How Do You Ensure Your Marketing Message Resonates?
Businesses generate billions of pieces of content every minute, but what will make your marketing message stick? Deane Hornsby, marketing director, Kronos Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia answer the big question: How do you make workforce management software sexy?
I’ve always had an interest in finding out what makes a workforce or business thrive. Somewhere its employees are proud of. Somewhere they wake up wanting to get to work.
There are many ingredients that make up a workplace – industry, management, structure, diversity, size, policies, rewards, agility, productivity and more. As the global leader in workforce management, Kronos understands the success of a business is hinged on balancing these variables with the key being people.
At the same time, our customers also rely on us to analyse and predict the desires, needs and pain points of the Australian workforce. With thousands of customers in over 100 countries, we’re in a privileged position to provide customers with the latest insights, research and findings to enable them to improve their workforce participation, productivity and profitability to assist their growth.
As a global business, we are able to share the cool and fun ways to interact with each other and our customers, such as using gamification and wearables. It’s all about delighting and exciting your audience.
During my time with Kronos, my approach has been to tell the story through the eyes of Australia’s workforce. I’ve launching three integrated campaign, with interconnected research, which delves into workforce, work-life and workplace issues across Australian business and the impact on the economy.
The storyline is about winning with your workforce – revealing moments of truth, where decisions need to be made by organisation to change, in order to sustain competitiveness and boost growth (Inc. GDP). The stories have resonated with business leaders, managers, employees, customers and prospects, leading to hundreds of new conversations, engagements and new customers for Kronos.
The first chapter starts by challenged the Australia’s working way – living to work or working to live?
Australia’s dilemma: Live to work, or work to live?
Australians are living and working longer than ever before. Life spans are getting longer and retirement is set to climb to 70-years-old by 2035 which begged the question: Are Australians facing a dilemma?
We tapped into the pulse of the nation and discovered 40 per cent of Australians want to work as long as possible to remain active in their senior years but over a quarter said they would struggle to complete the same duties in their senior years. Secondly, many Australians appeared not to be financially ready to retire, with more than a quarter expecting to have to work as long as possible. To ensure relevance across a variety of industries we cut the research by health, retail and manufacturing sectors.
The integrated campaign directed readers to industry insights, hosted on Kronos’ website. Downloaded hundreds of times, they were a valuable lead generation tool creating real reasons to call for our sales teams. Kronos’s position as a thought leader was further validated when the Australian government released its intergenerational report and we were approached by national newswire service AAP to provide comment on the report. Overall, we reached 30 million pieces of coverage, generated $1.5m in new opportunity and won an Asia Pacific Sabre award for the best B2B marketing campaign in Asia.
Having tested the dilemma by exploring the issues of an increasingly multicultural and aging workforce we were able to provide organisations guidance on bridging cultural, generational and technology gaps. The next chapter in the story took a look from a Millennials perspective.
Motivating Millennials: Managing tomorrow’s workforce, today
By 2025, 75 per cent of the workforce will be Millennials, the so called self-centred generation who managers can’t seem to keep in organisations. We decided to investigate their approach and mind set when it comes to work to determine how Australian businesses could harness their energy and enthusiasm.
We found this demographic is still greatly misunderstood and Australian businesses need to rethink their strategy when it comes to motivating and retaining Millennials. Rather than focussing purely on retention, managers need to restructure their approach to ensure better short-term engagement, up skilling employees and tailoring personal plans. Changing a managers mindset to consider the importance of employee engagement rather than employee longevity was key, ensuring upfront conversations on what both sides want for the partnership to be successeful. We coordinated three case studies to support our narrative and provide a third-party endorsement.
The Millennial research report generated over 170 pieces of media coverage reaching a potential audience of over 31 million and generated over $750k, to-date, in new business opportunity. Kronos experienced a wealth of quantifiable business benefits, including an influx of leads and literally doubled the website traffic. As an integrated campaign, we launched a series of social media posts synchronised with release of the findings, which generated 317k impressions and 332 social actions.
Having a view from both a maturing and new workforce, our next chapter looked at the engagement – enabling collaboration across the workforce and making changes in business models and practices to encourage greater levels of both employee and employer engagement.
Employee/Employer Engagement – The AU$56bn Question
Productivity is high on the news agenda with employers in every industry overburdened by unnecessary time-wasting tasks limiting their efficiency. We wanted to determine how this inefficiency was impacting employee motivation and to quantify the overall cost it was causing Australasian businesses.
Our research showed employees are overburdened with non-essential tasks not critical to their core role including large quantities of reporting or paperwork and poor technology. The impact on productivity creates an average loss of 2.5 hours per day, per employee with one in five respondents stating it is difficult to complete all their tasks on any given day. The research paper has generated 216 pieces of media coverage across print, online and radio, reaching a potential audience of 16.5 million.
Relevance is key otherwise your message will fall on deaf ears
The success of these integrated marketing campaigns can be attributed to listening to customers, mining key insights telling the workforce’s story, and keeping a finger on the pulse of real business issues. The value of the content is its real representation of Australia’s workforce. Organisations will increasingly face new challenges as Australian culture evolves. I see a primary part of my role at Kronos is to keep shining a light on these emerging industry issues and continuing, sometimes very tough, conversations to help businesses be appropriately prepared to navigate their way into the future.
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