Hi everyone! You might have heard our big news…
We’ve launched a new analytics & benchmarking tool for the Rally Recruitment Marketing community! The tool is called Rally® Inside™ and it provides you with a new way to measure and show your impact on attracting great talent to your company.
Check out my other video if you want to learn more about what Rally Inside does. You can also get a sneak peek of Rally Inside at our upcoming webinar on September 16 where we’ll discuss The New Way to Measure Recruitment Marketing. Save your seat by registering here >
What I want to share in this blog post and video is why Rally Inside does what it does, why I created Rally Inside for you by listening closely to your feedback, and how I hope this tool will help change the trajectory of your career. That’s a big goal, but I totally believe that together we can achieve it.
Let me share a story, a personal story about me, and how my career journey in Marketing and your career journey in Recruitment Marketing have a lot in common…
Trying to change the status quo
Like you, I’ve advocated for a new strategy over the status quo, created a job for myself, figured it out as I went along, worked for people who had no idea what I did, and therefore couldn’t really appreciate my value. Later in my career, I realized that I had to decide what my value was and how I would demonstrate it. Doing that changed the course of my career.
Now, you know that I bring marketing and branding best practices to the Rally Recruitment Marketing community. But I didn’t start out as a marketer, I wanted to be a journalist and early in my career I got a job at a publishing company, writing for newsletters and magazines. Everything we produced at that time was printed and mailed. But there was a new opportunity emerging — digital publishing — and so like many of you, I raised my hand and created a job for myself. There was no one to learn from, I was figuring it out as I went along, and there was lots of confusion over my role, because I had one leg in content and one leg in marketing. I was also young and navigating internal politics at the same time that I was trying to do something really strategic, like if they had realized how strategic this was going to become they probably wouldn’t have had an inexperienced 23 year old doing it.
A few years later, at another job, I found myself with another set of challenges. I was leading marketing for a division of a Fortune 100 company, and the marketing strategy I walked into consisted of two things: print advertising in industry magazines and trade shows. Now, this was about 7-8 years after my job at the publishing company, so digital wasn’t new any more, they really couldn’t use that excuse. This was more the case of working for a company that did things a certain way. I can’t tell you how many times I got the good we don’t do that here, or that’s not how it’s done.
The other challenge I had was that I was a marketer working for someone who wasn’t, and worse, someone who wasn’t interested in learning about marketing, at least not the direction marketing was going in. Now, I know this sounds familiar. Because about 35% of you who practice recruitment marketing and employer branding full time or part time work for someone who doesn’t know a thing about what you do. And boy is that tough!
I was a digital marketer in an analog world. My boss and my key stakeholders, we didn’t even talk in the same language. I’ve often thought, how could I have proven that we needed to invest less in traditional advertising and trade shows, and more into digital advertising and content marketing? Because I was pioneering strategies at that company before they were provable by today’s standards.
And you know to get someone to invest in something they don’t understand and that you can’t prove, that takes a serious leap of faith, so can you really blame them?
Defining how you should be measured
The job I went to next, I finally worked for someone who got it. It was a startup — they knew they needed marketing — and they were ready to start investing in it. I was given a small budget to start with, and I could decide on my own tools. We needed a better website, we needed to create lots of content, and we needed to get our message and content in front of our audience through email and social media.
Using marketing technology for the first time allowed me to see and measure the effectiveness of my tactics, and it was a game-changer. First and foremost, I could know myself whether what I was doing was effective. I could validate my strategies, and I could report on them.
As I mentioned, we were a start-up and every dollar spent on marketing was scrutinized by our CFO and CEO. But because I had data and I could measure my effectiveness, I was prepared for those discussions. I had a baseline to work with, and then I could say, here’s where we are today, and if you give me this budget, here’s how I’m gonna spend it, and here’s the result I’m projecting. I did that for a couple of quarters, and I met or exceeded my goals, showed progress, and that’s how I earned credibility, their respect and their trust in using the resources I’d been given to create value for the company.
One of the things, looking back, that was also critical to my success was that I defined my KPIs, my key performance indicators. I defined how marketing should be measured, and it was different than how sales was measured, and that was so important because my CEO was a former salesperson. His measurement was new logos and revenue. Yet, there was a lot that would be needed to drive revenue, including brand awareness, a positive reputation and strategies to attract and engage our target audience.
So he and I agreed that I didn’t need to convince him of every strategy and campaign — he didn’t need to be involved in the details of how I was going to move the needle — we just needed to agree how much the needle could be moved each quarter, and that I would show him based on actual data the resources it would take to move the needle where we wanted it to go.
This approach earned me a seat at the table, I was invited to join the leadership team, and it was career changing and life changing.
And I did that by seeing my data, knowing my effectiveness and showing my impact in a way that I defined and in a way that my leadership could understand.
The ‘why’ behind Rally Inside
I said at the beginning of this post that I was going to share why Rally Inside does what it does — it tracks and analyzes candidate engagement with your Recruitment Marketing content across all your social and digital channels — because I want to help you demonstrate the importance of not only attracting talent to your jobs, but also attracting talent to your employer brand. You have a unique role in your organization. Regardless of whether your company is hiring or not, your work is moving the needle by ensuring that candidates will want to work for your company in the first place.
I’d love for you to sign up for Rally Inside to get first access to unlock these insights and discover your own data story that will tell your leadership and your stakeholders the value that you’re building in your company each and every day.
