7 Signs You’re Not Seeing ROI from Marketing

Recruiters are no strangers to social media and marketing, but are your efforts delivering results?

For many, recruitment marketing ROI remains a mystery. Sure, you have a website, a logo and are sharing content on social media, but has marketing actually made a difference in the number of candidates registered, client leads generated, and placements made? The problem is that most agency leaders today don’t know how to evidence recruitment marketing ROI from marketing and are therefore reticent to invest.

The following are 7 signs that you’re not seeing recruitment marketing ROI – how many can you relate to?

You’re not seeing a rise in CVs or client leads

Marketing today is no longer about colouring in the lines or simply placing adverts in magazines, TV or billboards. While an appealing and engaging brand identity is important, today’s marketer should be an extension of your sales function and play a key role in candidate and client acquisition. Demonstrating how many CVs and client leads have been generated are key metrics for marketers and our equivalent of ‘making a placement’. If you’re not measuring this and benchmarking against previous months, quarters and years, you’ll never know if your marketing is making a tangible difference.

You don’t measure your recruitment marketing KPIs

So, how do you measure the success of a marketing campaign? With the vast data and technology at the disposal of today’s marketer, you should be tracking a vast array of metrics that each contribute to customer acquisition. While social media metrics can demonstrate engagement and build brand awareness, measuring and analysing website and other acquisition platforms (e.g. job boards) will demonstrate if your marketing activities are delivering more candidates and clients. Setting up and monitoring your Google Analytics platform is essential. Here you’ll be able to measure website traffic, events and conversions (aka CVs/registrations and client inquiries received), traffic sources and behavioural metrics (the path they take on the site, how long they’re on the site, time of day/week when visitors arrive etc.) Google Analytics has unlocked a world of wisdom at the marketer’s fingertips and is a great tool allowing marketers to partner with and demonstrate to our stakeholders the impact that marketing is having on the business.

You don’t analyse your recruitment marketing KPIs to make strategic decisions

As an extension to retrospective measurement of your marketing programmes, Google Analytics also allows you to develop both practical and strategic decision-making. What if you could tell that your best candidate applications (and placements!) are coming from a specific job board or that most of your client traffic comes from a certain social media site or campaign? Google Analytics allows you to identify what’s working, pivot strategy where necessary and develop more data-driven insights that can help your business grow.

You have not aligned marketing to your sales goals

How do you know what marketing needs to deliver if you haven’t benchmarked this against your sales and revenue goals? As a recruitment business, you likely have your sales targets and revenue projections for the year. But do you know how many placements you need to make to achieve this? Or how many candidate CVs or client leads you need to acquire to generate these customers? Marketing should have specific KPIs and figures that align to the goals of the business.

You’re posting on social media, but you don’t know why

As recruiters, most of us know that developing your personal and company brand on social media is a no brainer. As an extension to your CRM, it allows you to develop your client and candidate network, helping you be top of mind when they might have a hiring or career need. But have you thought about what you’re posting and why? Is it for brand awareness or to build your reputation? Is it to drive people to your website where you can engage with them and nurture them into becoming a customer? Like your wider sales and marketing strategy, you should be very considered and intentional with what you post on social media, how frequent you do so and what you hope to achieve.

You’ve not automated your processes

We’ve heard the arguments of ‘robots taking our jobs’ and witnessed many of the disruptors trying to our jobs better, faster and more cost effectively. And our response is always the same: ‘recruitment is a people business and you can’t take the human touch out of it’. Yet, you can leverage technology to make it more efficient. What if marketing automation can take away some of the top of the funnel activities like cold calling or reactivating lapsed candidates or clients in your database – activities you know can generate results but take a lot of manpower to execute? Marketing automation allows you to ‘warm up’ and nurture your leads, providing contacts to your recruiters who are ‘ready to buy’. It means that your teams can focus on the activities that require a human touch – building relationships, working the job and making more placements!

You don’t have a plan

Too many recruitment leaders say that they don’t see the value of marketing but have failed to identify what they want it to do. While you wouldn’t build a house without the blueprints, you shouldn’t embark on a marketing programme without a plan. It’s about understanding the wider business goals, analysing what has and hasn’t worked in the past, identifying your customer personas and pain points and developing specific channel and campaign strategies that will provide the building blocks to build your castle.

Recruitment marketing ROI should be a key part of your business growth and with the right metrics and analysis, can fundamentally enhance your sales generation activity. By establishing specific goals and best practice – developing strategy first and then executing the tactics – you’ll be better prepared to leverage the full impact of marketing and watch your business grow.

Supercharge Your Recruitment Marketing ROI with Thrive

Thrive Marketing Communications helps recruitment businesses and internal recruitment teams thrive with inbound marketing communications. We offer a free Google Analytics review and consultation to companies looking to get more out of their data and build marketing programmes that deliver results. For more information, visit here.