4 Recruitment Marketing Action Points for 2014
Will your 2014 marketing budget submission be a safe replica of the already accepted 2013 budget, with perhaps a tame 3 percent uplift to acknowledge inflation?
If this is what you are planning to do with your recruitment marketing budget this could be shortsighted and as there are several crucial marketing trends taking place ,which demand that recruiters dramatically evolve their tactics, in response, in order to stay ahead of the game. And, of course, these new tactics may require radical increases in budget.
Below, I have set out several of the key marketing trends that are impacting recruitment marketing and the suggested strategies recruiters may need to adopt to remain competitive.
1. Fight for at least a double digit increase in recruitment marketing budget
Social media marketing budgets will double over the next five years, according to the results of the CMO Survey, and they are expecting to see a 35 percent increase in budgets between 2013 and 2014.
Against this backdrop, wouldn’t a 3 percent inflationary uplift in your 2014 recruitment marketing budget seem kind of paltry; leaving you lagging behind the market?
This suggests that recruiters and HR need to be at least asking for larger budgets, (double digit at least) enabling you to better exploit social media recruiting technologies (such as video interviews and crowd-sourcing) and to enable you to more effectively promote your employer brand and jobs across social media.
2. Invest in a quality blogging presence on your website.
Companies with blogs generate 67 percent more leads per month on average, suggests this study. So, whether you are a recruiter looking for employers or candidates, or an employer looking for top talent, developing a blogging presence on your own site and key industry sites is likely to develop more leads. Of course, we don’t mean pure ‘personality’ blogging; we mean high quality industry focused blogging that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise and which leaves a kind of trail that clients/candidates can follow all the way back to your website. So invest some money this year in a clear, ‘blogging for leads’ strategy where your recruiters and talent managers really make their presence and profile known in the marketplace.
3. Add social sharing buttons into email marketing messages.
Emails with social sharing buttons increase click through rates by 158 percent, according to getresponse.com. This means email marketing is back, (but of course it never went away, it just went out of style for a while). Well, email marketing has come full circle. Where it once had to step aside for the social media marketing boom it has now merged with it to form something much more powerful. Yes, if you include social sharing buttons in your recruitment marketing messages to talent and employers you can increase click through rates by 158 percent. This seems another important area in which to invest your beefed up 2014 recruitment marketing budget.
4. Infographics are more viral then text documents.
Infographics are more than just pretty pictures, they are powerful marketing catalysts. Yes, research from slideshare reveals that infographics are 3X more likely to be shared on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook than text documents. So, it seems that making infographic representations of job vacancies and employer branding documents as opposed to text based alternatives would be a shrewd recruitment marketing investment for 2014 based on current trends.
Good luck in 2014.