While brick-and-mortar shopping still has skin in the retail game, the truth is, today’s customers shop very differently than they did even just a few years ago. The expansion and ease of online shopping have revolutionized the way modern consumers—consumers of all ages, mind you—approach and execute their shopping habits.

Today there are more than 2 billion digital buyers worldwide, and the data projects 3 million of them in the U.S. alone by 2025. Rapid national and global growth in e-commerce has altered the traditional buyer’s journey. And, as online retail continues to soar, social media is becoming increasingly influential all along that journey.

How influential, you ask? A couple of recent studies showed that:

• Nearly half (47%) of U.S. consumers have made a purchase through social media.
• 58% of these consumers say they are interested in doing it again.
• In 2022, social commerce made up approximately 5% of U.S. e-commerce sales, a number expected to grow to 7% by 2025.
• 81% of consumers’ buying decisions are influenced by friends’ posts on social.
• 78% of consumers say their purchases are influenced by brands’ social media posts.

This last one bears repeating—according to Forbes, “78% of consumers state their purchases are influenced by posts on the social media pages of brands.” What you do on your social media pages to support the buyer’s journey can have a significant impact on sales of products and/or services.

The four stages of the buyer’s journey have remained the same for generations—awareness, consideration, decision making and retention. The revolution comes in how today’s digital world impacts the buyer differently at every stage. And in that how, businesses of all shapes and sizes will find opportunities.

Building your social content for the journey

To leverage these opportunities for selling products and services you your website, it’s critical you produce content to address every stage of the buyer’s journey with effective communications—providing the right messages and answers at the right time. Here are some questions you should ask about your social content.

• Awareness—Are you educating consumers about your product/service? Does your content show that you understand their pain points and can help address them? Do you provide a solution they can act on today?
• Consideration—Are you providing content that establishes trust without making a hard sell just yet? Are you building a relationship that will extend beyond a one-off sale?
• Decision making—Have you made a strong case as to why your product or service is better? Do you give consumers a clear, direct way to convert them from “considerers” to paying customers?
• Retention—How are you staying engaged with your customers? Are you taking care to remain connected without overdoing it or seeming too invasive?

The bottom line is, the better you understand and react to consumers’ needs, the more you can effectively cater to those needs and, hopefully, secure a sale as well as customer loyalty.

A Buyer’s Journey Scenario—Pug Pleasures Creates a Loyal Customer.

(Partially based on a true story, names have been changed to protect the curly-tailed and wet-nosed!)

Awareness:

Debbie, “Proudest Pug Mom on Earth,” was beside herself when Franklin, her 5-year-old vivacious pug, started losing his fur—a side effect of a necessary medication. With a nearly bald underbelly, Franklin was getting bruises and abrasions from his harness every time they took a walk. Knowing that Franklin loved his walks, and that they kept him fit, Debbie needed something other than the style and brand of harness she’d been using since Franklin was a pup. And she needed it fast!

Consideration:

Debbie searched online first at the big-box pet stores and the biggest e-commerce pet supplier. But they didn’t give her a great vibe. How could these mammoth retailers possibly understand her problem? They surely were out of touch with Franklin’s unique needs. She continued her search through social media, friend recommendations and googling, “We care for your pug like family.” During this process she discovered several possibilities. But she landed on “So Soft Sherpa Products for Dogs” (SSSPD). Unlike the others, this company had pug-specific harnesses and shared videos to demonstrate them in action.

Decision making:

During her time on the SSSPD website, a window popped up asking Debbie if she’d like to share a little more about her pug. After filling out the questionnaire, Debbie received a text linking to several customer testimonials about a harness SSSPD recommended for Franklin. Wow, she thought, they really do understand and care about Franklin’s health and happiness.

Retention:

Debbie purchased her first SSSPD super-soft harness and tried it out, much to Franklin’s pleasure. A few days later, SSSPD DM’ed her to see how Franklin was doing with his new harness. The message offered suggestions for just-as-soft harnesses that may not be so hot for Franklin during the summer and linked to a 25% off coupon. SSSPD had two friends—one with four legs, one with two—for life!

Sources:

• https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/the-buyers-journey-how-reach-audience-every-stage-infographic/706595/
• https://www.bigcommerce.com/articles/ecommerce/

Physician vacancies pose a significant financial threat to healthcare organizations, affecting both short-term revenue and long-term sustainability. As healthcare institutions grapple with the challenges of physician shortages, the financial implications of these vacancies become increasingly pronounced and will determine who leads the industry into the future and who falls to the side along the way. 

At the forefront of the issue is the immediate impact on revenue generation. Unfilled physician positions translate to missed patient consultations, diagnostic procedures, and treatments, directly affecting billable services. The revenue potential associated with these unrealized services can quickly accumulate, creating a considerable dent in the financial performance. For example, did you know the national average revenue generated by a physician is $2.4 million per year? It’s easy to understand how vacancies can quickly add up to financial crisis.

MissingPhysician.com emerges as a valuable resource for healthcare recruiters and administrators seeking to quantify the financial risk posed by physician vacancies. This platform provides insights into at-risk revenue, allowing organizations to calculate the potential income lost due to unfilled positions. By leveraging such tools, healthcare leaders can make informed decisions about resource allocation and recruitment strategies — all with a focus on decreasing the time it takes to fill these needed roles.

Beyond the immediate financial setback, physician vacancies contribute to increased operational costs. When roles go unfilled, existing staff members bear the burden of additional responsibilities, leading to burnout and decreased productivity. Overtime pay, temporary staffing solutions, and recruitment expenses further escalate the financial toll associated with physician shortages.

Moreover, the reputation of the healthcare provider is at stake because extended physician vacancies can hinder patient trust and satisfaction. Negative patient experiences resulting from longer wait times and reduced access to care can lead to patient migration to competitors, affecting the overall patient volume and consequently the organization’s revenue stream. 

As healthcare providers are struggling with all the challenges associated with providing services in today’s challenging environment, their top priority should be attracting the individuals their patients are paying to see: their doctors. As the shortage worsens, it’s critical that organizations take a proactive stance in addressing these challenges to mitigate the immediate and long-term financial risks. As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, addressing physician shortages becomes not only a clinical imperative but a crucial financial strategy for the sustainability of healthcare institutions.

Well, before I weigh in, let’s ask our new friend ChatGPT. Here’s the response I got:

“As of now, a person is generally better at writing a job description than AI. While AI tools can assist in generating job descriptions and even provide suggestions, they may lack the nuanced understanding, creativity, and context that a human can bring to the task.”

Yep. Can’t say that I disagree. But as you can plainly see, part of the intro to this very blog came courtesy of a quick prompt I entered into ChatGPT. The Pew Research Center reports that for those who are aware of ChatGPT, 16% are regularly using it at work. Generative AI tools provide a much-needed jump-start to speed up and streamline tasks. And when you look at any list of “great” use cases of AI for recruiters, the task of job description rewrites almost always tops the list.

Leveraging AI to boost productivity by automating time-consuming work that feels like pure drudgery makes obvious sense. Applications of smart automation in our tech stack workflows and sourcing engines have already been delivering efficiencies and hours back in our day for years. The boost of a job description rewrite in seconds especially when so many of our job descriptions could seriously use one, also makes sense. However, the rewrite you get back is really just that—a boost.

Today, there’s still a need for plenty of human oversight with a generative AI tool writing your job descriptions. Here are three very real reasons why:

Misguided prompts

Out of date, jargon-filled, too much information. Too little information. For all or some of these reasons, your job descriptions may have been riding along on the struggle bus for years. An accurate portrayal of the job itself and ideal attributes that sync to your company’s culture, values, and purpose might be sorely missing within them, too. So, if you want to get yours off that bus by running them through a generative AI tool, it’s not enough to ask “Hey ChatGPT, make this a better job description.” You will need to think about a well-constructed prompt before you begin.

Take a closer look at your EVP, employer brand guidelines, and personas. Tap into that treasure trove of informed research and include it in your initial prompt. Here’s a basic example of what I mean:

This [JOB DECRIPTION] for a [JOB TITLE] needs to attract a person with the following attributes [INSERT ATTRIBUTE LIST] that align with our [COMPANY’S VALUES] while portraying a concise and realistic overview of what it takes to thrive in this role based on the following [PERSONA OVERVIEW] and the [EMPLOYEE VALUE PROPOSITION] our company offers in return.

Even with a solid start, the resulting copy may warrant continued prompts for specific and necessary tweaks. Regardless, as you perform your review, there’s a very strong case to be made that you or another real live person invested in your employer brand messaging will want to invest in finalizing copy. Why?

Quality is questionable

Even AI is aware that there’s a lack of “nuanced understanding, creativity, and context that a human can bring to the task” when writing job descriptions. Without a solid set of training data (think minimally of the fill-in-the-blank intel in the example prompt), a great job description rewrite isn’t going to happen.

More importantly, the human touch is missing in action. And that’s a big miss. Style and originality that more powerfully convey your employer brand won’t be coming from parsed copy. It will come from the perspectives of people.

And speaking of parsed copy, there’s a real chance that over time using generative AI tools like ChatGPT may homogenize our writing. Not so great when you are trying to differentiate, is it?

Let’s talk about bias 

AI has been positioned as a bias-buster for job descriptions. Its ability to identify stereotypical language and recommend gender-neutral terms appears to be a wonderful advantage and there are solutions out there doing a great job of it. However, let’s not forget how a tool like ChatGPT gets its learnings. It gets them from existing data and language patterns. From us. That creates an imperfect solution. So again, enough said. Human oversight of what generative AI produces is a must.

While we’re strictly talking about copy creation here, there’s been plenty of examples of text-to-image models of generative AI playing into race and gender stereotypes, too. When reporting for Bloomberg Technology + Equality, Leonardo Nicoletti and Diana Bass prompted a text-to-image model to “create representations of workers for 14 jobs — 300 images each for seven jobs that are typically considered ‘high-paying’ in the US and seven that are considered ‘low-paying’ — plus three categories related to crime.”

After a review of the results, it is no surprise that their report is titled: Humans are biased. Generative AI is even worse. I encourage you to give it a read.

In the end, my answer to the question that this blog post poses isn’t a hard no. Not at all. Staring at a blank screen or looking at that three-page deep job description not knowing where to even begin is in itself a time suck you don’t need to suffer through. With some consideration to your prompts, personas, and people who know your employer brand, it’s a yes to having improved copy in a split second. Limit your reliance on generative AI to what it’s good at—a working draft—and tap into what only a human can bring to the written word for your job descriptions. It will be a winning combination for this very important task.

While a bad candidate experience might cause to a candidate to quit your hiring process entirely or hurt your employer brand with a negative review on Glassdoor, a great candidate experience can help you turn your top prospects into hires. 

So, what can you do to create a great experience that helps your organization stand out from the competition? Our Redefining Recruitment series will provide answers in the coming weeks through blog posts focused on how to: 

1. Harness SEO to Showcase Your Job Opportunities 

People can’t apply to jobs they can’t find. 70% of all job searches start with Google—150 million of them every month. And Indeed can still boast that it reaches nearly 93% of online active US job seekers. Structured data and properly formatted feeds are the key to helping these sites find and properly identify your content. 

2. Create a Compelling Careers Site 

A careers site is vital to a quality candidate experience. Most referral sources will push prospects directly to a job description. If that description is coming from your ATS, those candidates will miss any employment brand messaging, benefits info, and hiring events you have invested in for your careers site. From delivering the right first impression to content that authentically presents insights candidates seek before they convert to applicants, we’ll outline the must-haves for creating a compelling careers site. 

3. Master the Art of Effective Job Descriptions 

Go beyond the requirements and internal jargon. Help the prospects see themselves in a career with your organization. You can also use the job description as a filter to connect with the talent you want and dissuade those you don’t. Salary, benefits, and hours are table stakes that should be included in all job descriptions. Stand out by highlighting sign-on bonuses, remote/hybrid opportunities, and quality of life and DEIB content and, most of all, differentiating your organization from the competition. 

4. Simplify the Application Process 

Have you tried applying for a job through your ATS? If so, was it on a mobile device? Most job seekers conduct their searches on a handheld device. If your ATS application process is long and involved, consider an alternative call to action where candidates, especially those for your harder-to fill-positions, can express their interest quickly and connect with a recruiter who can take it from there to guide them through the next steps.  

Introducing a new measure of an employer’s brand strength that is more inclusive than Net Promoter Score.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?

If this question looks familiar, then you’re probably already familiar with Net Promoter Score® (NPS)¹. For 20 years, it has been a bellwether metric for quantifying customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. With one easy-to-answer question, organizations of all sizes have been able to calculate the health of their customer engagement with a remarkably simple formula:

(Brand Promoters (scores of 9-10) − Brand Detractors (scores of 0-6)) ÷ Sample Size × 100

While the NPS formula is highly valuable in distilling customer sentiment down to a single number, the strategy team at Aloysius Butler and Clark (AB&C) felt we could develop a more robust measure of brand loyalty, especially in terms of recruiting and retaining talent. We put our 50-plus years of experience with qualitative branding research to use to develop a more complete measure of an employer’s brand strength, one that includes audience satisfaction, perception of employer reputation and NPS. It’s a calculation we call Employer Brand Strength Index™ (EBSI).

While it has the ease of use and simplicity of the traditional NPS, our proprietary EBSI measurement tool brings in more metrics that are tailored to individual organizations and their specific industries. Our measurement includes perceptions of current employees as well as external audiences, allowing us to benchmark external assessments of employer brands against internal reflections of employment experiences. Organizations are able to include their NPS and employment reputation into a measure that allows them to monitor the success of what is being promoted in the market.

And with the introduction of factor weights measured with a five-point Likert scale (see table below), we can refine the EBSI to help calculate overall employer brand health.

The EBSI can be used as a reliable predictor of employer brand strength and employee engagement. The inclusion of the EBSI in a recruiter’s toolbox provides talent acquisition and talent engagement teams a comprehensive additional key performance metric. The EBSI is a benchmark measure that should be reviewed over time to adjust operational practices and recruitment marketing messages to continually improve an organization’s employment brand to attract prospective employees and enhance employee loyalty.

1. In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, Inc. created the NPS metric.

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” These words from Arthur Ashe—a tennis legend who helped eliminate barriers for Black athletes in the U.S.—continue to inspire millions of people in their pursuit of a variety of goals and missions. Among these groups is the team at AB&C, who this spring took our commitment to giving back to our communities another notch higher. Year-round, AB&Cers engage in individual volunteer activities, and the agency as a whole offers opportunities to support local causes through events such as community walks, donations drives and more. But as a marketing communications agency that is always focused on innovating stronger strategies, we decided in May 2023 that it was time to apply “strategy” to elevate our impact on our neighbors and neighborhoods. We put our heads together, and Actions Building Community days were born.

AB&C facilitated opportunities for our team members to volunteer together and engage in causes that many of us didn’t realize needed our help. During Actions Building Community days, we supported four organizations that do great and critical work, and at the same time we learned more about each other, had fun and made meaningful connections with other volunteers that strengthened our resolve to keep community service central to the AB&C way.

Starting where we are

To determine our 2023 Actions Building Community opportunities, we “started where we are”—that is, in the areas where we operate our business and where clusters of our team members reside. This year, those areas were Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia and Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Being able to make a difference where we work, live, play and raise our families was a strong motivator for our teams to get involved.

Using what we have

Ability to do physical work. Transportation. Knowledge of ways our local leadership works to create thriving communities. Passion for helping others. These are some of our top assets, so we knew we could make a difference. Even time—which, in our industry, isn’t always readily available on a weekday—was added to the mix. AB&C gave all volunteers paid time off (PTO) for our time. We also staggered volunteer dates and times so that team members were available at the office to cover the work needs for staff who were out volunteering.

Doing what we can

From May 8 to 19, more than 50 AB&Cers participated in Actions Building Community activities. Our team members enthusiastically rolled up their sleeves and did the work that needed to be done, supporting programs that help families in food deserts and others that close the gaps of educational and wellness disparities. We proudly supported:

• United Way of Wilmington. AB&Cers helped with the installation of the first dual-language learning trail by painting and installing signage and preparing the trail for use.
• Philadelphia’s Share Food Program Warehouse. We invested hours cleaning, organizing and sorting produce, as well as packing DoorDash cars with Senior Food Box program boxes.
• Food Bank of Delaware, Wilmington. Our teams organized boxes and packed vehicles to deliver food to those in need.
• Bloomsburg Food Cupboard. We prepared, sorted and unloaded food, including weekend bags for elementary students in Bloomsburg School District.

For all of us who volunteered—as well as those who kept things moving at the office while we did—these days were incredibly rewarding and strengthened our appreciation for, and loyalty to, a company that cares about fulfilling a purpose beyond the “business of advertising.” More than 50 years ago, AB&C planted roots in Wilmington, and never strayed. Those strong roots have branched out even further to support the growth and prosperity of other communities in Delaware and beyond. We are grateful to have opportunities to engage with our neighbors, support wonderful causes and help make an impact.

On July 5, Meta launched its Twitter competitor: Threads, an Instagram App. Appearing in the App Store a day ahead of the announced launch date, Threads attracted at least 10 million signups—including celebrities, brands and political figures—within seven hours of launch, according to Meta.Read full post...

This year, AB&C wanted to experiment with a concept truer to the agency experience by creating a new social media intern team in addition to our traditional interns. By collaborating hands-on in a true team setting, interns get a fresh and exciting portrayal of what agency life is really like. Read full post...

Aggressive growth and new workplace model have paved the way for AB&C’s new location with open, modern office space.

WILMINGTON, Del. (May 18, 2023) — Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C), one of the largest independent full-service marketing communications agencies in the region, recently transitioned from their previous Wilmington, Delaware headquarters at 819 N. Washington Street to a modern office on the third floor of Courthouse Square, located at 600 N. King Street. AB&C’s new Delaware home is nearly 10,000 square feet and integrates features that foster optimal connectivity and productivity in today’s hybrid work model and provides the flexibility needed to accommodate the agency’s continued growth.Read full post...

As the world slowly but surely starts to open up again, travel enthusiasts everywhere are itching to get out and explore their own backyard. Whether it’s a day trip to a nearby county or a weekend getaway to a city, the concept of being a “local tourist” has never been more appealing. In fact, according to a recent survey of 500 people living in the Philadelphia region, 77% of people said that “traveling with their family or a group” was the best thing about being a local tourist.¹

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AB&C recently conducted a survey of consumers in the five-county Philadelphia region, Southern New Jersey and Northern Delaware. The survey covered topics including upcoming local travel plans and preferences, anticipated day and overnight trips, key catalysts for deciding to visit new places, as well as preferred media for learning about destinations and attractions. Below is a preview of the survey that was shared at the Philadelphia Business Journal’s “Tourism Turning Point: Growing the Philadelphia Region’s Travel Market” seminar. (Note: A detailed analysis of survey results will follow in the weeks ahead).

View a preview of the report (PDF, 1MB)

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Stand-out creative helps generate thousands of new memberships in January, blowing campaign goal “out of the water.”

WILMINGTON, DE (March 6, 2023) — Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C), one of the largest independent full-service marketing communications agencies in the region, recently teamed up with Adventure Aquarium to help thousands of area families and individuals reap the benefits of membership at the Camden, NJ educational and entertainment attraction. AB&C put its award-winning creative talents to use to focus attention on, and create urgency for, a limited-time membership sale. At the end of the 25-day campaign, the marketing strategies and execution exceeded the Adventure Aquarium’s goal by more than 66%. All told, the campaign also exceeded the Aquarium’s anticipated revenue by more than 85%.

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Everyone who has been to a big event — or even to a movie theater — knows that the cost of refreshments bears no relation to the actual cost of the ingredients themselves. A hot dog or a tub of popcorn that you can make in your own kitchen for maybe 50 cents costs $5. And who knows what the syrup in that soda costs, but you’re paying $5 for that too.Read full post...

If you’ve taken as many flights as we have, you know when your plane is about to take off. You can hear the engines straining. You can feel the enormous thrust it takes to accelerate. Yet, if you look out the window, you still haven’t left the ground.Read full post...