What do Lexus and Papa Johns have in common? They’re using cutting-edge marketing tactics that most of the talent-acquisition world isn’t using but should be.
Imagine a marketing strategy that involves being able to target people who attended a certain event, or visited a specific location during a certain time. Visualize marketers being able to send targeted content, in the form of banners and ads, to these individuals, to their mobile devices and to their home computers, nearly indefinitely, even after these people have left the aforementioned events or locations. Two examples: 1) Reaching attendees — candidates, in other words — attending a conference, or 2) Targeting your competitor’s headquarters, a sort of digital version of putting recruiting flyers on the windshield of cars in that competitor’s parking lot.
Historically, banner-type digital marketing has used cookies, but a new game is afoot, and cookies are no longer needed. Now consider what this might mean for recruiting, for hiring managers, for candidates, and for you. Other people are thinking about it and more than likely you should be too.
I first heard about IP targeting from Jim D’Amico, global talent acquisition leader at Celenese, during the most recent ERE recruiting conference in October. (Go ahead and add “first to use IP targeting as a recruiting tool” to D’Amico’s long list of accomplishments.) To say he’s an advocate of this type of strategy would be putting it lightly. D’Amico’s go-to resource on all things IP targeting is El Toro, a technology company based in Louisville.
El Toro has been around about five years and has been named by Deloitte the 13th fastest-growing tech company in North America. If you’ve never heard of IP targeting you’ve probably never heard of El Toro. It has pretty much cornered the market on IP targeting (Todd heard there may be other companies doing this in Germany, using Instagram for advertising; if you know of any, let us know).
Anyhow, El Toro’s claims to fame are exciting. It has determined a way to map IP addresses, gridding (if you will) the country down to square meters. Its database includes more than 205 million IP addresses, all mapped down to specific physical addresses. It holds patents on much what it has accomplished, and offers a suite of services that’s unprecedented. If wielded by smart recruitment marketers, the possibilities are endless.
One of El Toro’s offerings is called Venue Replay. The technique enables teams to collect the unique device IDs of people who have been at a certain location at a certain time, even if that time has already happened. Imagine you’re recruiting nurses and you know of a nursing conference that occurred at a certain location eight weeks ago. With Venue Replay, your team could specify the location of the event and collect the device IDs that were there during certain time periods; say, between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Once these unique IDs are gathered, your recruiting team could then send targeted ads to these devices and the home computers of these nurses, even after they’ve left the event.
El Toro can also serve ads to known lists that recruiting teams already have. If a recruiting team has a list of registered nurses, it can provide that list to El Toro to run a query and come up with the unique IP addresses of those individuals, who can then be marketed to.
What’s next? Only time will tell, but Lexus, Papa John’s, and many other brands you would recognize, are using El Toro as an important part of their overall strategy. This is definitely a technique to be kept on your radar.