Hospitality Rising

The objective

Activating new audiences and driving clicks to the careers page

Hospitality Rising is a collaborative effort to develop innovative marketing campaigns with the goal of generating interest in the hospitality industry among a younger audience of students and recent graduates. The goal? To attract new talent to the sector, and to shine a spotlight on the many hospitality employers who are creating exciting experiences across an industry that might not be on the radar of many young job-seekers!

To effectively engage this younger and notoriously discerning target demographic, they worked with their agency, Antler Social, to focus the campaign on transforming the profile of the hospitality industry, and initiate positive and online compelling conversations about it, as a means of stimulating job applications on the Hospitality Rising website.

The solution

Highlight benefits of the hospitality industry through relevant creator collaborations and Spark Ads

Focusing on the UK’s 18- to 24-year-old segment, with particular emphasis on current students and recent graduates, the cornerstone of Hospitality Rising’s campaign (their inaugural one on the TikTok platform!) was the collaboration with a wide array of creators – from a number of different backgrounds and with ranging audiences – all united by their shared past experiences working within the hospitality industry. Utilising the TikTok Creator Marketplace to identify an optimal line-up of creators, Hospitality Rising was able to engage talent who were authentic in their messaging and able to effectively impact their individual audiences with genuine storytelling and recommendations.

Contributing to the success of the campaign was Hospitality Rising’s decision to empower creators with creative license to produce whatever content was most authentic to their own pages and most impactful with their own audiences. Rather than imposing specific content requests, or guardrails regarding tone of voice and messaging, creators engaged for the campaign were encouraged to make #risefastworkyoung content that was true to their preestablished personalities and styles. Some opted for higher production value content, like developing comedic sketches that highlighted the fun features of the industry. Others kept it simple, filming “get ready with me” videos or filming basic straight-to-camera conversations where they simply chatted with their audiences about key messages and their own experiences.

With creator partnerships in place, the second prong of Hospitality Rising’s campaign was to activate Spark Ads, allowing them to expand the reach of the content generated, and enabling them to measure campaign actions in the form of clicks leading directly to the Hospitality Rising careers page.

The results

Proving that authenticity matters, especially with a youth-oriented campaign

The #risefastworkyoung campaign proved to be a success for Hospitality Rising. When it comes to performance, the campaign generated more than 18 million views, nearly 70 thousand clicks, and a reach of 3.6 million people. At the 3-month and 9-month marks of the campaign, they ran an interactive poll querying “how likely are you to apply for a job in the hospitality industry”. By month 9, positive responses had increased by 8%. But, most impressive of all, over 75 thousand job applications (and counting!) were submitted to the Hospitality Rising careers page throughout the campaign.

Today, the #risefastworkyoung campaign lives on – it continues to be featured across the UK in the form of digital ads and screens in major cities. Via the winning combination of expertly selected partners, authentic messaging, and highly effective ad deployment, Hospitality Rising was able to effectively highlight the many appealing aspects of the hospitality industry to the 18 to 24 age group in a measurable and sustained manner.

I was convinced that TikTok is underused in the targeting of Gen-Z and Millennials for hospitality recruitment, and I was right. I was inspired by TikTok resume (a pilot programme in the US) and took that theory to apply it to help change the perception of what a job or career in hospitality really looks like. Our strategy and execution set by the incredible Antler Social used insider knowledge to get the best results from TikTok by setting open tasks for the most relevant creators (big and small) to reach their audience in their own unique way. The results were devastatingly impactful and dwarfed any other channel in terms of reach, views, engagement and traffic to hospitalityrising.com. TikTok was the number one channel in our success and helped drive the majority of our 300,000 plus job application starts. To all marketers, whatever your challenge there will be a way to solve it using the power of TikTok.

Mark McCulloch, Founder and Campaign Director

Hospitality Rising