Digital Marketing for Recruiters: Maximize Engagement and Results
Marketing to both employers and candidates has become increasingly complex. Staffing agency owners are faced with a bewildering selection of approaches, tools, technologies, and the difficult task of making right-sized investments to balance the resources needed for simultaneously market to both targets.
This strategy is deployed by staffing agencies by offering variations on their core staffing services. You might have a “preferred customer” service with a core of “first choice” candidates, or even create a service that focuses on a narrow subset of candidates built around specific job titles or industries. Don’t forget where and in what locations/Cities you would want to target.
We often see a lot of confusion about what objectives, strategies, and tactics to use, and the relationship among them. Each growth strategy you employ will have its own unique set of objectives, strategies, and tactics, so electing to pursue different types of growth models has involves different terms of resources, technologies, costs.
So, what kind of strategies could you use? A goal like “plan and execute lead generation campaigns,” which can be one of many strategies that can be employed for increasing top line revenues.
In fact, each objective could have multiple strategies. Results for each strategy can be measured, and after tactics are identified, each strategy can have its own budget which, in turn, allows for a measurement of return on investment for the strategy.
Key Marketing Strategies for Your Staffing Agency or Recruiting Firm
An objective or goal of increasing the agency’s top line could have the following 3 strategies. We’ll also give a few examples of tactics for each strategy.
1. Increase Visibility and Brand Awareness
Whether it’s sourcing for new candidates or growing accounts, if you don’t have visibility, the likelihood that you’ll meet your growth goals will be significantly degraded.
To increase visibility with employers, tactics such as SEO for recruitment agencies, paid advertising, blogging, video marketing, and social media ad strategies can be highly effective.
Tactics for more visibility to candidates gets into the realm of agency branding and how your brand is developed and presented, particularly in the Online and social media sphere.
2. Finding Exceptional Candidates
Without exceptional candidates to fill open orders, reaching growth goals will be difficult. Sourcing great candidates is also instrumental for building your brand and pleasing clients.
From a tactical perspective, the bad news is that it’s likely that you and your competitors use the same channels to find and reach candidates. At Denali & Associates our strategies and keyword focus can generate both new clients and candidates in your perspective target market. This can give you a competitive advantage in finding new clients and candidates in a new way.
3. Generate More Leads
An employer-facing lead generation strategy and lead generation tactics are critical for any staffing or recruiting firm. While many agencies enjoy the benefit of an abundance of job orders, aggressive growth-oriented firms will want to develop and execute a proactive lead generation strategy and tactics that can capture a lead at any point on a client’s journey.
There are a wide variety of lead generation tactics, each of which requires a combination of funding, creativity, and great execution to be successful. That is where Denali & Associates come in.
To further enhance your lead generation efforts, you may also want to explore creative approaches to recruitment marketing. In our article, 13 Marketing Ideas For Recruitment Agencies, we delve into actionable strategies that can help recruitment firms attract both clients and candidates through innovative marketing techniques. These ideas can be a powerful complement to your overall strategy, ensuring you capture leads and maintain a competitive edge in your market.
Now, let’s continue with additional tactics that can boost your staffing agency’s visibility and success.
Building a campaign to Open the Door to New Accounts
There are three categories for account growth that staffing agencies and recruiting firms need to consider as part of their growth strategy and plans:
1. Strategic Growth Planning
Planning is an essential and fundamental part of your infrastructure needs. This includes activities like defining quantifiable goals and objectives for new business dollars, new accounts, sales qualified leads, and website visitors. Planning addresses, research of keywords and keyword search volume. It involves the Creation of Topical Map (1. Identify Seed Keywords like HR Staffing that we want to be the authority in) (2. We research all topics and queries, for content and guest posts, that will help your site be an authority in your niche – this involves internal linking etc.)
It involves competitive research and Website analysis. All of this has to work in harmony to be effective. This is so Google easily understands that you have an authority site and in turn ranks you faster and higher. It establishes your SEO and keyword strategy, and much more.
2. Content Development
Today’s marketing requires that staffing agencies create and use a significant number of different types of content for use at different stages of your buyer’s journey. This can include a blog, case studies, media buys, videos, whitepapers, and your website. It’s likely that of all the marketing items and actions in your budget, content will be the second largest line item.
3. Social Media
Social media has become an important tactic for staffing agencies for both account- and candidate-facing marketing initiatives. Beyond establishing social media accounts on Twitter, Meta, LinkedIn, etc., Posting to social media should be an internal process, because you know your business best, however, Denali & Associates can create highly targeted Meta ad campaigns and do all the heavy lifting as it relates to the development of a business suite, Ad development and budget management.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing, also known as traditional marketing, targets a broad audience using print ads, trade shows, telemarketing/cold calls, direct mail/e-mail, etc. Agencies push their messages outward in the hopes that it will trigger a response in the form of a contact. This is a more traditional approach to marketing. And there is nothing wrong with it. The more the marrier.
There’s a different and new way of getting more ROI from your agency’s investment in marketing and business development: inbound marketing
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is an approach to business development based upon moving away from pushing messages to pulling suspects and prospects into a relationship.
Inbound marketing involves strategies and tactics for:
- “Getting found first” by potential customers who are searching online for solutions to their staffing problems.
- Converting those who have found your agency into a new engagement with lead generation and nurturing tactics.
- Transforming traditional outbound activities for more inbound traffic.
- Continually monitoring and measuring results to refine tactics to deliver more ROI to your business.
Basically, rather than interrupting CEOs, CFOs, and business owners to get their attention with emails, cold calls, snail mail, and the like, inbound marketing relies on the principle that they’ll find and come to you if you have the right mix of online presence in place.
To build and maintain a successful inbound marketing program you should have.
1. Optimized Website
Websites need to be engineered in order to “get found.” This involves a combination of having a keyword strategy, page configuration, great copywriting, and continually adding content through vehicles like blogging.
2. Blog
Blogging serves a number of purposes, from adding optimized content around keywords and seed keywords as part of a “get found first” strategy, to its used as a vehicle for publishing key articles defining your services and issues involved in the industry.
3. Content
One of the more challenging aspects of inbound marketing is having a continually fresh supply of content to populate blogs, articles, and so forth. Our team of professional writers take on this heavy lifting and create awe inspiring content.
4. Great Lead Gen
Lead generation is a combination of art and science. It’s the hardest part of inbound marketing, requiring strategic thinking and planning first, and executions second. Denali & Associates excel in this process.
6. Landing Pages for Conversion
Once you get eyeballs to the website, you need to have an on-site mechanism to convert them to leads. This is done through landing pages, and interactive lead capture form, which serve to capture information and degree of interest of a client or applicant.
7. CRM
“Closed loop inbound marketing” includes a CRM system that “talks” to lead generation capture data and serves to outline and record information gathered. Do you have to have a CRM system, particularly if you are a mid to small HR recruiting firm, No. A CRM system just helps organize those inbound leads that come in.
For instance, if you currently have a PDF system in place, that has multiple fields, Denali & Associates has the expertise to convert these systems into a digital platform making it easier for new clients and applicants to complete and to help you organize these leads and information.
9. Analytics
Key analytics for inbound marketing include items such as sources of traffic, SEO, social media reach, lead gen campaign conversion metrics, site visitors, and more. Denali & Associates will configure Google Search Console and Analytics so together we can track the activity of your inbound campaign.
10. Social Media Accounts
Social media accounts like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Meta serve a few purposes — they can be used to promote and drive traffic to the website for conversion to leads, and are keys to listening and responding to conversations that can lead to new business opportunities.
11. Backlink Strategy
A key part of getting found first is based upon search engine page ranking, and search engines like Google look to see how many other sites link back to yours as a measure of the site’s authority and credibility. This is a difficult and arduous task that takes time, but one that needs critical attention.
Inbound Marketing for Staffing Agencies and Recruiting Firms
While some agencies and recruiting firms have been doing this in some fashion for quite a long time, new marketing thinking and tools like inbound marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and blogging are putting the need for a constant and consistent supply of fresh, relevant, and interesting content at the front and center of new business efforts.
Contextual Marketing:
Contextual marketing refers to online and mobile marketing that provides targeted communications based upon user information, such as the search terms they’re using, recent web-browsing activity, or demographics.
Contextual marketing has been developing over the past decade and continues to become more specific as the Internet becomes more accessible and integrated. Meanwhile, a new type of contextual marketing is being developed around mobile devices, as more and more people carry such technology with them everywhere they go.
A well planned and executed content strategy is built to move prospects through your sales funnel.
Lead generation involves both on-site and off-site promotion (outbound) to reach eyeballs for conversion to leads.
Call-to-Action Buttons
Essentially, a call-to-action (or CTA) is a banner, button, or some type of graphic or text on a website meant to prompt a user to click and continue down a conversion funnel. It is an essential part of inbound marketing in that it actively strives to convert a user into a lead and later into a customer.
Landing Pages
Your lead generation efforts need infrastructure for lead acquisition and capture. This is done through constructing a landing page on your website where you can capture a visitor’s contact information.
Off-Site Promotion
There are a variety of paid and unpaid media tactics we integrate into your lead generation campaign. These include paid advertising and media buys of high DA (Domain Authority) and Niche Relevance that promote and link back to your website.
Although the previous strategy is in reference to SEO, and though these strategies are great in themselves to drive traffic to your website and content, a comprehensive digital strategy may include Paid Google Advertising and incorporating retargeting (or remarketing). Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that allows you to serve ads to people who have previously visited your site, helping you reach those who don’t convert right away.
Lead capture development
Having an effortless lead generation form. At Denali & Associates we craft autofill forms with autocomplete for maximum results!
Metrics and Analysis
Together, we want to measure things like quantity of leads secured through a lead generation campaign, but also conversion metrics like visits-to-leads, landing page effectiveness, and the effectiveness of the various tactics you’ve deployed for promoting your offer.
Strong brands attract strong candidates. They serve as competitive differentiators. A strong brand drives inquiry from candidates, employers, and referral sources. A brand can be the basis for meaningful and long-lasting bonds of loyalty and trust. And finally, a strong brand identity can be a rationale for commanding higher fees.
In a time where good quality candidates are fielding multiple inquiries or offers, or reluctant to engage with you, being a commodity just won’t cut it. Your brand image, reputation, and the brand experience you deliver will be the difference between more qualified candidates, More customers, more satisfied customers, and more growth in revenues and profit.
Establishing a strong digital presence in the staffing and HR sector requires tailored solutions and specialized support. We understand the unique challenges faced by staffing and HR firms in the digital space. Our team collaborates with you to close branding gaps and broaden your online reach. We provide custom website development, targeted SEO copywriting, and a range of personalized content services designed to meet the specific needs of your HR Staffing business.
At Denali & Associates we aim to bridge the gap between your specialized services and the needs of employers and job seekers. We produce content that not only informs but also inspires employers and job seekers to take action. We are dedicated to establishing your online presence, enhancing your brand’s reach, and driving meaningful business growth.
Let’s Summarize – Denali & Associates offers a full-service SEO solution for your recruiting agency
Phase #1 – Keyword Research
- Identifying the right keywords to target
- Analyze the competitor keywords & SERPs.
- Grouping keywords to optimize existing pages or to create new content pages.
Phase #2 – On-Site Optimization
- Designing the website structure, interlinking pages
- Optimizing the content with the targeted keyword’s
- Writing catchy SEO titles and meta descriptions
- Checklist of twenty-one items….
- SETUP – Month 1 LOCAL BUSINESS SETUP
- Google My Business ✅
- Yelp Listing Creation ✅
- Yellow Pages Creation ✅
- Local Business Listings ✅
- Consultation ✅
- SETUP – Month 1 WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
- Pages Optimized
- Keyword Optimization
- Title Tag Optimization
- Meta Descriptions
- SEO Strategy ✅
- Google Analytics ✅
- Website Audit ✅
- Keyword Research ✅
- Keyword Groups ✅
- Google Search Console ✅
- Keyword Mapping ✅
- Robots.txt Check ✅
- Blog Activation ✅
- .xml Sitemap ✅
- Redirect Optimization ✅
- Extra Rich Snippet ✅
- Live SEO URL for Targeted Keywords
- Creation of Topical Map (1. Identify Seed Keywords like HR Staffing that we want to be the authority in) (2. We research all topics and queries, for content and guest posts, that will help your site be an authority in your niche – this involves internal linking etc.)
Furthermore, Denali & Associates offers everything you need to build an effective search engine friendly website or website redesign for your business. We have the expertise you need to build this most important foundation for your inbound marketing initiatives.
