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When it comes to your marketing you need to remember that your clients and your candidates are not you. It’s not a good idea to make decisions coming from that premise. That’s the subject of today’s podcast so let’s get into it.
Why is it what you like doesn’t really matter? Unless of course, you are your audience. Something that we challenge our clients on a number of occasions is not to make assumptions and as the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie amply demonstrated, we are all very different. You have to ensure that when you are marketing to your target market, you don’t get in the way. What I mean by that is they may have a different mindset to you, so they may think very different to you.
You probably have experienced this yourself, where you’re with a friend and you think “Why the heck have they done that?” Or “I cannot believe they’re doing that! I never thought that!” That’s because we are all different. One of the challenges that you have as a business owner is to be able to step inside your candidate and your client’s shoes. There’s a nice technical term for this and it is called “second positioning.” So you need to be able to second position the people that you are going to be marketing to so that you can use the words and phrases that will resonate with them.
In marketing speaking terms this is called your “message to market match” and you need to get it right. One of the ways of doing this is to create a persona – your client or candidate persona. Thinking about some of your favourite clients and some of the typical candidates that you find really easy to please. They will have certain attributes. Some people call these personas, some people call them avatars.
So if you were to look back at your favourite clients, the clients that pay you the most money are the easiest to work with, they will have certain attributes. What you need to think about is “If I’m wanting to attract this type of person to me, what are the words and phrases I need to use and what do I need to be delivering for that person to come to me?” That’s the key thing when it comes to developing your marketing and your messages.
Something else that is important, and we talked to a lot of recruiters about this, is making assumptions. Quite often we will say to people “We need some good evergreen content on your site related to your niche or sector.” That might be ‘interview questions’, ‘how to prepare yourself’, ‘how to be confident’. It is very easy to make an assumption “Oh Denise that has been done to death!” Well, actually no it hasn’t because this content is on your website and let’s just say we are working with a new client at the moment that is in the hospitality industry. They are a brilliant client and what they do is they help bring fantastic chefs into London and the South East and they do it really well.
Just this last week we created a blog post around CV Skills for Chefs – how they could map out the CV, what was going to be relevant? What experience was important? Obviously, we chatted about this with the client and literally in a relatively small niche, this particular article was shared around 70 or 80 times on LinkedIn because people found it of value.
Remember that in your industry you think “Oh well, everyone knows about interview skills” or “Everyone knows how to prepare for that next interview that they are going to have.” The truth is that they don’t. Another truth is they are not looking at every single website. For instance, we’ve talked about this client of ours that provides chefs. Chefs are not going to go and look on a recruiter’s website that is displaying admin jobs or that is in the engineering sector. It’s a completely different set. They are not going to search for that on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. They are going to go very specific to their sector.
The point of raising this with you again is to make sure that you don’t make assumptions that people know all that. You’re a recruiter. Of course, you know how to write a job spec and you know how to interview. It’s your job, your expertise and career. That is not the same for your clients and your candidates. Many of them don’t have the huge recruiting experience that you have.
I know from my own corporate background. I was quite lucky. I worked in recruitment within the organisation. I built a lot of sales forces. There were times when I would go through interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people so my skills were quite honed.
If you are a manager and you are just recruiting just 1 or 2 people a year which is not uncommon. Do you not think you might get rusty? Yes, you will. You do need some help and support. So imagine if you put that sort of information on your website, what a difference that could make.
This is Denise and I’m going to get off my soapbox now. I just wanted to make a point about this -remembering to step inside somebody else’s shoes. See it from a different point of view. See it from your client and your candidate’s point of view because you know what? That will so put you in front of the pack because a lot of people don’t. A lot of people think everyone is mistakenly and a little bit arrogantly think that everybody is like them and they know how to attract people. However, that is not my experience.
This is Denise, as I said you can head over to the superfastrecruitment.co.uk blog. You can download this and you can see the show notes. Bye for now!
Show Notes:
15 secs – Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire Movie – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ3fjQa5Hls
40 secs – When it comes to marketing, REMEMBER your clients and candidates are not you.
1:25 – Our website…
1:39 – Meet Flo
2:00 – Why what you like doesn’t matter – Don’t make assumptions
2:30 – Don’t get in the way when you are marketing to your target market
2:59 – Step inside your client or candidate’s shoes – second positioning
3:20 – Message to market match – client to candidate persona/avatar
3:50 – Create your own avatar
4:08 – What do I need to say or do to attract certain types of clients and candidates?
4:34 – On making assumptions
4:40 – Good evergreen content related to your niche
4:55 – Actually, It hasn’t been done ‘to death’
5:14 – Example: New client – CV Skills for Chefs
5:57 – You think everyone knows but they don’t
6:20 – People go to pages that are specific to their sector
6:50 – Many of them do not have the recruiting experience that you do
7:00 – My recruitment background
7:15 – Do you think you might get rusty?
7:25 – What kind of difference can you make?
7:50 – Don’t think that everybody is like you.
This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+
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