The difference between tech geeks and marketing geeks is that tech geeks KNOW you don’t have a clue what they are talking about (and take pleasure in that fact!) Marketing geeks ASSUME you understand what they are talking about (and it is beyond their comprehension that you don’t.)
I excitedly submerged myself into the world of marketing after being in the world of tech for longer than some of my co-workers have been breathing air. I spent several months smiling and nodding, furiously taking notes, or frantically googling acronyms during meetings. Before I morph into one of those marketing geeks whose knowledge I am in awe of, I thought it was important to document what I learned so far on my marketing journey.
SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. SEO is the thing that helps make your company website show up higher on search engine search results. When people type in phrases like “nursing jobs in Minneapolis” or “best temp service in Charlotte”, you don’t want to be on page 24. Have you ever looked at the 24th page of your search results? If you have, we need to find you a hobby.
There are marketing geeks out there who spend their careers honing their SEO craft and many hours of their week spent keeping up on the sneaky changes that search engines like Bing and Google make to the logic they use to decide what website ranks on page one, four or twenty-four.
Brad Smith, Director of Content & Digital Marketing at Haley Marketing does a great job of dumbing SEO down for us NMG’s (non-marketing geeks) in this short 3 minute video. Trust me, SEO falls under the same category as home electrical repairs. Leave it to the professionals!
PROGRAMMATIC JOB ADVERTISING
This concept took a little while to click with me. My marketing friends will probably cringe at my explanation but here goes.
Programmatic is using automation so you can analyze and manage your job advertising spend across multiple job boards. It is an automated way to buy and place your job ads through software. Since cost-per-click advertising is based on a bidding system, it is important to have software to make decisions about increasing or decreasing bids to get in front of candidates in the blink of an eye. Think of it like purchasing a baseball bat on EBay. Everyone wants that bat. So they are all bidding against each other to win the bat. It is the same with job ads getting in front of candidates.
Another important thing that it does is move your job spend around based on need. If you have already had 40 applicants for a job, why would you want to pay a high cost per click fee on that job? Your money would be better spent on the harder to fill jobs that aren’t getting as much visibility. Going back to the EBay bat analogy. You have bids on multiple bats. You win the bids on a couple bats but you might run out of money without getting the bat that you really want or need.
Now you could sit there all day monitoring your traffic and bidding, but no one has time for that. At Haley Marketing our experience has been that clients who use our programmatic services increase the number of applicants with no increase to their job spend and in some cases a decrease in spend. Check it out here!
Sure, you could try to use a Programmatic tool yourself, but the benefit of partnering with a company experienced in Programmatic is they can help eliminate wasted spend, supplement other job boards to find more candidates. They can do job title testing to see what candidates are engaging with and expand reach with geographic expansion to surrounding areas, and help with strategies for the different markets and categories of jobs.
BLOGGING
Your website should have a Blog. Blogs on a business website are short informational articles on subject matter that is of interest to your target audience. It is important that you add at least two new blogs each month, and ideally four or more. Why? Because search engines like fresh content.
As a staffing company, your blog posts should be a good mix of candidate and client focused. When deciding on blog topics, think about subjects your candidates and clients might be interested in and would be searching for. Examples would be:
How to think like a hiring manager and land your dream job
Or
Strategies to improve your diversity in recruiting
Occasionally adding company news and events is fine, but no one is searching for “XYZ staffing company picnic photos,” except maybe your recruiter’s grandma. But she isn’t your target audience.
If you continually add new content that is relevant to your target audience, the search engines will show you some love and move you up in the search rankings. A bonus to having a consistent flow of new blogs is it also provides content for your company social media accounts. Posting your blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, positions your company as a thought leader and drives traffic back to your website. I know it seems hard to believe but it really works.
Stay tuned for the next installment, where I impart my newfound knowledge of PPC and Direct Marketing!