What is Employment Marketing and why do you need it?

The 2017 unemployment rate is hovering around 2.6% in Southeastern Wisconsin. Many of our industrial clients have asked for help in creating and executing an employment marketing strategy for recruiting new employees. In this three-part blog series, we’ll explain:

1. What is employment marketing?
2. Why do you need it?
3. What tactics can be used to successfully recruit new employees and retain existing ones?

What Is Employment Marketing?

Employment marketing involves building a strong brand as a company and employer. The goal is to articulate what makes the company different or special. The employer brand image impacts recruiting, retention, engagement, and overall perception of your company. It should answer a very simple but important human resource related question: “Why should I work here?”

To be fair, many industrial company owners and HR professionals know the answer to this question but don’t have the marketing skills to communicate it – at least externally. In our work helping industrial clients with digital marketing, we see many examples of well-run companies with terrific cultures. Unfortunately, you would never learn this by visiting their websites or social channels. The web presence is typically, sales-centric rather than being well balanced with employment marketing. In most industrial companies, employment marketing is done poorly, if at all.

Why Employment Marketing?

Imagine the competitive advantage you would have if you were able to consistently hire and retain talented employees. But if you think recruiting for top talent in the industrial space is difficult now, wait until Foxconn and their suppliers start hiring thousands of employees in 2018 and 2019. The unemployment rate in Southeastern Wisconsin could dip below 2%. The importance of marketing in the HR field is further validated by the fact that ten thousand Baby Boomers in the US are retiring every single day. In light of this phenomenon, businesses are facing a looming labor shortage, and competition for skilled workers will rapidly become fierce. The battleground for finding top talent is the internet which requires effective marketing. As a result, Wisconsin companies are researching various solutions that will help them find, hire, and keep top-notch talent.

Today, many potential applicants use the same tactics in job searches as they do when searching for a new product or service as consumers. They will search the internet to determine whether your company is worth considering as a potential employer. In fact, 77% of applicants will research your company (visit your website, social channels, employee review sites like Glassdoor, etc.) before applying for a position. Employee review sites like Glassdoor enable employees to post good or bad comments about your company anonymously. So, take a moment to visit your website, social channels, and employer review sites like Glassdoor. Do these sites accurately communicate why someone should work at your company? Did you get a bad review by a former employee? Employment marketing uses tactics such as positive employee testimonials to manage and present a positive narrative about your company.

How Do I Build My Company or Employer Brand?

To answer the question “Why should I work here?” you really need to answer a series of questions from a potential candidate’s perspective. These questions will relate to why your company is a good employer and a great place to work. To communicate effectively, HR departments need to partner with marketing, and use various marketing strategies and tactics (touch points), such as video, images, interactive websites, social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), blogs, targeted ads, and more.

In our next blog in this employment marketing series, we will discuss the various employment marketing tactics that we used to help one of the fastest growing industrial companies in SE Wisconsin present a robust brand image as a great employer.

About Marketing Metrics Corp.

We specialize in employment marketing for the manufacturing sector. We use unique and effective employment marketing strategies and tactics to boost your employer brand, meet your hiring challenges, and improve the overall experience for your existing employees. If you need help but you don’t have the budget for a full-time position, consider outsourcing this vital function. By outsourcing employment marketing, business owners and HR professionals can save time, and focus their efforts on more pressing HR matters.

To learn more about our employment marketing services click here.

To learn how to use effective employment marketing strategies and tactics to boost your employer brand and meet your hiring challenges, download our free guide now.

Download the Employment Marketing Strategy Guide now

April 4, 2019September 23, 2020

Website Security

Raise your page rank, increase your traffic, and make sure that people want to reach out to you with HTTPS

An unsecure website can have negative consequences for your page rank, website traffic and the amount of data a user is willing to share on your website. HTTPS is a security protocol that uses SSL 2048-bit encryption to protect a user’s connection to the website. This ensures that any data transmitted to a HTTPS secured website cannot be tracked or stolen, and that the data is not corrupted as it is transferred.

Building a Trusted Brand

Google takes website security very seriously. In January 2017, Google Chrome started marking pages that receive sensitive user input, such as passwords or credit card information, as “Not Secure,” if they are not running on HTTPS. In October, Google expanded this practice to ALL pages that receive user input, including pages that contain Contact Us and Request for Quote forms. Pictured below is how a URL will be displayed after the changes are rolled out.

Savvy users will immediately realize that they are putting their personal information at risk by submitting information to an unsecure website, and 84% of regular users said they would abandon a purchase if data was sent over an unsecure connection. As security becomes more of a concern for Google, these “Not Secure” markings may become more visible

Protecting Your Users

You then have the question of security itself, which is a huge benefit, both for you and your users. Transmitting data over an unsecure connection puts your customers’ information at risk, leaving them open to identity theft and financial damage.

Furthermore, if the loss of personal information can be traced back to your website, you can be found liable in a court of law, fined and ordered to pay damages. Needless to say, data breaches are disastrous for a company’s image.

How do I find out if Google has indicated that my website is not secure?

The first step you should take is making sure your Chrome browser is up-to-date. To do this, open the Chrome Settings Menu by clicking on the icon with three vertical dots in the upper-right hand corner of the browser’s toolbar. If your browser is out of date, an option to update will be given in the menu options. If you do not see the option to update Chrome, you have the latest version. While most users will not have to manually update their browsers, it is important to double check to make sure you have the latest version. Staying up-to-date will keep your browsing information private and personal data secure.

You might not have even noticed it but when you use Google’s Chrome browser, there is an icon with a warning in the URL bar. When you click on the icon next to your URL in the address bar, you see the warning. Please see the example below.

These options are available in Chrome browsers that have been updated to at least v.62. Since the browser auto-updates, most users will be updated to the most current version. Any version after v.62 will still include all the security updates and features needed to ensure you are browsing safely and able to check the security of every site you are on.

How Do I Secure My Website?

Install a secure certificate

A secure certificate encrypts information between a web browser and a web server, so unauthorized people cannot view what is being displayed or submitted. If you are a current customer of ours, the good news is that your website is already running in https://. Secure certificates are installed on our customers’ sites, free of charge. Do you need a certificate? We can help. Contact us to learn more.

Secure your DNS

DNS tells the world where your digital assets, such as website or email server, are located. Marketing Metrics Corp uses Cloudflare as our primary DNS provider. Cloudflare handles the DNS for 38% of the internet’s websites and provides exceptional security and DDoS protection.

Install a Web Application Firewall

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects a website from malicious activity such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and malicious file uploads. Marketing Metrics Corp installs, tailors and maintains the security policies for our client’s WAFs, making sure their websites are safe and secure.

Need help from a website security company?

Keeping your website secure is good for your online reputation, future revenue growth, and your customers’ privacy. If you have any questions about the process and costs of securing a website, contact us today and take advantage of our FREE website review process.

April 4, 2019September 2, 2020

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Compliance

With increased attention from HR departments, media outlets [including the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal] and a historic lawsuit, we have received numerous calls from prospective and current clients who are concerned about their websites being compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

What is the ADA?

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits discrimination based on disability in places of public accommodation. Businesses both large and small are affected by the ADA. While Title III of the ADA is often known for its applicability to physical barriers such as lack of wheelchair access, acceptance of service animals, effective communication for hard-of-hearing individuals and accommodations for the vision impaired, its focus in the digital age has turned to websites. Where a website is heavily integrated with physical store locations and operates as a gateway to the physical store locations, courts have found that the website is a service of a public accommodation and is covered by the ADA. Nat’l Fed’n of the Blind v. Target Corp., 452 F.Supp.2d 946, 953-55 (N.D. Cal.2006).

Why is website accessibility important?

In addition to mitigating the legal risk, there is an upside marketing-wise to making your website more accessible to the 39+ million people that live with a disability in the United States.

ADA Public Accommodations Website Accessibility TrialM

On June 12, 2017, a federal judge in Florida ruled that Winn-Dixie, a supermarket chain based out of Florida, was liable under Title III of the ADA. Its website was not compliant because it could not be accessed by the visually impaired via a screen reader. The Court awarded the plaintiff injunctive relief and attorney fees. The judge also ordered that Winn-Dixie make changes to its website to ensure compliance with the WCAG 2.0 standard. See below. Moreover, the court ruled that the Winn-Dixie website must be accessible by individuals with disabilities who use computers, laptops, tablets and Smartphones. Download and read the case here.
According to the WSJ, since the beginning of 2015 more than 350 US businesses from large retailers to small companies in all industries have been sued in federal court over website accessibility. Most companies settle for between $10,000 and $75,000 for legal fees & costs. They then must take on the cost of modifying their website to be assessable to the disabled. No doubt that the number of federal lawsuits alleging inaccessible websites will dramatically increase because of this ruling.

Is this a demographic I should include?

A recent study by Level Access presented at the CSUN 2017 Assistive Technology Conference found that people with disabilities in the age range of 21 to 64 represented a total market of $810 billion. They accounted for roughly 12% of the market in this age range. People with severe disabilities in the same age range represented a total market of $471 billion as well as accounted for 7% of the market in their age range. Since disability does not discriminate based on race, social class, industry or age a website should always be prepared to accommodate for this important population.
Having an inaccessible website will often result in disabled users leaving the site because of poor customer care and a perceived lack of understanding of their needs. In the same study mentioned previously, 85% of participants limited their web usage to sites they knew to be accessible. They were also more willing to spend money or engage in services with sites that were accessible to them, even if they ended up spending extra money.

How do I make my website compliant?

The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) provides a framework of how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. This was the standard that the Florida Judge used in his ruling on the Winn-Dixie case. It includes 12 guidelines that are organized under four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.

Perceivable

A website will provide text alternatives for non-text content. This allows machine readers the ability to describe images to vision-impaired users.
A website will provide captions and other alternatives for multimedia. This allows hearing-impaired users to understand the content of videos and other sound-based media.
A website will create and provide content that can be presented in different ways, including by assistive technologies, without losing meaning. This means any user, regardless of level of ability, should be able to utilize the full scope of a website.
A website will make it easier for users to see and hear content. This ensures vision and hearing-impaired users will be able to easily access assistive tools and functionalities.

Operable

All a website’s functionality will be available from a keyboard. This allows users without mouse, touch, or vocal based inputs to use the full scope of a website.
A website will give users enough time to read and use content. This means users will not be denied access to content based off arbitrary time limitations that impede their ability to fully utilize a website.
A website will not use content that causes seizures. This includes flashing images, visual content with a strobe-like effect, and other visually triggering media.
A website will help users navigate and find content. This is done by a clear and concise navigation with proper labeling for machine readers and other assistive devices.

Understandable

A website’s text will be readable and understandable. This means text will not only be large enough to read, but also has a high enough contrast to be distinguishable from its background on a webpage. This also means that text on a website will be readable by machine readers and other assistive tools.
A website will make content appear and operate in predictable ways. Navigational menus, buttons and icons will provide clear and understandable messaging to make it easy for any user to navigate a website. Key pages on a website will be easy to access and any forms or interactive content will be usable by alternative methods described previously.
A website will help users avoid and correct mistakes. If a user encounters a dead-end such as a 404 page, the content of that webpage should allow the user to find the content they were looking for. Any interactive content requiring text input should have clear and explicit instructive text to alleviate confusion.

Robust

A website will maximize compatibility with browsers and user tools. A website should be able to be accessed from any web browser. A website will not require or will minimize the usage of tools such as Flash for its operation.

To learn more about conformance, visit W3C.

The Marketing Metrics ADA Compliance Solution

At Marketing Metrics Corp., we assist businesses in making their website accessible and compliant with the WCAG 2.0 standards.

Website Accessibility Audit: Our web team will fully audit your website and provide a detailed report on the state of your site’s compliance. This will include estimated costs to bring it up to compliance, a projected timeline of the work, and a detailed plan to correct the violations.
Get compliant: Our developers will bring the website up to current accessibility standards and test it (validation) with assistive technology tools and create a Website Accessibility Policy Statement
Stay compliant: We will provide future monitoring to maintain your accessibility compliance as new technologies and standards are put into practice