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Hi there listeners! Let’s talk about inbound marketing for recruiters in 2015.
Obviously inbound marketing is a very trendy jargon word but what we are looking at here is how we attract people towards us rather than have to pick up that phone and do the cold calling that many of us hate. Personally I’m quite cool with it because I just love talking so maybe there’s something a bit different about me but as a general rule of thumb, people say “How can we pull people into our organisation rather than having to push out people?” These are some of the things that we wanted to talk about. There might be some different things here that we are going to mention as well.
First thing is brand dominance. We all buy brands that we know, like and trust. We are cycling towards the end of the year and we are having a group of people come up and stay so therefore we suddenly decided we need to re-decorate and we need to get some nice things in the lounge. What does that involve? It involves buying things.
So we know we need some lights and various other things, so what do we do? We know we’re going to get them from Marks’ or we’re going to get them from John Lewis or something like that because we know it is a reliable brand we can trust. They market themselves very well. They are front of mind for us. Imagine that is the sort of brand presence that you want for your recruitment organization and you can get it.
I’ll never forget when I worked in the pharmaceutical sales industry and there were certain well-known brands when it came to recruitment that people always contacted if they wanted a new job in the industry. I won’t mention names here but there were some really big players and people would always contact those individuals. It’s all about brand dominance and you can do that through a number of areas.
We are going to just very quickly talk about websites. You need a good looking website. It’s your shop front. It’s your John Lewis wonderful window dressing. It is what will entice people into your brand. It starts the engagement piece.
You’ve got to have a decent website and one of the good things nowadays is that you don’t have to pay a fortune either. You can get a good looking website for probably half the price that you used to years ago. So that’s another element which I won’t go into in this podcast but basically you need a good looking website, you need something that communicates your brand with some good copy on it and you need it to be responsive so you need to be able to access it form any single device that they may have.
So we’ve talked about brand dominance. We’ve talked about your website. Now let’s talk about Content marketing – which is quite important. Why? Because it works. It’s about positioning you as an authority. I’m not going to talk too much about that but you can look at our website on some great blog posts on content marketing and how that works. It positions you as an authority and it will bring leads into your business. Content marketing can be anything from videos, a podcast like this, text – all those types of things will bring you that authority status.
Obviously for recruiters, we’re talking social media and we’re talking specifically LinkedIn. Depending on what sector you are working in, LinkedIn is vital for your business. It’s where a lot of people hang out. Some recent LinkedIn survey data talked about how the majority of passive candidates still use social networks or are using social networks increasingly to look for their next job.
So what other channels can we look at when it comes to inbound marketing? Here’s something a bit different for you and that’s having a referral program. People ask “Well, how does that work as inbound marketing Denise?” Well, it does because you can set it and forget it. If you have a system and a process, and you know “Well, okay, that this is what I need to set up… “
We have one fantastic client that we work with that uses this really well. At certain times of the year they run a referral program. They have some outrageously fantastic prizes that they give away, but you don’t have to do it that way. If it’s always promoted in your email footer, if it’s always promoted in your blog post, if it’s constantly mentioned on the back of your business card, if you drive people through social media, then that referral program is always there.
If you make sure that when people answer the phone it is something that is mentioned, that will start to bear fruit all the time and that to me is an inbound strategy because it is a set it and forget it strategy that you put in place that is always there. People know Smith Recruitment has a fantastic referral scheme and I know I can get my M&S vouchers or I can get my Apple vouchers if I refer people to them. Referral programs is something that’s really important.
We talked about social media. Twitter can be great depending on what sector you are in. One of the things I always say to people is the thing about Twitter is a lot of journalists hang out on Twitter. So if you are in the recruitment sector and you comment on different things you can be a bit outrageous sometimes, you might attract the PR type of person to come along and ask you to give a comment on something. One of our clients ended up on local through it so it is well worth looking at that as well.
Paid advertising works. Paid advertising could be anything. That could be your advertising on job boards, it could be advertising on a deed. It could be advertising on whatever way you want to do it, through LinkedIn, through pay per click, or a new one which I think will be a big thing in 2015 is Facebook advertising. So watch out, I’m going to talk more about that next year. That’s important and obviously LinkedIn advertising as well. You can do the pay per click ads within LinkedIn.
The other thing are white papers. We do really well with white papers. White paper is some content put into a PDF or something like that, that you send to someone who brands you as an authority. People go and download it. We have our ‘5 Strategies’ series reports. People get to consume that information and what’s great is they are consuming information because they are giving you their email address. Which means they’ve raised their hand and said “I’m interested” and then you can start to market to them over time which brings me on to the next one which is email marketing.
No matter what anybody tells you, email marketing is huge. It is a great inbound strategy. You can set up your campaigns. They could be sent out on auto pilot so that you don’t have to worry. Or you can outsource it. We do email marketing for people. We actually write campaigns for people but you can do it yourself. We also teach people how to do that.
So imagine you’ve written out a long campaign. It is all in your auto responder series. We’re going to talk more about that next year and that can be a great way to bring in inbound leads. Suddenly people are getting an experience of you all the time? That’s what inbound marketing is all about.
So we’ve talked about brand dominance, content marketing, LinkedIn, white papers and email marketing. One of the other things that I wanted to mention is webinars. Webinars are relatively new for the recruitment sector but imagine running a webinar. You can actually automate webinars as well. You can have webinar recordings so you’ve got a great way to do content.
Imagine if you had a webinar and people came along to your website and they knew they could opt into a monthly webinar. Literally it could be a simple sort of content, it could be on interview skills. It could be on anything at all. Imagine branding yourself as the recruiter of choice by doing something like that?
So this is Denise just running through the infographic that you will have seen on ‘Inbound Marketing For Recruiters in 2015’ and this is based on our assessment of working with clients over the last 12 months and what’s working for them. So very top line, we’re giving you those 10 key areas you need to be thinking about, having a strategy around for your inbound marketing in 2015. So this is Denise saying bye for now!
This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+
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