Talent attraction campaign yields positive results

July 23, 2018

Talent is the top concern among business executives when we talk to a company about relocating or expanding to Tampa. Therefore, talent attraction has become a top priority for the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corporation.

To address this concern, the EDC, in partnership with leaders from Visit Tampa Bay, the Tourist Development Council of Hillsborough County and Hillsborough County Economic Development, created a marketing campaign aimed at attracting more talent and business relocations. Make It Tampa Bay launched last fall and the results have been very promising.

Here’s a recap:

Make It Tampa Bay was the brainchild of our millennial advisory group, StandUp Tampa, and was developed from a perception study commissioned in 2016 that garnered millennials’ perceptions about Tampa and their own cities.

Make It Tampa Bay leverages the power of Visit Tampa Bay’s existing marketing platforms to interject its lifestyle themes with messaging about workforce attraction and business recruitment.

The website and multi-platform marketing campaign targets young professionals and millennial entrepreneurs in the hot markets of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas, and the campaign’s goals are laid out in three key sections: “Work Here,” “Live Here,” and “Build a Business.”

Some of the results:

The campaign has performed extremely well across multiple platforms, including targeted ads via Facebook posts, Pandora, and short videos played in office buildings within the main business districts of our key markets.

• 47% of viewers expressed interest in relocating after seeing the out-of-home ads.
• Twitter and Facebook activity is seeing results of 15,000 monthly impressions, and monthly post reaches of up to 100,000, respectively.
• A LinkedIn InMail campaign has produced an open rate of 74%, which blows away the average open rates for similar campaigns.
• A job search function was added to the website based on user feedback, and out of market job searches account for 64% of the total job searches.

Here’s what’s next:

We’re anxiously awaiting the results from post-campaign perception research, so we can measure the effectiveness of the campaign and plan the next phase of our outreach and advertising efforts.

StandUp Tampa is also exploring opportunities to target soon-to-be college graduates via job fairs and on-campus career services to share positive messages about Tampa’s business climate and excellent quality of life.

We’re also starting to partner with corporate recruiters to interject some of the Make It Tampa Bay themes into some of their communications with colleges and recent graduates.

Join the effort:

If your company would like to participate in recruitment efforts or if you know someone who recently relocated to the Tampa area after seeing the Make It Tampa Bay campaign, please contact Hussain Shamseddine at hshamseddine@tampabayedc.com.