According to HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report, the biggest challenges for any marketeer in 2021 are:
- Generating traffic
- Generating leads
- Proving return on investment (ROI) for your marketing activities
So, let’s look at ways to solve each of these when it comes to recruitment marketing.
How can you generate traffic for your recruitment website?
Almost half of the marketers surveyed listed getting traffic to their website as their biggest challenge. So, how can you increase your website traffic?
By ensuring your content is search engine optimised (SEO).
I’m not talking about writing for Google. We all know that content has to be written for real people. It has to be clear, concise, easy and enjoyable to read. It has to answer a question for your audience, or solve a problem for them. But in additional to all that, it has to be SEO friendly.
How do you optimise your recruitment marketing content?
To help you write and optimise your recruitment blog, BlueSky PR has a handy checklist available that you can download but here are some of the key tips:
- Be sure to optimise the length of and the key phrase used in your title tag.
- Check the competitiveness of the key word or phrase you‘re targeting and make sure your blog post is the optimal length.
- Use images and videos with relevant alt tags.
- Use a persuasive meta description – one that gives readers a reason to click through to your website.
How can you turn your web traffic into leads?
It’s all very well getting people to your website but now you have to convert them into leads.
One of the biggest challenges for marketers year on year, according to HubSpot’s report, is proving return on investment (ROI) from your marketing activities. And for recruitment marketing, proving ROI is all about tracking the leads your marketing activities bring in.
Whether your goal here is for your website visitors to call you, or give you their details so you an call them. You have to give them a reason to do so.
Now if they are an active job seeker visiting a job advert, as long as the job appeals to them they are likely to apply or call you. But that’s not going to work for passive candidates (or clients).
What would make a passive candidate give you their contact details?
Access to gated content that solves a problem or answers a question for them such as an eBook, whitepaper or webinar.
What that problem / question is, and what compels them, will depend on the industry you work with but it is sharing your expertise that will drive leads.
How do you demonstrate the ROI from your marketing activities?
As a recruitment marketer, you know that recruitment marketing is vital to growing a recruitment business but it can be hard to demonstrate this.
There are lots of useful stats you want to be measuring to ensure the success of your recruitment marketing strategy, such a the number of website visitors your site is receiving, the sources of your website traffic and your Google ranking to make sure your SEO is working BUT that isn’t the ROI.
When it comes to recruitment marketing ROI, the metrics that count are:
- The number of leads brought in (their estimated value is the potential ROI from marketing)
- The number of leads that convert (the deal or contract value is the ROI from the combination of marketing and sales)
Whether the leads your are looking to attract from a particular marketing campaign are clients or candidates, each will have a financial value attached, either the value of the overall client contact or the individual client placement.
Your CRM is where you can track the number of leads you bring in, whether it be via your website, events, social media etc. either by using a specific field to track this, which is the simplest option, or by using the notes function. It also helps to get your consultants to ask any leads that come in via the phone what content led them to call in, and then to track this to the CRM.
And as long as you can see where a lead came from, and any content they engaged with along the way, then you, and/or your MD, can track the number of leads that convert as well.
That will give you a true picture of the return on your investment.
The solution to all three challenges
At the end of the day, to solve any of these recruitment marketing challenges, giving people what they want is the answer:
- Give your audience the answer to the question they’ve been Googling.
- Solve their problem.
- Show them they can trust you.
- Find out your Director’s goals and measure against them.
The full original article with additional tips is available on the BlueSky PR website.