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Hi, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Sharon Newey from Superfast Recruitment, and like you, I’m a business owner.
Every day, we talk to clients and prospective clients just like you guys, hopefully; having lots of clients conversations and candidate conversations.
And what’s really interesting is that people have got lots of questions right now; human curiosity cannot resist kicking in because people love to know what is everybody else doing, don’t they?
And so that is the topic of today’s blog.
It’s a quick update on what we are seeing, hearing and having conversations about, with business owners like yourself.
What are Recruitment Business Owners Focusing on Right Now?
So, now, here we are coming towards the back end of the year, heading into 2021, and many of us, we can’t wait, can we?
But as we’re planning, we want to know what else is happening in the market, what are other people doing, because that will influence what we may do.
So let me share with you sort of four key observations that we are seeing.
Now, if we think about companies, between two to three billers up to about 30 consultants, there are four different responses that we are seeing in the current market.
1. Hibernating Companies
Unfortunately, there are some companies who in the early days of lockdown, they made that decision that they were going to almost go into hibernation.
Now, of course, that was influenced by what was happening to certain markets. And some markets we know have been hit far greater than others.
However, some of those businesses are still sitting this out, and they’re in hibernation.
In a previous video, we talked about the recession response curve. And what the recession response curve suggests is that businesses who do almost shut down, hibernate, put themselves on ice, whatever way you want to describe it, they are the businesses that unfortunately are at real high risk of not returning when the markets do return.
So, unfortunately, we are still seeing businesses like that who are not doing any marketing, and there’s a real danger there.
2. Taking First Steps into Marketing
The second is a group of people who have ventured into the world of marketing, which is fantastic. Perhaps they were implementing a couple of different strategies, and they got them working and delivering for their business, which is great.
The thing now, though, is that we’re in a different world, aren’t we?
Things have changed so much in the last 7-8 months, and we’re not going to go back to a pre-COVID world; that’s just not going to happen.
There are so many reports out there; we saw a great one from McKinsey, that talked yesterday about how organisations are far more comfortable doing business online, communicating online, and investing in much higher-value products and services, than they ever did before.
So, thinking about that, as a business, is it really sensible to think that what marketing you were doing before everything happened in 2020, you can go back to doing post-Covid and where we are today?
It’s a risky strategy. And I would suggest that there’s a lot of vulnerabilities there, if you think that, “Well, it worked before, we’ve been successful before, so we’ll just replicate it.” I probably guide people away from relying on and presuming that things will work out just the same because that’s probably highly unlikely.
3. Waking Up to Marketing
We’ve then got another group of people who have never done any marketing before. Maybe they’ve been in that luxury position of having a great strong client base, very loyal, and they’ve had lots of referrals, and they’ve discovered in recent months that that loyal client base actually wasn’t quite as loyal as they thought.
So there’s that realisation that “I need to do some of this marketing because actually, I need new clients, I need some new business.” And so we’re seeing those kinds of individuals waking up and starting to look at “how do we market our business?”
And this could mean that that they have to get involved themselves.
Some people in that group know that they need to market, want to start marketing, and yet for a number of reasons, they’re holding back, and they’re waiting, which makes me feel nervous for them.
It could be they’re waiting because things are a little bit more uncertain or uncomfortable, perhaps now than they were late, late summer. Maybe they’re waiting because of cash flow; it could be a number of reasons.
And I think what I would encourage those individuals to do, is while they are waiting, other people are taking action, and they are moving their marketing forward.
And so playing that waiting game is a really risky strategy.
So if that means that it’s uncomfortable or even more uncomfortable financially, if it’s uncomfortable because it means you’re going to be taking on some additional responsibility because you need to learn a bit more about marketing, you need to roll up your sleeves and do some marketing even if it’s in your own time, to get things going, to get your brand out into the market, to get some new ways of getting new business in for your consultants and for yourself.
Then that’s what we have to do as business owners, isn’t it?
We have to step outside our comfort zones, take that responsibility, and move into action.
Because while people are waiting, everybody else, many other businesses are getting on and they’re ploughing on, and they’re getting marketing working for them right now. And then there’s the fourth group that we find.
4. Making Marketing Work
This is the group that during lockdown and as we were coming out of lockdown, these individuals and business owners, they have been doing massive amounts of reflecting. They’ve moved into action, they’ve pivoted, they’re adding new sectors and aligned divisions into their current offering; they’ve launched new services.
These individuals are really ramping up their marketing, and they’re seeing results already.
So when you think about you and your business, where do you fall into in terms of those groups that I’ve described?
Because if you are the mothball company, I really strongly encourage you to start acting on your marketing now, so that as your own markets open up more and more, at least you are going to be present in front of your target audience.
And if you haven’t done any marketing before and you’re waiting, and you’re watching, I’d really strongly encourage you to start moving into action.
Finally
Stop thinking, stop thinking about it, make a decision, and move into action, because that is how you will start developing more new business opportunities for yourself and your consultants.
So I hope that update has been helpful.
If you realise that you need to be doing more with your recruitment marketing, we have a range of free resources available on our downloads page, including our free recruitment marketing checklist which will help you discover if your current marketing processes are working, and how to improve them straight away.
I’m Sharon Newey from Superfast Recruitment, I’ll speak to you soon.
