Sometimes, a fact or a statistic will appear that completely contradicts what we think about how candidates or clients behave online – suddenly, we understand why our marketing results are struggling in a certain area or why a marketing channel isn’t working for us anymore.
The important thing is that we pay attention to the facts and adapt our recruitment marketing strategy in response.
This has happened to us a couple of times this year, so we thought we’d share some interesting but little-known marketing facts we think you’ll want to know.
Fact #1: There’s been a 900% growth in ‘near me’ searches
When a candidate searches ‘Marketing jobs near me’, the only way your recruitment brand will appear in their search is if you’ve got a Google My Business page. And this doesn’t happen automatically – you need to set it up yourself.
In the last two years, ‘near me’ searches have grown exponentially – 900%, according to Think with Google. Not only this, but as many as 60% of smartphone users will contact businesses using the ‘click to call’ button on the Google My Business search result.
So if you want to take advantage of this and start pulling in as much local interest from candidates and clients as possible, use this guide to create your own Google My Business page.
Fact 2#: Subject lines can land your email in the junk folder
We all know how important an engaging subject line is to our email marketing metrics. No matter how great the content of your email is, if the subject line doesn’t cut it, your candidates won’t open.
But did you know that some of the most enticing words you could use, like ‘free’ and ‘deal’, will actually work against you? Here’s the full list of words to avoid.
Spam filters are getting more and more sophisticated and have identified these sorts of words as being common in phishing emails and other unsolicited comms.
So if you use words like this in your subject line and notice your email open rates are abysmal, it’s likely because they’ve been caught by spam filters!
This isn’t just a one-off issue either: Falling into junk once can cause email providers to flag your future emails as spam too - so avoid this at all costs.
Fact #3: Search engines don’t pick up ‘stop’ words
Research has shown that as much as 25% of blog posts are made up of stop words like ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘but,’ ‘you’ etc.
But what if I was to tell you that these words actually work against you in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?
Search engines like Google don’t actually pay any attention to these sorts of words, so if you use too many of them, this makes it harder for Google to process when indexing your pages.
Next time you’re struggling to shorten a blog title or a URL to pull it within the character limit – ditch those stop words!
Fact #4: Reducing application length can triple conversions
Studies have shown that reducing the length of a job ad application process to five minutes or less will increase your job ad conversion rate by up to 365%!
So if your job ad metrics are telling you that candidates are viewing your adverts but few are completing the application, your application is too long and you'll get better results by cutting it down.
Fact #5: 50% of Google searches end without a click
The idea of getting all the information you need directly from a Google search page will be familiar to you – but the impact of this will be news.
Now that Google uses featured snippets and pulls relevant search data into the meta description, this means it’s really normal for us to find the answers we need without clicking through to any websites that are listed.
The impact of this? 50.3% of us never leave the Google listing! This means that Google wins the traffic value over any of the websites listed in the search page. This tells us that making our titles and meta data enticing is more important than ever – so never skimp on this.
Track the success of your 2021 recruitment marketing plan using Google Analytics. The eBook below has everything you need to know to get started.
