Smart marketing strategy causes strong influx to Helan’s candidate pool

A complex challenge

In early 2022, recruiting good staff was Helan's top priority. The health insurance fund offering domestic helper services simply couldn’t keep up with demand. But it’s easier said than done in a highly competitive market where business declined by 7,7% compared to the pre-pandemic period, and where more people quit or take sick leave than apply. Additionally, Helan was a new brand, the result of a recent merger between Partena and OZ. It needed to rebuild trust with its clients and candidates for whom the new brand was still relatively unknown.

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Challenge

Attracting domestic helpers in a tight labour market.

Solution

A smart marketing strategy with strong performance and branding components.

About Helan

Helan is a Belgian independent health insurance fund created by the merger of Partena and OZ in 2022. Today, the health insurance fund has about 1 million members.

Learn more about Helan

Wanted urgently: domestic helpers

In order to comply with the growing customer demand, Helan needed suitable domestic cleaners. So getting them to apply for the job was Helan’s first and most urgent goal.

As Helan's – or rather: Partena’s and OZ’s – long-term performance marketing partner, we developed three powerful and converging performance paths to guide candidates deeper into the decision funnel: triggering their interest, nudging them, and getting them to apply. With a wide array of campaign types and ad formats, we appealed to a broad audience.

Step 1: Positioning Helan as a good employer

Wanting candidates to know and trust Helan as a committed employer, we first focused on a broad employer branding campaign. We ran this on multiple marketing channels, using different advertising formats, and expanded our audience to make Helan a household name – pun intended.

With the GWI audience insight tool, we were able to more accurately define distinct audiences. In addition, we combined Google's predefined target groups with groups we custom-built using particular keywords.

Step 2: Promoting the job of domestic helper

To get more people to consider a job as a domestic cleaner, we extended our target audience.

Based on new research, we defined some additional target groups. Then, we took the three personas Helan had previously identified and targeted each of them with custom-made ads.

Next, we launched Display, Discovery, and YouTube campaigns based on tailor-made audiences. And we retargeted people who engaged with the employer branding ads.

We further refined additional target groups and put these to the test. With a search campaign, we drew them to a landing page that highlights the advantages of working as a domestic cleaner at Helan. They converted massively and even turned out to be the more valuable applicants. So we decided to run this search campaign as an always-on.

“Thanks to the three tightly directed campaign runs and constant optimisations, we were able to significantly reduce the cost per application within the year.”

Jonas Stinkens, Performance Marketeer at iO

Step 3: Optimising to boost performance

Following the merger, Helan needed to rebuild its performance marketing. For Google, Helan.be was new, and the conversion campaigns on this website, too. There were simply no results that the algorithms could rely upon to optimise the Helan campaigns.

To generate even more valuable job applications, we constantly evaluated and optimised the ongoing Helan campaigns, merging fragmented search campaigns and setting up ongoing and remarketing campaigns. We set up additional campaigns to extend our reach, targeting different language groups and regions and testing smart bidding strategies. This approach bore fruit: with the exception of the seasonal summer months and end-of-year period, the number of promising applications remained high and constant.

To fine-tune the campaigns and budgets, we didn’t just look at the Google Ads results but also scrutinised Helan’s CRM data. The latter gave us a better idea of the actual quality of the applications. And they allowed us to measure which campaigns and channels generated the most efficient cost per valuable applicant.

How we helped Helan

The result: A staggering increase in high-quality applications

Thanks to our agile performance optimisation approach we obtained a staggering increase in high-quality applications per month for the new Helan brand in just one year.

This success is also due to iterations based on insights we gathered from Helan, their CRM, and analysis tools like GWI. By defining data-based hypotheses, testing them, and evaluating the results, we managed to optimise the audiences, ad campaigns, and always-on tactics.

We didn’t literally make gold for Helan, but we did make their waiting list for domestic helpers, who are worth their wait in gold, much shorter.