The Marketing Cycle
Marketing cycles and strategies for the staffing and recruiting industry have to serve many captains and even more missions.
For most recruitment companies, this includes marketing to candidates, marketing to prospective and existing clients, as well as marketing to support the development and awareness of your firm’s brand. All of these audiences and goals overlap to an extent, meaning your messaging has to be consistent between intended recipients and support the brand that you are cultivating.
Let’s look at how you can break down and optimize your recruitment marketing cycle by fortifying it with planning, automation, and smart workflows.
What is a Marketing Cycle?
Marketing for a multi-funnel, multi-audience recruitment company is complicated, and there are a ton of ways you could describe it, but basically it is this:
“The specific process and steps the marketing team or persons take to support recruitment and sales team’s communications and promotional initiatives while making the entire brand discoverable, engaging, and reliable.”
Let’s break this beast down into some smaller chunks that we can really dig into and discover what we can simplify (and make better) through automation and planning. We’ll also look for opportunities to collaborate with sales, recruitment, and leadership.
Conceptualize
This step involves thinking big. Brainstorming. What could you do? Start with your biggest ideas, then use the next step to firm them up by planning, strategizing, and prioritizing in accordance with the company’s (and their various department heads’) business goals.
This step should include thinking about which processes, emails, campaigns, and programs you can automate.
Plan and Strategize
This also includes prioritizing, because, unfortunately, we just can’t do everything. Try not to get distracted by shiny objects that derail your game plan, your goals, and your resources. And, do your best to keep your constituents focused, as well. Involving departmental leaders in your planning and strategizing process helps keep them bought in and on board with the marketing plan.
Research
No doubt you will have plenty you need to research once you’ve planned. From competitive research to industry news to content planning, this is a step that should not be skipped.
Create
Here comes the fun part. Here is where you will make your marketing plan come to life. From the website and blog to your social media channels, to your email campaigns, to your automations – this is when you will build all those pieces out (or whatever is missing).
Don’t forget to partner with the recruitment and sales teams to ensure your creations are aligned with their current needs and expectations. For example, you want to make sure that what you say on the website jives with what they say on the phone and in sales meetings.
Optimize
Content (including job postings) isn’t going to do you much good if no one can find it! Brush up on your SEO, double-check that your wording makes sense, add some hashtags, and make sure your brand and its properties are discoverable.
Another major component of this is optimizing your database so that your targeting is more effective. This includes data hygiene, updating records, and more. Don’t worry, Automations make this cumbersome task a breeze!
Publish
Time to pull the trigger. Along with your marketing plan, you should be able to set in motion a content/job promotion/nurturing publishing plan for at least a full calendar quarter at a time. Much more in advance than that, and you won’t have a lot of room for agility and current events.
Test
Whether you utilize A/B testing (we are a big fan) or trial various strategies, channels, or messages, be sure you are testing one thing at a time and measuring your results.
Distribute
Think about all of the places your audience(s) hang out when you are considering where to publish / post. It’ll vary by industry but typically will include your website, email, and text, some segment of social media channels, job boards, Google, and so forth.
Analyze
The fire that fuels the entire rest of the marketing cycle: analytics. It’s true, you don’t know what you don’t know, especially if you aren’t tracking, reviewing and reporting on your activities.
The CMO Survey shares that “only 40% of marketers report having the right quantitative tools to demonstrate the impact of marketing spend on company performance.”
If you can’t show that what you are doing is working, then how can you get full credit for your assignment? Whether you do it the hard way (Excel, pivot tables) or the easy way with a platform made for analytics, like Bullhorn, make sure you are tracking and analyzing all marketing initiatives.
Optimize
Yes, again. Take what you learned from your recent analytics review (above) and update your marketing plan, your campaigns, your content, whatever needs to be tweaked due to performance. It could also be taking a successful campaign, and running a follow-up campaign to take advantage of the momentum.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to marketing for recruitment and sales, you may feel like you are living a split life. The reality is you are, but the more you can plan and coordinate between your teams and your business cycles, the more cohesive and effective your execution will be.
