Winning Job Board Glory

Sometimes the best way to win is to team up with organizations that, in other contexts, would be close competitors. Co-opetition is the current buzzword.

Client

American Marketing Association (AMA)
Chicago IL
http://www.marketingpower.com

Note: as Director, Internet Marketing at AMA

Description

AMA is a highly respected association for professional marketers. It boasts more than 70 professional chapters in the United States and Canada, an extensive array of conferences, trade shows and educational events, and several publications and academic journals exploring the world of marketing.

Members join the AMA for career benefits – both through networking with peers and picking up new skills at events.

Problem Statement

Since members join to advance careers, it certainly made sense to launch an online job board back when such things were shiny and new in the late 1990s.

So it launched, and then it … sat there.

The job board was producing some revenue – low six figures – but wasn’t nearly where it should have been with an organization with the large member base and respected brand like the AMA.

In the job board world, scale matters. Job seekers won’t come to an empty job board, and without candidates, it’s difficult to sell job listings. Organic growth will take care of the problem in time, but moving slow in the Internet world is often not a particularly strong business strategy.

Resources Available

AMA had a fantastic brand and a loyal member base. Additionally the MarketingPower.com portal, which had been launched three years before, had attracted a qualified email list of 100,000+ marketers.

Second, AMA was working with Boxwood Technology, a leading online job board platform with an extensive base in the nonprofit and professional association space. Boxwood had several existing clients with a problem similar to AMA’s. Each had a qualified, valuable candidate base, but was unable to activate it well in a job board business to produce significant revenue.

Program

AMA and Boxwood developed an innovative alliance among the leading marketing associations called the Marketing Career Network.

Initially, the Network consisted of 6 members, but has since grown to include almost 80 at last count. Each of the members of the network was, by any other measure, a competitor. Indeed, many spent quality meeting-time hours plotting ways to snag members from the other organizations.

However, the Marketing Career Network enabled these associations to share resources and build each other’s job board businesses without sparking competitive issues.

Since all were operating on Boxwood’s job board platform, the associations were able to share job listings and candidate traffic in the background, while still presenting its own unique branding and look to the employers and job candidates.

Each member association owned its data, which was key because many associations in the past had “partnered” with the mainstream job boards only to find that they were sharing their valuable member lists in exchange for a few shiny quarters.

Execution

The associations had to be approached one-by-one to build the idea. The AMA and Boxwood worked quite well together by drawing on the existing credibility of each organization to promote the overall idea.

Once it was clear that the membership lists were secure, the only sticking point was maintaining common pricing. Many associations were charging low rates and were worried that a price hike would drive away the few customers they had.

Instead, they learned that their membership bases were so valuable that by operating as stand-alone job boards they were leaving a lot of money on the table.

Results

Through a revenue share program, Marketing Career Network partners were able to accomplish two things at once:

1. Deliver a higher volume of qualified candidates to each job listing
2. Present a broad array of available positions to members

This produced two positive business results:

1. Satisfied customers posted more listings in the future
2. Satisfied members tended to renew

For the AMA, the program helped enormously on both fronts.

Job board revenue over the next 4 years grew from low six-figures into low seven figures. Indeed, the job board became one of the top revenue sources for the organization, and certainly the most profitable.

Second, the members were happy. Surveys consistently showed the job board as one of the most cited member benefits – which was funny because the job board wasn’t restricted to members only. Members assumed it was.

Lessons Learned

Don’t assume the existing business environment is the way it has to be. Creative ideas well executed can create a profitable niche.