7x the goal: How we reached
5M tech talents on a €30K budget
Brief
Our task was to create a spring 2024 campaign to attract tech talent from India, Brazil, and Vietnam, focusing on high-skilled ICT professionals. The goal was to spark their interest about building a life and career in Finland. Success was measured by visits to workinfinland.com to explore open jobs and reach among target audience.
Insight
We needed to address the elephant in the room: the fear of not belonging. Finland is often celebrated as the happiest country in the world, with top education, safety, and quality of life. Yet issues like racism, integration challenges, and immigration policies made headlines. Our audience—highly educated and globally aware—knew both Finland’s strengths and struggles.
Globally, tech talent is in high demand. These professionals can choose where they work. Yet, in most countries, long hours are expected for career success, often at the cost of personal and family time.
Challenge
Previous Work in Finland campaigns highlighted the country's image and positives, like “happiest country in the world”, but was that enough? How could we truly engage the audience while emphasising Finland’s benefits? Especially with our small budget — €30 000 to reach a specific group in three countries — we had to be strategic.
Idea
The There Is More to Life Than Work campaign tackled the fear of not belonging. It spoke to career-driven, highly successful individuals about what mattered most—their life outside work. This approach was entirely new for the programme and globally unique. While other markets and past campaigns focused on work, we highlighted life beyond it. We did this by sharing and showing real stories from expats in Finland.
Strategy
Creative Strategy
To show what life and work in Finland are like for international talent, we put real expats on the front of the stage. Content about real people and influencers was used in paid media, while the influencers also shared longer videos, Reels and stories on their channels. We didn’t direct the content of the influencers; they decided how to share and show their daily lives, experiences, and feelings in their own words. Ad content portraited real expants and their lives.
Platform Strategy
LinkedIn and Meta were chosen as campaign platforms, both widely used in target countries.
LinkedIn, being work-focused, allowed precise targeting based on professional attributes.
Meta, a top social platform in all target countries, is not work-centric but reflects how modern life blends work and leisure. Since our campaign also touched on life outside work, it fit well. Meta was also key for raising awareness.
Target Audience Optimizing
Identifying our audience required significant effort. They are highly educated, successful tech talents—a globally small but valuable group. Especially with a limited budget, we had to monitor spending carefully. Throughout the campaign, we monitored content performance and adjusted it to maximise engagement and resonance.
Strategic Guidelines for Ad Creatives:
#1 Relatable Authenticity
Show, don’t tell. To address the fear of belonging, our ads featured real international talents living in Finland. We strengthened this by collaborating with influencers from India and Finland—Kabira and Varpu.
#2 Leveraging Familiar Success
We analyzed and utilised top-performing assets emphasising Finland’s strengths, its status as the happiest country, high quality of life, and unique traits like sauna culture and ice swimming.
#3 Country-Specific Content
We tailored content for each target country, featuring people from those regions now living and working in Finland. Each asset was based on market insights to ensure relevance.
In short, we shifted the perspective from stating facts about how amazing Finland is for talent to showing how people have truly found a home and a sense of belonging.
Creative execution:
Video was the most effective way to deliver the campaign message. Creatives addressed belonging, Finland’s high quality of life, work-life balance, safety, strong communities, and, of course, unique nature and local quirks.
The content combined influencer-style footage with high-production value visuals — designed to feel relatable and engaging — both organically on Varpu’s Instagram & YouTube and Kabira’s Instagram & YouTube, and in paid media. Quality, style, and a unique perspective were key to the campaign’s success.
Multiple versions of assets were created to optimise performance across placements. We continuously monitored and adjusted the campaign for the best results.
The results exceeded its goals
– multiple times.
The campaign targeted a niche and discerning group of people
scattered around the world, making the results amazing.
19 804
CLICKS TO OPEN JOB DESCRIPTIONS
+787%
from forecast 2 516
+456%
from forecast 7 684
1.12%
CTR
+193%
+366%
from forecast 55 087
LI: 0.94% (Global avg. sponsored content: 0.44% – 0.65%)
Meta: 1.14% (Global avg. employment & job training category: 0.47%)
3 371 864
VIDEO VIEWS
+325%
from forecast 1 038 571
35 710
ENGAGED SESSIONS TO
WORKINFINLAND.COM
4 922 294
REACH
+256%
from forecast 1 923 810
Media budget: €30 000
Campaign flight time: March 18 – April 14, 2024
Measured with Google Analytics, Meta Business Tools and LinkedIn Business Tools
€1.51
CLICKS TO OPEN JOB DESCRIPTIONS
(LI global avg. $5.26)
(Meta global avg. employment industry $2.72)
201 629
LINK CLICKS
18 018 110
IMPRESSIONS
+189%
from forecast 9 521 429
Price per conversion
There is more to life than work
With a great strategy and bang-on content we achieved big results in a cost-efficient way.