Written by Michele / May 20, 2020
Perkbox is a leading employee engagement and experience platform that brings employee benefits, wellbeing, feedback and recognition together in order to help companies create the ultimate employee experience.
Their key target audience includes HR decision makers from companies with 50 employees or more, and C-Suite members of companies with less than 50 employees who haven’t yet developed HR divisions.
Already well established, they wanted to test unconventional ways of acquiring new leads at scale and they also wanted to celebrate businesses that do great things to engage their employees.
Perkbox needed to try something new in order to attract more of the right type of leads in a cost effective way.
With the majority of their advertising budget allocated to their always on ATL and digital campaigns, we had to think of an out of the box idea that would make a small budget work hard and that would help us access their expensive and sometimes hard to reach audience.
We came up with the idea of an integrated viral marketing campaign called the Best Workplace Culture Awards 2019.
The Workplace Culture Awards campaign was split into two phases. The first phase was the Nomination phase, which ran for a month. The Nomination phase focussed on driving employees to the awards-dedicated landing page we created to fill out a quick form to nominate their company for the awards. During this time, we targeted employees from companies within Perkbox’s 5 key target industries, although the awards were open to applicants from all.
As part of the form, they had to share the details of someone who was able to confirm the nomination on behalf of their company – such as the Head of HR, Head of People, or CEO – aka Perkbox’s key target audience.
We had a small budget to spend on paid social media advertising and programmatic retargeting to kick off our first few nominations and spread the word about the awards, but the rest of our campaign relied on viral marketing techniques using organic social, email marketing, influencer marketing and word of mouth.
To incentivise employees to get involved and take the time to nominate, we offered a range of prizes for the teams of the award winning companies such as a Perkbox funded office party, free virgin experience days and free Costa coffees.
The second phase of the campaign was the Voting phase. Once we’d verified all nominations, we split the companies into 3 award categories based upon their company size: Small (less than 50 employees), Medium (50-250) and Large (250+). For each category we created a live leaderboard.
The voting phase lasted for 2 weeks and relied entirely on viral marketing. During this time, we encouraged employees from the nominated companies to vote for them in order to be in with a chance of winning – the scores from the public vote were reflected in real time on the leaderboards to encourage healthy competition. The top three companies with the most votes in each category would take the prizes and title of having the best workplace culture 2019.
We used a mixture of channels and techniques to encourage votes. We used Perkbox’s main organic social media channels to share daily posts encouraging people to get involved and vote. We created an awards-specific LinkedIn Showcase Page, where we posted multiple times a day, tagging key stakeholders and company pages to let them know where they ranked and encouraging them to up their game to be in with a chance of winning.
We sent regular emails to the nominators and key stakeholders from each company, sharing a list of recommended ways they could boost their votes and we also encouraged the key stakeholder from each nominated company to send us pictures and videos of their company that prove they have the best workplace culture, that we could share across Perkbox’s social channels during the campaign.
The awards were a roaring success, with both the Nomination and Voting phases massively exceeding all expectations.
Our goal was to get 200 nominations – we smashed that target by 261% – receiving 708!
We originally planned to have 50 companies in each category, giving us 150 in total, but there were just too many good entries to choose from, so we ended up with 250 in total.
When voting happened, we literally broke the internet. With a new registration every 7 seconds for the first few hours, our website crashed due to unprecedented traffic. Our target number of votes was 1,225… we exceeded this by 720%, ending up with over 12.5k subscribers (and voters).
These votes came from almost 4,000 different company names and domains – meaning we reached far beyond our pool of nominated companies.
Our dedicated LinkedIn Showcase awards page achieved 20k organic impressions, with 80% coming from people in senior, managerial and C-Suite roles.
You can see the winners from each category here on the awards dedicated landing page: https://awards.perkbox.com/