Marketing mistakes happen every day in recruitment. We’re only human after all! But these mistakes can have a real impact on the hiring process: They don’t just result in social media unfollows, they can result in things like candidates unsubscribing to job alerts too. In other words, marketing mistakes can get in the way of your company placing great candidates.
Marketing is constantly changing, so it can be tough to keep up with best practices – particularly if you recruit in more than one niche. However, there are a few marketing mistakes that will be damaging to your strategy, no matter what industry you recruit in. Here’s what they are…
1. Not using brand guidelines
To create a strong and recognisable brand, you need consistency across all your marketing platforms.
Having clear brand guidelines is the easiest and most effective way to keep your brand cohesive. These guidelines are not just for marketers, but for anyone representing the brand online – especially your recruiters.
Your brand guidelines should contain details on the following:
- Company tone of voice
- Key messaging
- Company hashtags (and how to use them on social media)
- Branded social headers for employees to use on their personal accounts
- Up-to-date company logos
- Brand colours (including exact colour codes).
It can be hard to keep track of everything your team post online or send by email, but try to keep an eye out for any mistakes and ask them to make changes themselves rather than you fixing it for them – otherwise, the same mistakes will just repeat.
2. Not thinking carefully about who your audience are
One of the biggest mistakes many recruitment agencies make with their marketing is they don’t acknowledge that they have to reach both a B2B and B2C audience (clients and candidates) with their marketing.
This is not to say that a your content should appeal to both clients and candidates simultaneously (this is basically impossible as they are two very different audiences), but more that you need to factor in content for both audiences in your marketing plan.
You also need to spend time understanding the differences between these audiences, what their challenges are and how to approach them if you’re going to build a winning recruitment marketing strategy.
This recruitment marketing persona toolkit will help you segment your audience effectively and plan how to market directly to them.
3. Keeping marketing separate from recruitment
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You can’t execute a successful recruitment marketing strategy without getting input from your recruiters. Recruiters are the faces of the brand, they are talking to your audience all day every day and research has shown that your audience will engage with them than they will with company pages
There’s loads that recruiters and marketers can learn from each other, and working closely together is a sure-fire way to improve both your strategies.
If you’re recruiters are busy and say they don’t have time to get involved in your marketing campaigns, show them what’s in it for them – you’d be surprised how persuasive this can be.
4. Focusing your goals on vanity metrics
If you focus too heavily on marketing vanity metrics like social media followers and email open rates (which only tells you you’ve got a good subject line), you’ll never see any impact from your marketing strategy.
Instead, look at valuable marketing metrics that measure whether you’re attracting the right candidates to your recruitment agency. For example, your job ad conversion rate is a good indicator of whether your job ads are enticing the right candidates to apply to your open positions.
These types of metrics clearly show how your marketing efforts translate into revenue for your business – so directly relate to the true goals of your company.
5. Not listening to the data
Sometimes our marketing results tell us things that we don’t want to hear, but ignoring the bad news only results in worse results later down the line. Learn from absolutely everything you do in marketing and make any changes you need to make – even if this means doing something you don’t want to do!
For example, if you’re enjoying writing blogs every month but the company is getting absolutely nothing from them, this is not a good use of company time. Either be more strategic with your blogs, or stop writing them.
If you don’t listen to your data, you’ll continue to work on projects that have no value, waste valuable time and never show the real ROI in your marketing.
Identifying what’s not working and knowing when to stop is the difference between a good marketer and a great marketer.
Wider business goals should drive your marketing and give it purpose. Download the eBook below to learn how to create a marketing plan around these goals - it also contains a free content template for you to use too!
