Conquests > Case Studies
Talent Attraction for the State of Michigan
In January of 2007, BrainGain was awarded the "e-quality of life" campaign by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC). The goal of the campaign was to promote life and careers throughout the State of Michigan to a young, creative class. The mission of the project was a perfect fit for the new marketing group as BrainGain carved out its niche as an agency focusing on talent attraction and retention.
BrainGain took MEDC's existing publication, a monthly e-magazine about general lifestyle in Michigan and revamped it with an edgier look and new content targeting a younger, more tech-savvy crowd that BrainGain refers to as "the talent class."
The new MiLifeMiTimes.com launched in late April of 2007 as a user-generated, blog-based website featuring positive stories about lifestyle, culture, travel and careers all over Michigan with a "cool crowd" point-of-view. One key objective was (and remains) to promote careers and regions by producing interesting stories about trends and attractive lifestyle qualities happening around specific cities and jobs. MiLife MiTimes has also become a multimedia experience, offering photo, video, podcast, and blog network capabilities.
Although the site acts as the campaign's most visual and public tactic, to date the marketing efforts include:
- community engagement with Young Professional Organizations (YPOs), Covention and Tourism Bureaus (CVBs) and universities;
- blog strategy and blogger relations;
- development of relevant content for the site and enewsletters;
- a content-push strategy to virally spread positive stories to other sites and like-minded folks;
- visits to college campuses;
- street teams passing out collateral at popular festivals;
- a Northern Michigan Getaway Contest;
- production of trendier T-shirts and other marketing materials.
In just three months the site has had more than 200,000 page views and the newsletter has garnered an additional 10,000 subscribers from the base 15,000 email addresses.