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‘Regional Australia is getting no love’: ViewJobs co-founders prepare a $5 million marketing blitz
Mumbrella spoke to ViewJobs' founder and managing director Lewis Romano, and co-founder and COO Jarrah Kammoora about a big national push that begins this Saturday - and why ViewJobs is sorely needed.
ViewJobs is a dedicated marketplace for regional employment, launching into an under-served marketplace with an Airbnb-style map-based search functionality, zero advertising spend to date, and the power of the ACM network.
The platform is a 50-50 joint venture between news publisher Australian Community Media’s Antony Catalano, and Lewis Romano, founder of SpotJobs and Credit Clear.
ViewJobs sits across the digital ACM properties such as Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald, Illawarra Mercury, Ballarat’s The Courier, and The Examiner in Launceston.
After soft-launching the platform in late March, ViewJobs.com.au immediately caught fire. Now, it’s time for a full court press, with a $5 million advertising launch into the heartland of the country.
Lewis Romano and Jarrah Kammoora
How has the soft launch gone? It’s been around three months.
Lewis Romano: The soft launch has been a remarkable success, introducing Australia’s first dedicated regional job platform to the market, back in March.
Through the pilot period, we exceeded expectations across all key metrics, job listings, traffic through the platform, job seeker signups, placements of people into roles — which is the ultimate metric that we care about.
We’ve been delighted by the early traction of ViewJobs, as well as the ViewJobs Academy, which is our online skills training and education division – that launched only six weeks ago. We’re seeing great traction with that division of the business as well.
We launched with zero advertising spend, having over 120,000 people engaged in the soft launch, it’s a really strong start. We’ve had a cumulative total of 15,000 jobs listed in just over four months, and 25,000 job applications.
We’re looking at thousands of new job seekers registering to the site each week, on the back of no ad spend. We’ve validated the gap we knew existed: that regional Australia is getting no love when it comes to employment marketplaces.
And, given that ViewJobs is a joint venture between ourselves, the founders of ViewJobs, and ACM, we’re now ready to execute phase two of the strategy and launch into a significant advertising campaign.
Yeah, the big advertising push. Can you explain what that will entail?
Jarrah Kammoora: It’s very timely, the success of the soft launch has given us quantification around how our brand resonates, and what aspects of the brand and propositions are working. We are entering this campaign on quite a strong footing, having tested a lot of messaging through our soft launch comms already.
Essentially the campaign has two aspects. One, there’s $5 million over 12 months with ACM. The way that’s split up is it’s heavily front-loaded into brand awareness.
The goal is positive sentiment and awareness around ViewJobs and association of ViewJobs in rural and regional cities and towns as the destination for employment – for both sides of the marketplace.
Two, the campaign will evolve and move from awareness down into engagement and conversion throughout the year, becoming more performance orientated. But, very much so, the next three months is really about, ‘Frank Walker from National Tiles’, everybody knowing our name and having a clear association with ViewJobs as the destination employment marketplace across regional Australia. .
From that perspective, ACM is the perfect partner because they have fantastic reach into these often quite fragmented communities that sometimes digital is harder to target and enter into. The mastheads ACM have across Australia, anything from the Canberra Times down, are quite institutional with a really positive and strong sentiment in those communities and quite a strong standing as a voice within those communities.
The partnership allows ViewJobs to function with the accessibility and reach of a digital platform and marketplace, but extend as a trusted and local voice, co-branded in the classifieds section of ACM mastheads.Essentially it’s a cross channel or omni-channel marketplace covering both print and digital. It becomes a huge asset for awareness and targeting. We’ll support that with below-the-line media that’s more targeted at conversion messaging and driving more job listings..
From a consumer and awareness perspective, ACM is going to give us a lot of national coverage in the right markets.
And obviously as you said, they’ve got that regional market locked in.
Lewis Romano: We’re blessed with 100 ACM mastheads, if you look at Ballarat, on thecourier.com.au, you’ll see the ViewJobs link emblazoned at the top menu, as well as in the jobs link. So we’re able to create that network effect, throughout the ACM network, of promoting employment opportunities in Ballarat that may be relevant to an ACM reader, both print and digital, in Glen Innes, or in Tamworth, or in Armidale.
We’re very much about promoting regional careers to those that live in that region, promoting regional careers to individuals that may have left their hometown and gone somewhere else, and we want to attract them to come back and bring their skills to their hometown, as well as the promotion of regional opportunities and the lifestyle benefits for those that live in metro and metro fringe markets, where they might be able to have the uplift and associated lifestyle benefits of having more money in their pocket, potentially, and a bigger backyard through taking a job that they’re skilled for, that before ViewJobs, they never would have considered or been aware about.
We’ve seen that exact example in Tamworth, we were able to place some skilled boilermakers into a role for an engineering plant, who had no idea that those vacancies existed before ViewJobs.
That brings us to the fact that View also has the real estate arm. Are there integrations planned between those in terms of, obviously, if people are looking for jobs in Tamworth, they’ll also be looking at housing?
Jarrah Kammoora: There is a huge opportunity there.
We are about to trial a pilot integration with View where we can cross promote available real estate, both rentals and properties for purchase, in key regions where we have strong reach.
The interesting overlap is the consumer proposition. We see career and lifestyle as intrinsically linked, access to housing is a key aspect of quality of life and links to employment choices. Presenting that information to a job seeker looking for areas to live/work is of huge benefit, and View can power that.
There’s an opportunity to bring the two closer together, and present a holistic proposition around career, lifestyle, place of work, place of living.
First and foremost we need to own being the destination for employment and jobs in regional and rural, second we can really strengthen the customer proposition – by layering in a holistic view of what lifestyle and career means.
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Is this some sort.of advertorial written by the “news” org owned by that startups owner? Should be marked as such…
Ah, yes, also, the regional jobs listing market is not underserved. There just aren’t a lot of jobs there. Having the same jobs listed on a third rate site won’t help anyone.
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Makes sense
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