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Today, I want to discuss how marketing specifically grows your recruiting and search business.
I want to talk about this today because it has come up on several calls recently.
As I mentioned in the podcast intro, how marketing works is a logical question, especially if you’ve never really done marketing before.
Maybe you’ve always been somebody to whom business has come. You’ve worked with bigger clients, or you’ve been in a fulfilment role because vacancies have come to you.
Then you’re probably wondering, “Why do I need to do marketing now?
Or maybe you are wondering why other people are marketing, and they’re getting results, and you are trying to do it but are not getting results?
What can it really deliver for me, anyway?” These are all logical questions, which we will answer today.
Marketing: A Definition
Why should you invest in marketing, and how will it help you attract the candidates and clients you want?
Let’s start with the classic definition of what marketing is and does.
Marketing is about creating demand, AND Sales is about converting that demand.
Marketing puts your message and brand out in front of your ideal clients and candidates, and then you talk to people and hopefully convert that person to work with you.
Whether that’s a candidate that you’re working exclusively with, whether it’s a client that you’re delivering a retained project for, or you’re working contingency.
This is how marketing starts the process of supporting your success.
Because, as business owners, we want more demand.
- We want more clients.
- We want more candidates.
- We want more people to work with us.
- We want more revenue flowing through our business.
The only way we can do this is by creating more demand.
Many companies are sales-led, and the recruitment and search sectors have been very sales-led over the years, where people pick up the phone and start talking to people, and the power of their communication converts them.
However, the market has changed so much over the years.
When it comes to leveraging your time and the ability to grow, sales is very much a one-to-one strategy, particularly when looking at a B2B environment, which fundamentally is what
recruitment is.
Companies and Candidates Have More Choice When It Comes to Who They Work With
Recruitment is a high-value transaction business.
Some of you will be placing candidates and gaining fees of four, five, or six figures. When that’s happening, a process goes before you about how you stand out in a market and demonstrate to people that you are the person to work with.
People now have a lot more choices when it comes to deciding which company to work with.
By marketing you and your brand, you have a strategy known as a one-to-many process rather than a one-to-one process.
Let me give you an example of how this works.
Earlier this year, we did a webinar about standing out on social media, and I shared a marketing strategy about the value of posting on social media.
I was looking at somebody’s profile the other day who had a lot of followers. This was a recruiter in the UK, and they had 28,000 followers.
Imagine if they start posting more regularly on LinkedIn. A large percentage of those people are likely to see their content; they’ll get an experience of them, and they’ll start validating whether they could work with that person.
An easy win.
Why? Because you are using marketing in a way that’s going out one-to-many.
People Can’t Work With You If The Don’t Know Who You Are
A very simple phrase goes along with marketing: People can’t work with you if they don’t know who you are, what you do and how you can help them.
That’s where many recruiters struggle; they are great at what they do, though not at promoting who they are to the market.
Recruiters we work with are good at what they do, but the challenge is that they haven’t done much marketing before.
On the upside, once they start using different strategies, they succeed quite quickly when they start communicating consistently through the different marketing channels, strategies and processes that we work on.
Think of marketing as the vehicle that gets your offer in front of the people you want to serve.
Be that candidate and client; be known as your ideal business persona or avatar. You’ll have heard me talk about business personas/avatars before.
We have many podcasts and posts about identifying your ideal business persona because marketing is marketing to the people you want to serve and the people you serve best.
Let me give you an example from our perspective to make it logical for you guys and a shameless plug for us!
Our main offer is Superfast Circle, which you can learn more about at the link. In addition to Superfast Circle, we provide other support around consultancy and performance coaching.
Fundamentally, that is our key main offer, and that is for micro businesses, solo recruiters, and small SMEs: That’s our market.
Corporate recruiters listen to our podcast. I know because I see them on our subscriber list, and they open all our emails.
That isn’t our market.
Our offer is designed to support people we know we can help. Yes, of course, we could help a corporate organisation, but let’s be honest: you would hope that the likes of Hays and Page, etc., all have a marketing department that works well for them.
They have several marketers doing everything and have all of the strategies. They are working together.
A smaller organization doesn’t have that.
We are an outsourced CMO for many organisations we support with their marketing, providing content for them.
That is our market.
Think about you and your market; the marketing you create and the messaging around your offer will attract people you know you can support and help.
When you focus your marketing in this way, you repel some people and attract others—obviously, the people that you want.
Marketing gets your message out in front of the people you want to work with because it’s all about consistency. If you have marketing systems and processes in your business, it will help you be so much more consistent.
Marketing Is Part of Your BD Process
Our last podcast was around BD and why it isn’t working. I think one of the things with BD is that people don’t bolt on the marketing systems around their BD that will make it work for them.
That’s how marketing will support you as you move forward. We always need a supply of new customers, as any business does.
We need to create demand with a new section of the market or people who have never heard of us before.
That is where marketing will create demand for you.
Marketing Works With The Buyers Cycle
Something I want to talk about, which I have mentioned before, is how marketing helps you when it comes to the buyer’s cycle. The great thing about marketing is it enables you to leverage the buyer’s cycle.
The buyer’s cycle relates to people buying when they want to, not when we want them to.
We don’t always need something straight away.
A classic example is when buying a new car and deciding what car you want to buy. Let’s say you want to buy a 4×4 or whatever.
You decide, “Okay, I need to buy a 4×4.” There are hundreds of different 4x4s on the market, and you hone down to specifically what type of 4×4 you want to purchase and what will be the best for you and your family.
Because what’s happened then is we are moving through the buyer’s cycle.
It starts with becoming aware of a brand or a supplier and then going through that validation process where we engage with their content.
We’re then deciding whether this person is the sort of person to work with. We then probably have a conversation with them. All of this time, we are going through the buyers’ cycle before we make a purchasing decision.
What is great about marketing? It’s the classic buyer cycle in the form of a marketing funnel.
This is the beauty of marketing because marketing isn’t just getting people into that funnel initially. Marketing is about how we interact with that individual, how we then have a conversation with them, and how we start to provide the information that’s important for them to make that buying decision.
Say, for instance, you want to attract new clients. You want new clients to work with, and they come across you. You’ve been posting on LinkedIn and your social media. Maybe somebody shared a post, or you’ve reached out to them on LinkedIn and connected with them, but it’s gone no further than that.
They start to see your content. They go to your website and begin to look and think, “They provide a lot of really useful information and share some ideas I have not seen before.
They are very different from other recruiters who email me asking if I’ve got any roles. These guys are educating.
They know what they’re doing,” so they’re all over your website. They’re reading your social media. They may be downloading the odd report. They’re engaging and opening your emails. And reading your testimonials and watching your videos.
Maybe some of you are listening to your podcast. They’re doing all these different things, helping them decide about you and whether they work with you.
All of this is because your marketing is creating demand throughout the buyer cycle from first coming across you to reading your case studies and watching one of your videos.
All of these things help make you the person they are now going to work with, whether a candidate or a client.
That’s how marketing works.
It takes you from unknown to known to the person they start working with faster, easier, and in a repeatable way.
The key thing about marketing is that it does not have to be complicated. You can market in different ways. You can get your messaging right. You can be out in front of your market on social media. You can produce content.
If you want to know where and how to start, watch one of our masterclasses, the lead generation triad. It explains this entire process and how marketing across all different channels will help you.
All you need to do is go to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/LGT, lead generation triad, add your name and email address, and watch our hour-long training, which you’ll find useful.
Hopefully, today, we’ve explained more about how marketing can make a difference by creating more demand for your products and services.
Thanks
Denise
How We Can Help You
We work with recruiters to get marketing working for them in their business. If you want a conversation about how it can work
