To deliver employer branding and recruitment marketing, a collaborative, open and honest partnership is the key to success, explain Lloyds Banking Group and Blackbridge Communications.

They share the secrets that have made their early talent recruitment marketing campaigns and long-term partnership so successful. Their approach won an ISE Award this year.

Vision for the future

Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) is on a journey to challenge misconceptions around banking and financial services, appointing a CEO to drive forward growth and change ambitions.

Alongside this, the organisation introduced a new group-wide strategy to support its purpose of Helping Britain Prosper and its vision of delivering the future of finance as a force for good.

The partnership between LBG and Blackbridge Communications has paid considerable dividends in delivering this strategy through targeted employer branding and recruitment marketing.

LBG also created new values of ‘we trust each other, we put people first, we’re bold, we embrace our differences, we’re sustainable’.

At Blackbridge, we have encapsulated these values in our objectives to position LBG as an employer of choice and grow the early talent pipeline.

With inclusion and diversity as a key driver for our campaigns, we engaged with more diverse candidates to reflect the communities which LBG serves.

Achieving goals through collaboration

For LBG’s early careers campaigns, we took our inspiration from the group strategy and focused on the idea of giving students something of real value, with advice that would support them in their careers.

The Bright Network’s 22/23 report What do graduates want? showed that although confidence is returning to post-pandemic levels, there are still 45% of students who are not confident about securing a graduate role after university.

The resulting campaigns helped raise awareness and position LBG as an employer of choice, as opposed to solely focusing on driving applications.

• Imagine What’s Next aimed to take some of the anxiety out of career decisions and replace it with excitement. Which in turn positions LBG as a welcoming, encouraging place to start an exhilarating career. We created a unique hero film, tailored to our Gen Z audience, that made LBG graduates and apprentices the stars.

• Calendar of Kindness used colourful animation, playful typography and real people, communicating a commitment to health and wellbeing to our audience.

• Life Ready celebrated the qualities that will serve young people in their careers. A series of podcast style videos and influencer content encouraged students to think holistically about employability skills.

Engaging with the business

From the start, we involved our target audience, who were our graduates and apprentices to gather feedback, check content, and deliver an outstanding partnership.

We arranged a series of workshops which gave the chance to develop a clear understanding of LBG’s objectives and share ideas.

We aligned with other suppliers from LBG’s wider talent ecosystem to make sure we could maximise the value of their contributions.

We worked in close partnership with many LBG teams including wider talent acquisiton and internal branding to execute these campaigns.

Making an impact across the business

The success of any partnership can be measured by the results it delivers, and this one did not disappoint, with phenomenal levels of engagement.

Our Imagine What’s Next campaign reached great heights:
• 214,945 website visitors from launch
• 3,860 views of the hero film on YouTube
• 6,500 clicks
• 26.6% rise in applications
• 169% increase in tech engineering grad scheme

The Calendar of Kindness campaign exceeded its objectives:

Facebook:
• 2,035,593 reach
• 3,085% increase in reach compared with the previous period
• 4,077 link clicks to the website

Instagram:
• 1,773,702 unique accounts reached
• 15,941% increase in reach compared with the previous period

Our Life-Ready campaign really hit the mark:

Facebook & Instagram:
• 3,525,991 accounts reached
• 10,363 Thruplays on video assets

TikTok:
• 1,571,165 impressions
• 582,548 accounts reached

As well as the above success, LBG jumped eight places to number 20 in the Times Top 100 Graduate Employers rankings.

Nofi Balogun of LBG explains, “we benefit hugely from Blackbridge’s innovation and creative expertise”. Keshia Thompson of Blackbidge speaks of achieving success through working “collaboratively, allowing us to feel like an extension of the LBG team”.

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Award-winning campaigns