Promoting At Your Crossroads

Ontario and Oxford County are growing economies facing a shortage in skilled labour. Areas like construction and home improvement are finding it harder and harder by the day to find qualified people to fill open positions.

To address this, Oxford County received financial aid from the federal government to develop a program aimed at increasing awareness of career paths in the skilled trades and providing people with basic training that was valuable to get started in the industry.

To accomplish our reach and enrollment objectives, and be aware that it was going to be hard to obtain contact information, it was decided to use a campaign with multiple touchpoints using Spotify, Google Search and Display, and Facebook. Across these platforms, the campaign message was customized to target 3 audiences: recent high school graduates, unemployed individuals and career changers. 

To further the relevance of the campaign, the landing page had copy customizations that would be displayed to the client based on the ad clicked, guaranteeing consistency between the ad creatives and the website copy.

Our paid campaign was complemented by organic outreach to improve our cost performance. To this effect, we deployed an email campaign to help us liaise with decision-makers at organizations that worked closely with our target audience. There was also special emphasis given to promoting the program in top local news outlets, and by distributing press releases and participating in radio interviews, we were able to position At Your Crossroads in the minds of residents and spread awareness.

At the end of the program, we had far exceeded our participant target and generated more leads than initially anticipated, helping to spark interest among participants to start a career in the skilled trades.