The goal of this campaign was to build brand awareness and raise our profile as market leaders in the defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure industries while also driving potential applicants to site. This was the first external integrated marketing campaign our Corporation has ever run. As a digital marketing team, we aimed at leveraging a mix of digital mediums like LinkedIn, Google Search, and Programmatic versus relying on traditional media, which had been the main advertising and marketing medium in the past. Our secondary objected was, as a result of increased awareness, to drive leads as well as completed applications.
We targeted audiences that were in the defense, intelligence community, and critical infrastructure job market in the United States. We used a mix industry-focused creative for the market-specific ads, which included highlights of our capabilities from our top Space and Geospatial, Missile Defense and C5ISR, Smart Cities, Utilities, and Cyber services. On the other hand, for our recruiting efforts we focused on people-based creative by leveraging our very own employees as the face of our company and different departments.
Our team used LinkedIn’s strong targeting features, which served as a high-traffic channel to ensure broad messaging and reach users by the job titles. LinkedIn has the highest investment for our recruitment effort, especially for competitor conquesting, serving as an excellent resource to reach interested, qualified applicants.
Secondly, we chose to run ads on Programmatic, which offers a broad approach for awareness and its low cost-per-click will cast a wide net around our target audience ensuring we reach as many potential applicants as possible.
Lastly, paid search’s inherent inbound nature positions it as an excellent resource for the recruiting effort and direct sales.
Our ads were viewed over 12 million times with nearly 34 thousand clicks to the site. 81% of those clicks were new visitors that have never been to Parsons.com. Social media served as strong channel for the recruitment effort with LinkedIn serving as an excellent resource to reach interested, qualified applicants by garnering over 150 completed applications, which included users that work for several of our top competitors across various industries. In addition, paid search ads on Google allowed us to provide strong inbound leads, which also resulted in over 150 inquiries that we were able to track through pixels placed on various website pages. Our Programmatic ads allowed us to leverage efficient targeting and multi-device capability by reaching a wide audience on any device from smart phones and desktops to smart TVs. We were ablet to strongly trafficked websites such as Accuweather, NBC, Fox, The Washington Post, ESPN, and many, which contributed to our increased visibility and ultimately, the high number of inquiries and applications.
The highly increased traffic to the website resulted in a 48% visitor increase compared to the same time period in 2019 and a 41%increase in time spent on site, which speaks to the user engagement and user experience.
