In May 2019, the huge job site Indeed purchased Syft, a London-based recruitment platform connecting employers with temporary and casual staff.
When the pandemic up-ended the world of work, casual recruiting boomed, prompting Indeed to rebrand the app Indeed Flex.
Indeed Flex chief marketing officer Angela Tang, who joined via the Syft acquisition, just relocated to grow the business in the US.
In this chat, she tells me how she is rebranding the division for a world in which flexible work is normalised, how a global digital platform is using hyper-local pamphlets to build traction and how media outlets raise brand awareness.
Excerpts below, or watch the full video.
1. Balancing brands
RW: You’ve got a big brand, a new off-shoot and a whole new country. Tell us about your plans.
AT: “Many people recognise our logo because of the brand equity that we inherit from Indeed.
“This year, we decided to do a rebrand of our brand and make it a bit more sophisticated, telling our brand stories and our USPs better.
“In the US, we are doing our first brand marketing campaign in coming months to really properly we introduce in Indeed Flex to the market … We have taken that to the market to test.”
2. Diverse channels
RW: What kinds of channels do you use?
AT: “Our business is quite location-driven sometimes … We have a little bit of hyper-local targeting when it comes to some above-the-line planning and in terms of billboards or public transportation advertising.
“We can even sometimes go hyperlocal level in the UK – for example, in local cafes. In logistics roles, we look at gas station pumps where we advertise as well. … Some of these activities are more ground-level … we are talking about flyering in certain neighbourhoods or working with local communities, organisations like charities or NGOs.
“In the US, the audience is very diverse in the language they speak and in culture. We actually buy, for example, Spanish TV channels and the digital audio side of things. On social or SEM we have multilingual ads … making sure we are speaking to a diverse and broad audience.”
3. Extending the journey
RW: What’s on your roadmap for the next 12 to 24 months?
AT: “Better at aligning ourselves with Indeed … When a job seeker is looking for a job, the journey doesn’t stop … We see that whole experience actually like a revolving door – people come and go and that’s normal for any career journey.
“We are focusing more on ‘how do we improve our CRM, build better and stronger lifecycle marketing?’
“We would adopt the approach of combining and have a good balance of hyperlocal … and selecting the above-the-line channels…”
4. Media grow awareness
RW: Where role do premium and traditional media play?
AT: “Radio is still broadcasting and is able to reach a bigger audience. You can still have a bit of measuring … and profiling of the people who listen.
“So we actually use radio, digital audio and streaming ads a bit interchangeably.
“We choose music streaming apps to target a little bit younger demographic – below forties, for example – while radio would also sometimes cover a business audience in that brand building.”
5. Agency empathy
RW: How do you get the best out of your media agencies?
AT: “We use the same media agency, MAG, Media Agency Group, in the UK and US. It’s really important to make sure your agencies are understanding what your business really needs. But we also really want to make sure we take their industry experience and expertise on board when it comes to considering a media mix.
“We look quite in depth into the planning on locations and demands and actually making sure that planning is not static. We evolve together as one team and they are also very flexible.
“We also use creative agency called Toast in the UK. They actually take care of our latest TV commercial production globally. We go quite detailed into that … When it comes to creative production and localising the content for different country, it’s really about the details of the production… our team worked closely so we gave feedback timely of what we are looking for, so we have some really good results to make sure it works for both markets.”