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Marketing Strategy for Staffing Firms (7-minute educational video)

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What’s the best marketing strategy for your staffing agency?

In this short Snack Time video, Co-CEO David Searns explains three unique models for creating your staffing or recruiting firm’s marketing strategy:

3 Models for Your Staffing Agency’s Marketing Strategy

Here at Haley Marketing, every Thursday morning we hold a “Be a Consultant Class” and lesson six is entitled “My Three Favorite Models.” These are my three favorite ways to look at marketing strategy:

Model 1: The Marketing Pyramid

Think about the marketing for your organization like a pyramid. The foundation of your pyramid is your company’s mission, vision and values. They really form the basis for everything you’re going to do. It’s what your company is all about, and everything you do – from sales to marketing to recruiting – has to be true to those values and mission.

Sitting on top of that is your messaging. It’s the words you use to describe your value and your purpose to employers and job seekers. Your messaging consists of your:

  • Key differentiators: those attributes of your services that make you different
  • Value proposition: why those key differentiators have value for your clients and candidates.
  • Positioning: think of the marketplace like a pie. This is the slice of the pie you own; it’s the playing field where you’re gonna play. You’re defining your ideal customers.
  • Core story: an educational story that ties it all together to convey to your ideal customers your differentiators and your value.

On top of that sits your website and collateral and your messaging should permeate your website content and your sales collateral, whether that’s printed or digital materials that you’re using to enhance the sales process.

Now on top of that are two things that help support the very top of the pyramid, which is your salespeople and your recruiters.

So in that center section is integrated direct marketing and content and inbound marketing, but they support sales, and so a marketing pyramid has all these elements that your company’s values, your purpose, flows through all the way up to how your people sell and recruit.

Model 2: Strategic Communication

How do we get your staffing firm’s messaging to the right people? First, you must know who your ideal customer is – is it an HR manager? Is that a line manager? A front-line supervisor or maybe a CEO?

If we think about how we should get our message to that audience, we usually think of picking up the phone. We make calls, we go knock on doors, we attend trade events and we do all kinds of things to try to tell our message to the world. That’s called promotion. It can be done with advertisements or on social media, but it’s our message going out.

But when it comes to reaching your target decisionmaker, that’s really one leg of a triangle and that leg actually works better if you do these other two legs first.

The second leg is influencers: Who already has a channel of communication into that person in the middle of the triangle that you want to reach? Maybe it’s their peers, maybe it’s other vendors, maybe it’s their supervisor.

I heard a great example from some company that sold incentive travel and they said the person in the center of the triangle was the CEO, the influencer was the CEO’s spouse or significant other – because they were the ones who really got to use the benefits of the travel destination.

Who are your staffing agency’s influencers and can you market to them to get referred to your target decision-maker?

The third leg of the triangle is becoming a source of information. When your ideal customer has a question, where do they turn? Well, they go to Google. So are they finding you on Google? Are you producing lots of great content that’s optimized for search engines?

But where else do they go? Are there trade publications or expert advisors who have podcasts or webinars in your industry? If you think about your customers and your candidates and where they look to get information to address their business challenges or their job-search challenges, you want to become that source of information. And if you’re effectively working with influencers to get referred in, you’re a source of information people are finding.

Now when you do your promotion, you’re a company that’s known – you have top-of-mind awareness. You’ve created a positive perception of your brand, which makes your sales efforts and recruiting efforts much more productive.

Model 3: Integrated Direct Marketing | Content and Inbound Marketing

Integrated direct marketing is about being strategic: having a process that systematically goes after every prospect with a consistent sequence of activities. You may use lots of different channels of communication: mail, email, social media, the phone, paid advertising on Google or social media, going to trade conferences, etc. You’re trying to reach people the way they want to be reached.

Integrated Direct Marketing

With integrated direct marketing, your sales team is using multiple ways to follow up:

  • They’re picking up the phone.
  • They’re sending out email.
  • They’re connecting on LinkedIn.
  • They may be even texting.
  • They may be using Facebook specifically for recruiting or Messenger in Facebook to communicate.

And you’re giving people different ways to take action. Sure they can answer your call, but maybe they can go to your website and visit a landing page. They can just respond with an email. Maybe they’ll agree to an in-person meeting. And when you integrate marketing before your sales call, and again after your sales call to stay top of mind, you’ll see anywhere from two to ten times the response to what you would normally get with pure cold calling.

Content and Inbound Marketing: The Art of Selling Without Selling

Content and inbound marketing is about getting people to come to you. That’s what we do in recruiting all the time, but we can also do it in business development by creating content:

  • Blogs
  • Videos
  • Infographics
  • eBooks
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletters
  • Webinars

After you create your content, you have to make sure it gets found. Just creating it’s not enough! You can help your content found through email, social media, having salespeople dropping things off, paid advertising on Google, search engine optimization and more.

Once people find your content, you have to drive response from them. Include offers and calls to action associated with a landing page for the piece of content, or create a follow-up process with marketing automation to get people to take action. When staffing companies use a great content and inbound strategy, 30 to 40 percent of business can be inbound!

What’s the right marketing approach for your staffing or recruiting firm?

Schedule a free consultation with a marketing educator today!

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