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PPC Monday – What Happens When My Marketing Has a Bad Month?

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Everyone has a bad day, bad week, bad month and sometimes even a bad year. Factors outside of our control make an impact on our personal lives and professional lives. As much as we try to keep them isolated, it’s impossible, because we are humans.

What does this have to do with your marketing? Stay with me.

When that employee of yours makes a bad decision or just doesn’t deliver (for whatever reason) on a project, over the course of a week or during a substandard 30 days, what is your reaction?
Some managers (bad ones) will overreact and reprimand their employee. It could be through yelling. It could be through taking away responsibility. It could be through termination.

Good managers don’t do that. They don’t overreact. They try to get to the bottom of the issue and find solutions. Are there external factors affecting your employee’s productivity? Is it just human nature and their decisions were wrong? Did market factors change and everyone has to make an adjustment?

Are you still with me? Good – because here’s where it ties into marketing.

Your marketing team, partner, etc. is going to have a bad month. After a period of steady growth, for some reason, the report on your desk at the first of the month is going to have worse results than you are used to.

Why am I writing about this topic in a PPC Monday post? Because in the month of May, the Facebook advertising results for staffing agencies were definitely worse than the first four months of the year? Why – we’ll dig a little deeper but the answer isn’t apparent yet. What is apparent is that results dropped anywhere from 25-50 percent for a lot of Facebook campaigns.

When you are making an investment in marketing, the first reaction can be to overreact and want to make numerous changes. That’s not going to be the right decision. Here’s what you should do.

Don’t Overreact!

If your decision is to fire a member of your marketing team (or your marketing partner) every time they bring you bad news, the turnover is going to be really high.

However, as a decision-maker in your staffing agency, you should expect answers, and a good marketer will be able to give those answers.

With Facebook, we saw a significant decrease in click-thru rate for a number of our campaigns (a 25-50 percent decrease in some cases). Why is that? It could be a number of reasons:

  • More competition on Facebook
  • Fewer people interested in staffing agency content
  • Fewer people looking for jobs
  • Change in Facebook algorithm

In April, a number of staffing agencies that we work with saw great analytics with their Facebook advertising, so there really wasn’t a reason to expect a drop-off in May (and possibly moving forward). Similar to the second half of 2016, we saw website traffic drop across the industry by a significant percentage because of fewer job candidates looking for jobs.

Could the same thing be happening on Facebook? Possibly, but we need a bigger sample size to find out.

What’s Our Plan?

That’s not to say your marketing team should just ignore the month of May and carry on in June as if everything was gumdrops and butterflies. What are some ideas to stimulate your Facebook advertising?

  • Does your Facebook campaign need a fresh set of ads? Facebook’s algorithm wants to see new ads every three to six months. Maybe it’s time to change them up. Consider new images and copy.
  • Should you be promoting something different? Maybe people aren’t searching for jobs in the same capacity. What will they always click on? GOOD CONTENT! Take a step back and look at the blog posts, white papers, ebooks, etc. that receive the highest amount of clicks and people spend the longest amount of time reading. Promote that content and see what happens
  • Does your staffing agency need to change its targeting? Maybe your target audience is stale and you need to get in front of new users. A Facebook remarketing and Google remarketing campaigns are a great way to keep that audience fresh because your most recent website visitors will see your latest advertisements.
  • Was it just a bad month? It could have been a weird month in the online advertising world. Maybe it will bounce back. The analytics will let you know.
  • Should you be spending more money? That is a long-term answer (and another PPC Monday blog post for another Monday), but if the market is getting more competitive, your current ad spend isn’t going to produce the same results as it did six months ago. Are you satisfied with that?

Consult with your marketing team and see what the best option is for your staffing agency. Just like that employee who had a bad month, you aren’t going to let them sit idly and hope for the best, but you aren’t going to overreact. You will use the symptoms to dig down to the root of the problem and make the necessary changes.

Remember – one bad month is just an example. Two bad months is a coincidence. Three bad months is a trend.

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