Businesses are Shifting from Brand Ads to Job Ads

Over the past few months, we’ve been running more and more job ads rather than general branding ads for our clients. I didn’t think much of it until I was listening to a morning radio show. During a sponsorship message for a local restaurant, the DJ mentioned that the restaurant is a great place to work, whereas previously, he said it was a great place to eat dinner. A few days later during a morning commute, I heard three different job ads, including one for Amazon.

As we all know, many businesses are understaffed. So now instead of primarily competing for customers, these businesses are also competing for employees. In this case, the same rules of customer adoption marketing apply when crafting your ads. For example, you have to make prospective employees aware (step one) that your business exists and get them interested (step two) in working for you. Then you have to repeat your employment message several times for it to stick with a prospective employee.

Regarding the message, should a business also include general marketing messages in its job ads to try to capture both customers and employees as a two-for-one? I’m a believer that when you put too many messages targeting too many audiences in one ad, it becomes less effective for each of those audiences. Thus, make each of your ads tailored for one specific audience–for instance, either customers or employees, but not both.