Marketing your company is essential because it helps you sell your brand’s products or services.
Strategic marketing often leads to the business’ growth. The ultimate goal of any business is making money, and marketing plays a huge role in reaching that goal.
Marketing is all about telling people that you have the solution to their problems. In brief, and extension to sales. And without marketing, many businesses would not even exist. If you manage to educate your customers, keep them engaged, and build a reputation among customers by selling them smartly, your business will likely do well.
Marketing has become very crucial today with digital marketing, as it helps in connecting with the audience instantly. However, marketing your agency in a populated industry such as staffing is a huge challenge.
You must have to stand out in the crowd by working hard to go a long way. There is no set strategy like the “right” staffing strategy. Each company has its own methods of staffing candidates based on their location, industry, culture, and staffing teams.
You have to separate yourself from the field and think about which staffing marketing strategy should be implemented that no one else is implementing.
As a staffing company, you either fill permanent vacancies or find employees to fill temporary job orders at offices, trade shows, food sampling stations, or product demonstrations. Either way, staffing agencies must develop effective marketing strategies that are successful on two different levels. First, you need to find companies that have job opportunities. Second, you need a steady stream of suitable candidates who can fill your client’s openings.
Choosing the best marketing strategy for your staffing company depends on a variety of things, such as:
- What are you looking to accomplish? Do you want to generate inbound sales leads through your marketing? Do you want to make your outbound sales efforts more productive and appropriate?
- What is your need? How many clients do you want? Two clients or two hundred? How much talent do you need to get those open jobs filled?
- What is the time frame for achieving your goals? Are you planning to make an immediate impact on driving short-term results or a long-term strategy?
- What kind of staffing do you do? The best practices for a commercial staffing company are different than those for an IT staffing company. And marketing related to direct hire or executive recruiting tends to be quite different from marketing related to temporary staffing.
- Where do you work? Do you need marketing that is international or national in scope? Are you focused on your hometown? And is that a small community or a big city? The geographic scope will help determine the best ways to market your staffing business.
- How do you sell? Are you primarily dependent on face-to-face cold calling, networking on LinkedIn? Do you regularly attend or perform at conferences? Do you currently leverage thought leadership or other content in your sales approach?
- Who do you call on? Do you primarily call HR, department heads and other hiring managers, frontline supervisors, purchasing officers, or C-levels? Your marketing strategy will be very different depending on your target market/audience.
- What are you selling? Do you sell traditional staffing services (temporary, temporary-to-hire, direct hire, or payrolling)? Strategic Services like onsite, VMS, MSP, or other workforce solutions? Do you sell statements of work or other project solutions?
- How strategic are your sales reps? Are your people comfortable talking to senior decision-makers? Can they effectively explain and demonstrate the economic value of your services? Or are they vital in building relationships and selling traditional staffing services?
- How competitive is your market? Are there many strong staffing companies in your market? How do they sell? What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses?
- Do you want to be positioned, or how are you positioned? Have you clearly mentioned how you want to appear in the market? Is that message on your website, in your sales collateral, and in the way you sell, recruit and serve customers?
- What tools are you using in your marketing and sales process? Is your site up to date? Do you’ve a strong presence on social media? Do you use email marketing to put your company at the forefront? Do you regularly create content that supports your site? Are you active in professional associations? Do you’ve a marketing automation platform?
- What’s your business strategy for achieving your end goal? Getting aggressive about marketing and sales is one strategy for growth, but it’s not the only one. Other growth strategies include:
- Product Excellence: Offering something that your competitors do not provide.
- Service Excellence: Provides an exceptional experience for clients or candidates.
- Partnerships: Working with other companies to provide a more complete service.
- Bundling: Create new services where you bundle existing services into packages.
- Service-line extension: Getting into new skill discipline.
- Moving up the value chain. Taking on higher-level responsibilities like project solutions.
- Geographic expansion. Offering services in newer locations.
- New service models. Finding new ways to provide staffing, such as online staffing.
- Pricing. Offering lower price, better value, or special payment terms.
- M&A. Acquiring or Buying complementary businesses or services.
Marketing Strategies for Staffing Agencies
1. Competitive Advantage
Take a look at your competitors, find out agencies that fill vacancies different from those you handle. Find out how they get clients, how much they charge for placements, and how they attract quality talent. To stand out from your targeted competitors, you must create a niche by focusing on a specific market where you and your employees have experience finding candidates and filling vacancies such as technology, accounting, industrial, manufacturing, or clerical jobs.
2. Identify the Markets
Start by identifying your preferred type of customer, and then name secondary market as potential customers as things move forward with your marketing plan. Learn all about the characteristics of your primary market, such as company type, size, location, number of job openings per year, and the likelihood of using the agency. You also need to know about the decision-makers who have the final word on recruiting, such as their level of authority, title, education, and their willingness to be considered for opening a staffing company.
3. Client Marketing
Your marketing strategies should include providing quality customer service by finding potential talent or filling temporary positions as quickly as possible. You also have to establish and maintain relationships through networking and presentations with companies that use agencies.
Using cold calling, websites, social media networks, and direct mail sales letters also plays a part in introducing your company to businesses that are ready to consider your candidates. Include email marketing messages to keep current and potential customers updated about the candidates you’ve placed and the openings you’ve filled to show how your company is building its brand.
4. Attract Candidates
To attract people looking for work, use email marketing, text messaging, or tweets to let potential applicants know about job openings you want to fill. Set up an online job board on your site to find candidates, and optimize it for search engines, so that job seekers find your site, send you resume, and feel compelled to come in for interviews. Post job openings on online job portals to find suitable candidates.