Radio - Planning, Buying & Production
Radio & Recruitment
When developing an online marketing campaign for your recruitment, radio is the ideal way to back-up that activity as a highly effective way of reaching potential candidates – whether it’s your only medium or part of a larger multimedia campaign. With a little creativity, radio advertising can help you establish a strong, memorable brand character.
Radio has always produced great call to action responses. It can motivate a person into doing things, which makes recruitment on radio an ideal option for advertisers. Gone are the days when job seekers had to memorise a phone number as now they can use short texts, station websites or original URL’s. The medium itself offers a compelling argument, is extremely good value and the next step is to encourage greater creativity in the ads themselves.
Why Use Radio for Recruitment?
High reach of your audience - 69% of UK Adults 18-60 in employment listen to Commercial Radio for an average of 12.4 hours each week.
Cost-efficient advertising
Over 300 UK radio stations provide recruitment advertisers with more choice and defined targeting resulting in less wastage.
Intrusive
Radio can be consumed alongside other media and other day-to-day activities. You can’t read a newspaper or watch TV whilst you are driving a cat, but radio is the soundtrack to people’s lives meaning you can communicate with potential applicants when they are most receptive to your recruitment message. 5 million adults listed to radio whilst they are at work – a key time to reach job seekers with your recruitment message.
Radio is a trusted source of information
Listeners use radio for emotional reasons and it becomes a friend and companion. Stations interact personally with each listener, encourage debate and are thought provoking. Radio also plays music people want to hear and involves them across a variety of platforms including on air, online and at station events.
Morale booster
Radio promotes the company’s image as an employer – this helps not only in terms of recruitment, but as a retention aid for current staff. Hearing their company on the radio builds a sense of pride.
Creativity
Radio offers a greater degree of creativity; including the use of innovative concepts, creative sound effects, voicecasting and scripting.
Measureable
The bottom-line in recruitment is always tangible response on your investment. As a recruiter you want to see how many quality applicants your campaigns has driven in order to measure its effectiveness: text response is a particularly effective mechanism and allows you to do this in real-time; using a bespoke URL means that you can accurately measure the exact number of applicants your campaign generates.
Diversity
Many employers have a diversity requirement to ensure their work-force is reflective of the local community or to increase the range of skills within their team. Radio is a great diversity medium, the broad span of stations means that each station has a clear demographic profile. For specialist recruitment there are stations with specialist and foreign language programming that offer access to hard-to-target groups.
Low ad avoidance
It’s possible to read a whole magazine without actually reading an ad, or read your local newspaper and, if you’re not looking for a job, you’re unlikely to read the classified section. Radio is a low ad avoidance medium, meaning more potential applicants will hear a compelling recruitment message, helping you to reach passive and active job seekers.
Reaching candidates at relevant times
Whether you’re working at your desk, stuck in your daily commute or just at home, listening to the radio can accompany your tasks throughout the day. Station content is often designed to fit with the listener’s daily routine, providing the ideal context for advertisers to speak to their customers. For example during the rush hour when people are driving their cars, the government uses radio to remind them about road safety.
As an advertiser, you benefit because a listener’s advertising recall is higher when he or she is in an activity that relates to an advertised service.
Reaching people at relevant moments with other media may have an equally positive effect on advertising recall, however radio is the only medium where nine out of ten people are doing something else at the same time as they’re being exposed to your commercial.
Driving response with radio
When telling potential candidates about your position, you may want them to respond to you to obtain more information about the role and how they can apply. Radio drives response, both directly and indirectly, from your current and future employees.
Stimulating direct response
Direct response is when a candidates immediately responds to an advertisement, normally by visiting an advertiser website direct such as army.mod.uk, specialist recruitment websites such as monter.co.uk and increasingly to specialist recruitment sites hosted by radio groups such as Key103jobs.co.uk.
Stimulating indirect response
When a candidate is alerted to a potential job by one medium and response via another they’ve responded indirectly to the first medium. Evidence suggests that radio is perhaps more effective as an indirect response medium and works best by driving response through other media. Radio advertising has been shown to have a very positive effect on response rates via other media.
As radio listeners, we hear messages from advertisers regardless of whether we’re interested in the service or product they are advertising. Contrast this with print media, where consumers edit ruthlessly according to their own needs and interests, so it’s easy for them to skip to your advert entirely. In this respect radio can make a huge difference to results.
