Campaign: Magnet Migrant Attraction
Client: Department of Labor, Immigration New Zealand
Agency: Rapport Advertising and Marketing
To combat a shrinking population and one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world, Immigration New Zealand, a division of the country’s Department of Labor, Began in 2007 to plan a campaign to draw overseas skilled workers to relocate to the country, targeting the U.S. and the U.K. The ministry was particularly interested in attracting immigrants skilled in critical job categories as engineering, information technologies, health and education—sectors in which the competition for talent is truly global these days.
The campaign, called “Magnet,” was given a budget of NZ $300,000 and tasked with spending that money to reach a world-wide audience. A benchmark of NZ $1,000 per registrant was set; that compared favorably to the NZ $20,000 in average recruiter’s fees for a mid-level job placement.
Working cost-effectively within that budget meant taking the campaign digital and targeting carefully.
The campaign Rapport designed for the Magnet program was loosely built on the conventional marketing logic of creating “awareness, interest, desire and action,” and effective using pay-per-click (PPC) ads in search marketing was a key component in building awareness.
From January 2008 through March 2008, Rapport tested more than 13,000 search keywords, from terms as broad as “work USA” to as targeted as “occupational therapists employment.” These were paired with 300 different pay-per-click search ads and 20 landing pages tailored to specific occupations, driving registrations for further information.
The keyword lists were also designed to exclude certain searches on terms such as “New Zealand,” which tests proved were often done by would-be tourists researching vacation possibilities.
The resulting PPC campaign proved twice as successful as display ads on the department home site and up to 8 times more effective than banner ads, ultimately amassing a 10% conversion rate from PPC ad to registration. Rapport’s analysis using Google Analytics tools found that fewer than 20% of those visitors who made it as far as the registration page failed to fill it in.)
In terms of targeting, the Magnet campaign was a great success for New Zealand, with 34% of registrants coming from the U.S. and 48% from the U.K. Half of all registrants work in professions the Labor Department has identified as crucial but under-served, and almost 75% of those registrants have a four-year college degree or more.
In fact Magnet was so successful in generating possible immigration that media spending for the online campaign was stopped in March 2008 simply to process the registrants it had already attracted: some 42,375 by November 2008.
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