Salary Guides
The largest integrated campaign at Robert Half is their annual Salary Guide thought leadership program. It consists of the printed guide used by staffing professionals in over 600 offices across America as well as international versions created for Europe, South America and Asia/Pacific regions.
In addition to the printed guide, an interactive PDF is also developed along with supporting materials online like infographics, an interactive salary calculator, and videos. To support promotions across various channels like advertising, social and marketing automation, additional components like animated banners, memes, emails, signature pickers were all orchestrated along the main Salary Guide theme with visuals and messaging tailored to specific audiences and channels.
We were awarded the American Inhouse Design Award by Graphic Design USA for both the 2016 Salary Guide and 2017 Salary Guide campaigns.
Being responsible for the past 5 years of Salary Guides has allowed me to continually improve the performance of the program and keep evolving the brand to stay relevant.
Many country’s guides aren’t shown as well as the multiple language versions needed for several markets. It is a lot of work accomplished by many people every year, with new challenges to overcome in order to get everything to the printer to launch on time.
Salary Centers
The digital hub for accessing the Salary Guide and all associated tools & media is always a work in progress. Using previous year’s performance metrics, we keep refining what content is useful to users, how to optimize page functionality, make the brand more present and deliver our promise to help people navigate the tricky process of negotiating salaries for finding work or hiring staff.
Previous years were bogged down with adding everything our partners had to the page. Over time we were able to show how and why less was more in order to meet the KPIs defined by leadership.
Circa 2016: Too much content and no page focus was creating confusion and missed conversions.
Insights from user testing and metrics showed we needed to trim content.
In 2017 the new streamlined pages gave both users what they needed and the business what it wanted.
Working closely with business owners, Digital Marketing and IT, we iterated on the embedded Salary Calculator every year to improve ease of use, showcasing the most valuable data from the guides and integrating effective transition points for users to flow through their various journey towards conversion. Functionality had to include various lines of business as well as flexibility to support international sites and multiple languages.
Infographics were a key component of the Salary Center, pulling key data from within the guide and surfacing it for users to showcase the value of downloading the guide. Infographics were versioned for each line of business (x5) for each country (x10) in multiple languages (x7) so the content on the page related to the unique visitors and helped move them through the marketing funnel quickly.
Promotional Channels
Here are some examples of the various assets created for the 2017 Salary Guide to help the business understand how everything is connected and how various user journeys would be experienced by customers.
Social media headers created for major platforms to surface imagery and messaging from the campaign to the brand profile page. Care was taken to accommodate device and OS nuances.
Imagery for posts also resonated with the cover photo and guide concept.
Along with social media posts, we had a Salary Guide promo video (see video section below) versioned out for multiple lines of business that was leverage via social channels, as well as external email templates and internal email signatures that drove the bulk of the traffic to our pages.
All in all, we created several hundred components for the annual campaign. Once the launch was finalized, and all teams were able to take a deep breath, our team would begin brainstorming concepts for next year.