Marketing Best Practices: A Comprehensive Guide for Staffing Firms

Experience, outstanding customer service and a range of solutions are all great ways to gain clients, but in order to gain their business, they need to know who you are first! Potential customers must know you exist and what advantages your services offer before you have a chance to win their business. Following marketing best practices for your staffing and recruiting agency will be able to help you attract more customers.

Consider these marketing best practices to help increase your firm’s business volume and profitability:

Differentiate Yourself

Show potential customers you are not the same as everyone else. Focus on what makes you unique.  A few ideas are concentrating on a specific geographic area. Can you help your clients in this area solve their challenges such as providing reliable, skilled candidates? You should always be highlighting your competitive advantages and how you can help your customers find and retain talent.

Want more tips on standing out? Read our blog post “Be Willing to Be Different: How to Make Your Staffing Firm Stand Out”.

Target Your Market

An up-to-date website is critical to your firm’s success. Be sure it represents you well and is easy to navigate. Follow content marketing best practices and focus your content on your customers’ toughest challenges. The focus of search engine optimization (SEO) is to drive people to your site, but also to drive the right people. Are you targeting the right market? Marketing automation is another great way to help you target your audience. Look for software that will integrate easily into your current systems and processes, is scalable, is easy to upgrade and well supported. Using a CRM can also allow you to market more effectively and enable your recruiters to reach a lot of prospects at once.

Update your strategy with these ideas: B2B marketing ideas: B2B Marketing – How to Update Your Firm’s Marketing Strategy.

Encourage Repeat Business

Under promise and over deliver. This is a great motto to ensure clients come back to you for new job orders. Bring in high-quality people faster than employers expect. Empower your employees. Hire people you can trust and give them autonomy. Give clients faster and better service. Don’t know what they want? Ask. You may uncover an opportunity you wouldn’t have otherwise. Reward your best customers by offering freebies or enhanced guarantees to loyal customers. Be a resource by teaching your candidates how to write resume or advise clients on crafting job descriptions that attract the best candidates.

Explore these five strategies in our blog post ”Creating Brand Loyalty for Your Staffing Firm” as a way to help retain clients.

Revisit What Works

Why not visit some past successes? Consider How to Use Email Marketing to Engage and Reactivate Your Prospects and Candidates. People you have already worked with make have proven themselves to be great customers.

Increase Social Media Engagement

Use social media to get to know a candidate’s personality better can help you match them with the right job. Seek out passive candidates by reaching out to professionals who are not actively seeking a new job, but would be open to discussing just the right opportunity if it should arise. Don’t overdo it on social media. Establishing a presence is important, but don’t overwhelm your audience. Be a resource, not a nuisance. Don’t delete negative comments; instead, you should acknowledge the problem and attempt to take it offline to address any concerns. Tailor your message to your customers by focusing on your clients’ and candidates’ interests.

Want more social media tips? Read our blog post, ”Recruiting and Staffing Firms: 5 Do’s and Don’ts” to be sure you’re taking the correct approach to social media.

Improve Your Talent Pool

Consider creating industry-specific landing pages, targeted online advertising and providing a mobile-friendly interface. Recruiting from colleges and universities or launching a referral program for current employees are all great ways to attract talent.

”A Great ATS is Only One Part of the Puzzle”, offers some smart ideas to upgrade your talent bench.

Track Your Progress

You’ve updated your marketing to employ all the best practices, but what do you measure to know if the practices are actually working for you? It’s important to track your progress via web analytics – measuring everything from website visits to conversions.

Website visits are how many times are people making it to your site. From there, look at unique visitors if you are interested in generating new business. Bounce rate indicates whether you are attracting the wrong people or the right people are coming and not finding what they need from your website. Search engine traffic is how many people are reaching you via organic search. One great metric to look at is the number of overall pageviews versus unique visitors. This will give you a sense of how engaging your content is. The more pages a unique visitor goes to, the more engaging your content is. Conversions are your bread and butter and can help drive revenue. This is a very important metric to ensure you have set up correctly and track closely. The channel metric shows you where traffic is coming from. The main ones to assess are direct, referral, organic and social.

You should also track your sales team’s activity. You should ensure your response time is as fast as possible. Leads get cold quickly, and a slow response can equal a lost sale. Figure out your teams’ time spent selling by what portion of each day is spent on actual revenue-driving activities. Finally, what’s your average sale, and is there a way to increase the dollar amount per sale or replicate the success of salespeople closing the larger deals? These are all things to track and consider to increase your sales and revenue.

10 Marketing Metrics to Monitor (and What to Do with Them).

Conclusion:

If you implement these marketing best practices, it’s likely you’ll see an increase in customers and attract and place the right talent. By ensuring you have the right marketing practices in place, from attracting new clients through SEO and social media to closing the deal because you were able to differentiate yourself from the competition, you will be able to continuously grow in this competitive environment. And most importantly, don’t forget to keep track of your marketing and sales efforts!

Through web analytics and your CRM/ATS, you should be able to understand how people interact with your website and how your teams are reaching your organization’s goals.

About Avionté:

At Avionté, we provide software solutions for staffing firms that help you to operate more effectively and keep your operational costs down. Our comprehensive staffing software delivers integrated software systems that make it easier to drive growth, maximize profitability and streamline your administrative tasks, so you can focus on your serving your customers. To learn more about the many benefits of Avionté staffing software, contact us today.  

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