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Terri Roeslmeier
Terri Roeslmeier is President of Automated Business Designs, Inc., software developer of Ultra-Staff software for the staffing and direct hire industry. Ultra-Staff is a full-featured business solution with components for front office, back office, mobile and web suite. For more information on Ultra-Staff go to www.abd.net.

The Staffing Marketing Tool That Takes the Mystery Out of Marketing

  By Terri Roeslmeier  |    Monday September 13, 2016



Preventing your brand messaging from getting lost in the chatter may be one of the most difficult challenges facing members of the staffing industry today. Your clients and candidates have no shortage of staffing firms to select from, most of which claim equal expertise or offer a comparable value proposition. To be noticed, let alone remembered, requires more than a routine message. 

Contemporary marketing is built to target people on the individual level. Your staffing marketing tool should have the analytic power and maneuverability to make that happen. Here’s how the right recruiting and staffing software can integrate into your competitive marketing strategy. 

Quickly Identifying Which Marketing Tactics Work

In previous years, your staffing firm might have had the luxury to test marketing tactics at a leisurely pace. However, that’s not the case today. Data analysis tools have influenced every inch of the staffing industry, from sourcing and customer relationship management to back office and marketing strategies. The difference in the growth of companies who effectively use their data is the difference in speed you see between a bullet train and a stagecoach. The right staffing marketing tool can contribute to a staffing agency’s significant boost. 

It all starts with the recruiting and sales teams and data that they enter. Without meticulous data entry on their part, a good chunk of staffing data would be lost. For them to enter notes and other key information, the overall recruitment CRM dashboard needs to be clear, customized, and set up for rapid input during a call or after a meeting. Knowing where those referrals come from makes a world of difference. 

For marketing purposes, there needs to be a quick way to select and sort the source of client and candidate contacts. Was a contact convinced to contact you from an organic Google search? From your LinkedIn posts? From a laser-targeted AdWords campaign? Gathering that data is the first half. The second half, of course, comes back to analysis.

Having an analytics side to your staffing and recruiting platform simplifies the whole reporting process. Insight is almost instantaneous. That speed of feedback ensures that your recruiters and salespeople will gather data in the first place. The fewer steps they need to take to contribute to generating a marketing report, the more likely they’ll track their interactions. 

Once the report is generated by your staffing marketing tool, it only takes a moment to see which strategies are working, which need to be tweaked, and which need to be abandoned outright. 

Identifying When to Send Marketing Campaigns

Your staffing software can also tell you when it’s time to send marketing campaigns. Getting in touch with your inner Nostradamus requires nothing more than the ability to look at historic trends. That’s where the reporting features of your staffing marketing tool makes all of the difference. 

Once again, comprehensive tracking is the ticket. Having the ability to review the trends in your interactions and job orders with specific clients can tell you when it’s time to give them a little marketing fueled nudge. 

For example, let’s say that a staffing report indicates that a certain client contact tends to request a bulk order like clockwork every July. Right before they even get the impulse to buy, you’ve already contacted them with an email discussing the latest hiring trends or providing downloadable content about competitive industry salaries in their area. This targeted message achieves two things: it provides them valuable new information and a reminder that your team can deliver results. 

Personalizing Every Prospect’s Buying Cycle

You can’t control when during the buying process you will connect with a prospect. At one end, you have the prospects who are just recognizing their challenges and need guidance. At the other end, you have prospects ready and eager to sign an agreement. Between the two poles are a whole spectrum of prospects with varying needs, and your staffing software needs to help you address it all. 

Nurturing those leads through purchase and beyond requires diverse tactics and the ability to identify when to put them to use. That’s no small feat unless you have a staffing marketing tool that’s equipped to track each prospect’s progression in an uncomplicated way. It starts, once again, with a strong recruitment CRM. Most are built to easily input client notes and updates, but fall short when looking at a prospect readiness as a whole. 

Why does that matter for marketing? It depends on the way you customize your buying process. Different marketing tools correspond with different phases of the buying process. And encouraging your team to use the staffing marketing tools at their disposal allows for a faster conversion of leads into customers. 

Why Your Staffing Marketing Tool Needs to Easily Integrate

There are a variety of platforms that you can turn to for these capabilities. Some only handle fractions of the process, but there are enough staffing marketing options that handle the full scope of what’s mentioned above. In the end, your decision comes down to which tools can integrate with your staffing and recruiting platform without making extra steps. 

 


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