Traditional, outbound marketing methods just aren’t effective for gaining the leads you need to stay ahead of your competitors anymore.
With so many agencies competing for attention, as a recruitment agency you need to ensure that your digital marketing skills are of the highest quality if you’re going to cut-through the noise and reach your recruitment goals, especially in today’s ever-competitive market.
However, when it comes to crafting a successful digital marketing strategy for a recruitment agency, it can be difficult knowing where to start, and the process can seem pretty overwhelming. And that’s exactly where we come in!
So, whether your recruitment agency is just getting started with digital marketing or you want to optimise your current strategy to increase your leads, this guide will help you set up and implement a digital marketing strategy for a recruitment agency, step by step.
The power of inbound marketing for recruitment agencies
Inbound marketing is a great strategy to use to help you structure and deliver successful digital marketing programme that will help you turn your target audience into quality candidates and right-fit clients.
The power of inbound cannot be denied. According to HubSpot, 74% of marketing professionals believing that inbound is more effective than traditional methods - and when utilised by recruitment agencies, inbound marketing can help you to:
- Identify industry trends and target the right candidates
- Optimise your job postings to capture the attention of top talent
- Maximise return on your recruitment investment
- Capture qualified candidates and attract right-fit clients
- Get ahead of your competitors with clever SEO
An overview of inbound
It starts with developing your key target candidates and core client personas, so you can begin to understand who your ideal candidates and clients are and how you can cater your marketing strategy to meet their needs.
The next stage of the inbound marketing methodology is conducting keyword research. Start by asking yourself what your target personas are searching for online – do they need advice on how to get that perfect job in a niche industry? Or do they want to hire the hottest talent in their space, at speed and at scale?
Once you know your target keywords, you can begin to create amazing content that helps solve their problems.
You then need to optimise this content for search engines, share it on your social channels, and promote it via paid ads. You could also share it with your existing audience via email to create digital word-of-mouth – and watch the traffic to your website go through the roof! Check out this case study to find out how we helped one of our clients achieve a traffic increase of 812% and a 4000% increase in lead generation.
The next major phase of the inbound marketing methodology is converting these visitors into new contacts for your agency. Offering your website visitors something they just can’t refuse is a great way to do this; for example, you could create downloadable guides or offer free CV clinics.
To get access to these offers, your website visitors will need to fill in a form, which then captures their data. Once they’re contacts for your agency, your sales team can then engage with them directly, and you can also use automated email marketing to nurture these leads into new candidates or clients.
Of course, while this all sounds pretty straight forward, getting it done and making sure all the pieces of your digital marketing puzzle fit together can be tricky - which is exactly why we’ve created this guide to help get you started on your digital marketing journey.
Ready to get started? Let’s dive in and start creating your digital marketing strategy for a recruitment agency!
6 steps to creating the ultimate digital marketing strategy for recruitment agencies
1. Create amazing content
By creating engaging, relevant, and helpful content that’s targeted specifically towards your audience, you’ll not only attract visitors to your website but also turn those visitors into valuable clients and candidates that are perfect for your agency.
How do you do it? By starting a blog. Easier said than done, right? But a blog makes your website more dynamic by automatically injecting new content every time an article is published. Plus, Google loves websites that are always adding fresh content, rewarding them with higher rankings.
What do I write about?
Well, if your aim is to attract new candidate applications, then you need to write blog posts that will help your potential candidates.
Think of the most common questions and problems candidates have when they come to see you: are they struggling with interview nerves? Not sure how to write the best CV? Worried about what sort of jobs to apply for? Answer these concerns in a series of blog posts, and you’ll see an uplift in traffic.
Alternatively, if you want to increase the number of clients you work with, use the same approach to attract them. Create your ideal persona and ensure you think about what challenges they face and what can you do to help overcome them.
To learn more about how to create engaging content and how to use topic clusters to boost your website traffic, check out this blog post.
2. Optimise your website
The next step to a great digital marketing strategy is SEO (search engine optimisation). SEO involves implementing a range of techniques to help you attract potential candidates and clients to the content on your website. It involves two sets of tactics: on-page and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO includes everything you do within your website to optimise it, such as the strategic implementation of relevant keywords. Many people will want to rank first on Google’s results page, but in order to do so, you need to choose a term that you want to be number one for.
To do this, you need to research the most common questions your candidates and clients ask you and see if there are any keywords relating to this so you can ensure your keywords are as relevant and helpful as possible for new prospects who are searching for a recruitment agency.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to improving your website’s overall authority on the web. One key way to do this is by getting other websites to link back to yours. The more high-authority sites linking to your website, the stronger your authority becomes, and the more likely your website is to be found by potential leads.
Quick tips:
- Include your keyword within your SEO page title, as close to the beginning as possible. This tells Google that the content on this page is relevant.
- Implement your keyword throughout your web content, ensuring that what you’re posting is engaging and helpful for your readers to enhance your credibility as a recruitment agency. For example, writing candidate-focused content, such as interview or CV writing tips, will be useful and worthwhile for your target audience and will enhance your credibility as a recruitment agency.
- Knowing your candidate’s persona will enable you to do better keyword research, so ensure you conduct research into your target audience and what really matters to them.
- Write a meta description for every page of your website and each blog you publish. Make sure that your meta description is compelling and engaging, and that it also includes your keyword.
- Use heading tags! These are pieces of text that appear larger and bolder on the page. Within the HTML coding of your text, use <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> tags. Remember that <h1> tags give the text more weight as keywords than <h2> or <h3> tags, so you should only use the <h1> tag once (preferably for the main header) to avoid diluting the text.
- Optimise your job pages – after all, this is the page you want your candidates to end up on!
- Enhance user experience with images. When inserting images into your website, ensure that you use the ‘alt text’ HTML attribute to provide relevant text descriptions of the image and that you use your keyword in the file name.
Want even more tips on how to improve the digital marketing strategy for your recruitment agency? If so, download our in-depth guide. It walks you through everything you need to know to implement a killer marketing strategy that will help you attract the candidates and clients you need.
3. Share on social media
To have the best chance of your content being seen, you need to share it on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram so you can directly communicate with your prospects.
Use social media to grow your audience by actively interacting with candidates, sharing other people’s content as well as your own, and offering advice - and don’t forget that different platforms suit different audiences.
For example, LinkedIn is a great place to find potential candidates and clients, whereas Twitter and Facebook provide a fantastic opportunity to share your content to help achieve better coverage.
Investing in paid social media ads can also be a hugely beneficial way to reach more candidates, and they can also be targeted towards your ideal target audience.
4. Create CTAs
Now that you’re attracting people to your website, you need to turn them into leads. How do you do this? By offering them something they can’t refuse!
This could be anything from a useful eBook or resource to a free consultation… whatever works for your agency, catches the attention of your website visitors and gives them a reason to fill out a form to collect their information.
Once you have decided on your offer, create a call to action (CTA). This is a button that your web visitors click to take them to a landing page. They can be placed anywhere within your website and will trigger lead generation.
On a landing page, your visitors will be asked to fill out a form in order to get access to your offer. Remember to include a thank-you page that your leads are redirected to!
5. Nurture your leads
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with your potential customers by sending targeted, relevant, and valuable messages to them in a timely manner.
This includes automated emails that offer them useful and engaging information so that, when the time comes, they will choose to register with your agency over your competitors.
According to research by LinkedIn, 70% of the workforce is passively looking for a job - so lead nurturing is an essential way to engage with and bring in passive talent.
Each one of your marketing campaigns should have a goal. Make it clear what recipients are supposed to do once they open your email. Are you asking them to share an offer on social media, or inviting them to download your new eBook?
Whatever it is, remember to use a CTA that links to a landing page where they can further engage with your company.
6. Evaluate the results
Of course, to find out how successful your campaigns are, you need to measure them! You can do this by monitoring your click-through rate (CTR) which indicates the number of people that have clicked on your links, showing you how compelling your email messages are.
Another metric you can track is the unsubscribe rate, which measures the percentage of recipients who have opted out of your email communications.
Of course, this isn’t ideal and may leave you feeling a little deflated, but don’t worry – the unsubscribe rate isn’t a completely reliable picture of your email list’s health. Many subscribers won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process but will just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your messages.
Ready to rock your recruitment marketing?
Now you have a pretty solid understanding about how to create a great digital marketing strategy for your recruitment agency and how inbound can work for you, it’s time to get started!
However, if you want to find out more about digital marketing for recruitment agencies, download our free guide for an in-depth walk-through of everything your agency needs to do to start getting your marketing strategy off the ground.
At Angelfish Marketing, we’re experts in creating powerful, measurable campaigns for recruitment agencies, and have helped numerous recruitment consultancies to stand out from the crowd in an increasingly competitive market.
Find out more about how we can support you with your digital marketing strategy for a recruitment agency with a free, one-hour marketing consultation and report. Simply click the button below to book your free consultation in today.
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