Inspiring the Next Generation to Go Build
Created by the Alabama Construction Recruitment Institute (ACRI), Go Build Alabama is a statewide workforce development campaign designed to inspire and educate students, parents, educators, and the underemployed about training and career opportunities in the skilled trades.
Campaign rebranding and lead-generation strategy across paid, owned, and earned media
Persona-driven messaging and videos, website redesign, email drip campaigns, and print/signage collateral
5,000+ leads since launching in 2020
Go Build Alabama first launched in 2010 to build awareness about career opportunities in the skilled trades with an advertising campaign utilizing the message “The future is for workers. Learn a skill. Master a trade”.
We found that the overall message and corresponding creative content didn’t speak to people from diverse backgrounds with different career motivators, as well as those who influence the decision to pursue training, such as parents, teachers, and career coaches. Additionally, the campaign was unable to measure impact. It lacked a marketing automation system that tracked how marketing investments correlated to enrollments in training programs at trade schools and community colleges.
After completing the brand and content audit and conducting focus groups and interviews with trade school students and apprentices, teachers, skilled tradespeople, and contractors, we developed a new messaging framework for the campaign, which needed to shift perceptions about skilled trade careers and be highly modular to resonate with the four personas we identified: the career changer, the student, the educator, and the partner.
We anchored to the idea - which was mentioned frequently during focus groups - that learning a new skill enabled these people to do more with their careers and with their lives.
The Go Build Alabama campaign represents an integrated content strategy with a mix of paid and organic multimedia assets.
We built awareness and generated leads through highly targeted advertisements across PPC and digital display, social, YouTube, OOH, OTT, and native placements that drove traffic to a new website with persona-specific landing pages and gravity contact forms to capture leads, which were nurtured via an email automation and applicant tracking system in ActiveCampaign. We also developed a low-cost, no-code career quiz to help spark interest organically.
A suite of educational resources, including a field guide that highlighted specific trades and one-pagers with more information about training programs across the state, provided technical details about the skilled trades and were sent via email and printed for career fairs.
We also developed a hero video concept titled “Take It From Me” that spoke directly to the motivators of each persona. We developed persona-specific video cut downs to live on each landing page and share across social.
In the first year of distribution, we focused on establishing benchmarks for the lead-generation strategy and quantifying ROI. Since launching in January 2020, the Go Build Alabama campaign has generated more than 5,000 leads, millions of impressions, and an efficient system to onboard leads and drive training enrollments. The campaign was so well-received that we extended our partnership with other workforce coalitions around the state, including direct content marketing support for various trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and community colleges.
