dynamic work environments and work with a sense of purpose, to carefully decide which qualities best aligned to BNY Mellon's brand, then created captivating hashtags and concise statements for each quality/identifier.
Ideas such as #BeGlobal, #BeInnovative, #BeAspirational and #BeYourself were amongst the most popular choices that tied directly into our corporate culture. We wanted students to understand what it meant to "Be BNY Mellon," which included thinking about what makes our company and internship/job offerings unique, but also what qualities we look for in our candidates. For instance, being a global financial services firm is critical to BNY Mellon's identity. From a recruitment perspective, if a student wanted to work for BNY Mellon, he or she should ultimately have a global mindset and a particular interest in working for a global institution. That's what we aimed to capture by using the #BeGlobal idea and informing students of our extensive global footprint (our #BeGlobal graphic was accompanied by a statement showing the number of markets/countries we operates in).
Aside from social media, we also added #BeBNYMellon graphics and verbiage to our campus careers page. Circling back to one of our objectives, we wanted students to immediately think of the #BeBNYMellon campaign whenever they heard or saw our firm's name.
The six-week #BeBNYMellon campaign ran from September to October 2017 and drove 13 million impressions (views) overall, with an average click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.08%. LinkedIn drove highest impression volume and most engaged audience exceeding industry CTR benchmark. Overall, this paid social media campaign coincided with a notable boost in organic search visits and site engagement indicating increased interest among the target audience.
BNY Mellon did not have any campus-related social media prior to 2017, so we are excited that this campaign yielded a 24% increase in engagement (number of interactions/followers acquired divided by the number of impressions), 590% increase in career website downloads and 426% increase in video views. 45% of final round intern candidates for our 2018 program also confirmed they saw this campaign. Verbatim comments included: "Social media made me more aware of the brand" and "I was surprised to see BNY Mellon on Instagram, but happy this appeared so I could learn about the company."
Additionally, the average number of weekly visits to our Campus Careers site went up significantly. From June to August, there were 265 average weekly visits. That number skyrocketed to 1,883 average weekly visits from September to October (9/11/17 – 10/23/17) while in the midst of this campaign.
Lastly, we saw qualitative measures of success when candidates accepted an offer and shared the exciting news via social media using #BeBNYMellon. This helped expand our reach as each candidate's own networks became familiar with the concept of becoming BNY Mellon.
