How to Pivot from Consumer Leads to Recruiting

By Laura Heilenday, Vice President of Marketing at Authority Brands

As a consumer marketing team, how do you handle feedback that the leads you are drawing in can’t be serviced due to staffing shortages? Well, you pivot! Being able to pivot in our marketing effort first started with identifying the need. One of our brands, Homewatch CareGivers, worked with its franchisees to best understand the challenges they were facing and how recruiting shortages were really impacting the business. While staff shortages have been making headlines recently, the home health care space has been dealing with chronic staffing issues for years, which recent events have brought to a fever pitch.

In understanding that franchisees were frequently beginning to turn away business, it was evident that until we helped them overcome the staff shortages, our advertising dollars would be spent attracting consumers they could not serve and would not provide the best ROI.

Although faced with limitations helping independently-owned franchise locations with their local staffing and recruiting efforts, we effectively focused on providing content, collateral, assets, and guidance which could be used at the local level, as well as streamlining the digital user experience for applying on our website. Much of this was centered around learning how to speak to those seeking employment vs. those seeking out services. By engaging and listening to our franchisees, we were able to identify what was important to our typical candidate, what motivates them, what they were looking for, and what language would resonate with them.

Many industries have elevated essential workers during the pandemic, but for Homewatch CareGivers, local offices being able to employ and nurture their caregivers always has been, and always will be, the heart of the business. It’s important that the job seekers we’re marketing to know that with our language.

Some of the strategies we employed included:

• Creation of recruiting materials, which could be customized by local owners
• Creation of branded video assets, which speak to jobseekers
• Re-hauling website content and streamlining the local application process
• Executing a branded photoshoot with a heavy focus on the caregivers 
• Working with our digital agency of record to set a strategy for local offices who wanted to shift marketing dollars to recruiting vs. consumer lead gen via digital marketing efforts

It’s important to note that in executing these strategies, we never took our foot off the gas pedal of consumer marketing, to avoid our leads slowing while attempting to focus on a different target. It’s about finding the appropriate balance to keep consumers coming to the brand, and also be sure local staff is able to serve those consumers.

It’s about finding the appropriate balance to keep consumers coming to the brand, and also be sure local staff is able to serve those consumers.

When it comes to creating assets and coaching franchisees on how to use them, we realized that caregivers and consumers are both on social media and these could appeal to both audiences at the same time. People who hire a caregiver want to know that they are happy in their work, just as a caregiver wants to spend their day engaged in meaningful activity for others.

One example of assets is social media posts we typically make geared toward consumers, sharing a quote from an online review left by a client or family member of a client in which they praise a local office for a positive caregiving experience. We simply pivoted to use quotes left by caregivers on similar posts. “It’s actually the best agency I have ever worked for,” was one testimonial highlighted on a branded post, along #caregiverjobs and a link to a website page where they could apply, posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Similarly, b-roll that was filmed to show someone receiving home care simply required a different script and voiceover to highlight that being a caregiver can be rewarding and impactful. “A caregiver can make a difference in someone’s life,” is one line that can resonate with a potential caregiver, the family member of a someone who needs care, or a person in search of care for themselves.

One of Homewatch CareGiver’s taglines is, “Here, home care is human,” and this is the same sentiment applied to pivoting our marketing efforts: we knew the same messages might be seen by both prospective clients and caregivers who each benefit from the other being satisfied in this essential job. In this way, we maintained connection with both singularly important audiences while expanding the brand voice overall.