As a recruitment agency owner, you know you need a marketing plan to get clients and drive revenue. And recruitment marketing is no cakewalk in the modern sales world. It’s hard to keep tabs on potential clients when you’re working on several hundred hiring pipelines internally. You might also be short on resources, or simply find the whole shenanigans of marketing exhausting. 

That said, having a marketing plan in place for your recruitment agency is important. But it shouldn’t veer you away from your main focus; placing more candidates. A marketing plan for your recruitment agency should help your business stand out from your competition and help you stand out and scale your business quickly. 

Should you be starting with email marketing? Posting on social media? Going to networking events? There’s a lot of marketing advice out there, but it may not be suitable for every recruitment agency. 

Also, check to Think Like a Marketer When Sending Recruiting Emails

So we’ve put together a realistic, actionable marketing plan that you can build from the ground up. We’re talking about perfecting your ideal client persona (ICP), unique selling proposition, marketing strategy, and most importantly – your marketing goals. 

Let’s get started. 

What is Recruitment Marketing? 

A recruitment marketing plan is what will fuel your staffing agency’s revenue. Done right, it can help you reach potential clients, share your company’s story, and most importantly, close deals. In simple words, recruitment marketing is the process of attracting and nurturing clients to your biz by marketing to them. 

Having an effective recruitment marketing plan can pivot your staffing agency and help you achieve your milestones at a much faster pace. You can even target and close high-ticket clients with the right recruitment marketing strategies. 

If you’re a small recruiting agency that’s just starting out, you may use your personal network to get clients at the beginning. But at some point, you’ll want to scale your clientele, expand your services, and increase revenue. And then it’s going to be really difficult to compete with the big fish in the market for the same clients. 

So it’s important to be strategic and build a marketing plan that generates potential clients for your recruiting agency regardless of the size of your team. Remember, it’s the little decisions that count and matter; it’s what most successful businesses thrive on for years. 

Before You Build Your Recruitment Marketing Plan – Here’s What You Need 

If you’ve decided to build a recruitment marketing plan to support your business plan, you already have the will to do it – and we’ve got your back. 

So, where do you start? 

Recruitment marketing starts with taking small steps. This means you need to put together a couple of things first. 

• Prepare a list of your existing clients. 
• Create a document consisting of all your products and services
• Conduct a situation analysis – market opportunities, competitors, customer types, unique selling position (USP), and marketing channels. 
• Pull out your latest financial report to see how much you can allocate to your marketing plan 

Once you have gathered all these documents, compile them in a PDF or a Google Drive folder. Now, you have all the information you need to get started on your marketing plan. 

Note that this is only the starting point and from here on, we’ll take a deep dive into each of these points – so you can create your own marketing plan for your recruitment agency. 

A Step-By-Step Guide To Create Your Recruitment Marketing Plan 

Step 1: Define your target market & USP

Not all companies are your potential clients. You need to narrow down your audience to a target group of companies that fit your business model. Defining your target market is crucial, especially when you’re a recruitment agency in a competitive market like IT, student banking, or healthcare. 

• “There is only one winning strategy. It is to carefully define the target market and direct a superior offering to that target market.” – Philip Kotler, Marketing Author

If you’ve done your market research well, you should have a basic understanding of how your service benefits your target audience. However, if you did not do it properly, it is recommended to get support from marketing consulting firms that can help with conducting thorough market research and market intelligence. From here, you need to know who exactly needs it. You can segment your target market using demographics such as 

• Age,
• Sex,
• Location,
• Industry,
• Income. 

Now that you have real data on who you should plan to sell to, you need to validate your target market. Simply put, you need to verify if you’ll be selling to a market that’s worth serving. 

Ask yourself these questions:

• “Does this market segment have the money to buy our product or service?”
• “How often do they need a product like the one I’m selling?”
• “Are they working with any of our competitors right now?”
• “If yes, what could we offer more that could set us apart from the competition?”

There are many other important questions that you could ask about your target market. At this point, it’s worth noting that you need to set aside your bias and avoid assumptions during this process. 

Many people unintentionally interpret their potential clients in a way that confirms their pre-existing beliefs. So, be careful and clearly define your target market and audience.

Dig deeper into the market and uncover your potential customer’s pain points. Focus on how you could market your product in a way that builds credibility and helps you sell to them easily. 

As a recruitment agency, your target audience’s pain points can be broadly divided into two ways:

• Money: A bad hire can cost a company up to $50,000. This not only wastes their money but can also impact the company in morale and culture. Staffing agencies are known to have a large pool of talent, a variety of candidates, and sometimes even hidden gems that might be perfect for you! Such firms can define who the company needs to hire for a particular job and then help them hire a good fit for the role. 

• Time: Companies need to hire new talent, and they need them fast! Hiring Managers is a strained time. They don’t have the necessary time or expertise to source candidates, screen them, and close them. They need someone to take these off their hands so that they can focus on their core business.  

Once you have all this information, you can create Ideal Client Personas (ICP); a detailed customer persona that defines their pain points, how you can solve them, and how likely they are to use your services. 

This will help you align your marketing plan goals and objectives with your audience and ensure that you’re selling to the right people, at the right time. 

Check out our FREE candidate persona template. 

Pro Tip: It’s helpful to find out the devices your potential customers use and where they interact with brands online. Put yourself in front of them – don’t wait for them to find you. 

Step 2: Identify your marketing goals 

Your marketing goals will set the tone for your entire marketing plan. And these goals should ideally coincide with your business goals. Think of it as planning a trip. First, you select a destination. Then, you figure out if you want this trip to be adventurous, luxurious, or relaxing. This then helps you set your itinerary. 

For instance, if you want to go on a 7-day trek to the Himalayas (adventurous), you start exercising, buy a specific gear set, hire a trekking expert, and implement your knowledge throughout your trip. 

That’s pretty much how you should take your marketing plan. Identify what you want to achieve with your marketing. Be as specific as possible. A vague set of marketing goals for your recruitment agency can derail your team and prove to be inefficient quite quickly. 

Here’s a good example of a marketing goal. 

Stay clear and concise when choosing your marketing goals. This will help you keep your campaigns and activities aligned with your overall recruitment marketing goals. 

Also, check how to make more predictable placements with activity-based recruiting.

Step 3: Choose the right tools 

Building a tech stack for your marketing is undeniably one of the most important steps. Once you have your ideal client persona, unique selling proposition, and marketing goals in place, you need to choose the right marketing tools that help you achieve these goals. 

Now, the idea is to choose tools that match your requirements. For instance, you may want to use a tool that’s easy to use but still offers advanced features like automated funnels, reports, and more. Or you may want to compare different tools based on their price. 

Here are some tools that are key to marketing: 

Marketing Automation

EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing automation and CRM software that helps businesses attract, engage, and nurture their customers through email marketing, social media marketing, lead capture forms, and more. They also offer a free trial so that businesses can try the software before committing to a subscription. Overall, EngageBay is an excellent choice for startups and enterprises looking for an all-in-one marketing automation and CRM solution.

Email Marketing Automation

ConvertKit is one of the best email marketing software for small businesses. Especially for small businesses and enterprises that are looking for an easy-to-use and powerful solution. You can easily segment your audience, set up opt-in forms, create newsletters, build automated funnels, send targeted emails, and do more. 

Landing Page Builder

Unbounce is a great tool to build landing pages for your website. Features like a drag-and-drop builder, well-designed templates, dynamic text replacement, location-specific targeting, and rich reporting allow companies to build highly effective landing pages that convert well. 

Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool to measure your website performance. By getting in-depth data about how your website visitors interact with your content, you can improve your SEO, identify more prospective clients, segment your visitors to cater to more personalized service, and plan future goals. Google Analytics not only offers all of this valuable data for websites but also mobile apps. Using Google Analytics for mobile apps extends its benefits to those creating and launching mobile applications by providing real-time information about user interactions and usage patterns – allowing developers to identify areas where they can effectively optimize their app experience. Recently, there’s been released a new platform called Google Analytics 4 which got some really cool features. Here’s an implementation guide to upgrading to GA4.

Marketing Suite

Coschedule offers two major products: a marketing calendar and a marketing suite. If you want to see the big picture and get updates on the go about your marketing, you can opt for the marketing calendar option. Kanban boards make it easy and quick to see all of your projects in one place. 

However, if you want more than just the calendar, you can opt for their marketing suite which includes features like calendar organizer, content organizer, asset organizer, and more. This helps you eliminate bottlenecks in the marketing process. 

Of course, there are many other tools that you may need in your marketing tech stack. Make sure that every tool you choose makes it easier for your team to implement marketing strategies and processes quickly. The last thing you’d want is a complex tool with a steep learning curve that makes the job more difficult. 

Step 4: Set a budget for your recruitment marketing plan

This is where most small recruitment agencies get stuck; budget. It’s okay to have exciting ideas for your marketing, but you also need to ask yourself and your team, “How much is this going to cost? And, is there any cost-effective option to do this?”

According to Deloitte’s annual CMO survey, marketing budgets are nearly 11.7% of the total company-wide budget. 

The report also reveals that the pandemic has led to increased demand from customers for strong digital experiences; this has positioned marketing as a key driver for direction and growth. 

However, there’s no one-size-fits-all. Your own marketing budget will depend on a variety of factors – including industry, company annual revenue, and business needs. This should help you get a ballpark percentage of your total company-wide marketing budget. 

Once you have a reasonable lump sum amount, break it down and allocate it for different objectives. Broadly, you can put your budget into two different categories: set expenses such as the salary of your marketing team, monthly subscriptions, website expenses, and variable expenses such as advertising, sponsorships, affiliate programs, PR campaigns, and event hosting costs. 

This way, you can figure out your monthly marketing operational costs and the occasional, added expense that you’ll spend depending on when you run specific campaigns. 

This free marketing budget template set from HubSpot is perfect for setting up your specific expenses.

Step 5: Finally, measure and optimize your recruitment marketing plan as you go

Lastly, you need to measure the success of your recruitment marketing efforts. By setting KPIs in place, gather metrics on what works and what doesn’t so you can adjust and review your recruitment marketing efforts. 

In the review process, ask specific questions such as:

• “How many new leads are you getting from each distribution channel?” 
• “Which campaigns got the most and least number of leads?”
• “What’s the customer acquisition cost (CAC)?”
• “How has the marketing strategy increased sales?”

Also, check Strategies to Increase Staffing Agency Sales

Reviewing your marketing plan actions one by one will help you identify loopholes that you may need to fix. Marketing can get super expensive, if not carefully reviewed timely. Make sure to review your budget, timelines, and benchmarks or milestones that you established to measure success. 

After you’ve found what’s working and what’s not, it’s time to make some changes. Updating your recruitment marketing plan could include changing the ad expense for Google ads, CRO and A/B testing, frequency of social media postings, creating a new content strategy, or increasing or decreasing the budget for certain campaigns based on the data you’ve gathered so far. 

BONUS TIP: Winning Clients With Your Content Marketing Funnel

Like it or not, most marketing efforts are directed toward content. Even the seemingly average pieces of content are known to influence a specific response from potential customers. Having a content marketing funnel in place will play a large role in your overall marketing success. This is because the content in different stages supports the buyer’s journey, and good content pulls the leads closer to a purchase. 

This makes total sense since the main goal of your marketing is to attract a defined target audience, engage it, and finally, turn them into paying customers for your biz. Creating valuable content for prospects at each stage of their buyer journey to ensure you offer them the right info at the right time is hands-down a winning strategy. 

Here are some tips that will help you run your content marketing smoothly:

• Create valuable, action-driven content like landing pages, infographics, PowerPoint slides, explainer videos, and newsletters.
• Publish specific use-cases and customer success stories to generate leads. 
• Create product overview and customer reviews to drive purchases.
• Move your prospects through the funnel with targeted emails and personalized content. 
• Do competitor analysis and keyword research to create new content. 
• Use conversion rate to measure your content funnel effectiveness. 
• Think about SEO to get your funnel content seen. Either work on this house or you can outsource it to an SEO consultant or agency.

FREE RESOURCE For Scaling Your Recruiting Agency

If you’re scaling up your recruitment agency, you might have plenty of questions. In this video, Brad Wolff, Managing Partner at People Max talks with Manan Shah, Co-Founder of Recruiterflow to share how recruitment agencies can scale up their business.

With an experience of 25+ years in the recruitment industry and two successful firms, Wolff walks through his journey and offers insights into scaling a recruiting business, navigating recruiting models, and tips to set yourself up for success. 

Conclusion & Your Journey From Here On  

You might be planning to scale up your recruitment agency or are looking for new clients and this is the perfect time to get started with your marketing journey. It really isn’t that much different from setting up goals and priorities for your overall business & b2b social media marketing strategy. And once you get the hang of it, you’ll see the numbers change and your revenue increase. 

Moreover, if you’re a founder of a small recruitment firm, it’s easy to get lost in the sales and hiring process. Building a solid marketing plan that can work to achieve your goals and objectives more easily without you constantly cold-calling people will be game-changing for your team. 

Sure, the process will have its ebbs and ways. But that shouldn’t stop you from experimenting. Once you have set your mind to build your marketing strategy, stick to it. Create a realistic plan for your team and set achievable goals. Also, make sure you allocate enough money and resources to your marketing. 

Also, if you’re looking for a recruitment CRM for your staffing agency, please reach out to us – we’d love to hear from you!