STA Recruitment Marketing

STA takes pride in its student-centric approach, as well as its family-oriented business plan.  They strive to seek professional school bus drivers, mechanics and technicians, dispatchers, managers, safety trainers, and a slew of other employees working behind the scenes to provide safe and reliable transportation solutions.  More specifically, they reached out to Lounge Lizard’s marketing team for assistance with recruitment campaigns to fill bus driver positions across the country.  They also wanted to improve overall website performance, branding, and increase social media and website engagement.

Some pain points that they needed to address/resolve included:

• Website responsiveness
• Conversion rate on PPC ads
• User Experience (UX)
• Website maintenance
• Website was not mobile-friendly

For instance, prospects would land on STA’s website but would have to select the state they were in when looking for a job post.  It would not automatically show listings in respective states.  It is important to note that STA is a parent company to local operators that know their local communities well and are backed by the support of STA’s national network.

Lounge Lizard and STA arrived at defined expectations and goals for the project.  Lounge Lizard’s team of experts came together to create Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaigns for recruitment, as well as devising an SEO strategy that would assist with UX.  The marketing and SEO teams worked closely with the development team to ensure that all website-related concerns were addressed and resolved.

Lounge Lizard’s experts forged ahead in creating a strategy that would assist STA in improving user experience, thus increasing the engagement rate on their website and the recruitment of qualified bus drivers.  The strategy involved Lounge Lizards SEO team researching local SEO analytics, in order to formulate highly-targeted local SEO strategies for each recruiting location.  

Additionally, the Lounge Lizard SEO team conducted extensive keyword research paying close attention to search query intent and reviewing competitor keywords to utilize their successful actions to the benefit of STA’s needs.

Lounge Lizard’s brandtenders crafted a digital marketing strategy that would assist STA in reaching its intended target audience through the usage of hyper-targeted PPC ads using Google Adwords and Meta Business Manager.  This strategy began by researching STA’s main competitors and reverse engineering their existing PPC efforts.  

In regards to the design of the ads, STA provided all creatives, while the Lounge Lizard marketing team assisted with adding Call-To-Actions (CTAs) and relevant text to the creatives.  As their industry is very diverse, the creatives and ad copy remarkably displayed said diversity, which helped to encourage people from all walks of life to apply. 

As a bonus, to the job itself, STA provided training and certification to prospects, which made it easier to get prospects to apply.

Keeping up with today’s latest trends, Lounge Lizard’s brandtenders implemented the use of dynamic ads on Meta to catapult the recruitment campaign.  Some additional technologies that were used for this project included ZoHo, Google AdWords, and WordPress, to name a few.

The PPC campaigns and other components of the STA project proved to be quite an accomplishment, as the Lounge Lizard team met and exceeded STA’s expectations.

The highlight of the project was Lounge Lizard’s ability to clean up STA’s previous marketing efforts and improve their ad optimization score, adding relevant keywords, headlines, and descriptions, as well as adding the full scope of available assets on Google ads like site link extensions, structured snippets, and images.

STA saw a significant increase in high-quality leads – recruiting bus drivers in each recruitment location.  Thus, they were highly satisfied with the outcome of the recruitment campaigns.

Additional results that produced successful outcomes included:

• Website optimization
• Creating a mobile-friendly website
• Improved UX by adding an auto-scroll feature to STA’s website that would automatically bring prospects to job posts in their home states.