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Hi there, everyone. This is Denise from The Recruitment Marketing and Sales podcast. Welcome to today’s episode, which I hope will be useful for many of you. We often get people emailing about marketing, about working with us and about how our program actually could deliver results for them? So I thought it would be a good idea because often, at this time of year, people start to think, “Okay, what’s next? How am I going to end the year strong?” So let me answer some of the most common questions we get before people start working with us, giving you more of a sense of what exactly we can deliver for you.
Where Do I Start?
The most common question for starters is, “My marketing is pretty rubbish, and I don’t do enough of it. Yes, I know I should. I just feel overwhelmed, and I don’t know where to start.”
That is one of the most common questions, and of course, what our brains do? It has a pattern that kicks in when we know we should do something, and then we end up procrastinating and moving back and forth and back and forth. So, let’s be honest, if you’ve got this question going on for you, you’re not the first person that said this to us.
Though it sounds cliched, it is like anything. If you have a process or a blueprint, then you can follow that step by step by step. Now, this is the same in all areas of our life. I’m recording this as we near the end of a pandemic, and if you consider that, for many recruitment and staffing businesses, things went a bit weird last year, and you lost clients, what was the first thing you did? You did your classic process of getting in contact with clients. You use your classic lead generation process that you probably have been using for years.
It is the same when it comes to marketing. Yes, it’s a very creative process; however, it’s a step-by-step process. If you follow the steps and follow the system that we teach, you will get leads; you will get more candidate attraction, your brand will stand out more because we’ve mapped it all out. We are confident of this because we’ve been delivering services for recruitment and staffing companies for coming up to 15 years now.
We know what works and what doesn’t work because we get paid to deliver it for clients, so we’re not going to teach anything that doesn’t work. Of course, when you work with us, we help you save more time because we provide collateral and different resources. So that is often the first question that people want an answer to.
But I Already Do Marketing
The next question at the other end of the spectrum – one which is always a little bit more uncomfortable for people to hear the truth about – is that people come to us and say, “We’ve got our marketing covered. We’re absolutely fine. We do have some social media, we’ve got blogs, we’ve updated our brand and website, everything is in hand.” If only that were true. It is very easy when we think about our favourite brands out there, and we watch their content marketing, social media, read the odd email, probably look on the website. It does look so simple and easy, and it is very natural to think, “Oh well, that’s it. That’s marketing.”
That isn’t always true because what often will happen, and this is what we find when we talk to business owners, are that they look at things very much at a surface level. So, for example, “I’m doing social media” could mean posting twice a week when you need to be posting a lot more than that. It could be, “Well, we send out an email once a month,” or “We send out a newsletter,” all of which are just scratching the surface because the fact is that you’re only really touching the tip of the iceberg.
Remember, the recruitment sector has doubled in size in the UK over the last few years, and I appreciate that some organisations either scaled down or disappeared last year. However, what is even scarier is I think there are even more new recruitment companies registered in the UK in the last few months than ever before. If you look at some of the latest data from McKinsey, there are so many vacancies coming to the fore at the moment that many recruitment companies are being extremely competitive and going out there to grab business.
If you want to have new clients, you want to attract more candidates, which has proven a challenge. When clients first come to us, and we shine a light on what they are doing and their results, they think that what they are doing is working. But trust me, it’s highly likely that it isn’t because even though you have a blog and you have a bit of social media, ‘build it and they will come’ doesn’t quite work.
You have to have a combined sales and marketing plan that works together. Because even though you may have a presence on social media, how are you pulling that through? That’s where we come in. We give templates, resources, and instructional videos to make social selling work for you.
All of that is part of your membership of Superfast Circle. Don’t assume, in a very competitive market in which you are now operating, that it is working for you just because you are ticking one or two boxes. If you haven’t downloaded our checklist, I strongly suggest you go and look at our marketing audit checklist. You will find it at superfastrecruitment.co.uk/mcl. Go and download your copy of it and have a look. Print it off. There are 30 simple questions to answer. It will really inform you about how you are doing when delivering your marketing strategy across all the different platforms.
Will it Work for Me?
People get the value of marketing. Interestingly, I did a recent poll on LinkedIn and asked a number of questions. One of the options was, “I do no marketing”. Nobody said that they didn’t do any marketing. Many people get the value of marketing, but they’re at a point in their business where they don’t know whether it will work for them, and they’re not necessarily willing to invest in a marketing person. They’re not sure of the best way forward and how to resource their marketing, and what they might achieve.
Now, I appreciate it’s the same in every business. It’s a catch 22 situation. “When will I get the money? When will I not get the money? When should I invest?” That is a question that every business owner has to navigate at some point. That’s why it’s even more vital that you invest your valuable time and resources in proven marketing activities that work. That is what we deliver through the different elements of our programme.
We have a training part of the program. There are over 120 training videos, and we also deliver a marketing campaign every single month. On top of that, we have four or five different email campaigns to adapt that you can use in your marketing. So we give you many resources as well as training.
We even have a tech expert who can demonstrate how to set up an email campaign after setting up your social media. All these different things that you can move forward with right now. I suggest you do not wait until you get a marketing exec or a marketing manager to start doing something. One of my mentors always says, ‘Do the hard things now if you want to grow and stop complaining about it’.
As you start doing those hard things and start implementing, you need to think about where you can get resources to use now that has been tested and works. Well, you can get those from us. If you want to know more about our resource section and everything we do, get in touch with us. You can book a call with either Sharon or me by going to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call.
Do I need a strategy?
People often say, “We’re doing a few marketing things, but we need a plan. We need to know what’s going to work in our specific sector.” Now, here’s the thing. Marketing is marketing, and it’s about creating demand. The majority of strategies we teach and provide resources for will work in any sector.
Over the past 14, 15 years, we’ve worked with recruitment companies to build marketing plans across a multitude of sectors from FinTech to hospitality, to leadership, to consultancies, to the legal sector, to people that wanted contractors, interims, and contracting staff and temps. We have worked across the whole spectrum. Trust me, the campaigns that we’ve developed work across all of these sectors. That is a straightforward answer to your question. Of course, because we have experience working in all these sectors, come and have a conversation. We will let you know and just say, “Yes, we can help you there.” Or “No, we can’t.” Again, very simple. Just book a call with one of us.
Marketing Doesn’t Work for Us
People often tell us that they’re doing blogs and social media, they’re sending occasional emails, they’ve created a report, they’ve sent some paid traffic to it, and nothing’s worked. We get a classic line of, “It’s not working”. It’s not your fault; it’s very easy to think that marketing is very simple and I just need to do one or two things.
If you’ve read a couple of random blogs online, it would be easy to think, “This is easy.” But, as I mentioned earlier, you need a process; you need something that you follow. So often, we will find that people have got the pieces of the puzzle all wrong because many people will say, “Well, this message isn’t landing.” It’s because you are delivering the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time.
We have a whole section where we help you hone your value proposition for your brand. Think about companies like Microsoft and Apple, who spend a huge amount of time, energy and resource getting their messaging right. That’s why they can scale and grow. However, for many SME businesses, their challenge is that they just don’t do that. Instead, they think, “Well, I’ll just go out and say I’m a recruitment company and I can provide you with candidates.”
Well, yes, you can, but you need to make it a little bit more sexy than that so that you get under the skin of what’s important to them and how you can help them. If you’ve done some things up to now and it hasn’t worked, that’s okay because there’s probably a reason for it. You might have done them in the wrong order, or you’ve not done the right amount of activities in the right places, in the right channels. That is something else that we can help you with.
Are You Marketing Consistently?
Something else that often happens is the “I” word appears. That’s inconsistency. We get many people saying, “Well, look, I get that I need to market, but we’re a relatively small organisation. There’s only three or four of us. It’s all hands on deck. How do we get the consistency going because we’ll get a load of jobs, and they just have to be filled?” There are different aspects to that. Maybe the way that you’re structuring how you work from a 360-perspective compared to others.
Here’s the thing, if you have a marketing process dialled in, if you are provided with templates and resources and a step-by-step framework, you can follow that; you can implement that, you can automate that. We teach you how to do all of this so that when the proverbial hits the fan, your emails are still going out; your social media are still going out, your brand presence is still increasing. You’re still front of mind in the market.
Because what is key here — and funny, we were talking to one of our clients the other day about filling the pipeline because your pipeline needs to be consistently brimming over. If it isn’t, what happens is you take your foot off the gas and go about, “My word. There’s nobody in the pipeline.” If you have a consistent marketing process – which is, of course, what we help you do because we provide you with all the resources to do that in all our different types of campaigns – then that makes a massive difference so that if you are distracted and you are filling jobs, then we can help you with that. Because again, it’s about the systems that we have built over the years because we know that this is a common pattern with recruiters. That’s why we developed them in such a way to help you.
What do I do?
Now the final couple of questions that we get are all around, “I don’t know where to start, and I don’t know what to do.” That’s fabulous because that’s why you come to somebody that understands and is an expert in their niche. Just like you might be a Fintech recruiter or a legal recruiter, or a healthcare recruiter and your clients and candidates come to you because they know that you understand the market, you know what needs to happen to help people move forward. So if candidates come to you and want the next role, you can help them hone their CV because of what your clients are looking for now.
It is the same when it comes to marketing. We have been working with recruitment and staffing organisations across the globe for approaching 15 years now. One of the things that’s different about us is we’re both marketing and sales directors, so we understand what needs to happen. We have built teams ourselves, so we know the whole recruitment process, but also, we have been delivering marketing services for people for many, many years.
Now, when you’re delivering the service and that service doesn’t work, people don’t work with you. People stop working with you. People continue to work with us, and we have now expanded into our training platform, Superfast Circle, to leverage more of what we do for people because we’ve tested everything. We know whether it works or it doesn’t work. So, therefore, we can demonstrate to you, we can give you the training, and we can tell you exactly where to start.
When you start at Superfast Circle, we even have a new starter course. You get some private one-to-one time with Sharon and me, and we actually map out your “Where do you need to start?”. We have multiple calls each week that are aligned for people across the globe at different times so that you can come on a call and ask your questions. There is no way that you will get stuck and not move forward. We are always there. We are always there to answer questions. We are always there to help with resourcing.
I hopefully have answered some questions that we often have from people before they jump on a call with us and have a conversation. So, why don’t you just book a call with either Sharon or I. Just go to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call and then we can have a conversation. We will let you know if you’re a fit and a match. We don’t work with two people in the same geography and the same niche because that’s not ethical. Come and have a conversation with us, and we’ll let you know, “Yes, we can work with you. Yes, absolutely, we can help you, and when do you want to get started?”.
How We Can Help
We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we give them. If you want a quick chat to see if what we do can work for you, book your call and demonstration here.
Thanks,
Denise
