Everyone knows that marketing is a key component of any business. But it’s totally amazing and a little bit scary how many recruitment agencies don’t seem to have an actual marketing strategy beyond splashing their cash on job boards.

Most agencies would argue that they get good results from this, but the reality is that most could do even better. Imagine this scenario: two similar agencies, both with 7 recruiters and making roughly 70k a month. The first easily spends between £2-4k on job board advertising, and the second spends £1-1.5k less. Now we’ve played spot the difference, time to ask why…their marketing strategy of course!

If both of these agencies get a new job, and they’ve both recruited for similar roles in the past – who’s more likely to get the placement first? The agency that’s data is out-of-date and has to advertise on a job board, or the agency that has a fully accessible, up-to-date bank of candidates that they know are looking?

If you agree that it would be the latter, then it’s time to start looking at a different approach when it comes to marketing your agency. It might seem like a big change, but it only takes a few small steps before you can begin to reap the rewards of a better, more intuitive marketing strategy.

Get Found

First and foremost, to start attracting more clients to your website and candidates to your jobs, they have to be able to find you easily. If a client or candidate does a Google search for recruitment agencies or vacancies in your sector, is your agency or job going to be on amongst the top of the search results? If not, it’s unlikely that anyone can find you. And that means it’s time to start improving your SEO.

Having the location, key skill and ‘jobs’ in all advert URLs is also great for SEO, as it makes your jobs much more likely to be found by candidates using a search engine to look for vacancies. Semantic search is so important these days as search engines are doing more and more to try and figure out the user’s intent and then return relevant results. And the last thing you want it to be overlooked because it wasn’t clear to a search engine what your advert is.

Once you’ve got the basics nailed, start using social media networks to get the word out about your agency and jobs and fire up a blog to draw people back into your website with useful content.

Attract and Entice

The last thing you want to do is put the hard work into making sure people can find your website, only for them to leave as soon as they arrive! Having content pages with useful and interesting information is a great way to generate interest in your agency and jobs. A blog demonstrates industry knowledge to both your clients and candidates, whilst news and testimonial pages are also great for engagement and credibility.

Every page should have a clear call-to-action (CTA), making it easy for their visit to accelerate into a form submission, application or some other form of contact.

Engage and Nurture

If you can nail this last one, then your recruitment agency marketing is set to take off – big style. In the same way that it seems a bit pointless to make your website easy to find if there’s nothing to see once you get there, it seems a bit mad to attract and entice visitors to give you their information if the majority of it isn’t going to be put to the best possible use.

The best way to keep your data up-to-date and valuable is to have your database crackling with activity. Ideally, candidates and contacts will be able to log-in to your database, with restricted access of course, to keep their own information up-to-date. And on your end, sending out email marketing and job alerts to both contacts and candidates as appropriate keeps them active and engaged with your agency.

If the idea of moving away from job boards still makes you shiver, then fear not. No-one is saying you need to go cold turkey, but give it a shot. The more you put into turning your marketing strategy around, the less you’ll find yourself relying on any other spend to keep your agency afloat.