Case Study: London Borough of Enfield

One of CAN’s ‘frequent fliers’, the London Borough of Enfield currently uses CAN Citizen Reach to digitally target audiences for around 70% of its campaigns.

Over the past three years, its marketing team has had success with everything from fostering to recycling and from recruiting private landlords to meet a social housing shortage to encouraging volunteering among different age groups.

But it’s in the area of jobs and training that Enfield has found the benefits of precise targeting really come into their own.

The borough doesn’t have a particular problem with unemployment – the rate of those out of a job and actively looking for work is around 4% of Enfield’s working-age population – but in common with most local councils, it is tasked with promoting jobs and training to match the skills needed for current and future local opportunities.

In 2017, the Build Enfield initiative was launched to encourage locals to train for work in the construction industry, with so many borough building projects in the pipeline. The marketing team chose to work with CAN to engage people digitally with its campaign.

Shima Tailor, Marketing Manager at Enfield Council, said: “Other digital companies felt too commercial in their outlook and didn’t understand the political, creative and financial red tape local authorities often have to overcome. CAN just gets it. Many of the team have either worked for, or closely with, councils.”

There were two tranches of campaigning – around the launch event in March 2017 that showcased different construction jobs from plumbing to robotics, and then follow-up activity in July and August that year – plus digital adverts promoting a more generic jobs fair in September.

The March launch campaign was immediately impressive, with a click-through rate (CTR) to the Build Enfield website of 2.31% (compared to the Google Display Network overall average of 0.35%). However – even though reach had grown four-fold for the 2017 Jobs Fair digital campaign in September – the CTR had fallen to 0.14%.

“The benefits of building up data and insight – campaign by campaign – is an enormous help for future planning,” said Shima. By the time the 2018 Enfield Jobs Fair campaign came around, these lessons learned started to pay dividends.

It became obvious that more could be done around tailoring messages to achieve better targeting – all three previous campaigns had used the same message on adverts for all target groups. So, the 2018 campaign used three distinct messages aimed at: jobseekers aged 18-54; those looking for training aged 25-54; and those who wanted an apprenticeship aged 18-34.

This campaign also made use of an iCal icon to put a marker in the calendars of those who registered an interest, so that a diary reminder popped up on the day.

As a result, there were almost 1,000 more click-throughs than for the previous year’s job fair campaign, even though the actual reach more than halved – so more tailored messaging and audience insight gained from the other campaigns had reached the audience that mattered.

Shima said: “Even though the actual number of visitors on the day didn’t increase massively from the previous year, we made progress on targeting the right people. This showed at opening time, when there was a queue waiting to get in. These were people who had engaged online beforehand, rather than just coming along because they saw a sign outside the venue.”

“And another great outcome from the campaign we hadn’t predicted was that local employers also saw the digital ads and want to be part of our jobs and training plans – we have loads of leads to follow up on.”

Read more on how to reach the right people with your digital campaigns. Or contact CAN to arrange a chat.