Angelfish Marketing Blog

In today’s increasingly online world, it comes as no surprise that 60% of consumers now make purchasing decisions before even speaking to a sales rep. So, knowing that your prospective customers are likely to go to your website before coming to you, it’s important that you optimise your website so it's easy to find, exciting, engaging, easy to navigate, and as enjoyable to use as possible. 

If you're a business owner, you should already know that having an attractive website is essential if you want new customers and clients to find your business and purchase your products or services. But there's more to having a strong online presence than simply putting up a couple of pages about your business; you should also have a blog in your marketing plan for several reasons, including improving your SEO and the overall effectiveness of your online marketing. 

The challenge

Five months ago, we started working with a recruitment consultancy, M&E Global, who specialise in subcontracting work for the defence industry. Over the past 20 years, they’ve been offering a range of project solutions, supporting various global military contracts. They take a well-rounded approach to recruitment, not only finding their candidates jobs but also supporting them throughout the entirety of their contracts. This holistic approach to recruitment is what makes M&E unique, working closely with both candidates and clients so that all parties get exactly what they need.

With 55% of marketers saying that blog content creation is their top marketing priority, it’s clear to see that marketing strategies are moving from traditional, ‘outbound’ techniques to more up-to-date, ‘inbound’ methods where it’s all about enticing people to engage with the business. Producing blog content is a great way to offer potential leads something valuable so that, when they’re at the point where they’re ready to make a purchase, they pick you over your competitors. Plus, the stats are pretty promising: marketers who prioritise blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see a positive return on investment (ROI) and content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. 

Continually writing creative content can be exhausting, especially when you’ve got a department to run. The writing process takes up so much time - from topic creation to final draft, there are a lot of steps involved in creating just one piece of content. But as a marketing manager, controlling the content your business outputs is absolutely essential - after all, you need it to pull in the right customers for the company. However, when you throw in planning and running a successful SEO marketing strategy to the mix, you’ve suddenly got a lot of pressure weighing on your shoulders and a lot to control.

In the past couple of years, there have been significant changes to the way Google’s search engine works. Google used to deny that social media has a direct effect on rankings, but now, social media URLs appear in search engines at a much larger scale. What we all really want to know is whether social media sharing actually helps improve search engine ranking. So, how closely linked are SEO and social media strategy?

Traditional, outbound marketing methods such as cold calling just aren’t as effective in gaining the leads you need to stay ahead of your competitors anymore. As a recruitment agency, you need to ensure that your digital marketing skills are of the highest quality, especially in today’s ever-competitive market.

Sometimes, it’s really difficult to know where to start, and the workload ahead of you can seem overwhelming. So, whether your recruitment agency is just getting started with digital marketing or you want to optimise your current strategy, this guide will help you set up and implement a successful digital marketing strategy for your recruitment agency, step by step.

The starting point

As a recruitment agency, getting the right candidates from the right areas is a tricky task in itself, not to mention attracting and retaining the right clients. Throw in a lack of social media presence, sporadic marketing campaigns, poor site optimisation, and an over-reliance on traditional, interruptive marketing techniques, and this task becomes even more of a challenge.

This is the situation our client found themselves in before they came to us. They weren’t hitting their business goals and their website traffic wasn’t as high as most of their competitors’ were. Basically, they needed a marketing plan for a recruitment agency that would boost candidate acquisition - and they needed it fast.

As we enter 2019, how is digital marketing changing? And how will this impact your inbound methods?

In this blog, we highlight what’s influencing the marketing industry, and how you can leverage digital marketing changes...

Regardless of your industry, the web is an ever increasingly competitive space. Battling it out on the SEO playground has never felt trickier. Just when you think you’ve got it sussed, the rules of engagement change and everything that worked in the past seems futile. And there’s always some SEO expert selling their magic sauce for traffic-pumping success. But the truth is there is no magic sauce. And Google isn't trying to thwart online businesses by making it hard for you to rank. They want the same thing we all want: A great user experience and for everyone to find the best, most relevant content as easily as possible.

This is where the topic cluster SEO strategy comes in...