The Advertising Program is tasked with supporting the recruiter in the field by delivering at least 12% of contracts to supplement the annual enlistment goal. More granularly, the success of the Advertising Program is directly tied to the volume of responses (response rate), qualified leads and contracts (contract rate) it generates. Campaign tracking informs the attribution of results, and deeper analysis of the outcome further informs the audience-related optimization efforts.

Considering the Moveable Middle segment’s lower affinity toward the military, it meant that this group in general was harder to attract due to their limited consideration to the Marine Corps as a post-graduation path, setting up a longer journey to enlistment than the Historical Core, the majority of whom, if they enlisted, reported knowing for 18 months or more that they wanted to be a Marine.

However, we are already starting to see the fruits of our labor emerge.

• DM segmented test packages outperformed the control creative by 10%

• Diversity representation for qualified leads generated in FY14 improved—14% for African American, 26% for Hispanic, and 50% for Asian populations (compared to 2012).

• Another notable improvement was our ability to expand our reach geographically and recruit from the parts of the country where we weren’t successful before—see baseline results from 2010 compared to 2014 (Image 4 & 5, supporting content) and a visual depiction of the Moveable Middle (Suburban Remix) geographic representation.

Employing data and insights strategically to inspire creative communication, we are well on our way to supporting the Marine Corps in recruiting a force representative of the nation it serves, while maintaining the highest quality, historical standards and warfighting ethos.

Recruiting is always one of the biggest challenges that the Marine Corps faces. Every year the challenge is how to allocate the budget (incidentally the smallest budget of the four military branches) in order to secure the next generation of Marines. Message effectiveness and laser-focused targeting is the key to success.

The output from the segmentation told us that Moveable Middle prospects surround large and medium-sized cities, and ¾ grow up in middle-income households. They aren’t patriotic in the same way the Historical Core is, but they are heavily engaged in efforts to improve their local communities. More importantly, they share a desire to make the world a better place, even if they haven’t thought of the Marine Corps as a way to achieve that. And, best of all, if they were going to consider enlisting in the military, they preferred the elite legacy of the Marine Corps.

This critical insights were necessary to tailor the Marine Corps’ communication strategy and its messaging more effectively. Creating this user profile afforded us the ability to pinpoint the appropriate motivational triggers in prospects’ decision-making journey. Armed with their geographic location, behavioral history and channel/message consumption habits, direct response campaigns were created, being customized against existing benchmarks and available success metrics.

Most notably the Direct Mail program benefited from the ability to tailor creative concepts specific to the Historical Core and Moveable Middle audiences, with great success (Direct Mail, supporting content pdfs). We also extended our message customization to social media and engaged our prospects with targeted content on Twitter and Facebook. Finally, the audience discovery culminated in the launch of the most recent prospect campaign titled Home of the Brave, intended to position the Corps for greater success with a multicultural audience by resonating with a broader cross-section of American youth.