GWADS Promotional Awards

Skagit Valley Herald
3rd Place

Facebook ads for Carrier Recruitment

City: Mt. Vernon, WA
Daily audited circulation size: 10,009
Sunday audited circulation size: 10,086

Objective

To increase awareness about our need to recruit more independent contractors (carriers) to deliver the Skagit Valley Herald to a larger scale audience.

Strategy

With unemployment rates at a low, our newspaper, much like other newspapers across the country have struggled to entice reliable men and women to become carriers of the Skagit Valley Herald. We opted to use Facebook as our communication channel to reach a wider, more diverse audience, while simultaneously being able to strategically target specific demographics. We ran our first Facebook boosted ad in December of 2018. The duration was two weeks and it cost us about $25. The response rate was promising enough to run a second ad, equipped with more knowledge about demographic targeting. We ran another boosted ad at the end of March. This ad was set to run for three weeks. We set the age demographic at 17-65 years old, both male and female. The distance was set at 20 miles from Mount Vernon, and Facebook ensured that 110,000 people would see the ad pop up on their news feed. Between the age and distance demographics, anywhere from 220-660 people were likely to see the ad on a daily basis. To run the ad for 21 days would at maximum cost $30.00 (around $1.42 per day), but if Facebook could not reach the number of people they estimated, we would only be charged at the end of the 21 days for the amount of people who actually did see the ad on their news feed.

Results

After 21 days of running, the Facebook boosted ad reached 5,389 people. There were 444 engagements with the post, and our application submissions quadrupled. We increased the traffic to our carrier application web page, and were able to fill more of our open routes with reliable carriers. There were 172 reactions, comments and shares on the post, 101 "Like's" and 272 "post clicks" , 58 of which were click-through's to the carrier application page. It is a strategy we will continue to use in the future to recruit more newspaper carriers.