As per American Staffing Association, Staffing agencies provided jobs to 16 million employees pre-pandemic.Staffing agencies possess extensive know-how and caliber to attract and procure the right talent.
As per American Staffing Association, Staffing agencies provided jobs to 16 million employees pre-pandemic.
The staffing industry is highly competitive, with over $140 billion a year in revenue. Moreover, of the 20,000 staffing agencies in the US, the top 5 staffing agencies hold 50% of the market share.
Therefore, the fight to discover and convert leads is intense and deserves a well-thought-of recruitment marketing strategy.
A good recruitment marketing strategy would help staffing agencies to position themselves well in the recruiting landscape and help differentiate themselves from their competitors. The marketing strategy must inspire clients to choose the staffing agency over its competitors.
When done correctly, recruitment marketing can help staffing agencies break out, sustain, and cross the $1 million magic number in revenue, which only a few agencies can manage.
A marketing strategy is crucial for a staffing agency as it helps increase inbound leads, improve conversion rates, increase job orders, and help grow revenue.
Before framing your marketing strategy, staffing agencies must determine the pointers on which they will base their strategy.
Some of these pointers include the USP of the staffing agency, the scope of marketing, time allotted for goal achievement, channels to find clients, brand positioning, and tools the agency deploys in its sales and marketing process.
After answering these key questions, the staffing agency can plan its recruitment marketing strategy. With these 8 ways, staffing agencies can market themselves, secure leads, and convert them into long-term business opportunities.
8 Strategies to Market your Staffing Agency
#1 Define and Position yourself in the market
When your staffing agency sets upon writing the ingredient list for your marketing strategy, you must define the market position of your staffing agency first. Some of the pointers that you may ponder and work upon may be:
- How your brand of services is distinct from your competitors
- What’s your USP?
- What kind of staffing software do you use that gives you an edge over others?
- What kind of clients would you ideally like to serve?
- Which niches in the market would you be targeting?
Once clarity around the above ideas is achieved, the marketing team can start working on the brand message and define what your staffing agency will work on.
#2 Research your market and identify leads
Now that you have zeroed in on the niches and markets you target, you must research the market and the qualified leads. This step is crucial to a recruitment marketing plan to generate consistent revenue.
The potential lead could be the one who is within your niche, falls in a set revenue range you decided for yourself, and could possibly leverage your services to their benefit.
Say you shortlist 50 companies or people as the best high-ticket prospects to whom you would pitch your services. Before pitching your staffing agency services, try to know your prospective client better.
Learn about their pain points and explain why they should consider hiring your services to tackle the same.
Next, to have a proper recruitment marketing strategy in place, build your ideal customer profile (ICP) just like the candidate persona. The ICP for a particular prospect can be developed after studying the lead’s website and social media, press releases and media mentions, financial events like mergers and investments, upcoming projects, frequent open positions, etc.
You can use Google Alerts for these companies to stay updated on the information and recent hiring triggers.
#3 Develop an outreach strategy and follow-up process
Depending on the ICP you created, reach out to potential clients by contacting the people who have the budgetary authority or are decision-makers in the company.
Instead of having a single point of contact in the prospective client company, opt for multiple points of contact to build strong relationships, which is great for the long run. The advantage of this step would be that you won’t have to keep track of your single point of contact and start from scratch in case they leave the company or change departments.
Whoever your target customers are, reaching out once can never be sufficient. Develop a follow-up strategy. Connect with them on professional and social media platforms. Use emails to check with them frequently.
The crux of the strategy lies in the fact that you need to nurture relationships, not just build them. While following up, be consistent about your brand image and the solutions you offered previously. Use email sequences – manual or automated – to maintain the consistency and flow of communication.
#4 Develop a content marketing strategy
A well-spread-out content marketing strategy across verticals and horizontals, channels, and segments covering target clients can work wonders to get inbound leads or while you reach out to prospects.
Prospective clients seek value in relationships, and content marketing helps deliver that. Create a strong inbound marketing strategy so that the content you create is able to attract customers who reach out to you directly.
Your content must be interesting, timely, educational, relevant, actionable, and engaging. Content marketing helps to build your organic reach and increase traffic on your website and social media channels.
A content marketing strategy may involve blogs, articles, landing pages, social media posts, short videos, newsletters, tutorials, podcasts, and webinars.
From this influx of traffic, you will find your possible leads and conversions.
To create such engaging content, you need to plan a content marketing strategy. A content marketing strategy would involve researching the top 3 or more marketing channels to give you maximum reach to your target clients.
Address and study what your competitors are doing and discuss the same with your content team. Find out what’s working or not for your client and how you can improve and incorporate it into your content strategy.
Once you develop a community that regularly consumes your content and considers you as their go-to option when they seek advice on their recruiting problems, you will become a trusted partner to them, which may bring in inbound leads.
Check – Social Media Recruitment Strategy
#5 Level up your SEO game
Content marketing cannot meet its desired goals if the content isn’t optimized for SEO. Good content needs to reach the right audience to generate results. Optimize your website, content, and social media posts for SEO.
This would help you gain better traffic and Google search rankings. Google indexes websites based on many factors such as keywords, originality, backlinks, etc. If your content team is doing everything alright, no one can stop your staffing agency website from ranking higher in the SERPs and gaining maximum traction.
Backlinko data says that a website with the #1 organic ranking in a Google search is 10x more likely to receive a click than the #10 SERP result.
If technical SEO can get intimidating, hire an SEO agency to manage your site architecture, page speed optimization, mobile optimization, site migrations, etc., along with content optimization.
Practicing SEO best practices will give your staffing agency visibility on search engines like Google and help it rank higher to increase the chances of discovery and possible clicks.
#6 Leverage social media
Social media marketing (SMM) can prove highly valuable as billions use one or more social media platforms daily. Every company has a social media page today, a team managing postings and hashtags, and a paid and organic marketing strategy to find and convert leads.
Though SMM can be costly and time-consuming, it can help your staffing agency by strengthening the brand image, creating a strong community, and bringing in candidates and customers. Instead, Randstad, a popular staffing agency, has over 17k followers over 2100 of Allegis Group, which is also similar in size and function.
Like keywords and backlinks in SEO, hashtags can be crucial for discovering your posts. Incorporate a decent number of relevant keywords in your posts related to the staffing industry.
Post articles from your blog to add traffic to your website, or else have the key figures in your company post thought leadership views, related news, announcements, and other information from their personal handles.
#7 Get yourself listed in industry directories
Besides keeping your website up-to-date and running smoothly, invest some time creating and optimizing your Google My Business profile (GMP) to improve your online presence.
Google provides a special program for staffing agencies where agencies can get themselves registered and input multiple addresses. This can be a good start to building your local SEO presence.
Anybody looking for a ‘staffing agency near me’ can discover you in the search results provided your GMP is optimized and updated.
Another way to build your presence and relevance in local search is by getting listed in industry directories. The backlink in each directory will boost your website’s domain presence.Some of the best directories to start your SEO journey could be the American Staffing Association or your local Chamber of Commerce or Business Association.
#8 Leverage fairs and referrals
One way to increase your digital presence online is through media mentions or industry publications. This kind of media marketing would help build an online presence and lend credibility to your brand.
Finding a space in featured pieces like top 10 staffing agencies on a high-ranking website can also boost awareness around your brand.
Beyond the digital, event marketing is another way to effectively market your staffing agency. The pandemic did cause such events to be put on hold for a while, but when you host, sponsor, or become a part of such marketing events, you are opening up new avenues to meet other companies, executives, and employees.
Hosting such events allows you to own your visibility and audience. According to the Event Marketing Benchmarks and Trends report, 93% of the respondents in a survey agreed that such events provided the attendees with the chance to build in-person connections.
Client referrals can also help you gather word-of-mouth publicity to crack crucial leads. Client referral programs also have various benefits and can help your agency to find high-ticket clients. By incentivizing referrals, you can bring in customers for your business. Other names include Bing, LinkedIn, Google, Recruiter.com, Foursquare, Yahoo!, Whitepages, etc.
Wrap-up
These could be some of the many ways to build your recruitment marketing strategy and increase your visibility. The staffing agency can have an in-house marketing team or hire a marketing agency to enable your marketing strategy.
An effective recruitment marketing strategy can simultaneously bring in crucial leads and increase sales. The end motive should be to find the right framework and combination of strategies that will cater to the unique requirements of your staffing agency.
Also read: 12 Recruitment Marketing Strategies To Use in 2023 12 Effective Strategies for Recruitment Marketing
FAQs on Marketing Strategies for Staffing Agencies
How do staffing agencies get new clients?
To get a new client, staffing agencies work on a marketing strategy that involves creating an ICP, finding clients via job postings, using social media to increase online presence, and using other mediums like cold emailing, phone calls, client referrals, and networking, to reach out to prospective clients.
How do you create a staffing strategy?
The best way to create a staffing strategy is to begin by determining the goals, identifying the factors involved in personnel availability, determining the functional needs of the organization, conducting a gap analysis, and creating the final staffing plan.
What are the 4 things clients look for when engaging a recruitment agency?
The four things that clients look for when hiring a staffing agency include the depth of the recruiting process an agency is using for sourcing candidates, transparency in operations, the relationship the agency builds with the candidates, and the level of understanding the agency has for the industries they serve.
Who is the target market of the recruitment agency?
The target market or audience of a recruitment agency is a group of individuals with specific qualifications and experiences that fit a particular recruitment need.
What are the six elements of recruitment strategy?
The six key elements of recruitment strategy include workforce planning, company brand building, sourcing and recruiting, comprehensive onboarding, using new technologies, and use of data analytics.
