When assembling an experiential marketing program, creating the right team is a crucial step in the game. Following the right recruiting and onboarding strategies are necessary to succeed. 
 

Switch implements programs that deliver results from start to finish. With that responsibility, we take on many tasks that will make our clients’ lives easier, such as staffing. When producing an experiential marketing program, putting together the right field staff is a crucial step in the game. Our experience is vast – currently, we represent 15 brands with more than 1,300 field marketing specialists, operating 160+ vehicles nationwide.

Staffing and managing an army of brand ambassadors is no easy feat. It starts with the nuts and bolts, and even the nuts and bolts need to be broken down. Recruiting, for example, is more than writing up a job description and posting it to the company’s career site. You must first come up with a recruiting strategy by identifying a few key components.

1. Know your recruitment market.

If your company is based in Seattle, but you need to recruit for a market opening in New York City, how will potential applicants in New York know to visit your website for job opportunities? Researching recruitment sources in various cities will save you time and money by knowing where to post your job descriptions ahead of time.

2. Understand the product/service you’re marketing and its target audience.

A field staff team selling energy drinks will require a different demographic for its brand ambassadors than one selling healthcare products. Knowing your demographic will help you target the recruitment sources that will provide the most reach for your job’s skills and functions.

3. Have a firm budget in place.

Recruitment is not cheap, but it’s worth the investment to hire a top-notch team in the designated market. If a budget is not available, be ready to allocate time for researching and digging into free recruitment sites used by the local market. And, don’t forget your passwords of the sites you create accounts.

Once your recruitment strategy has been implemented and you’ve found the right brand ambassadors for your team, you need to get them onboarded. From signed contracts to drug screen releases, hired employees complete more than 20 different forms of paperwork. With 717 new hires in 2013 alone, Switch processed 20,076 pages of paperwork. To say this is time-consuming is an understatement, and it is often overlooked as an essential step in the onboarding process.

Just as in the recruitment process, an onboarding strategy needs to be identified for each client’s program specifics. We suggest these guidelines to implement the most efficient onboarding strategy for your field marketing team:

1. Keep an open and frequent communication with the client and the market’s team manager.

Having all the information first-hand is the means to a timely and fully staffed team for a successful product launching, event promotion or other promotional activity. Communication also establishes trust and helps foster meaningful relationships between the client, company and field staff team.

2. Set up a tracking system.

The tracking system will maintain some clarity in the midst of the 20,000+ pages of paperwork coming in to be processed. It will also be a reliable tool to reference when discrepancies occur in the onboarding process or throughout the duration of a brand ambassador’s employment with the company.

3. Never clear a new hire until all paperwork is complete.

Each piece of paper completed by a new hire has a purpose. Some pages are signed releases for the company to run background and drug screenings, while others are the banking information through which the employee will be paid. If a new hire is cleared before receiving a background check that shows criminal activity, there can be serious consequences … should something occur during one of his or her shifts. If payroll hasn’t received the necessary banking information for a new hire, expect an angry phone call when that new hire finds their bank account empty on payday.

Implementing an experiential marketing program for clients is more than creative concepting and event planning. You have to know the nuts and bolts, and that includes recruiting and onboarding the brand ambassadors who will make up your field staff team. By following these guidelines, a staffing strategy should help to make the implementation of your marketing program more efficient and straightforward.

 

To learn more about Switch’s recruiting and on boarding process, please contact Megan Kennedy at MeganK@theswitch.us or Kat Newbold at KatherineN@theswitch.us.