In our first blog post in the PPC Monday series, we provided a baseline of understanding about the world of pay-per-click advertising.
Now that we’ve gotten our toes wet, it’s time to figure out if your staffing agency should even be considering online advertising as a marketing option. It might not be the best fit or it could be the perfect answer.
Well, What’s Your Business Goal
In our role as consultants, we work with staffing agencies nationwide to help them overcome marketing challenges to reach their business goals. What are some common goals we hear?
- We need candidates (a very popular one right now)
- We have low brand recognition
- We staff in a niche industry
- We have great website traffic but aren’t getting new clients/candidates
- Our social media posts don’t reach many people
- Our return website visits are low
- We want to reach a new geographic market
- We can’t find new clients
Online advertising can help with all of these goals. It shouldn’t be your only method and isn’t the silver bullet, but it can be a really, really effective part of your marketing strategy.
Wait, Online Advertising Can Help with All of Those?
Well, the same strategy won’t meet every goal. Facebook ads won’t meet the goal that a Google Remarketing campaign accomplishes. Google Adwords won’t help your business reach the goal of a LinkedIn ad.
So why is online advertising a good solution for staffing agencies’ goals?
- Adults spend 11.5 hours per day online, at a desktop or laptop or on a tablet or mobile device.
- 85 percent of searches for products or services take place online
- 54.5 percent of people can’t identify online ads
- People spend 50 minutes per day on Facebook. The only things we do more are sleep, eat/drink and watch TV
We’ll stop at four, but those statistics are impressive. If people are spending a lot of time online and half of them can’t identify advertisements, it sounds like a perfect opportunity for staffing agencies and recruiters.
Cost Is the Kicker, Right?
Well, yes and no. An online advertising budget can be whatever you want. A lower budget works better on Facebook, which is the most cost-effective online advertising solution available.
Facebook is the perfect answer for recruiting light industrial, administrative, clerical and healthcare – to name just a few. We have seen a lot of success targeting job candidates in those industries. The information technology and engineers of the world aren’t going to Facebook to find a new job. (Or if they are, the cost to obtain that job candidate is very high).
On Google and LinkedIn, cost can be a different story. Remember the Google AdWords we talked about last week? (Hint: The text ads that show up at the top of your search results.) Those can be very competitive and expensive. You’ll be competing with Indeed, Monster, large staffing agencies and other national companies.
Should Google AdWords be avoided? No – 3.5 billion searches take place on Google each day. However, Google AdWords has to fit into your budget and be the right option to meet the need of your business goal.
The same can be said for LinkedIn. That online advertising platform is as expensive as anything available in the online advertising space for staffing agencies. On LinkedIn, the cost per click could be anywhere from $7-$100 where on Facebook, that cost per click is under a dollar (sometimes around $0.25). It can work especially well in the B2B space or if you’re placing direct hires with high salaries. But for light industrial or administrative staffing, that won’t be the answer.
Yes – Online Advertising Is Right for Your Staffing Agency
If I just wrote that at the top of this blog, it puts the cart before the horse. There is no cookie-cutter solution for your staffing agency to use online advertising as a marketing solution to meet your business goal. We’ll dig deeper later in the series into each of these solutions.
Working in the space every day, I am biased and think every staffing agency should have some sort of online advertising campaign. It’s hard to dispute the number of people online every day and the amount of time they spend on computers, laptops, tablets and mobile devices.
Will PPC ads be the right fit? Will Google AdWords help your company? Should you be on Facebook? The answer comes in examining your goals, target audience and budget, and finding the right solution for your staffing agency. The answer will be yes.
Next Time on PPC Monday – Search Engine Marketing vs. PPC
Does your staffing agency need both? Should it only focus on SEO? Should you dump all of your budget into Facebook ads? Should you ignore SEO and just try to be in the top spot of Google AdWords for the terms your candidates are searching for? We’ll touch on that next time.
