THE PROJECT
Apex looked to Magnetize for a recruiting brand and campaign to engage their target audiences — not only to inspire them to choose or continue a career in the trades, but to work for one of their organizations while learning their trade.
Messaging strategy
Based on our discovery and brand audit work, we framed out a messaging strategy supported by three platforms:
Care & Reward: recognizing contributions and value, ensuring success and well-being
Tools & Development: empowered through support and resources
Partner & Stability: long-term view of success
These helped us shape a differentiated recruiting position for Apex, craft deeper narrative and even inspired our design work.
Audience alignment
We also categorized seven distinct audience groups and prioritized our three messaging platforms for each group:
Experienced Tradespeople: Employees at competitors
Transferable Skills: Mechanics, those in other service industries & military veterans
Vocational and Trade Schools: Students
Influencers: Parents & teachers
Community Colleges & High Schools
Immigrants & First-Generation Families
General
Campaign tagline
Magnetize created the TradeUP tagline and turned it into a bold lockup that offers an empowering call to action — not to mention immediate context for the industry. The design of the lockup allowed for a modular approach so that it would be easy to customize all communications for each Apex partner brand.
TradeUP to an impactful campaign
Visually, the campaign uses bold colors and imagery to pay homage to the trades and those who build valued careers in them.
Clean, organized layouts reminiscent of early 20th century industrial and government initiative posters, hint at a clear path forward The TradeUP theme as the call-to-action visually reinforces the affiliate brand while supporting a branded and clear domain strategy for landing pages.
Tools of the trade
The campaign not only elevates the employer brand, but also gives Apex partners the tools and templates needed to customize materials at the local level. The campaign toolkit walks through how to use assets and choose channels to best target qualified candidates and provides comprehensive marketing guidance.
Apex offers rewarding trade careers where people can grow — they just needed to make a great impression with the right prospects. We created a recruiting brand and campaign to help them do that with agility and impact.
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