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Why is Marketing Important for Recruitment Companies?

Many recruitment companies rely on cold outreach to get new clients and candidates. However, that’s becoming harder than ever, as people are increasingly bombarded by advertisements and sales messages and are therefore tuning out. If you want to stand a better chance of converting the people you’re cold-calling, you should invest in recruitment marketing for your company. 

What is recruitment marketing? 

The term ‘recruitment marketing’ refers to marketing for recruitment companies and the talent acquisition department of a larger organisation. This blog is about the former, focussing on how recruitment companies can better market themselves. In that context, recruitment marketing often includes activities like brand awareness, sales enablement, and value propositions. These marketing methods will be structured in a funnel that creates awareness of the company, builds trust with its audience, and helps your consultants convert them into clients and candidates. 

The Benefits of Brand Awareness

As we mentioned earlier, cold outreach on its own doesn’t have a great conversion rate. However, if the people you’re calling know about you or your company, they’re more likely to entertain your pitch when they pick up the phone. Brand awareness essentially warms up your leads before you reach out to them, making them easier to sell to. If you’re regularly posting good content, you’ll stay top-of-mind when your ideal clients are ready to hire, making them more likely to reach out to you. 

How to Blend Marketing & Sales 

There’s a common misconception that marketing and sales should be separate departments. But, if they work together, they can create something special. The job of any marketing department is to help the rest of the company bring in revenue. Pairing them with your consultants will help them understand the challenges your sales team is facing so they can create content that helps solve those challenges. 

For example, if potential clients are telling your consultants that they don’t see the value of your services, your marketing team can create more case studies that demonstrate the impact that your services have had on similar companies, increasing the perceived value of your work. Your marketing team can also create sales enablement pieces like pitch decks and brochures, which look professional and make it easier for your consultants to send over more information after a call. 

Basically, blending your marketing and sales departments is the best way to improve your conversion rates. 

Reaching Consultancy Status 

When the economy dips and companies stop hiring new people, recruitment companies need a way to stay relevant. By positioning your company as a consultancy firm, you can advise your clients on things like onboarding, training and development, diversity, etc., which prolongs your relationship with them and continues to add value beyond the hiring process. 

To position yourself as a consultant, you’ll need to create thought leadership content. That’s the perfect task for your marketing department, who can produce whitepapers and testimonial videos to promote your wider services. That content will present you as a strategic partner rather than an expendable supplier, therefore future-proofing your company until hiring increases again. 

Conclusion 

Recruitment marketing is essential for any agency that wants to succeed in the current economy. It increases your conversion rates by building trust with your potential clients, as well as positions you as a strategic consultant who can continue to add value to your customers’ companies, even beyond the hiring phase. Marketing is often the first department to experience cutbacks during harder times, but it’s the place you should invest in the most. 

To find out how we can help you market your recruitment company, contact us for a free consultation with one of our directors. 

Make Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy Easy – Download your FREE template here

Ready to take your recruitment company to the next level?

Then it’s time to put together a comprehensive marketing strategy. 

Planning out your marketing gives it a much higher chance of converting your leads into clients. It also helps you quantify things like your budget, goals and tactics rather than sticking your finger in the air and praying.

A strategy also keeps you on track, guiding the content you create and helping you avoid wasting time on posts or campaigns that don’t serve your business objectives. 

To help you get started, we’ve put together a simple, step-by-step guide to writing your own recruitment marketing strategy. The guide includes handy downloadable Notion and Word Document templates that make it easier to share your strategy with your team. 

1 – Objectives

The first thing you need to establish is your business objectives. Are you looking to source more candidates or improve your exclusive retainer rates? Figuring this out will help you build a marketing plan that supports your overall goals. 

Here are some handy shortcuts for figuring out which marketing methods support which goals: 

  • Brand awareness = social media or PPC advertising 
  • Website leads =  lead magnet or downloadable content 
  • Returning clients = email campaign or retargeting ads

2 – SMART Goals 

If your goals aren’t SMART, then they’re not tangible, so how would you know if you hit them? To make the most of your marketing activity and determine which campaigns drive the most conversions, your overall objectives should be broken down into SMART goals. SMART stands for: 

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant 
  • Timely

That means setting goals like ‘get 10% more enquiry forms through the website in the next quarter’ is more helpful than vague goals like ‘boost brand awareness’. which can be directly tracked in relation to your marketing activities. Whatever your SMART goals are, make sure they support your overall objectives. 

3 – Audience 

Once you’ve established what you want to gain from your marketing activities, it’s time to figure out who you’ll be aiming your content at. You need to know who you’re talking to if you want your message to land. 

Creating a thorough profile for the people you want to buy your product or services will help you establish what tone and style you should use in your content. That will make it much easier to make content that resonates with your target audience. And, as we all know, content that resonates is content that sells. 

4 – Unique Selling Points (USPs)

You’ll struggle to stand out in recruitment if you don’t have a USP. 

When you’re marketing your services, it’s important to be specific about what your customers will get from choosing you over your competitors. For example, if you’re selling onboarding support alongside your recruitment services, you might want to create content around the outcomes you can deliver, such as reduced turnover and higher employee satisfaction. 

If you can educate your target audience about why they need your solutions, they’re far more likely to recognise how it would benefit their business to work with you. That’s why having distinct USPs, like leadership coaching in the pre-boarding stage, is an essential part of your marketing. 

5 – Platforms 

People won’t come to you. You have to go to them. 

So, once you’ve established what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to, you need to figure out where to reach them. Most professionals will be on LinkedIn, making that a great place to start with any B2B marketing. You should also prioritise putting content on your website, as that will build credibility and boost your ranking on most search engines. Blog content and testimonials will, when done well, contain keywords that help with search engine optimisation (SEO). 

It’s also worth testing other social media platforms because clients and candidates often flock there outside work hours. If you can catch their attention there, you’ll significantly increase your reach and exposure. 

Finally, emails can be a powerful tool for delivering personalised messages straight to your audience. However, they have to be done well. A spray-and-pray approach won’t fly on email, so it’s important to make sure you’re providing useful insights that people will want to stay subscribed to. 

6 – Content 

Content is the final part of constructing a marketing strategy. If you don’t include it as part of your strategy, you can waste valuable time and resources making content that doesn’t help you achieve your goals. 

Go back to step 1 and look at your overall objectives, then establish what kind of content will drive people to meet those goals. For example, if you want more qualified leads, creating a gated lead magnet, like a salary survey, is a great path for you. If you want to increase brand awareness, posting entertaining content on social media is probably a better strategy. Don’t be afraid to test a few options, but make sure you set up tracking links to see which campaign is driving which actions. 

7 – Download the template

Now that you know how to create a marketing strategy, you can download our free template to help you make your own. If you need some help fine-tuning it, just email us, and one of our team would be happy to help. 

How to Market Your Recruitment Company 

If you want to make your recruitment company stand out, you’ve got to market it well. 

But how can you do that? 

Marketing is largely about providing value and staying top of mind so that when your clients are ready to recruit, they think of you. To do that, you need to share high-value content that people actually want to consume consistently. We’re going to show you how to do that in four simple steps. 

Step 1 – Understand Your Audience 

While marketing might seem like talking about yourself, it’s actually all about talking to your audience about the things they’re interested in. 

To create relevant, engaging content, you have to know what makes your audience tick. That means spending time talking to your clients and figuring out what’s bothering them at the moment, whether that’s the time to hire or the lack of skilled candidates in the talent pool. Once you’ve done that, you can start to build up a picture of the topics that come up a lot and build a strategy around addressing them. 

Hot tip:

Make sure you keep notes of which clients are struggling with what so that you can segment your email lists and offer them tailored content. 

Step 2 – Create Cornerstone Content 

Once you know the topics that need addressing, it’s time to start making content. This can be anything from an in-depth salary survey to a half-hour webinar, but our recommendation would be a long-standing podcast series. This allows you to connect with leading people in your niche while you create content, giving you business development opportunities in the process. 

Hot tip: 

Whatever format you choose, your cornerstone content should feature high-quality insights and a professional production value to help you stand out from the crowd on LinkedIn. 

Step 3 – Break it Down

Your cornerstone content feeds your wider marketing ecosystem. You can repurpose content into clips for social media, blogs on key topics, or insightful emails. By turning the highlights of each episode, webinar, etc., into different formats, you make your content digestible and accessible. You can also share it over a longer period of time, helping you stay top of mind throughout your clients’ buying journeys. 

Hot tip:

Smaller pieces of content have the added benefit of being sharable, particularly on LinkedIn. You can tag any guest contributors in each piece of content and hijack their audience in the process, putting you in front of more potential clients. 

Step 4 – Gather Some Feedback 

Once you’ve been putting out content for a couple of months, you should be able to use your analytics to get a sense of what’s working and what isn’t. This will inform your marketing strategy as you educate your audience on your solutions. Done well, it will also spark ideas for further content. Once you’ve gathered enough feedback from your audience, you can begin the entire process again in a self-sustaining loop. 

Hot tip:

Keep a close eye on what people say in response to your content. If a particular topic seems to resonate with them, create more content around it and answer any questions they may have had. Try using different formats to reach as many people as possible. 

Still want to know more? 

Contact us for some more personalised content help, or follow us on LinkedIn for more content.

4 SEO Pillars to Help Your Recruitment Company Rank Well on Google 

Your website is a powerful part of your marketing collateral. Helping people find it takes a lot of skill, combining technical knowledge, keyword research, and powerful content. In this blog, we’ll discuss the four key pillars behind great SEO to help you take your website from unfindable to ranking on the first page. 

On-Page SEO

The first ranking factor to tackle is on-page SEO. This is everything from meta descriptions and site titles to the content that people read on your website. When you’re writing front and back-end content, your not-so-secret weapon is keyword research. Keywords are terms that people search for, such as ‘IT recruitment company’ when they’re looking for you or your services online. Placing the right keywords at strategic points across your website can help search engines identify how relevant your website is and show it to potential customers. 

So, when it comes to keyword research, what should you be looking for? There is a delicate balance between finding a keyword that has a high search volume and low competition, which often means choosing longer phrases, otherwise known as long-tail keywords, to try and rank for. Search queries such as ‘Midlands-based JavaScript developer roles’ will often provide better results as there will be less competition for them, and the people searching for them will be more likely to buy from you thanks to their more specific intent. 

To help you find the right keywords, use a tool such as Semrush, Surfer SEO or Ahrefs, or platform-specific tools like Google Keyword Planner. These will be able to provide related or similar keywords, show you the search volume and competition for each phrase and help you write content with the right amount of relevant terms. Chat GPT and other generative AI tools can also help you come up with related content ideas that use frequently-used language and popular search terms. Try using prompts like ‘Give me 10 blog ideas related to X keyword’. 

Keyword tools can also help you avoid something called ‘keyword stuffing’, which is a bad practice when it comes to optimising your site and is effectively the over-use of keywords in your copy, to the point that your content and grammar suffer as a result. Some great places to include keywords that won’t affect the quality of your writing include meta descriptions, titles, tags and headings or subheadings. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is typically the realm of developers, but you can use a variety of plugins to make adjustments to your own website. This includes improving your website’s speed and accessibility to give your website visitors the smoothest experience possible. Things like broken links, navigation errors and mobile compatibility are essential to getting a high ranking, as search engines crawl bots will find and flag any issues and therefore lower your site’s value in the index. 

Security is another concern for search engines, so make sure that all relevant certificates and information are clearly accessible to visitors. Your cookie policy and usage can also impact your ranking on Google. 

Links are one of the most important aspects of technical SEO, as they will help crawl bots and visitors navigate around your site. Ensuring that you don’t have over-complicated URLs will boost your ranking, while fixing any broken links or looped redirects will improve your chances of making the first page. Adding your site to Google Search Console is the best way to find any broken links and assess your overall site health. 

Valuable Content

The third ranking factor is content. Google is placing increasing importance on things like read time and returning visitors, both of which indicate valuable content. If people are reading multiple articles on your site at once, this will also help your search ranking, so make sure you have plenty of engaging, insight-driven content for your audience to consume. Clearly linking related articles will also help your visitors find the best bits on your site and increase read times. 

Blogs are a great way to include more of the keywords we discussed earlier, particularly long-tail keywords. You can use subheadings to answer questions that your customers might have, like ‘how to improve retention’ too, which will improve your chances of appearing on search engine results pages. Regularly posting content such as articles, reports and downloads will also signal that your website is a relevant resource that is continually updated, which will in turn improve your site’s SEO. 

Backlinks

The final point of SEO that you should pay attention to is your backlinks. These are other places online that link back to your website (hence the name), whether that’s on other websites, social media or online directories. Taking the time to optimise your business’s listing on Google My Business will help customers and crawlers see you as a reliable company, as will positive reviews on your account. You can gain backlinks from activities like: 

  • Submitting your content to industry news forums or publications
  • Charity work 
  • Sponsorship opportunities 
  • Guest posting 
  • Partnerships with related organisations

This will give your website more validity and increase the number of references to it online, which will improve your SEO score and help people find you through other sources. Relevant backlinks from reputable sources are worth their weight in gold. 

To find out more about improving your own website’s SEO, get in touch with our Director and Head Developer Haydn Morgans via haydn@searchstack.co.uk

How to get Consultants involved with Personal Branding 

When it comes to recruitment, having a strong personal brand is one of the best ways to gain credibility and build your network of candidates. Despite that, it’s often difficult to get consultants to put time in their personal brands or the marketing campaigns of the wider company. Here are our tips for getting more consultants into personal branding:

Set goals

Are you looking to grow your network? Increase engagement? Boost brand awareness? Establish clear targets before you start so you can demonstrate to the people involved that your efforts have been successful afterwards.

Plan out the project

Write out exactly what you need from people before you start. Approaching colleagues with a fully-developed idea of what you need from them is far more likely to end in success than pitching a vague idea that sounds like a lot of mental work for them.

Get people involved

Start by finding the influencers in your company. Who’s already posting on LinkedIn? Who’s up for doing new things? These people are ideal for testing your strategy, and when people see their colleagues succeed, they’ll want in.

Start small

When someone is used to saying yes to small favours, they’re more inclined to agree to bigger ones down the line. Start by asking people to be in a picture of the office to go on LinkedIn. Move to suggesting them starring in a video for the company’s page. This will boost their ego and set you up for a win. 

Be open to their ideas

If the aim is to get people excited about building their own online presence, encouraging their input is a great way to build confidence. 

Keep them updated

Get enthusiastic consent from people before you post anything that they’re in. Let them know when it goes live and where it is too, as that’ll encourage them to interact with and take pride in the content they helped produce. Be sure to share its progress and celebrate your wins together!

Offer support 

Being online comes with a host of challenges. It’s easy to get sucked into vanity metrics or succumb to the taunts of online trolls, so offering support to people who are venturing online is an essential part of encouraging your consultants to utilise their personal brand. This can be as simple as showing up for them if they’re having a hard time.

Say thank you

Once you’ve gotten people involved, it’s important to show your appreciation for their time and effort. Shout about who’s helped you and share the wins that your consultants have as a result of their personal branding work. 

Translate your success

Once you’ve got your trendsetters creating, posting and sharing great content, it’s time to get everyone else involved. Ask your first consultants to act as advocates for personal branding amongst their colleagues. You can use those metrics from the beginning to show people the impact an online presence can create, or you can let your wins speak for themselves. People don’t want to be left behind. 

Still need some help getting started? Reach out to see how we can help you build your own marketing strategy and promote your personal branding strategy. 

Building Communities & Audiences on Linkedin in 2023

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: building an engaged community is the holy grail of recruitment marketing. 

If you want to meet inspired professionals on their forum, the chances are you’re doing a lot of work on Linkedin. To set you up for success, we’ve put together the best advice for growing your audience and building a community in 2023. 

Plan for the Long-Term

As any writer will tell you, you should always start with a plan. Before you set up your strategy for the year ahead, it’s worth researching what your network is talking about and how they perceive you or your company. 

From there, you can create a roadmap and figure out where you want to end up. Do you want people to be more engaged with your content? Do you want a better ROI for your business? Do you want to up your follower count? 

Make a plan that outlines your goals and consistently work towards them. 

When it comes down to your content it’s important that you communicate your company’s mission. That gives people a reason to listen to you and tune into what you have to say. Your mission should be the reason that you’re doing what you’re doing, whether it’s to solve a problem or make people’s lives easier. 

Keep to that message. Consistency builds trust, so give it time and allow your audience to grow naturally. Engaging relevant people with genuine content will give you far better ROI than just shouting your ideas at everyone through boosted ads. 

Optimise Your Pages 

Having great content is useless if nobody can find you. Optimise your page to be searchable by using keywords in blurbs, and complete all the fields on your page. 

Utilise showcase pages to talk about projects or sectors that you have within the business. This will help you build niche-targeted communities who are laser-focused on your message. 

Keep your branding consistent across your page, and consider providing your employees with a branded format to use on their personal accounts. This gives you a cohesive brand feel and boosts the community feel online. 

Create Great Content 

People want to buy from people. Utilising your personal narrative in your marketing will help people resonate with your brand, making you approachable and personable. 

Use simple words that are easy to digest when you’re writing. People on Linkedin are looking to connect with people, not read academic jargon, so make sure that your voice, including hints of your dialect, is present in your writing. 

Create content across a variety of media. Use visual and video content to grab people’s attention, and utilise polls to boost interactions with your audience. Don’t be scared of long text posts. They can provide more value to your audience by giving depth to your topics, thereby providing valuable insights.  

While your personal story is important, not everything should be about you. Try to follow the 4-1-1 rule, which gives your audience four pieces of news or relevant topics from your field, then one personal update and one piece of content from or about someone else in the community. You can put a personal spin on each of these, but you shouldn’t be the focus all the time. 

Understand the Psychology of Your Audience 

It’s easy for social media to convince you to measure success through engagement metrics. It’s important to remember that interactions on Linkedin aren’t always about your content but your message. Someone could find your point really interesting, but not want to align themselves with your message as it’s off-brand for them. Keep posting on-message content and see what happens. 

Always offer value to the reader. People want to be informed or entertained, so think about what matters most to them and offer it in your content. Are you sharing content that helps people feel connected? Are you offering solutions to common problems in your sector? Are you building a network of like-minded people? Build content that speaks to people’s needs. 

Don’t be scared to share your personal or company values in your posts. Advocating for social responsibility, diversity and inclusion will make people feel included and seen. People respond to what matters to them, so telling them what you care about is likely to make them feel included when it’s a shared value or experience. 

Performance Tips

  1. Experiment with different content and see what works for you and your audience
  2. Post 1-2 times per day. If that’s not achievable, post consistently 
  3. Ask questions and invite feedback to get people engaged 
  4. Use links in your posts, these get around 45% more engagement 
  5. Focus on user experience while creating content as it boosts conversion rates
  6. Communities are about people, so Linkedin promotes people’s posts over company posts. Where possible, share your content from personal pages.

Create a Community Feel

If you see people commenting on your posts, reward them for interacting with you and make them feel like valued members of your community. Find champions within your community and raise them up. 

Utilise your team members and encourage employee engagement. This will help spread the reach of your content and get your immediate network invested in sharing your message. 

Healthy communities are an ecosystem. The content you create will bring people in who will then have conversations about what matters to them. That will form qualitative research, which will inform the content you create in the future, which will bring more people in. This is what we call consumer generated content.

It doesn’t have to be professional, but building genuine relationships is essential to a healthy community. 

If you’d like to know more about building your personal brand and audience on Linkedin, reach out to see how we can help!

How to Make Great Videos for Linkedin

If you read our previous blog ‘Revolutionise Your Social Marketing Strategy With Video’, you’ll already know the best practices for making and posting videos on Linkedin. 

You might be wondering ‘But how do I make them?’ 

Don’t worry, we’re here to help! 

We’ve put together technical tips and a step-by-step checklist that will help you independently nail your video content. 

Step 1 – Script Your Video

While it’s tempting to include a branded introduction for your videos, ask yourself if your audience will want that. If you only include necessary content people are more likely to stay engaged during your videos. Try to include graphics or logos to promote your brand instead of creating an intro that isn’t providing value to your audience. 

Write a script for everything you want to include in your video and rehearse it before you start recording. Make your content concise and helpful to keep people’s attention. 

Don’t use phrases like ‘that’s how you land your next job’ until the end of your videos. Doing this will tell people that you’ve already given them what they came for, so they’ll start looking for something else to watch. Avoiding those phrases will allow you to  promote your own services or further content while you have a viewer’s attention. 

Wrap up your videos with a simple and clear call to action, and articulate what the benefits of following it are. Invitations like ‘get in touch to find your next opportunity’ let viewers know exactly what you’re offering. 

Step 2 – Record Your Content

So you’ve planned out your content, you’ve got a script and you know how you’re going to grab attention. What’s next? 

When you’re recording your videos there are some things you can do that will enhance your video’s performance. 

Make sure your videos are still engaging with the sound off, as that’s how they initially play on LinkedIn. Your content needs to be visually appealing, so make sure that your speaker has dynamic body language, leans towards the camera and uses gestures to create an engaging video. 

Change up your backgrounds too, even if it’s just filming from varied angles to keep it interesting. It’s also worth considering investing in visual assets that you can have in the background of your videos, such as your brand’s logo, some plants or an interesting piece of decor. 

Set up your recording studio somewhere that has good natural lighting and isn’t too noisy so that you can get clear video and audio. Even making small adjustments like facing a window can make a lot of difference to your content. 

Most of all, remember to have fun with it!

Step 3 – Edit Your Clips

Once you’ve recorded your masterpiece, there are some things that you can fine-tune during editing to make sure that your videos really stand out. 

When you’re editing your audio it’s important to consider how engaging it is. Can you clearly hear the speaker, and is their voice dynamic and engaging? If it’s sounding a little flat it can be helpful to include background music to provide an immersive experience. Be careful not to overwhelm viewers with too much stimulation though – if you’ve hosted a lively conversation with lots of different voices it could be overwhelming to have music playing as well, so consider how best to support the content that you have. 

Consider the pacing of the video, and whether you can cut out any unnecessary pauses, stammers or repetitions. Keeping your content streamlined is essential to keeping your viewers engaged. 

While you’re editing it’s time to insert any visuals such as slides, graphics or logos to your video. Consider adding gifs that encourage people to like or share your video, as well as helpful section headers and subtitles that further communicate your message. It’s also important to ensure that you’ve properly adjusted your colour levels to reflect the tone of your content or brand, and apply this to all of your videos to create consistency. 

Step 4 – Nail Video Copy

Before you upload your videos, think carefully about how you can engage your audience before they even see your video. 

Crafting a great title is almost as important as having a good video. When writing your title, it’s important to reflect what you’re actually offering in your content. Don’t use clickbait as people will leave if they don’t get what they came for, and you’ll have wasted an opportunity to engage with potential clients and community members.  

Referencing your audience in your title can also be a good idea. People are more likely to watch something they immediately know will be relevant to them, so try using titles like this: 

  • “5 Ways Videos Will Transform Your Recruitment Company’s Marketing Strategy”
  • “Why Podcasts are the Future of Recruitment Marketing”
  • “How Recruiters Can Nail Personal Branding”

Another consideration is using closed captions. Failing to use them will exclude those with accessibility needs and limit your engagement. Not only that, videos automatically play with sound off on LinkedIn, so having subtitles can give people an idea of what you’re talking about before they turn the sound on, making you more likely to get people interested in what you’re saying. 

Like titles, headlines are also essential to drawing people into your videos, so think carefully about what you’re going to write to go alongside your video. Make sure you’re giving people a reason to consume your content in the first sentence of your post, so that they’re interested before they’ve even clicked ‘…see more’. 

Do keyword research and tag your videos with relevant terms that will help them find the right audience on LinkedIn. You can include these in both your post and captions to boost their reach. Around 90% of people will read captions at least some of the time, so don’t miss out on this resource. 

Step 5 – Share Your Masterpiece

Now that you’ve grasped the basics, you’re all set to go out and create high-performing video content!

Revolutionise Your Social Marketing Strategy With Video

For recruitment companies and consultants, building a community of engaged talent on platforms like LinkedIn creates an invaluable resource. 

If you’re looking to level up your social media marketing game, the perfect way to engage your audience is through video. According to LinkedIn, videos are 5 times more likely to start a conversation amongst users than other forms of content, which prompts the platform’s algorithm to promote your pieces to a wider audience. 

Video marketing can grow your brand up to 49 times faster than text or picture posts, so it’s a fantastic opportunity to grow your audience. 

Sound exciting? 

Read on for our tips for how to make and use videos in a marketing campaign!

Plan Your Content 

Be conscious of the length of videos that you’re making and where you plan to share it. People on socials want to scroll through bite-sized pieces, so consider how you’ll put your message into a short, consumable clip. If you’re tackling big topics, break them down into smaller bits that you can turn into a video series. 

Add Value

Always add value to your audience. Is what you’re talking about relevant? Is it providing insights or information? Posting high-impact marketing videos that boost your brand awareness should be done far less frequently than sharing value-adding brand consideration videos to your channel. 

Script It

Scripting your video can help you keep out any unwanted waffle. Avoid complicated language as this will also alienate people who aren’t in your area and make it inaccessible to a lot of viewers. Rehearse your scripts so you come across as confident and knowledgeable. Keep your content concise, speak clearly and avoid repeating yourself. 

Get Viewers Hooked

Start your videos with a hook that tells viewers what you’re offering them. LinkedIn says that interest drops from 65% to 45% after around 10 seconds of view time, so be clear about why they should watch your content. 

Pace Yourself

Be mindful of your pacing. If you speak so fast that people can’t understand you then you’ll lose your audience, but you also don’t want people to get bored if you’re taking too long to offer them something of value. Find the sweet spot somewhere in the middle to keep your viewers switched on. 

Build a Niche

Consistently posting content in your niche will help you build a reputation and attract a community of like-minded people. Posting directly to groups that your target market is in will help you reach the right people quickly. Once you’ve established yourself as a thought leader in their field, your audience is more likely to come directly to you. 

Be Inclusive 

If you’re regularly producing videos, make sure your cast reflects the people you’re trying to appeal to. Whether you’re inviting diverse guests, stitching videos with people from different backgrounds or including a variety of people from your company, having representation can help make your community inviting to a wider audience. 

Post Regularly

Just one or two videos won’t make an impact. It’s important to have a long-term plan and stick to it if you want to build your following and provide meaningful content to your audience. You don’t have to post every day, but deciding on a schedule and sticking to it is really important if you want to build trust within a community. 

Engage Your Audience

Once your videos are out there, connect with your audience by asking them questions and replying to their comments. It’s helpful to use a call to action such as ‘tell me what you think in the comments’ or ‘if you want to hear more, contact me on xyz’. Even inviting people to share their perspective is a valuable tool. People will come back to your page if you’ve made them feel like part of your network or community.

If you’ve read all of that and still don’t quite know where to start, drop us an email and one of our team will be more than happy to talk through some ideas with you!

Recruitment Marketing Trends for 2022

As we finish up for the first full year of Search Stack I thought it would be fun and interesting to share some of our predictions on what could really work in the Recruitment/B2B marketing landscape in 2022.

I’ve made these predictions purely through assumptions and observations on what looks like is working from individuals and companies already implementing and succeeding with them now.

So there’s no big market survey, no data, it’s all speculative so take it all with a pinch of salt!

Authenticity is the new buzzword.

And rightly so, with an increasingly diverse, complex, and switched-on audience, the old ways of one message for everyone just won’t work.

Smart companies are investing time into researching and understanding their target market and creating specific campaigns that speak directly to them. We need to get personal to break through the noise.

Try doing a bit of in-depth client research at the beginning of the year.

TikTok is becoming more appreciative of informative content.

The video-based social platform is stepping out of its Wild West days, and creators are finding a lot of success creating informative, fun, and value-adding content. With user adoption growing every week, it may be the right time to experiment.

There’s a growing trend of creators giving advice, tips, and guidance; rather than the usual dancing and meme content. If you can piggyback on the fun, trends but also good solid advice on the platform then you may be onto a winner.

Email is big – but not how you remember.

Newsletters are seeing an increase, they’re becoming niche and seriously value-driven. The companies that put a face to their newsletter and consistently turn up with an email packed with great content are catching attention.

Scrap the cold automation and lifeless company updates. It’s 2022 no one cares.

You need to use your platform to aggregate great content from your industry niche, or share value-adding content (not links to your blogs) pack it with easily digestible value-adding content.

Modern marketers need to put trust into creating relationships with their audience. Rather than forcing the action with a CTA. Which leads to my next point…

Stop gating content, trust in dark social brand advocacy.

With privacy being the next big topic of discussion and big tech ruining the trust of their users, what hope do you stand? Emails and contact details are becoming more precious. And, content in exchange for personal information is not a fair trade anymore.

Marketers need to phase out that distrust and step away from those email-driven KPMs, because much of your success will now be down to the intangible dark social.

Companies that back their content so much that they’re confident giving it away without the need for email addresses are going to bank favor, trust and advocacy with their audience. We just need to be smarter about how we earn their time.

Branding is more important than ever.

The noise out there is crazy. You’re competing with millions of companies and individuals for a small slice of attention. And one of the best ways to stand out is to have a strong, solid brand.

Spending time with a branding consultant will help you unlock messaging and visual identity which talks directly to your audience, rather than bore them by saying why you’re so great.

If you need more convincing begin by reading the starting a story brand book in the new year.

NFTS are going to be huge in communities.

Wow what can I say about NFTs, flash in the pan, genius, stupid, overpriced, fad, future of everything; many opinions for the non-fungible-token. But you cannot argue their stratospheric rise in 2021.

What really is interesting though is their ‘token’ aspect, many people don’t realise that these NFTs can have real-world benefits attracted to owning one; like the bored ape yacht club VIP parties, or Gary Vee NFT Vee Con tokens.

And what really excites us about this is DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) the blockchain and these tokens now allow us to create exclusive communities with perks, value, and most excitingly a democratic say to the future and development of that community.

I think recruiters are in a super interesting position with this and if they can build a DAO community for their niche then they could be trailblazing the future.

Personal brands are the #1 channel for businesses.

The reach personal brands are getting across all social platforms is unbelievable, views, engagements & leads you’d hope to dream of from other sources.

People really do buy from people. And, when you consistently show up day after day to provide value, engage with your target audience, and build a personal brand you will stand head and shoulders above any competitor that is relying on regular social.

If you’ve not taken the time to grow your personal brand then 2022 needs to be the time to do it.

Niche podcasts are killing it.

We’ve been helping multiple recruitment clients build and grow their podcasts in 2021, it’s been super interesting watching them grow and flourish and the niche audience they develop over time.

We always advocate for the power of podcasts, for the business development aspect, the stretching of content, the personal brand benefits. But one of the most powerful things coming out of these niche podcasts is communities that are growing around them.

Stretching content is more relevant than ever.

It’s obvious that time constraints are one of the biggest barriers to creating content and marketing. So it really defies sense when we see so many companies just not stretching their content.

We have so many different mediums and platforms that people engage with, but we pigeonhole that one great idea into something like a blog, post it, then abandon it.

If you’re not already utilising content stretching to share your content across various platforms then you’re wasting your time and not getting the most out of your content.