This is a guest post from Tom McLoughlin at Growth Recruits, a specialist marketing company for recruitment agencies, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Tom shares his thoughts on marketing for recruitment companies.
As a recruitment company, it’s your job to support companies and candidates by bridging the gap. Even though there are a plethora of employment platforms that automate the recruitment process for both sides, candidates still look to recruitment agencies to assist them in finding the right role.
Likewise, to reach the best candidates, companies take the route of recruitment agencies and to find the best agencies, they look online. It, therefore, becomes integral that recruiters ensure they have an engaging presence online and leverage these opportunities.
With that in mind, listed below are five marketing strategies to bolster your efforts in reaching your audience. Utilising these approaches will help you get an edge over your competitors and increase the chances of growing your business.
Solidifying Brand
According to Forbes business consultant Larry Alton, ‘Two-thirds of major companies will fail in the next 25 years.’
To survive in an ever-developing, over-crowded market, you need something different from the competition. A survey by OnBuy revealed 71% of the prospective consumers identify with a brand before buying a product or subscribing to a service. For companies in the recruitment sector, getting a jump on the major players means projecting your agency as a specialist in its niche.
Solidifying your brand will help you get the desired recognition in the eyes of your potential customers if they believe the value in your expert knowledge.
Chris Oddy, at Harrogate based, KO2 Embedded Recruitment Solutions, believes ‘Our knowledge of the market, coupled with our collaborative approach & passion for the industry, is key to our success. Deciding to hone in on electronics and embedded systems, over the more generic sector or recruitment in general has definitely helped our business growth and marketing.”
It’s not just a company brand that can make a difference. Your efforts combined with employer branding will certainly help you attract the right talent and keep you in the good books of both the employers and candidates.
There are various ways to enhance your brand image in the industry:
- Hosting well-orchestrated events: Sponsoring or hosting events is a great way to attract employers and job seekers. Events help you gain more audience and build relationships.
- Take part in Job Fairs: Participate in job fairs specific to your industry. Prepare ahead for these events, develop your advertisement banners, promotional materials and don’t be scared to talk to people.
- Social Media: Using social media to project your company values and working culture can help attract potential candidates not only to use your recruitment service but to want to work for you.
In the words of Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room.” It’s important to make sure what they say is positive, but it’s more important to make sure they positively interact with your company.
Limit Yourself, Don’t Limit Yourself!
When approaching a marketing campaign, try narrowing down your target audience. The more you boil down your market, the better the chances of engagement. It is better to attract the interested audience than to cast the net too wide and catch nothing.
This applies especially when dealing with journalists to gain PR coverage. If you don’t have anything different, they are not going to publish your content.
Sometimes to get coverage from PR work, you have to sacrifice some of the audience. Limiting your audience might seem counter-intuitive but trying to run an all encapsulating campaign that the whole world loves usually ends up in content that is too generic to engage anyone.
Another great way to focus on niche marketing is by using email campaigns. Email marketing is one of the most underrated strategies today. It has a higher engagement level than most channels and will also help you filter out your most interested candidates and clients.
Another quick and easy way to do this is to create dedicated social media pages for your agency and approach the potential job seekers on social media. Where Facebook and Instagram offer a more casual approach, using platforms like LinkedIn can reach candidates directly looking for jobs.
Shout About Positive Customer Reviews
Around 63% of new customers engage with brands that have positive customer reviews on their website.
Satisfied customers provide authentic reviews for the services provided. Make sure to add those reviews on your social media and to your website. This is one of the best ways for word-of-mouth advertising.
There are several benefits of sharing your customer reviews:
- Reviews help shape a positive customer opinion: When companies and candidates observe your previous and existing clients’ past experiences, the first impression resonates with trust. In this, it is also important to publish the moderate reviews because showing only positive reviews are less likely to attract attention.
- Reviews on social media are a great image uplifter: Social media referrals are trusted by 71% of the consumers. Therefore, share your reviews on social media to garner more trust and better clients.
SEO
Never underestimate the power of good SEO when it comes to marketing and enhancing your outreach. It’s now widely known that the majority of job seekers search for job vacancies on the internet and usually via a mobile phone.
Improving your website’s SEO with targeted keywords and phrases will help you get more attention. Leverage good content, site structure, and linking (internal and external) to improve your visibility in search engines.
More importantly, ensure that you have a mobile-friendly and fully responsive website. A large proportion of users are using mobile phones to search, buy, and entertain themselves.
SEO consists of using both on-site and off-site practices to get the desired results. While presenting your users with good content strengthened with solid SEO practices, you can get higher rankings in search engines like Google and Bing where both clients and candidates are searching.
Keep it Simple
Your website is like a storefront to anyone who lands on it. Be it someone who is looking for a job or a company that wants to hire the services of a recruitment agency.
It is imperative to have a well-designed, clean, and aptly formatted website if you wish to gain and retain customers. Once landed, the user needs to get the relevant information within seconds. It must present them with original content bereft of any fluff and further give them a clear action to propel them towards a conversion.
Formatting your information in a manner that is easy to read, understand, and relate with is key. Every page must be focused and clearly explain the company’s values and mission. Vet Finders, a York based vet recruitment company, is a great example of not only targeting a niche with the brand but how this then translates to having a clear landing page that tells the customer what service they provide, why they are the right choice and gives an obvious call to action.
What you should be aiming for is to enhance the user experience. Any visitor who lands on your website must find it easy to navigate and find the information they need, quickly. Declutter your website and ensure the information is nicely spread with a smooth colour scheme. Keep it simple.
Conclusion
While these points will help you get ahead of the game, it’s worth noting that marketing is not a static concept. The strategies that you implement today may not work forever. Just like display ads or billboard advertisements are less prevalent than they were 50 years ago.
There are, of course, many more ways of getting your message out to the market, but the approaches highlighted above are ones we see working consistently in the industry and that if you implement now can bring you results in the relatively short term.
Author, Tom McLoughlin – Director of Growth Recruits
Tom McLoughlin is the director of, UK based, recruitment marketing specialists, Growth Recruits. Tom has vast experience from his many years in digital marketing and has an in-depth knowledge of the recruitment sector and the marketing that is required to succeed.
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