4 Ways to Change your Recruitment Marketing for the New Normal

Intro: Recruitment marketing has undergone a sea change following the pandemic with employers strategising more on enhancing the experiences of prospects and employees

 

Last year saw the basics of recruitment marketing strategies being turned over its head to appeal to a candidate pool fraught with an uncertain road ahead. Much of that has settled down now, with a new normal gradually becoming the same-old, same-old. Organizations are now building candidate experiences on Zoom interviews while recruitment marketing agencies are crafting employer branding through interesting stories about employee remote work experiences. What’s been consistent throughout these confusing times is that recruiters from both in-house HR teams and recruiting marketing agency have adapted brilliantly to achieve results.

 

Nevertheless, COVID-19 has left recruitment marketers with lots of lessons, some never implemented, some oft-reiterated and others that will always stand you in good stead for your employer branding and recruitment marketing through 2021. Here goes:

 

  1. Building a meaningful relationship, be it with your prospective candidates or your employees, has been on every recruiter’s best practices list, but always sidetracked due to lack of time or commitment before the pandemic. Now, more than in the past, it’s a no-brainer that an emotional connect, where your attitude is candidate or employee-centric rather than task-centric, is bound to make your recruitment marketing and employer branding sticky.

 

  1. Employer branding is an ongoing activity, and the pandemic has made several organizations realize that the only way to propagate their company’s culture in the present times is to bring forth interesting and inspiring individual, team and departmental stories. Devoid of office set-ups and the cooler and coffee machine exchanges, the new online conversations and discussions are, in fact, richer and deeper and connect with remote teams even better.

 

  1. Eliciting experiences and work-related anecdotes from employees is one thing, but propagating them and having them resonate with the target audience and prospective candidate pool is an altogether different challenge. Earlier, company events like R&R (rewards and recognition) displays, annual meet-ups, CSR activities helped draw attention to the brand, creating photo ops and viral quality content. Now, organizations are hoping for their employees to take extra initiatives and create these employer branding features. This has led to organizations now training employees to create such user-generated content, and even sending across equipment like cameras, tripods to make it easier for employees to do so.

 

  1. The pandemic also highlighted for HR teams the fact that at the end of the day experience is what counts, whether it’s in-person or digital. For both, candidates seeking to join an organisation or the employees at the organisation, the level of remote-friendliness that their employers offered, how seamless their digital experiences were be it on meetings and collaborative tools, exchanging work-related documentation, ease for candidates to give interviews and assessments is what earned extra brownie points. Consumer marketing has exposed everyone to such seamless practices that candidates and employees are bound to expect the same user experience even at their workplaces.

The Barriers of Implementing Marketing Automation

Marketing automation has been extensively used by many small and large B2B corporations ever since its existence. But even today not every business that uses a marketing automation strategy gets the true value out of it. Sure, it has helped to alleviate many pain points of the inherent problems in traditional marketing but here are some areas where many businesses still struggle with when it comes to successfully implementing a marketing automation strategy:

 

  • Adopting Marketing Automation Services

Many B2B organizations purchase marketing automation tools and software’s in the hopes that it will somehow magically solve all their problems right out of the box. While it’s true that marketing automation services can drastically scale up your sales and marketing efforts, companies often face an uphill battle when the right resources and expertise aren’t in place. This is especially common at SMEs, which is ironic because it’s these companies that have the greatest need for marketing automation solutions and have the most to gain from it.

 

  • Difficulties Around Email Deliverability

According to a marketing automation specialist, email automation is one of the most successful digital marketing strategies even today which is why it is crucial to improve an organization's email deliverability- the overall health of a sender’s email including delivery rates, inbox rates, click rates, perceived email channel health, and ROI from email — amongst others. This ensures quality in boxing but unfortunately many marketers are not familiar with this concept and have no clue how to improve it.

 

  • Effective Marketing Automation for Lead Management

The integration between your marketing automation agency and CRM can create a world of lead management opportunities. But thanks to inaccurate and poor lead scoring, marketing teams aren’t able segment and groom those leads in an effective way. Many marketers still struggle to leverage the most of their lead conversion as a result of less than ideal marketing automation initiatives in place.

 

In the end it all comes down to lead prioritization which is achievable within most marketing technology stacks and solutions but your marketing and sales efforts need to be informed, intentional and proactive when scoring, nurturing and managing prospects.

 

Blog Link Resource:-
https://oxpermission.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-barriers-of-implementing-marketing.html

Is The Future of Recruitment Inbound?

It’s no news that hiring talent in a candidate-driven job market means putting aside our egos and focusing our efforts to meet the needs of the candidates.  Nowadays, the candidate behavior pattern has changed tremendously and nobody wants to be “sourced”. This makes us seriously ponder upon the future implications of the traditional recruitment process as it slowly shifts toward us moving out of our corporate desks and boardrooms to engage and build a meaningful relationship with the candidates. Doing this successfully, will open our doors to the best of talent out there.

 

For candidates, applying for a job is a big personal investment and it takes time to turn them from a visitor to an applicant. Like marketers convert leads into sales, as recruiters, we must market our organization and sell our job openings to the aspiring talent out there. The tables have now turned- instead of them coming to us, we now have to go knock on their doors for hiring. Such is the future of recruitment- inbound marketing. 

 

Now, if you’re looking for inbound recruitment in Delhi or Pune or anywhere else in India, the process is the same- don’t rush into things expecting for quick results. It’s a long-term strategy and takes time before you can fully reap the long-drawn rewards of an inbound recruitment strategy. Just focus on tailoring your approach to every step of the applicant’s journey and measure the performance of your employer branding content, recruitment marketing campaigns and careers page. Now, this may seem like a lot of effort but its benefits in the long run- employer brand gravity, lower cost per applicant, lower cost per hire and improved quality of talent in the workforce, are hard to argue with.

 

Just like with inbound marketing, prospects are segmented into buyer personas- a fictionalized representation of your ideal buyers which marketers can use to more effectively target their content- the very same principles apply in inbound recruitment marketing as well. Crafting candidate personas here will help you guide your recruitment marketing automation strategy towards prospective candidates more effectively. Now that you have a candidate persona in place, you can begin to work on the candidate journey which you can understand better by mapping it out into discrete steps.

 

Candidates are now customers, thus by taking an inbound marketing approach to recruiting, companies can connect with passive and active job seekers, engage with their network, and delight candidates throughout the application process.

 

Blog Link Resource:-
https://www.apsense.com/article/is-the-future-of-recruitment-inbound.html

The Struggles of An Account-based Approach in Marketing

Unbeknownst to many, the road to success in account based marketing can be fraught with inherent challenges and obstacles that every B2B marketing agency has to overcome. While some of these struggles may be specific to an agency and its method of operating, other recurring issues have a tendency to manifest in any organisation that practices account-based marketing.

The overarching objective is to recognize these problems and act swiftly to solve them so that businesses can stay focused on success instead of allowing failures to fester and weigh on company morale. Here are some struggles to lookout for while implementing an account-based approach towards your B2B marketing-

1.      The sales funnel is not deep enough for awareness leads

Grooming leads out of the awareness stage requires understanding and responding to business obstacles they currently experience. Tailoring content with the solution to their problems is vital. A prospective lead must understand the value of solving this problem for their company before moving onto the decision stage. Therefore, curate more varied content that is appropriate to each stage of the process before rushing on to the demo too soon.

2.      A crowded market lacking differentiation

Standing out is important in a crowded market place. Focusing on curating interesting and engaging content is just not enough. Your company’s marketing messages should elucidate your points of differentiation and your unique brand promise. Differentiation is critical to your organisation’s survival because a stellar reputation or the cheapest price is not a strong enough foundation to differentiate your brand.

3.      The response to cold outreach is slim to none

The lack of recording response rates or an ineffective method of cold outreach is not only a waste of time but can lead to larger issues in the process like grey mail challenges that will eventually hurt all of your email marketing and sales efforts.  It is important to measure the response rates to every one of your campaigns which will help to determine which campaigns should you forgo and which ones you can continue with going forward.

Now, there are many other inherent problems of account-based marketing like misaligned marketing and sales, ignoring GDPR and flawed data collection practices all of which your B2B marketing agency can overcome with more experience in the field of account-based marketing practices.

 
 

The B2B and B2C Marketing Differences

A simple google search will tell you B2B stands for “business-to-business” while B2C stands for “business-to-consumers”. So, a B2B marketing agency sells its products or services to other businesses whereas a B2C marketing agency  sells its products and services to end-consumers and buyers for personal use. More specifically, B2B marketers sell to the key decision makers or influencers of a particular business which can include everything from high-end marketing automation services to something as simple as office chairs.  B2C marketers sell anything from clothes to groceries to romantic getaways/cruises, cars, gadgets and so much more.

THE KEY DIFFERENCES:

Both B2C and B2B marketing campaigns use more or less the same technical practices like retargeting to reduce abandoned carts or negative keywords to improve ad placements. While the inherent objective and initiatives to get there remain the same, there are fundamental differences between the two in certain areas-

  1. The Decision Maker/ Influencer

Reaching out to the key decision maker of the household will benefit B2C marketers but they don’t have to exclusively appeal to a single member in the family or household to sell their product. For e.g. A kid who fawns over a new flavour of ice-cream he never tried before might ask his mother to purchase it for him, even though the ad appealed to someone other than the primary buyer of the product.

However, in B2B marketing, you need to appeal to a specific individual or a small group of individuals in the business who are the key decision makers of whether they want to buy a product or service from another business. For e.g. if 20 employees in a company want new chairs, only the office manager or the upper-level employee will have the ability to make the purchase decision and they have to be on the receiving end of the ads directly.

  1. Underlying Motivation

The motivation for a business purchase and a personal purchase is likely to be very different. While B2C consumers are purchasing with the desire to improve their lives, B2B consumers purchase with the goal of improving their business and most importantly the company’s bottom line.

  1. The Time Taken To Convert

B2B customers are likely to take a significantly longer time conducting more and more research before arriving at the purchase decision. Once they see the initial benefits, they’ll click to your site to learn more and see the details, then look for third party reviews and at other competing options. It’s their business, after all, so the stakes are high.

B2C consumers want to see pretty much everything they need to know about the product or service immediately before making a purchase decision. For e.g. If you’re switching to a new brand of tea or buying a skincare product online, you’re not going to put extensive research of months and years to finalise the decision. A simple look at the packaging of the products or its online reviews is enough to drive purchase decisions. This is why it takes longer for B2B consumers to convert to leads as opposed to B2C consumers.

With that said, there are a lot of similarities in B2B and B2C businesses as well, for e.g. their end goal or objective is the same because in both cases you are selling to people no matter what.

 

Blog Link Resource:-
https://justpaste.it/4ow6d

Solid Marketing Ideas For Recruitment Firms

“How do I find more clients?” is a question frequently asked by staffing agencies and recruitment firms who are always looking to differentiate themselves from the steep mountain of competitors. I understand that marketing your agency in an industry as crowded as recruitment can be challenging.

 

Professional recruiters know that working hard will only get you so far and committing yourself to content marketing will give you a leg up over some of your competitors but won’t necessarily make you stand out if you’re using the same tactics as everyone else. So, here’s a few ideas for recruitment marketing that can help your agency get an edge over competitors-

 

  1. Next-Level Content Marketing

Blog posts that barely scratch the surface of any issue- like “10 Buzzwords You Should Delete From Your LinkedIn Profile” or “Don’t Overlook The Importance of Soft Skills” are redundant. They have no value to the readers. Even if they agree with the assertion, there are already thousands of similar 300-word posts on the topic. So, there is simply no point in re-hashing the subject.

 

Instead create content that is so good that there is simply no way it will not be widely shared amongst your target audience. This type of next-level content requires thorough research and expertise on industry topics that come from a point of view that is your own and not available anywhere else.

 

  1. Reddit Ads

The most popular ad markets like Google Adwords and LinkedIn are incredibly oversaturated so much so that most of your recruitment marketing ideas will be expensive to execute on these platforms and tough to justify on a small budget. Here’s where you can still find cheap advertising for your recruitment firm- Reddit. There are tens and thousands of daily users on many subreddits who accept ads at reasonable prices.

 

If you want to know more about advertising on Reddit, here's where you should go: https://www.redditinc.com/advertising While creating your ad just make sure you target specific subreddits where you know the people you’re looking for are hanging out.

 

  1. Free Online Software

The best way to attract new clients to your recruitment marketing agency is to create a free online tool or software that offers them immense value upfront. An example of this would be Hubspot’s free Website Grader tool (https://website.grader.com/) that scores your business website on a number of parameters- SEO, Speed, Mobile Readiness, Security etc.

The advantage of creating free online tools for users like the one discussed here is twofold- a) you get hordes of email addresses from potential clients you can start an email campaign with to win them over as your customers and b) by offering them immense value at the very beginning of the sales cycle, the odds of them choosing you for their recruitment marketing efforts will dramatically increase down the road.

 

All these steps can be a little tricky to pull off at first, but if done well, you will reap huge benefits in the form of endless leads pouring into your business.

Blog Link Resource:-

https://oxper.mystrikingly.com/blog/solid-marketing-ideas-for-recruitment-firms

It’s Critical To Make The Switch To Account-based Marketing

Account Based Marketing

In a nutshell, account based marketing is a B2B marketing strategy focusing on finding companies (accounts) that match ideal client profiles and then target the key decision makers of those companies with personalised content and messaging through advertising and marketing campaigns.

It avoids the use of “spray and pray” tactics that target the masses and uses laser-like focus instead to understand client needs to set in motion the most effective marketing strategy that will nurture engagement and value addition along with key stakeholders. 

It’s the best way for B2B companies to do away with their misaligned marketing and sales efforts by outsourcing the job to an account based marketing agency that takes mass marketing and targets it to a market of one (account) for that specific message. So, here’s why you should integrate account-based marketing into your B2B marketing strategy:

1.      Targeted Communications

There’s no doubt that offering personalized content tailored to each individual resonates more with them instead of a generic and slightly off-putting “Dear Potential Customer”.  With account-based marketing you can take personalized marketing to a new level by developing researched content and messages those key decision makers want and need to move through the buyer’s journey. Such finely-tuned content requires expertise and knowledge which they will immediately recognise and are more likely to subscribe to than generic email blasts.

2.      A More Defined RoI

A marketing strategy must be measurable. This is no different for account-based marketing. More than 84% of businesses have revealed in a survey that account-based marketing generates a higher return on investment than other marketing strategies. Being able to measure the RoI is critical for any marketing initiative and through ABM you can see both the RoI for such an initiative and the immediate areas for improvement based on how contacts are responding to your content.

3.      Efficient Utilization of B2B Resources

Marketing is always pulled in many different directions. But an account-based marketing agency can seamlessly structure your marketing efforts and resources focusing only on your key accounts to drive the most revenue. With such a narrow focus, account-based marketing initiatives optimize your most valuable resources i.e. money and time, uniting your sales-marketing efforts and maximizing the efficiency of your B2B marketing resources.

While account-based marketing doesn't intend to replace mass marketing efforts that drive awareness and traffic, it is the next level of B2B marketing that pushes companies towards a clearer RoI, implementing personalized campaigns with measurable sales results.

Blog Link Resource:-

https://oxpermission.blogspot.com/2021/03/its-critical-to-make-switch-to-account.html