After years of enjoying the perks of ‘Free’ as business owners, it is irrefutable that the time has come to put our hands in our pockets and spend money with the social media giants. Christina Robinson from Green Umbrella says this is arguably rightly so given the level of targeting that is available to us on Facebook, and now through LinkedIn too with their recently upgraded Campaign Manager.
The problem is many agencies take the approach that if they throw some cash at a Facebook or Instagram advert, it will automagically result in a plethora of candidates and therefore placements. (If only it worked that way!) This approach leads to £1000s of wasted advertising spend, and recruiters who feel frustrated that they have wasted their time as much as their budget.
Before embarking on any type of Paid social advertising, you should be asking yourself the following questions:
Who specifically will I target?
DON’T just enter a few demographics expecting to find your needle in a haystack.
DO use the information and data available to you to create highly relevant audiences. For example, retarget anyone who has visited your website in the last 30 days by having a Facebook Pixel or LinkedIn Insight tag added to your website. (These are simply tiny pieces of code that can be added to the header of your website.) If you’re using Facebook Advertising specifically, you can use this audience as source data, and ask Facebook to create ‘Lookalike audiences’ (i.e. users with a similar social profile) and target them too.
What message am I communicating?
DON’T ignore everything you know about writing job adverts – but also, don’t mistake social sites for job boards! You are potentially reaching passive candidates or prospect clients. In both cases, they may not yet be aware of you or of the fact they need your services. You have to put that idea in their heads.
DO consider where your target audience are in your sales funnel. What story should you be sharing with them to get from A to B on their journey to engaging with you? Is it time to tell these people what a fantastic organisation you are to work with – or are you simply leading them to a piece of content that will allow you to generate and qualify them as a possible lead?
Where will I place my advert?
DON’T take a scattergun approach to social advertising. Facebook and LinkedIn both have multiple placement options, and you can be fooled into thinking that the more places your ads are seen, the better your results will be. It might be true that you get awesome cost per click rates, but more clicks do not mean better results!
DO think about user experience. In this day and age, most websites have been built with a ‘mobile first’ approach – but if you know that your website offers a poor mobile experience, or the page you are directing traffic to creates a clunky user experience. Why are you spending good money educating your audience of the fact? Choose desktop only advertising placements!
DO think about protecting your brand. Facebook and LinkedIn both offer advertising options on their Audience Networks; this means other websites that they have deemed to be quality sites. Facebook will also run your ads on Instagram. This is great if Instagram fits your demographic, but what of it doesn’t?
Facebook and LinkedIn are looking to give you the best bang for your buck. It’s up to you to plan for positive user experiences, and to ensure you are protecting your brand at all times.
When will I measure my results?
DON’T be fooled into thinking one boosted post will equal one placement. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have spoken to organisations that have said they don’t get results. Only to find they spent £100 boosting a Facebook post for one that said “We’re Recruiting” with a link to a white-collar job.
Measure your adverts against the objectives you were expecting to meet from that advert. If you boosted a Facebook post – your objective was for people to see it. Nothing more. If you want people to click through and look at your web page, measure landing page views, not just clicks.
DO take a holistic view. To continue on from the previous paragraph, if you wanted someone to download a whitepaper or register interest with you, you might have run a few different ads across Facebook and LinkedIn in order to move these users through your funnel. So, look at the overall results, and be ready to include organic results in your calculations too. By taking a holistic view, you will often uncover side effects that make future advertising strategies more powerful.
Why am I running this advert?
Don’t spend money running a social ad out of desperation. I’m not saying it never ever works – but successes are few and far between.
Do take a campaign approach. Go old school. Draw your funnel, map the course, plot out the different types of adverts you need considering the four questions above. Hand on heart, if you are realistic about the outcomes, failures are few and far between.
With the technology available to today’s recruiters it is essential that we shift our focus and see social media activity (whether it is paid or organic) as a way of getting things moving through the various stages of our sales funnel – instead of something that will lead to a direct end result.
