SiteOne, the nation’s largest distributor of landscape supply, launched its first marketing effort targeting the Latino landscape business owner in 2021. The Latino population plays a vital role in the landscape supply industry in the United States and while this segment represents just 13.4% of the US workforce, they represent a whopping 35.2% of all workers in the landscaping industry.
While we were confident in our ability to deliver a strategic, holistic marketing plan to build awareness of the SiteOne offering among the Latino landscaper audience and drive traffic to the branches, we learned early on that many of their locations were not staffed with bilingual associates. Thus, a recruitment effort became a crucial pillar of our recommendation (along with awareness and promo/sales efforts) to ensure that they could service this new customer base while also fostering a commitment to the local community by showing that they were hiring and supporting local Hispanic owned businesses.
Through qualitative research among Latino landscapers we learned how relationship-oriented this audience is. When asked about where they conducted business, they described the staff, not the brand. It was critically important for them to have a place where they felt welcomed and comfortable enough to talk about their business challenges, their product opportunities, and even their need for further training to keep their businesses growing.
The role of the bilingual associate was a critical part of this equation - and a critical piece of SiteOne’s path to growth. And that those who would fill these roles had an opportunity to grow with the company. Thus, for bilingual Hispanics interested in expanding their careers in the landscape business, SiteOne’s offering would be viewed not as short term / part-time gigs, but rather, a career path.
To this point, SiteOne had almost universally been using the job posting site Indeed for all of their recruiting efforts, including bilingual associates. However, Indeed is not a readily used platform among Hispanics looking for work in this industry. While our research reflected that career opportunities are often discovered via word of mouth (WOM), we know that today, social/digital media is a primary vehicle for WOM and thus recommended to SiteOne that we explore less traditional channels to attract potential bilingual applicants who are knowledgeable about the landscaping space.
We developed a multi-platform Spanish language initiative that was anchored by visually driven, geo-targeted (to 10mi. radius around branches with highest need for bilingual associates) Facebook/Instagram ads on social media, Indeed (small % of budget to maintain the platform they were comfortable with, and benchmark new platforms against), Google search, but which also took advantage of the other more traditional tactics in the market by tagging our awareness/promo radio spots and DJ live reads with a recruitment message. This allowed the plan to have a national presence, all the while being geo-targeted around the branches for maximum impact.
From a creative messaging approach we also knew that a text ad promoting the job position with a link (as found in most job posting sites) would not provide enough of a hook to attract these customers/consumers. Therefore we developed a more visual “A Place For You” campaign with “Spanglish” copy to help attract this bilingual applicant and help them see themselves in this career.
SiteOne achieved more than 1.8M impressions with a total of 18,739 click throughs with just $50K of paid media, resulting in a very efficient $2.67 CPC.
An incredible 47% of those who clicked through submitted an application, showing the strength of the leads. Bilingual applications more than doubled YOY.
75% of hires were attributable to our digital efforts. And, with a total of 281 bilingual hires, SiteOne achieved an unprecedented cost of just $232/hire vs. the historical benchmark of $828/hire for the company.
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