Background of Rota

Rota is a London based company with its headquarters in London. Tom Williams and Will Taylor founded it in 2015 (Rota, 2018). It has not more than 11-50 employees. Rota is a pool of quality-assured employees. They have a user-friendly app that connects venues such as bars, hotel and restaurants to the workers. A selection process of three rounds selects these workers and only 20% of applied people are able to crack the rounds. Unlike any other company, Rota allows the workers to choose shift timings according to their suitability. The power is on the manager, no agents are involved in its business. Rota has a policy, which lets the customers to rate the workers as per their performance and working hours. This report discusses the current position of Rota and it further gives some recommendations on digital marketing in order to improve their strategy.

Rota is a start-up company and it has entered into a competitive market successfully. They got their first client followed by two more clients within three months of staring their business. Soon after that, they gained popularity and earned revenue of 16,000, 26,000 and 29,000 Euros after three months of their service to people (Rota, 2018). According to the CEO, they had a very good start and this encouraged them to keep on doing their job with even better services in order to increase their revenue further. Soon they introduced an app, which was supported by Android as well as IOS and covered over 90% of operating systems. The CEO and Rota’s lead developer shifted their focus on improving their strategies and provide better services along with keeping the workers job satisfaction. They built their platform once again to ensure that Rota was applying the latest of the technologies. The technologies used by them were React Native and React Native Android16 which was already been used by Facebook. React Native lets the developers to design code for apps in a way, which allows them to run on both Android and IOS devices simultaneously. In UK Rota was the first commercially launched non-gaming app using this technology. They had planned to redesign their platform annually in order to stay updated and maintain best user experiences. This would also help them to create a combative advantage for the company. Currently they have various offices in Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, London and Birmingham. The two key principles of their platform are that they are able to collect information about every transaction on a regular basis and they are able to repeat processes and automate routines in the form of algorithms. These are the major forms of competition in case of many businesses. Rota had developed an algorithm for matching staffs as per the necessities at a very early stage but it was usually shut down. This resulted in carrying out the matches manually for the recruitment process. Now they have started a service in which the employees were allowed to choose the shift timing they were comfortable with. This has led them to use the algorithm for approximately 90% of shifts. The workers are reminded by a text message on their phones the day before their shifts times, which are allotted to the workers. The strategy is important in order to maintain a good customer relationship and avoid mistakes and frauds. Employees will carry out few overhead tasks in their business, which can need low-tech solutions. These tasks include frequently asked questions, automation of basic level and self-services of employees such as filling up forms. Rests of the tasks that need advanced solutions are done by using automation technologies like intelligent robots.

Technology used by Rota

Rota takes pride in their relationship maintained with their employees as well as their quality. They see their employees as an origin of competitive advantage. They make the maximum funding on training and development of their staffs. This results in the quality assurance of the workers. They provide enough pay to their staffs apart from the amount that they earn from the venues. They have a policy of fair play in which the prices are set by Rota and cannot be fluctuated in case of supply or demand. Sometimes Rota faces imbalance between the demand and supply of their services, they focus on recruiting more and more employees who are comfortable with various shift timings. They do not force the existing pool to attend the shift timing that they do not want. The minimum length of their shift timing is 4 hours. They assure that their wages are enough to fulfill any cost regarding transport. They take care of the customers in a way that they provide staffs to them whenever and wherever they require. They match the requirements of their customers and provide them staffs accordingly. They carry out a selection process of three rounds in order to select their candidates. Twenty percent of the people applied are able to crack the rounds. Every employee is rated after every shift. This helps in judging the performance of the employee and assures that they have the best staffs to serve people. The app has all the information regarding the rules that the employees need to be followed such as maintaining a proper dress code and being punctual. Customer can sign the employees in and out according to their arrival and departure time. This would make sure that the customer pays only for the hours worked. Rating the employees help the customers to get back the staff liked by them. Whenever a leader of a hotel needs a staff, they give the chance to Rota. They match it with the staff skills as well as experience. The task is never offered to someone who is not eligible. The task is offered to the staffs who best match it. At the conclusion of a shift, the shift leader as well as the staff member provides ratings based on their experience on various dimensions.

Along with customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction is an important factor for Rota. Some employees have provided some feedback about the company, which clearly reflects the friendly environment they work in along with friendly shift timings. An employee of Rota says that he works in Rota along with working in another company, he says he always gets a shift timing, which suits his needs, and the environment is very friendly. His co-workers are fun to work with and he has made some best friends from this company along with making good money. Another employee of Rota said being an actor working at Rota is the best option for him, because after his shoot the left over time gets utilize in earning some more money. This flexibility of Rota has helped him a lot. Flexibility of workplace is very important for employees (Christensen and Schneider, 2015). According to Pan (2015) in most of the organizations, they do not provide shift timing according to the employees will. A student of Westminster said that she goes to university as well as work at Rota. She also says that Rota genuinely cares about their staffs. The training provided to her has helped her grow confidence and improve personality. She has always received positive feedback from customers, the employees she has come across has always rated Rota as a very good organization.

Approaches of Rota towards employees

As per Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick (2016) digital marketing is a platform used by most of the organizations. Rota has several options in order to introduce digital marketing to their company. Some of the options are as follows

They can request their customers to post stories regarding their experiences with their employees. This would help people to know about the company (Chaffey, 2016). The employees can share their thoughts regarding the work environment in the company. This would help in more recruitment of employees because the better the working environment the more people get attracted to it. Direct staff booking can also be introduced which would help the customers to book the staffs they like the most. Email is also a very good platform for promoting the company (Karjaluoto, Mustonen and Ulkuniemi, 2015). Social media such as Instagram is not used by most of the organizations to its full potential. Almost all the organizations use the same path which makes their profile to look the same. Rota can turn into influencer marketing. For this purpose Instagram is the best platform.Rota can create sponsored accounts of influencers. Once the accounts are set up they can be handed over to the influencers, these influencers would obviously have their own accounts besides this account. They can make use of a recently evolving social media called Snapchat. They can share their activities live on Snapchat. They can provide Snapchatters their real time updates with the help of live story and also allow them to contribute to their story by posting pictures of themselves.

Email Marketing can be adopted as an effective Digital Marketing strategy by Rota to promote their business and it has been noticed that emails are delivering a good Return-on-Investment (ROI) to marketers (Clark and Melancon 2013). Although there is no one strategy which fits for all the companies and it is at the company’s discretion as to which strategy the company should adopt and what type of customers the company is targeting, still email marketing strategy has proved to be an effective digital marketing strategy. The emphasis must be laid upon the subject line to be written in the emails and it must be ensured that the emails be written in a plain and persuasive manner with crisp and to-the-point manner (Sridevi and Kumarn 2015.

 When it comes to Social media, the potential of fully exploiting the benefits accruing out of social media is huge, and Rota, being very much an online based company, might venture out to reap the benefits accruing out of it. Social media has not just remained a social networking tool rather it has become an important platform for conducting business and a place wherein companies advertise their plans and initiatives in an elaborative manner (Behal and Sareen 2014). Rota can exploit the social media platform to its advantage, as it will increase the exposure and number of its customers thus increasing the sales. The needs of different companies and startups are catered to by the different types of social networking sites, for example if one company has a large follower base in Facebook then it does not mean that the other company will also find the majority of their customers and followers in Facebook (Wagner et al. 2015).

Digital Marketing strategies for Rota

Rota being very much involved in hospitality sector faces the double challenge of not only recruiting good staffs but also making sure that the turnover rate is low. Therefore, Rota must focus more on those social networking sites, which are employment-oriented service websites for example, LinkedIn (Business.linkedin.com, 2018). Rota can also consult a professional social media consultant and then strategize about the plan they are going to follow to take their business forward in their preferred social media-marketing channel. Rota can also invest in LinkedIn’s premium services such as Sales Navigator, which is a valuable paid feature of LinkedIn and allows searching and finding targeted job seekers easier.

Another strategy Rota can adopt is Affiliate Marketing whereby they can enter into a deal with any of the social networking site such as LinkedIn or Facebook, and then display their website’s advertisement in those social networking sites for which they will have to pay a commission to the social networking site. A lot of startups and companies to promote their services use affiliate marketing strategy and products (Wang et al. 2014).Twitter is another platform where Rota can engage and lure more people to its website and generate more revenues. Twitter has an option of sponsored tweets wherein they engage in customers and gain followers. Similarly, Rota can also opt for pay-to-play service, which is offered by Facebook, which can help the company gain a wide audience. For this, Rota will have to invest in Facebook.

Rota can also implement a Content Marketing strategy wherein they can publish and share their content frequently over the internet with the intention of educating strangers about the work that they perform (Daoud 2016). If this is done on a frequent and consistent way, then it has been noticed that strangers become fans of these contents and eventually the fans become customers (David, David and David 2014).

Rota can also utilize the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy to optimize their activities. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a format of mapping out preferred people or customers into the required website to generate more revenues. This is done by tracing the users by the keywords they type in the Online Search Engines they use (He et al. 2013). Search Engine Optimization also generates more Return-On-Investment (ROI), so this is a very profitable investment for startups as well as established companies (Sisodia, Verma and Vyas 2015). As there are hundreds of websites operating simultaneously and information being available at the click of a button, it becomes essential for having a tool whereby the potential customers can be attracted instantaneously and with minimum effort by noting their keywords (Wang et al. 2013). Search engine optimization also makes users aware about the efficiency of a website by ranking the websites based on their performance. So more the reputable a company is, more chances of it being higher in the search results of the search engine (McIntyre 2015).

Conclusion

 Rota can also use the Pay-per-click strategy to advertise their services. This pay-per-click option allows the company to advertise its products and services on one or numerous websites, for which the company pays the publisher a certain agreed upon sum of money. This model allows the advertiser to lure customers to its website and in this way gain in more customers. These Digital Media Strategies can be utilized by Rota to explore the areas of luring more followers in the online digital media platform and in a way build in their reputation and trust among the people. The more goodwill generated, the more chances of it being listed as a premier hospitality company (Safko 2013).

Conclusion

The report gives us an idea about the newly introduced company called Rota and the services they provide. Hospitality is a service needed by almost all the firms including hotels, tourist services and many more. They have very good strategy to attract customers as well as people who want to work along with pursuing their studies. There are several ways mentioned which can help the company in improving their business strategies. Some digitalization such as keeping the company app updated, proving better offers to the loyal customers, providing better shifts to the employees can help the company to earn more revenue. Some more measures can be taken in order to increase the popularity of the company. These measures include posting pictures or videos on social media. Blogging in social media regarding the activities taking place such as prize distribution, parties and many more.

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