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Today, I want to talk about marketing systems; first, I want to tell you about a brand new free video series you can access.
[Excuse any strange errors in this content as it is a direct transcription for your benefit.]
If you want to head over to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/clf, pop your name and email address in there, and you will gain access to a video series that Sharon and I have created on a specific hot topic all recruiters want to handle.
We know that from questions we get from clients and the number of visits on our website around these particular blog posts keywords, it’s the all-around lead flow for candidates and clients.
What has created a video series? As our American friends say, it will take you through from soup to nuts around what you need to consider when building consistent lead flow because it isn’t just about clients, and it isn’t just about candidates.
A successful business has to be strong in every area. That’s what we’ve done. We’d love your feedback on it too.
Just go along as I say to www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/clf, and I love doing this because, as I said, I’m recording this in November, and I haven’t recorded the videos yet. However, because I have now said that they will be available, Denise will record them all and create them all for you.
I’m sure you guys have plenty of systems around how you bring onboard new candidates, how you bring onboard new team members, how you all work together for the good of your organisation.
I’m sure you have plenty of systems around that.
The question is, how systematised is your marketing?
Because often my experience with recruiters is, it tends to get left to the last minute because if the proverbial hits the fan, then we can always pick up the phone later and build our pipeline.
Again, it may be a bit stressful. We can always do that. However, did you appreciate that it doesn’t have to be this way, that if you get a marketing system together, what a massive difference will make for you?
Before I get into that, something pivotal to the process is that you have to have a goal.
Now I know everyone talks about goal setting this time of year, and there’s lots of flack around the fact that we set a goal, and then nobody ever sticks to it.
However, when you build out your marketing system and your marketing process, you need to know what you aim for.
Systems Start With Maths
If you did X last year and want to do Y this year, that’s fine. However, you have to build a system around that to create the revenue you want.
Most people seem to forget that because if you’ve decided, let’s say you want to increase your revenue by 50%. Let’s say your turnover currently is 300K; let’s make it easy to do the math.
You’re currently turning over 300K, and next year you want to be turning over 450K. A significant jump not out to the realms of possibilities.
Some recruiters I know have had the best year ever. You need to be thinking about, “okay, I need to bring in 150K revenue.” I’m not going to get into what profit level; we’re talking about marketing here. Let’s look at it from a big picture perspective.
If that’s 150K, how many new roles do I need to bring in at what fee level and at which parts of the year.
Let’s say again makes it easier for the maths. Let’s say that each placement that you make is worth 10K. Therefore, do the maths; how many 10K placements do you need in addition to what you’re already doing to hit that extra 150?
My rudimentary maths, I have an A level in maths, by the way, my fundamental maths means that you would need to make an extra 15 placements. That’s always a starting point, so you know you have to make that many placements.
On average, what does your normal? I’m just going to use the word normal; the client give you when it comes to placements to make?
What’s your conversion rate with this particular type of role? Do you convert everybody? How many telephone calls do you need to make? How many emails do you need to send? What marketing do you need to have in place? All of these things are part of your system because remember you look at the definition of a system; it’s a set of things working together as part of the whole interconnecting and working to produce a result.
When you think about your marketing system, you have to start with the goal. We need to increase revenue by X. We want to penetrate this market.
Therefore, we need an extra. Let’s say we’ve used this magical number of 15 here, so let’s say you have a 50% conversion, right. You need to ensure that you’ve got 30 hot leads; let’s say that each company gives you one placement.
I know I’m making this simple, but you get what I’m saying here, because that will help you think about what resource I need to put into marketing and what systems I need?
Now, in reality, that’s a conservative goal to have, and you’ll see here as you’re starting to break it down, you realise, “oh gosh, that isn’t quite as challenging as I thought it would be.” Let’s think about the systems around that to have in place. Now I’ve just thought of something else here; to clarify, I’m not necessarily talking about who’s going to do the work. Should you outsource? Should you bring in some admin support? Should you bring in a full-time marketeer?
What Marketing ‘Systems’ Do You Need?
My thoughts on this are that it’s always helpful to have somebody helping you with your marketing because there are two key growth areas in a business: marketing and sales. Give some thought to how you might want to do that in 2022, but let’s start talking about systems first of all.
The first thing you need is you need a marketing plan. There’s a lot of data online; go and check it out. Businesses with a marketing plan are 26% more likely to achieve their goals than those that don’t.
This data I read from a guy called David Fray, one of the first online marketers I ever followed, and he was quoting data from the American Marketing Association.
Intuitively, I think we all know that if you have a plan, things are more likely to happen. You can start ticking things off, and then you don’t fall into that scenario of suddenly loads of jobs coming in, marketing gets dropped because you haven’t got a system where you’re monitoring and checking things.
At the same time, when thinking about your marketing plan as you are making your plan, I believe every podcaster talks about the marketing checklist. If you haven’t got it, grab one or just email me, and I’ll send it over to you in the post. Print it off; look at where you’re at. You need to know your starting point because if you have a starting point, you can start to measure and look at how you’re moving forward.
You need a marketing plan and, in that plan, you need to know who’s responsible for what and what campaigns you are going to run? How are you going to monitor and measure things through the year now?
As I say, we’re recording this in November; we’ve just run a session with our Superfast Circle clients, and we went through a whole session on a marketing plan, and we provided the templates for them.
We even provided the spreadsheet they just needed to pop their details into. Get yourself an Excel spreadsheet. It’s really easy. Don’t overcomplicate it. Then in that sheet, you can start to measure, track and add all of the different activities you want.
The next thing I want to talk about is repeatable tasks. One of the things that I came across many years ago because I’d worked in the pharmaceutical industry and worked in a big corporate is the need to have standard operating procedures. To you and I SOPs.
One of the great things about SOPs is that obviously, you can create your own. They make tasks so much easier to implement because anybody in the business can implement them, and the case of, “okay, so we do our social media every month.
The way that we do our social media is we have so many blog posts we share, so many jobs that we share, so many this, so many that.”
Suppose that’s the case; one of the easiest things for you is to create a standard operating procedure for that process to happen. We have some of our circle members because we provide collateral for them.
They have the systems that they’ve mapped out. I’ve shared some of our SOPs with them as well. One of the things to absolutely create next year is an SOP because that will give you so much more time back as you are utilising that process.
Whereas if you have a folder on the computer and there are videos, you can now buy screen capture software inexpensively. I think Zoom and Snagit do free versions, so you can always use something like that. We’ve talked about marketing planning. We’ve also just talked about standard operating procedures.
The next vital thing has a content and collateral system. However, you deliver this in your organisation, whether you have somebody who writes for you, whether our clients use the content we produce, or you’re outsourcing the content.
Whatever you are doing, content is king and queen at the moment. The more content you have, the more ways you can be in front of your market. The more ways you can convince both candidates and clients that you are the company to work with. You need to have that as part of your system. You can create a content plan, what you’re going to share during the year.
We alluded to early, you know how many needs you want, you know which particular market, you know everything about your avatar, that’s key. That way, you can basically map out all the different types of content you want to have that you’re going to create during the year, and it starts to become a system. It becomes a machine, and that really will free you up in time.
If you know that a particular time of year is mega, mega busy for you, it’s one of your best times of the year; what are you doing ahead of that to plan to tee up the market? We know for instance that the last quarter and the first quarter of the following year are really good sales times for us because people are thinking about marketing.
That’s one of the reasons why over the last month or so, I have created a series of podcasts; you’ll have seen lots of videos out online helping you around your marketing.
It’s the same for you to do that. I also systematise that process because once things are mapped out, I always talk to people and say that time is a mental construct. We can always do more than we think we can.
You have those situations where you think it’s going to take you– I saw something from Elon Musk the other day that if you think something’s going to take you 30 days, it’s going to take you 30 days, when actually what if it could only take three days. It’s just a case of systematising things and taking the time to do it. We’ve talked about content and collateral system.
Create a Candidate and a Client Marketing Campaign
The next thing is, and I’m going to share here two things: you must have a campaign for candidates and a campaign for clients even if you only have two campaigns that you are running. If you are growing and you want to acquire new recruiters, new resources, new marketeer’s whatever that be, your talent, then you need to have a system for that. Marketing is about creating demand, and it’s also about creating demand as you build your team.
Think about what I should create in my campaign for a client or candidate. If you know your candidates and clients well, the information, the ideas will automatically come to you. You know what your candidates need from you. You know what your clients need from you. Then you need to make sure that you’re communicating that out into the market. Also, you are there for them so that you nurture them.
One of the easiest things to do is offer them some value, whether that be a video, whether that be a case study, whether that be a report and then you can get their name and email address start to nurture them because over time, what is great about having a really good marketing system is this can be chugging away in the background all the time.
If you haven’t got a campaign for candidates campaign standing for clients, do that as a priority as you move into next year.
Only Automate Systems That Work
The next thing is automation. Everybody loves a good bit of automation. We do have an automation report as well. If you want to download that, that was based around a masterclass that we ran a while back. If you want a copy of that, I’ll drop a link to that in the transcription of this podcast, so you’ve got that. The more you can automate your marketing system, the better.
However, the caveat around this is that you’ve had to have the process dialled in first of all because there’s no point automating something that you don’t know if it works or not. That’s a question for you, but then, of course, there are so many things you can start to automate. I’m pleased to say this because this wasn’t always the case.
When we first started working in the recruitment sector was 16 years ago now, there was MailChimp, and there were CRM systems, and that was it.
There were no integrated systems.
Many CRM systems now integrate marketing automation and processes; I know Bullhorn does that. Forgive me if I don’t shout out your particular one, and I’ve missed it. I think Tracker does something similar, and I know that Loxo does well. There are all these different systems that you can use. You want to automate your touch campaigns, if you like, with clients and candidates because you always want to be in front of your mind.
One of the challenges people faced this year around candidate shortage is that they haven’t nurtured their candidates.
Candidates were the last thing that they were thinking about.
You need to make sure that you can dial that in whatever system you have because look on the Superfast recruitment website. I’ll make sure we probably link to some of our past posts around automation.
We did a whole section on automation, I think, towards the middle of last year. There’s lots of good ideas and content on there for you about the exact things you should be automating. There is so much you can automate that really will save you oodles and oodles of time provided that you systematise it. We’ve talked about campaigns for candidates and clients; we’ve spoken of automation software.
The other thing that I find invaluable when marketing is using a project management system.
I’ll tell you my personal favourite, entirely up to you what you do. I’m a marketeer, so we use it, and that’s monday.com. There’s a free version that you can get depending on the size of your organisation, but it’s pretty inexpensive.
I love Monday because we have recurring and repetitive tasks and top tips. If you are doing your marketing well, you will have recurring and repetitive tasks. I’m logged into the system. I get consistent emails tagging me and telling me what I need to do by when it keeps me on track, and then we manage the system to time how long it takes me to do things.
Work With a Mentor
The final thing that I would say around systems is, work with a mentor, work with somebody around your marketing that can help, somebody like us. Yes, we have competitors in the market. We always think nobody does it like us; I don’t think they do, because of our service but because we work with somebody because marketing is constantly changing.
We’ve just run an event for our Superfast Circle clients, and in that event, it was all brand new content that we were sharing because marketing is consistently changing.
If you work with someone that understands marketing, and I would work with somebody like ourselves or some of our competitors, it’s horses for courses.
Some people connect with some people; other people don’t.
Somebody that has experience of the marketing in the recruitment sector because it is different, because you have candidates, and then you have clients, and you need to think about how you’re going to work with that.
Then also the consultants that you work with, so that’s what I would say to you. When you’re building out your system, think about who your marketing mentor will be.
We cook quite a lot today around marketing systems. You’ve plenty of time to get yourself ready before the new year. Think about your goal and how that goal relates to the number of leads you need.
What’s your conversion rate? Are you going to add a new recruiting product? Are you going to add a new service that will bring extra revenue into your business?
That’s the first thing to start with, but then if we go through number one, always have a marketing plan, number two, consider standard operating procedures, document everything, the more systems and processes you have, the easier business become and the more freedom you get in your business too.
Number three, you need a content and collateral system.
Number four, make sure I’ve got them all written down; I didn’t want to miss them; make sure you have campaigns dialled in for both candidates and clients.
If you’re expanding, you need to consider your talent acquisition as well; remember number five to have automation software.
Number six is a bit of an add on to that, measure what you’re doing and keep a check on what you’re doing. Use a system of some sort. I just recommended monday.com.
Then finally, get help, get some help from a mentor or coach, or be in a community like superfast circle, which will make quite a difference for you.
This is Denise, talking Marketing Systems, what you need to have in place. Our next podcast is slightly different. It’ll be much shorter, but what I always do at this time of year, so you guys can get a handle on what’s important is to share with you the most popular blog posts that we’ve had this year. It gives you an idea of what’s topical, what’s current, and I’m sure you’ll find that useful. This is Denise saying, “Have an outstanding New Year, and we’ll see you in January. Bye for now.”
Thanks,
Denise
How We Can Help You in 2022
For many of our Superfast Circle clients, 2021 was their best year because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we give them. If you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you, book your call and demonstration here.
