Mediaboss Marketing

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Albert Einstein

In these uncertain times, there is one thing the vacation rental management (VRM) industry can count on: We are on the brink of the greatest talent shift in modern history. This presents an incredible opportunity for vacation rental companies to identify and hire the best talent using the right strategy and plan of action.

For industry professionals who are now on the hunt for a new employer, this shift provides an opportunity to work with a strong company that has made it through what may just be the biggest challenge to date.

A short time ago, the single biggest challenge our firm identified for this industry was an unprecedented talent shortage. In an industry that is completely reliant on people to provide exceptional service, this talent shortage was a significant problem for most VRMs. We constantly heard that applicant flow was anemic, with those applying for the many open positions lacking the experience and capabilities to properly fill the roles. With unemployment recently at a record low, managers were forced in many cases to hire individuals to be placed in the wrong seats. In most cases, there were no measures taken to validate that these candidates were a good fit for the roles.

What a difference a couple of months can make.

At the time of this writing, it is clear that an unemployment rate of 20 percent or more is in the cards in the COVID-19 era. While many expect this to be short-lived relative to previous recessions, the sheer scope of this increase in unemployment is without comparison.

consensus that as this crisis passes, vacation rentals will be one of, if not the most, attractive travel option. Before we had significant competition from cruise lines and large hotels. However, as the new normal unfolds, the privacy, security, and safety a vacation rental offers will be more desired than ever before. After being cooped up for what feels like forever, families will look to get away with these assurances in place. Consequently, the combination of the return of rental demand and the talent shift will open up a significant opportunity for both businesses and individuals.

Where before it was exceptionally challenging to identify and hire top talent, there are more qualified people in play than ever before. For talented and passionate professionals, this is an opportunity to find a position with an organization that has weathered the greatest storm of our lifetime and is ready to take advantage of a period of growth like we have never seen before.

To take advantage of this opportunity, organizations need a talent acquisition plan.

Most vacation rental companies have a multifaceted rental marketing plan. They have allocated a budget and have a well thought-out document compiled of tried-and-true marketing practices, along with new concepts used to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

What we find with most companies in our space is that their talent acquisition plans consist of online ads and postings of open positions on their websites. The selection process focuses on the resume, and the interviews are typically unstructured. In many cases, the person or persons responsible for hiring juggle this role along with many other competing responsibilities. This creates a lack of focus and allows for other distractions to deter them from allocating the right time to the process. Therefore, the hiring manager will hire who they think will be the right fit based on subjectivity and their own biases. In some cases, the hiring manager himself may be in the wrong seat.

Companies must move swiftly to create comprehensive talent acquisition plans, leverage people analytics, and assign a point person to ensure consistency and effectiveness. These three steps coupled with a structured interview process will ensure a strong fit for your team.

In rental marketing, we typically see a multifaceted strategy that includes a mix of search engine optimization, search engine marketing, social marketing, distribution, and more. People marketing should be done in a similar fashion.

One job posting is not enough. Put together a plan to distribute your job ads across multiple ad platforms such as LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and CareerBuilder. Consider having a professional and polished looking career page on your website where all open positions are posted and include an email sign-up for job alerts.

Utilizing your team to get the word out is also an effective strategy. Incentivize this by paying a referral bonus to those who refer candidates that you successfully hire. Be sure to post any job openings on your social media outlets, paying special attention to LinkedIn, which according to Social Media Today, is the fastest growing social network. The ultimate goal of your people marketing plan should be to significantly boost applicant flow, so you have a strong candidate pool to select from.

With an effective marketing campaign and increased applicant flow, narrowing the candidate pool down to the best potential hires is key. As Predictive Index certified partners, our firm utilizes behavioral profiling in the hiring process, for example. Leveraging a highly accurate, but simple and quick-to-administer behavioral survey gives you the ability to understand the job applicants behavioral traits. Prior to collecting these surveys, a job target is set by internal stakeholders based on the role. For example, are you looking for a reservations agent? What traits lend themselves to success for the role, according to those who interact most with that position? From this quick analysis, a behavioral target is set. Then all candidates are filtered through the process with the intent of identifying the applicants who closest match the desired behavioral profile.

As a next step, we recommend a cognitive test. Cognitive tests have been shown to be a high predictor of job success and are simple to administer. A cognitive test tells you how quickly this person will get up to speed with new concepts and necessary training. In most cases, the new hire will need to learn software platforms and systems they are not familiar with. It is crucial that they have the ability to ramp up quickly. The more technical the role the higher the cognitive requirements become. In the vacation rental industry, we often find ourselves interviewing applicants with little or no industry experience. Applicants with a higher cognitive score have a shortened learning curve and become more productive faster.

The combination of having a candidate with the right behavioral drives and cognitive abilities has been shown to be a collective 51 percent predictor of job performance.

Another helpful predictor of job performance (26 percent) is a structured interview. A structured interview is a standardized way of interviewing candidates based on the specific needs of the role they are applying for. Candidates are asked the same questions in the same order and responses are compared on the same scale. The key is to take the job description and build a group of interview questions that can properly access whether a candidate has what it takes to execute the job functions. This enables you to rate each candidate objectively and can greatly reduce hiring misfires.

Hiring the right person and placing them in the right seat feels like quite an achievement at this point; however, do not overlook the foundation of defining roles for your entire team. Organizational charts should be deleted and replaced with accountability charts. This reporting structure is said to be an organizational chart on steroids because it takes problem-solving and production to a higher level of performance. When employees know exactly what is expected of them and there is transparency within an organization, the business plan is carried out in a much more effective way than simply showing employees a chart of titles and direct reports.

Once you do the hard work of identifying the best players for your team, it is critical to set new hires on the right track. Research by Glassdoor found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent. On top of that, Gallup found that only 12 percent of employees strongly agree their organizations do a great job of onboarding new employees.

Most organizations stop the onboarding process after one week. But the best onboarding processes are no less than 90 days with some extending a full year, depending on the nature of the role. It is critical that the talent acquisition plan encompasses a structured process that ensures the new hire feels welcome, receives a proper introduction to the culture, and has access to the tools and knowledge they will need for long-term success at the company.

In the vacation rental industry, the best teams win. Its not the company with the best marketing person or housekeeping manager. Its the company that has a cohesive group of professionals all rowing in the same direction to lead the team and the company to success.

The Great Talent Shift is an opportunity like no other to identify, hire, and retain the very best team. You may be simply missing a few pieces or need to build an entire leadership team as we come out of this challenging time. I would encourage you to focus on the talent acquisition strategy of your company and take advantage of the greatest pool of available talent in our lifetimes.

Read more from the original source:
The Great Talent Shift - VRM Intel

This pandemic has taken its toll, and we will continue to still see the fallout in the months to come. One big hit inside the toy community is the layoffs at Funko. We have already seen reports that Funko will be cutting back shipments this year, as well as postponing and canceling a lot of their upcoming collectibles. During the ongoing pandemic, Funko did close all their corporate offices and their two big HQ stores in Everette and Hollywood. Newly added sanitation and safety precautions have been included, but that has not been enough.

The hits just keep on coming as Funko has announced more layoffs are here and will impact 250 jobs at their home Everett base. This will reportedly save the company $1 million, and even top management is taking 20% pay cuts to try and catch up. Most of these layoffs will start at the end of June, with the end coming hopefully in September. These layoffs have already begun to appear in the most shocking way as Funko makes major marketing team members hang up their coats.

This is a huge surprise for Funko as this team mainly consisted of the hit toy podcast Funko Funkast. These changes will impact the company in the future from the content we see online to the live-streams, gaming events, and even more possible future virtual cons. After the success of the Virtual Con for ECCC, I am quite surprised Funko would let go some of their most prominent and most valuable members go. The community will be reeling in for these crazy changes, and we will all be watching in on what Funko's next moves are.

The real question now is this the end of Funko, and could we see the decline of one of the biggest collectible companies out there? Only time will tell, but our hearts and collections are with all those Funko members who have had say goodbye. We appreciated everything you have done, and it has a pleasure and a wild journey we all have been on. Safe travels friends, and when one door closes, another opens.

He has been the Collectibles Editor since late 2019. Funko Funatic, Historian, Air Force Veteran, and dedicated collector of many things.

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Read more:
Funko Layoffs Will Now Include Funko Funkast And Social Staff - Bleeding Cool News

4th June, 2020 by Owen Bellwood

Last months most notable marketing campaigns included Hendricks Gins Pour it Forward initiative to help bartenders, Reykas run for charity and Smirnoffs celebrity-backed social media challenge.

Hendricks aims to help 100 bartenders in the US with its Pour it Forward campaign

As consumers stay at home and bars across the world remain shut due to the global coronavirus pandemic, spirits brands had to rethink their marketing strategies and turn their focus to the online channel.

A number of companies pledged its support to the on-trade amid the pandemic, including Hendricks Gin with its Pour it Forward campaign and mixer producer Fever-Tree, which offered a series of free online seminars.

Meanwhile, Tequila Cazadores celebrated Mexican festival Cinco de Mayo last month with a campaign that encouraged drinkers to make Tequilabased cocktails at home while celebrating with friends online.

Over the following pages, we name our pick of the top marketing initiatives launched in May 2020.

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Top 10 spirits marketing moves in May 2020 - The Spirits Business

The killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis has sparked public outcry across the United States, including its medical associations. Over the past week, several have made it clear that in their eyes, racism is a public health issue.

Many of thosestatementsincluding those from the American Medical Association, American College of Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Public Health Associationhave highlighted the police brutality that disproportionately affects African Americans. But all of them ultimately allude to a more foundational health threat.

Healthencompasses mental, social, economic, and educational success and stabilityall of which are eroded by structural racism. If US institutions want to combat racism like the publichealthissue it is, they need to address not its symptoms, but its causes: the centuries-old systems that oppress people of color.

The medical community has long acknowledged the ways that racism harms health. But the problem has gone by a different name: social determinants of health. The US Department of Health and Human Services has a program called Healthy People 2020 that sets out to create social and physical environments that promote good health for all in the next decade, acknowledging that access to economic opportunities, educational resources, and environmental safety have clear impacts on health.

What it doesnt clearly acknowledge is the direct link between social determinants and racism. In the US, black Americans are less likely to own homes or have access to adequate health care, education, and job opportunities. The impacts of these social determinants are visible in heightened death rates across many diseases; right now, communities of color are bearing a disproportionately high burden of fatalities from Covid-19. Black Americans experience high rates of serious psychological distress as a result of exposure to racism; as many as one in four black children who have been exposed to violence are at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder. These mental health concerns can also manifest in physical symptoms like high blood pressure.

Although we have never been more attentive to such concepts as the social determinants of health and health equity, our analysis is ironically myopic, wrote Mary Bassett, a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene now at Harvard University, in 2017. We must explicitly and unapologetically name racism as we protect and promote health.

Some parts of the US are doing so. The state of Ohio and several other smaller municipalities have moved to declare racism as a public health crisis, with the intent of making it an issue more capable of receiving funding to combat it.

Putting the name to it is one step. The harder part is determining what funding efforts could have the most impact. Some municipalities might prioritize police reform, in an attempt to stem the most visible, violent manifestations of racism. But police brutalityis an expression of racism as part of a system, says Abraham Salinas-Miranda, a physician and professor of public health at the University of South Florida.

If were going to address structural racism, the first thing we have to do to be clear about what it is and how it operates, says Linda Murray, a retired physician with a masters in public health.

Systemic change can start with individual choice, as some public health messaging campaigns have reflected. Campaigns like Friends Dont Let Friends Drive Drunk, from the 1980s, or the Truth Initiative of the 1990s that advertised against youth smoking, worked by normalizing healthy behaviors, explains Claudia Parvanta, a professor of public health messaging at the University of South Florida and co-director of the World Health Organizations Collaborating Center for Social Marketing.

But the shortcoming of these campaigns, Murray explains, is that they fail to address whypeople develop habits that are harmful to physical health. Putting the onus on the victims of racism wont change anything. In the recent time period, weve inappropriately focused on individual lifestyle issues, she says. Its like a doctor prescribing an aspirin for a headache she knows is caused by a brain tumor. It may work in the short term, but the problem will eventually manifest itself in ways that are harder to treat.

Public health has some frameworks for approaching pervasive issues like racism. Murray points to the work done by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s: He worked to eradicate the slums in Chicago not simply by improving the inadequate housing in which many black Americans lived, but by increasing access to education, job opportunities, and health services.

The result then was positive: The Chicago marches were concluded by a broad and sweeping agreement reached between civil-rights leaders and a wide spectrum of city agencies, real-estate dealers, religious leaders, and a wide spectrum of city agencies, real-estate dealers, religious leaders, and top business and labor figures, King wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in 1967.

In their fight against slums, King and his supporters found ways to address some of the social determinants that were ultimately harming the health of those communities. Thats how public health campaigns against racism can function today, too.

They can try to address racismbefore it happens, says Salinas-Miranda, by teaching children to celebrate diversity. Then when it happens, by listening to those in communities affected by racism and providing them the resources they need. And finally, by working to heal the trauma caused by years of living in a racist society.

See the original post here:
How to address racism like the public health crisis it is - Quartz

Marketing a business requires several tools and platforms. From Facebook to blogging, understanding the options available and their features can go a long way. Here are some tips from members of the online small business community to help you make sense of these popular marketing channels.

If you want to make the most of your Facebook marketing strategy, you need to post regularly. But coming up with enough content can be tricky. In this Social Media Today post, Andrew Hutchinson outlines Facebooks guidelines for creating your very own content calendar.

Google is constantly updating its technology to provide more relevant search results to users. This means that businesses that want to improve their SEO need to learn about new updates so they can tailor their strategies. Neil Patel elaborates on the latest update in this blog post.

The increased popularity of streaming services has changed the way many companies view TV advertising. However, before you adjust your spending, there are some important things to consider. This Target Marketing post by Adam Ortman and Shari Slackman discusses further.

If you want to really step up your SEO strategy, adding the right tools is a must. In this Cybernaira post, Adeshokan Shamsudeen goes over some of the different types of tools so business owners can choose the best ones for their needs. BizSugar members then discussed the post here.

Blogging is far from a new strategy for businesses. But some are just starting to consider it as a way to clearly communicate with customers and others in the industry from afar. If youre thinking about launching a blog, the tips in this Blogging Brute post by Mike Allton may help.

If you use a blog to market your business and communicate with potential customers, its important to have a goal in mind for each post. And sometimes, adding a clear call to action at the end of each one could help you achieve those goals. Dave Brown explores that concept in this Small Biz Daily post.

Venmo is a popular mobile payments platform that many businesses and individuals already use to collect money and pay others. But it can actually be more than that for businesses. In this DIY Marketers post, Sydney Wess shares tips for using Venmo to build a brand.

If you want to bring more visitors to your website, you need to choose the right keywords. And that requires research. In this Duct Tape Marketing post, John Jantsch offers tips for doing just that.

Using tech to run your business isnt just about choosing software programs. There are some hardware devices that could also have benefits for business users. Ivan Widjaya lists some of these various products in this Biz Epic post.

If the content on your website is the same as content posted elsewhere, it could have a major impact on your search rankings. If you want to avoid issues, check out this Pixel Productions post by Anmol Kumar. Then see what members of the BizSugar community have to say here.

If youd like to suggest your favorite small business content to be considered for an upcoming community roundup, please send your news tips to: sbtips@gmail.com.

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Image: Depositphotos.com

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10 Tips for Making the Most of Popular Online Marketing Channels and Tech Tools - Small Business Trends