Frustrations are always there for recruitment marketers. We often sit there with the best ideas in our head, on our notepad or in a draft email that we fear nobody is going to pay attention to. But how do we do better? How do we show that recruitment marketing is more than what many think it is? We can all appreciate that there are immediate business needs that need attention now and again but a marketing strategy can pay dividends and really elevate all of our roles to the next level.
Reactive vs. Proactive
As with all recruitment marketing teams, being pulled into reactive activity takes time away from more strategic recruitment marketing planning.
This happens more when there are fewer marketing heads in a team. How do we get the balance right?
One way to combat the ‘reactive activity’ is through empowering your consultants to self-serve with pre-prepared centralised toolkits. This central bank of resources can include presentations, case studies, Canva templates and so much more. By providing branded resources you’re controlling the materials being sent out without tying you to creating the documents from scratch every time somebody asks you for them.
Freeing your team up from reactive activity also allows you to look at the split of time between different brands, teams or locations. It’s so easy to gravitate towards a particular team if they’re being helpful, responsive and have bought into the impact marketing can have. The danger with this is that some teams become overlooked and under-resourced from a marketing perspective. This is when looking at the business’ goals comes into play as you can use that to decide the balance of marketing resources. Ensuring that there’s a conscious split that will support the overarching business objectives (and ultimately boost your standing within the business).
Let technology take the doubt out of the process. And save you time.
Technology should be a key part of your marketing function now. Making you more efficient, more automated and giving you back more time. With so many options available you’re only really limited by your budget. We’ve all heard of Herefish, Paiger, Hubspot and many others and the difference they can make is huge.
While marketing teams love technology to drive automation and setting up workflows, there is still a challenge around getting consultants to buy into using it fully. This could be that they feel less in control of an automated email sequence or maybe they’ve seen success with their methods and are reluctant to change. A block to new recruitment marketing ideas can simply be getting the buy-in they need from across the business, whether that’s from consultants or leadership. That needs to change. By either focusing on a single team to prove concept or if you’re the more assertive type, by brute force!
Show me the money!
Many of us will know that marketing teams don’t tend to hold a budget of their own, or if they do there will undoubtedly be a few things in it that you disagree with! That means that every new spend more than likely requires sign off. If you’re lucky the leadership of your business will be aligned with marketing’s goals and support new ideas and initiatives. Otherwise, you face the exhausting challenge of justifying and creating a business case every time. A clear budget demonstrates the commitment to marketing and allows more creativity when it comes to recruitment marketing ideas, without the fear that if something doesn’t work it will jeopardise future budget requests.
Influencing those types of decisions from leadership can be a big jump if you’ve never had those responsibilities before. Taking time to establish your authority and knowledge relies on you shouting that little bit louder, and it doesn’t hurt to be armed with a list of examples of your wins!
Your ideas for content and other marketing activity in recruitment gets caught up in so many other things. If you’re forever dealing with reactive requests you won’t have time. If you don’t have any budget you don’t have the money to try new things. If you don’t have the influence you won’t get sign-off from the top. Having the time, resources and creativity to create killer content and ideas relies on having the infrastructure around you – so the real question is how can you create that infrastructure? How can you build that strategy? Of course we’re going to say this, “we can help.”
This article was created off the back of a Lonely Marketers huddle with some of the most senior recruitment marketers in the industry representing £100m’s worth of turnover and established around the globe.
This is a regular feature of The Lonely Marketers community which TwoEnds is proud to power as we aim to complete our mission of building the best recruitment marketing teams there possibly can be.
