How Land O’Lakes Swiftly Delivered Its Most Impactful Campaign To Get Critical Jobs Filled

Land O’Lakes and butter are practically synonymous. The company, founded in 1921 by a group of Minnesota dairy farmers, set the standard for butter quality with its sweet cream recipe that countless consumers (including myself!) turn to for all of their cooking and baking needs.

Today, the Fortune 250 agriculture, manufacturing and technology giant — which is still a farmer-owned co-op, by the way — does a lot more than make great butter. With over 9,000 workers across 50 states and 50 countries around the world, Land O’Lakes is a company committed to advancing technology to solve critical food challenges.

Their commitment has been especially visible since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. When the demand for many of their core consumer products spiked, there was an urgency to support their hardworking manufacturing facilities — and in turn, help secure the nation’s food supply. The question was how they were going to do it quickly and efficiently.

Check out the full case study here to learn how they did it!

Turning to Technology

Dobby Gibson, Digital Communications Manager at Land O’Lakes, knew the challenges their talent acquisition team was facing: many of the open roles were in remote locations, which can be notoriously hard to fill. The good news? The team already had technology on their side that could help.

A Phenom customer that went live with the Talent Experience Management (TXM) platform not even two months prior, Land O’Lakes originally purchased the all-in-one AI solution to improve their employer branding and candidate experience. Although the company had yet to fully leverage their new CRM, the pandemic presented the perfect situation to combine its power with Phenom’s career site and robust campaigns functionality to reach job seekers as quickly as possible. In addition, Phenom AI’s ability to identify job seekers’ locations and then serve up the jobs closest to them proved crucial to candidate engagement.

An Integrated Solution

Utilizing Phenom Career Site, CMS, CRM, and Campaigns, Land O’Lakes launched their first end-to-end digital talent marketing campaign: “Feed the Nation”. “Instead of having to wait weeks to update our career site, we were in a position to move quickly and adapt,” says Gibson, who put the campaign’s landing page together in less than an hour with drag-and-drop copy, video, and graphics.

Land O’Lakes then used a number of supporting tactics to drive new job seeker traffic to the landing page. In addition to paid geo-targeted social ads in the ZIP codes surrounding key manufacturing facilities, they promoted the page via their corporate social channels, and tracked performance using UTM codes via Phenom Analytics. “This allowed us to see how many leads and applications we were driving with each ad unit. Then we were able to adjust creative and spend on-the-fly to optimize ad performance and budget,” reports Gibson.

How did Land O'Lakes amplify their reach? Read the case study to find out!

Mission Accomplished

Within just one month, Land O’Lakes’ “Feed the Nation” landing page became the second most visited page on their career site, generating almost 16K page views in 11 days — and almost surpassing their home page in traffic. In fact, they were able to fill 75% of open positions from the campaign alone.

“It was incredible,” says Gibson. “The traffic spikes from both new job seekers and returning job seekers were substantial.”

“This campaign has provided us with a repeatable template, so regardless of what we’re trying to do, this combination of Phenom, the right paid social, and our owned channels is an adjustable formula we can use going forward,” says Gibson. Moving forward, indeed. The team has also begun leveraging Phenom’s SMS capabilities, as well as piloting Phenom Gigs to explore how the platform can improve workforce mobilization and optimization.