How to Add a New Service Category to Your Marketing Business
It’s generally less expensive to sell more to your existing customers than it is to go out and find a new customer. What if you could add a category to your marketing consulting or agency business that could increase the amount of work you do with existing clients and open the door for new business too? You can with recruitment marketing.
Recruitment marketing is simply the use of marketing tactics to achieve recruiting and talent attraction objectives. It’s using what you already know and applying your expertise in a different way.
I’ve been successful in practicing recruitment marketing with my clients, and you can too.
I got started with recruitment marketing when one of my clients asked me to do something to help them promote their job opportunities. So I did. I used what I’m best at – content marketing – to help my clients create a consistent presence to reach more people with their talent attraction message.
Let’s talk about these two components – creating a consistent presence and communicating a talent attraction message -- and how they intertwine.
Related: Read my recruitment marketing story here...
Recruitment Marketing Is More Than Promoting Jobs
If you work with companies that are always hiring, then you might think that promoting open positions is the way that you create a consistent presence. Unfortunately, that tactic dries up when positions are filled.
Another problem with solely promoting job openings is that the message is often generic. How many times do you see a “We’re hiring!” message? You could insert just about any job for any company into that over-used phrase. We’ve seen this so many times that our brains glaze over it, and the result is that nothing sticks in the minds of job candidates.
Change the Talent Attraction Message
Fortunately, the way to earn a place in a person’s memory AND develop a consistent presence is by changing the message. Employee experience storytelling is the foundation for these new messages.
When you use employee experience as the basis for talent attraction messages, you don’t have to merely talk about the job. You can paint a picture of what it’s like to work at the company. That’s something you can talk about any time - not just when there are jobs to fill.
In fact, you can do better at promoting open jobs because you suddenly have something different to say compared to all the other companies going after the same talent.
What does this look like in practical terms for a small business client? It’s using the tactics you know and applying them to talent attraction. These are tactics like blogging, social media and digital advertising.
Makes sense, right? Makes sense if you have a process to follow so that you can:
Ask the questions that uncover employee experience.
Turn what employees say into compelling recruiting messages.
Get buy-in for something our clients have never done before.
You’ll get answers to many of your questions - plus a framework to use to craft the kind of recruiting messages that connect with people - in my online course: Better Message. Better Talent Pool.
Open Up the Door to More Business
When I first started talking about recruitment marketing, I thought that the people in HR were who I needed to reach. But now I’m convinced that the people who are best positioned to help small businesses adopt a new strategy for talent attraction are the marketing professionals who already work with these companies.
What’s more, recruitment marketing can open the door to more business. Companies that traditionally haven’t needed marketing to attract customers certainly need to do something different to attract workers in the current climate.
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