Sales & Marketing Tips for Recruitment Agencies to Grow Business

Recruiters often neglect marketing amidst daily activities of calling candidates and meeting clients, resulting in diluted brand recall in front of candidates and clients (and yup, its both)

If you are determined to support your recruiters in the mid-long term, it’s time to get strategic about marketing. Strategic focus on marketing is important for recruitment agencies as it helps them to attract clients and candidates, build brand awareness, differentiate from competitors, and establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry.

Here are some of the ways you can use to ensure your recruiters never slow down on calls and meetings while adding prospects to the pipeline.

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Account Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B marketing strategy that focuses on targeting specific accounts or companies rather than casting a wide net to attract as many leads as possible. The goal of ABM is to create highly personalized, targeted email marketing campaigns that speak directly to the needs and interests of the individual accounts being targeted. Here are the steps in brief

• Identify high-value target accounts: Just as with traditional ABM, you can use data and analytics to identify high-value clients that are most likely to be a good fit for your services. This may involve looking at factors like industry, location, size, and hiring patterns and even past successes to identify the companies that are most likely to need your agency's services. You can use also use signals like jobs posted in the last month, employee growth in Linkedin to identify whether companies are growing.
• Identify key prospects in an account: Once the target accounts have been identified, identify 4-5 contacts inside the company who could be potential decision makers. You could search using job titles (for e.g CEO, CMO etc) or even direct hiring managers. Having someone in previous relationships inside an account
• Connect with personalized messaging: Create content for each account that your sales team can use for sales outreach. These could be emails, linkedin messages, phone call scriptions and even landing pages. Keep in mind that the latest research suggests that a prospective buyer hear or see a marketing message at least seven times before they buy it, so have enough content. For email marketing and email analytics, consider Klaviyo (or Klaviyo alternatives) that offer robust features for tracking and analyzing email performance. To further personalize your message, it helps to communicate it in your prospect's language. For example, if your prospect is based in Spain, you can establish a stronger connection by learning and speaking Spanish.

While the process is indeed time taking, it is known to show results when done properly. To further personalize your outreach and make a lasting impression, consider creating visually engaging posters that highlight your agency's expertise and the value you offer to target accounts. Platforms like Canva or Adobe Spark offer a variety of templates and design tools that make it easy to create posters online in minutes, even without graphic design experience.

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Thought leadership

Creating thought leadership content can be an effective way to establish your recruitment agency as experts in their field and build credibility with potential clients and candidates. Here are some steps you can take to create thought leadership content:

• Identify relevant topics that will interest your target audience. This may involve researching industry trends and staying up-to-date on the latest news and developments in the field. It could also be something you learn when speaking to candidates and clients.
• Conduct original research to create unique and compelling content. This may involve conducting surveys with your connections, linkedin polls, analyzing industry data, or partnering with other organizations to gather information and insights. The idea here is to create content which is unique and the vast majority of the readers will learn something new with your content. Your content will be nothing without the branding image, so investing in a logo maker and brand-designing tools.
• Create high-quality content that engages and informs your target audience. It should be unique and can contain infographic as well.
• Promote your content to reach a wider audience: Share your content on linkedin, even get your team to do it. Partnering with industry influencers is very effective because it can potentially reach a much wider audience via them. Although slightly expensive, paid advertising on Linkedin to reach specific target audiences is also an effective channel.
• Engage with your audience: Responding to comments and feedback and participating in online discussions.

By following these steps, you can create thought leadership content that not only showcases your expertise but also helps you attract and engage potential clients and candidates.

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Leveraging Social Media

Being active on social media gives recruiters the opportunity to reach out to a wide range of personas and have meaningful interaction. Ask your team to share jobs they are working on, showcase industry experience by sharing key industry news, utilize an AI photo enhancer tool to visually appeal to your audience, engage with influencers by commenting. Videos get much higher engagement compared to static texts, so encourage your team to record videos explaining jobs descriptions asking people to apply. Using a free online video editor can help enhance the quality of these videos and make them more engaging for your audience.

Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer can be used to schedule, manage and monitor social media with spending not more than 30 mins in a week. Pro Tip - You can use a QR Code with logo and share it on social media platform such as LinkedIn, to boost brand identity and employee engagement. Recruiters can also use tools to embed social media feeds on their websites to increase the reach and engagement of their socials.

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Personalization is key

With 100s of tools to automate outreach and almost everyone using them - candidates have become really good at identifying the real emails vs automated. Hence, personalization is becoming even more important for recruiters if you truly want to connect with the passive candidates.

By personalizing emails or linkedin messages, recruiters can show that they care and have taken the time to understand the candidate's background, skills, and interests and how they feel that the candidate is most suited for the job. This can help to create a more meaningful connection and increase the likelihood of a response, and even build relationship for the longer term.

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Final Thoughts

Marketing is no longer restricted to clients but also candidates. Positioning yourself as a thought leader and being visible in front of candidates and client is key and the only way to differentiate yourself from the competition. If you don't have in-house expertise in marketing, consider outsourcing by hiring the right digital marketing agency for your company. New research says that prospective buyer hear or see a marketing message at least seven times before they buy, so consistency is the only sure shot way to grow your recruitment agency.