For the staffing industry, best practices for marketing to employers and candidates evolve almost weekly. Within the past year, changes in social media platforms and search engines have dramatically changed the ways you should connect with, engage and appeal to your target audiences to build your candidate database.
Leveraging these changes, remarketing is rapidly gaining steam as an effective tool for online advertising. Below, I explain three smart ways you can use remarketing to reach clients, prospects, and all types of talent.
For companies who have never embarked on a remarketing campaign, there are some easy ways to create that initial audience:
Google provides two techniques you can use to target your remarketing list. The first one focuses on the Google Display Network and banner ads. This technique keeps you top-of-mind and is extremely affordable. It won’t drive conversions but will drive impressions (tens of thousands of them per month).
Why would we want to do that?
Your staffing agency wants to stay top of mind with candidates and clients so that yours is the first company they think of when they have a hiring need. They may have visited your website on Nov. 12, but not had a hiring need until Jan. 31, when they saw your ad, clicked on your ad, and went to a conversion page on your staffing website. Or maybe they saw your ads so often that they went directly to your website.
If you aren’t top-of-mind with your past clients, candidates, and prospects, they won’t think of you when they have a business need. But if you are staying top of mind by having your ads appear on Google’s Display Network of two million websites, your ads will give the impression that you are following people around the Internet.
It’s a common misconception that the audience for Google AdWords can’t have a remarketing list… but it can!
In the staffing industry, the keywords for Google AdWords campaigns are extremely competitive. Think about it – if someone goes to Google and searches “jobs,” you compete with national companies for that keyword. And by national companies, I’m talking about Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, ZipRecruiter, etc. (who have million-dollar budgets).
Just because of budget size, we don’t want to eliminate the search engine marketing tactic because it can be effective. (Remember, we have to search for the terms that your target audience is searching for, not the terms YOU think they are searching for.) If your prospective candidate or client wants to find a job, you want to be there when they go to Google and search “jobs in CITY NAME.”
So, what can we do?
We can create Google Text Ads and show them to your remarketing list. (Remember – website visitors and email addresses). For example, if someone goes to Google and searches for a keyword you are targeting (let’s use “jobs”), they are more likely to see your ad because they are in your remarketing list than if you were targeting all people in your geographic market.
You can still compete for those terms people are searching for. You’re just paying a lower amount per click.
Facebook advertising continues to provide an incredible return on investment. Remarketing to your audience on Facebook is an awesome way to drive more website traffic and pick up leads.
Take your best-performing blog content and show it to your remarketing audience. Do you have any infographics? Do you have videos? Do you want to grow followers on your company page? Do you want to push job postings specifically to this audience so that they can apply right on Facebook?
Facebook offers a number of different ad tactics, and targeting your remarketing audience is an effective technique.
One of my clients implements all these techniques. As a professional staffing agency in the New Jersey and Delaware area, they have seen the value in leveraging their candidate database and recent website visitors. (About 50,000-60,000 audience size)
Since the goal of this staffing agency is to get applications, we are driving all the ads back to the Job Board.
These techniques show how remarketing, a powerful tool heavily used in online advertising, can be used in your staffing firm. But the results won’t happen overnight. Building your target audiences takes time – so commit to the work long-term.
And don’t try to do it all at once. Start with one platform and systematically test which ads drive the right applicant to your candidate database. Adjust when necessary, and then expand your campaign as your time and budget allow. In time, you’ll create a highly targeted, effective way to reach employers
Soon enough, candidates, clients, and more will comment that they saw your ads everywhere.
Haley Marketing provides website development, email and content marketing, social media marketing, and strategy consulting to the staffing industry. We provide services to more than 1,200 staffing and recruiting firms throughout the world, ranging from solo recruiters to larger staffing and recruiting organizations with regional, national, and international offices. Our mission is simple: to make great marketing more affordable!
