Background

Key Locations: Minehead, Bognor Regis, Skegness

Industry: Leisure

Challenge: In an increasingly competitive labour market, data-driven recruitment marketing strategies across multiple digital channels are essential to developing a competitive advantage. In one of the toughest labour markets on record Butlin’s needed to develop a powerful attraction strategy to ensure the holiday season could go ahead.

Solution: Butlin’s worked with inploi to diversify their talent attraction channels, adding a comprehensive data strategy to refine and optimise their online recruitment marketing to maximise candidate delivery and channel ROI. They implemented the Attract, Convert, and Analyse products.

Company Overview

Founded in 1936, Butlin's is one of the UK's premier holiday destinations with resorts in Skegness, Bognor Regis, and Minehead that employ over 3,500 people. Entering their busy summer period Butlin's found they had not escaped the dual labour market shocks of Brexit and Covid, negatively impacting their ability to find the people they needed to operate effectively, with a growing cost per hire and opportunity cost of unfilled vacancies.

Spinning up smart campaigns across social media channels, GoogleAds, traditional job boards, and programmatic aggregator channels in record time, inploi delivered a massive increase in candidate traffic to Butlin's roles, targeted according to the needs of particular parks. With live-in accommodation available for many roles, campaigns were multiplied to reach relevant job seekers all over the country. Ongoing optimisation informed by increasing volumes of data drove reductions in cost per application and increased conversion rates, delivering better outcomes for lower spend.

“Along with all businesses in Hospitality and Leisure 2021 was certainly a challenging year for Butlin’s attracting new team members to fill our career opportunities and vacancies.

Matt and the team at inploi have been an amazing partnership which has really helped us develop our reach externally through utilising job boards where we didn’t feature, targeted recruitment campaigns and utilising other paid media and social platforms.

They are a creative fast paced business which really do value their clients and go out of their way to innovate and bring new ideas and approaches in a challenging recruitment market and do their utmost to make a difference.”

Liz Lloyd
People Director at Butlin’s

Butlin's had specific marketing goals:

• Create personalised, highly-targeted marketing campaigns

• Increase exposure on social channels

• Increase total volume of applications at the top of the hiring funnel

• Improve application conversion further down the funnel

• Reduce cost per hire

• Provide full visibility over recruitment marketing spend and ROI

Using inploi to fuel more effective social media, programmatic aggregator, and GoogleAds campaigns

Butlin’s sought to maximise ad exposure and increase the volume of applications at the top of the funnel without overhauling their existing HR systems.

Working closely with the team at Butlin’s, inploi's Attract team set up highly-customised marketing campaigns - segmented by location, role type, and experience level - to target candidates across Facebook, Instagram, Google ads, job boards and dozens of aggregator sites, delivering over 700,000 job views, 45,000 applicants and an improved CPA.

Automated job sync and vacancy distribution with candidates delivered directly into Butlin’s Cornerstone ATS reduced friction and saved recruitment teams hours of administrative work. Automated email and text journeys alongside remarketing ads helped to improve conversion rates.

Becoming the single source of truth for data & reporting

With campaigns set up across dozens of digital channels, a single, accurate source of truth for data and analysis is essential to ensure the effective management and optimisation of marketing spend. inploi set up a comprehensive reporting framework including custom dashboards and weekly reporting with channel analysis , providing Butlin's recruitment teams with:

• End-to-end candidate journey tracking

• Candidate audience insights

• Location and industry-level market intelligence for wage benchmarking and job ad optimisation

• Full visibility of return on investment

• Costs stratified by channel and conversion event