Alex Ashby, marketing assistant at The HR Dept, explains why the business should win the marketing and PR category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition.
We provide outsourced HR for small to medium-sized businesses, and as a company that offers business services, credibility is everything. Customers really do their research before approaching any of our franchised businesses for outsourced HR. This is why we annually conduct customer research to make sure we’re making the grade, but it was only in the past couple of years that we decided to show off our results.
With our designer’s help, we transformed the data from our 890 respondents into an animation, visually depicting key industry stats and our performance scores. We released the film onto our website, and alongside our franchised offices we ran a social media, email, press and content marketing campaign to promote the clip.
The animation dramatically boosted brand awareness. Social media messaging drove 500 clicks to our website in one month, the video itself led to 465 plays on Vimeo and a fantastic 3,800 views on Facebook.
We are using the tool to prove credibility to recruit new licensees, and our licensees are using it to increase their credibility and demonstrate the quality of their services to current and potential customers.
The industry facts in the film have also helped us to become a voice for the SME market. Our accompanying press release was featured by local news outlets acrossthe UK.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
