Hyre’s Branding Pivot: A COVID-19 Tale
In order to attract the right users, you need to know your audience. If a potential customer lands on your site and doesn’t see themselves represented on your landing page, they will most likely abandon their search on your site and move onwards to the next product presented to them on Google.
Knowing Your Target Audience
Targeting the right audience has always been a priority for Hyre - a tech company that provides workforce management software for managers of shift workers. That said, the company had to reposition its brand in order to overcome some of the ripple effects of COVID-19.
Hyre’s Branding Journey
Pre-COVID, Hyre’s product, branding, and messaging was focused strictly on helping shift managers with temp staffing within the hospitality industry. The personas that Hyre targeted were event organizers and shift workers in the event space. Event organizers included banquet managers of hotels and venues, schedulers at catering companies, restaurant managers, and anyone who felt the pain of scheduling event staff on a daily basis. Event staff included waitstaff, bar staff, chef assists, and anyone with experience working at events.
The brand position was clear: Hyre helped these shift managers by providing them with high quality temp staff 24/7 through an online platform. These managers found staff with the click of a button on Hyre. They no longer needed to phone or email a random staffing agency in hopes of getting their roster filled with much needed event staff. On the other hand, Hyre had to ensure that when potential temp staff landed on their website, they understood that they could sign up and find shift opportunities on a temporary basis in the hospitality world. In order to clarify this value proposition to the right target audience, Hyre’s website was positioned to funnel their visitors to one of two landing pages. One was for event organizers who would put up vacant shifts and the other was for hospitality staff looking for temp work.
When the lockdown hit, the hospitality industry was among the hardest hit. Suddenly, Hyre’s entire client base dwindled down to almost nothing. Hotels were running on skeleton crews and events were no longer happening in the regions that Hyre was operating in. However, another industry needed a great deal of help managing and scheduling staff. Frontline shift managers in healthcare, especially long-term care homes, needed to update the way they managed their personnel. They were struggling to find the human resources they desperately needed. Moreover, the staff that they did have working for them were dropping like flies due to work conditions. Hyre saw that this industry could use some revamping and decided to pivot their hospitality platform to a healthcare product that would address the needs of frontline shift managers and workers.
The product team took on two challenges at once: pivot the brand to reflect healthcare and add a scheduling software product to their existing temp staffing platform. The branding pivot to an entirely new industry was not an easy feat. With this new company direction, Eropa, the founder of Hyre, created new personas that would represent their new target audience. The pivot towards healthcare from hospitality changed the way Hyre communicated with their clients. Their new personas were based on the wants, needs, and pain points of healthcare managers that scheduled the shift workers at their facilities. Hyre’s content strategy adapted towards articles and resources that relayed information about managing frontline workers during COVID-19. It was a balancing act of ushering in new healthcare clients to the website while still maintaining the recognizable layouts that their older clients in the hospitality industry would understand.
Now, Hyre supports multiple products such as scheduling and temp staffing. Their revamped scheduling product offers shift managers a way to properly manage their shift workers. This product change also meant changing the entire look and feel of the website to be more product focused so that potential customers could easily explore the different features related to employee scheduling. From advanced attendance tracking to payroll management, Hyre’s new website has a landing page focused on each feature. In regards to the temp staffing product, healthcare managers can now see themselves represented on these landing pages. Finally, a separate landing page is targeted at shift workers who are searching for temp shifts on Hyre - posted primarily by the healthcare managers on the platform.
Repositioning your own brand
COVID-19 has taken many industries by storm. The companies operating in the hardest hit industries have had to reposition themselves in order to withstand the multiple COVID waves. That means adapting and changing one’s messaging, services, and communication channels. We can’t control what happens to us but we can control how we respond to it. Hyre acted swiftly and responded in a way that they believed would lead their company out of the mess that they were in. Luckily, the team was able to reposition the brand and grow in a newly thriving industry. Good job!
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Eropa Stein is CEO & Founder of Hyre, an all-in-one HR platform that helps shift managers in industries such as Hospitality, Logistics, Long-Term Care, etc. manage their staffs' schedules and overall HR needs.