Marketing for Recruitment Agency Start-Ups

How do they distinguish between relevant and irrelevant metrics? What KPIs should they establish? How do you tackle other countries and cultures? Thrive Recruitment Marketing’s founder, Kristie Perrotte discusses this topic and gives an insightful guide for how to set up and develop your initial digital marketing strategy with Alison Humphries a podcast on recruitmentleadership.co.uk.

What’s the first thing that should be in your marketing strategy?

Many start up recruitment businesses start with a website that acts as a brochure, laying out information about your unique selling points and what sets you apart from other companies. Testimonials and case studies have their place alongside your job listings in order to get candidates interested and reassure your value to potential clients. However, very simple pitfalls mean you may not be maximising on that traffic and converting it into concrete leads, applications or enquiries. This is essential for initially building your database.

As you develop your business, turning your website from a brochure to a source of inbound leads – whether candidates applying for a job or uploading their CV, clients submitting a job vacancy or submitting a form to download a report or internal candidates applying for roles – will be a key part of your agency’s growth where marketing can be a driver of tangible business opportunities.

How can you make sure that marketing is having an impact?

The answer is Google Analytics. First and foremost, it’s about measuring your marketing performance through the volume of inbound leads and goals – called ‘conversions’. While though it’s nice to get a lot of likes and shares on LinkedIn, it doesn’t make much difference if it isn’t resulting in tangible business opportunities. Google Analytics allows you to track your marketing performance, as ultimately, it’s about acquiring more customers.

The second metric you should be considering in Google Analytics is website traffic – both volume and source. Looking at exactly where your website traffic is coming from will help you adjust your marketing strategy to get the most out of that channel, whether it’s organic search, job boards, pay per click advertising, or social media etc. Understanding your acquisition and channel mix and drilling down to a cost per application or cost per conversion/placement will help you understand which channel(s) drive the best results and lead to tangible business opportunities.

Who can help you maximise on your digital marketing channels?

Currently, there is a trend for start-up recruitment companies to find a junior marketer to do this who is either an ex-recruiter with a penchant for social media, or a very junior marketer lacking industry knowledge. However, utilising this kind of staff member might not be cost effective as they may struggle to define and hit appropriate KPIs and convert those all-important in-bound leads. It’s often more cost-effective to enlist the help of a third-party specialist or digital marketing consultancy, like Thrive Marketing Communications, who have knowledge of a wide variety of digital marketing channels and access to automation tools that can optimise communication with potential applicants based on behavioural triggered nurture sequences.