If you’re struggling with your marketing initiatives, you’re not alone.
We recently met up with staffing leaders from across the nation at this year’s TechServe Alliance Staffing Conference in sunny California. We took the opportunity to ask them how their marketing was going, and many admitted to the same challenges and obstacles.
What’s your #1 marketing challenge?
Answers to this question varied, but they all boil down to the same essential thing: brand awareness.
Brand awareness is all about reaching the right target audience (i.e. your ideal customer) with the right message (i.e. a message they’ll remember). Successful brand recognition results in improved lead generation, increased web traffic, and greater sales opportunities.
Here are other answers from leaders in the staffing space when asked about their marketing challenges:
- Differentiating ourselves from the competition
- Leveraging sales via effective communication and marketing
- Making marketing less labor intensive
- Getting potential customers to understand our value proposition
- Reaching the right people
- Creating high quality content to attract people
- Attracting more candidates to our website
- Growing our brand
How do you currently measure marketing?
It’s the basic premise of any goal or initiative: you can’t succeed at what you don’t measure. Marketing analytics are key to understanding what’s working and what isn’t. Only when you know where your efforts are falling flat can you determine how to improve.
Unlike sales, where you can more easily correlate data from job boards and cold calls to submissions and placements, the ROI on marketing is a little trickier to determine. It depends upon an intelligent analysis of multiple channels and consistent communication and integration with the sales team.
Here’s how some of the staffing industry’s leaders are tracking their marketing initiatives:
- Google Analytics
- Social media analytics
- Email marketing response rates, CTRs, etc.
- Marketing automation platform analytics
- Number of inbound leads and applications
Having listed those, however, 50% of the people we asked about measurement admitted they didn’t measure their marketing efforts at all. Just imagine how much more they could be achieving if they did.
In 2016, what would you like to achieve with your marketing program?
Measurement is only have the story, though. Marketing without clear cut goals is like taking a road trip without a map. You might get lucky and end up where you’d planned, but chances are you’ll get lost on some back road with an empty tank of gas.
That’s why we work closely with clients to create a strong foundation of realistic goals and schedules for getting things done. Successful inbound marketing is dependent upon consistent, high value action, which is only possibly with preparation and goal setting.
Here are some 2016 marketing goals we heard from staffing leaders:
- Grow YoY revenue by 50%
- Break into new markets
- Stay on top of Google search results
- Increase inbound inquiries
- Run several successful campaigns
- Increase brand recognition
- Increase ROI on social media
If any of these above challenges and goals sound familiar to you, we want to hear from you. Tell us more about how we can help you out today.
