What is Marketing? A Very Short Introduction For Recruiters
Recruiters are absolutely brilliant at sales. However, they are generally not very hot in marketing for some reason. My personal explanation for this is down to the way we are trained to do cold calling and face-to-face sales from day one.
However, marketing is straightforward at its core. Primarily it is communicating to your target audiences in a manner that builds a relationship towards a sale.
Of course, I know that in real life things are always easier said than done. So what are the critical components of marketing?
4 Key Components of Marketing
- Identifying your target marketplace, audience or tribe.
- Understanding the wants and needs of your target marketplace, audience or tribe.
- Creating and planning and then executing a plan that creates relevant offerings, messages and appeals that suit the target audience.
- Engaging with customers to form a brand image and awareness in your target marketplace mind and building this relationship to the point a sale is made.
These four steps are significant as they form a mesh that creates effective marketing campaigns.
Example for Recruiters
Examples are always helpful. Below is a model for a typical recruitment agency
Step 1: Identify the target Marketplace.
The Typical Recruitment Agency focuses on Accountancy and Finance placements within the Insurance sector in London. So the target audience is going to be hiring managers at insurance firms, HR at insurance firms and candidates who have a background in accountancy and finance generally and with insurance companies in particular.
Step 2: Understanding the needs of the audience
The typical Recruitment Agency has essentially three segments to understand. One, hiring managers, human resources and candidates. The candidates can be split into, but for our example, we will keep it simple.
Now that the Typical Recruitment Agency has its three audiences it can begin to understand their needs through market research, or as it is also known. Asking people stuff. At this stage, they need to understand the pain that each of these groups has.
Step 3: Creating and Executing a Plan
This is one of the more difficult steps as it requires messages to be crafted, plans to be made and action to be taken. But mostly, it is what letter, to whom, how often and in what medium.
So Monthly marketing campaign may include
Weekly video on pain points to be shared via social media.
Monthly mailshot hiring managers
£xxx spend per day on Facebook adverts that draw in candidates to the agency's weekly jobs newsletter
Step 4: Engaging Customers to build the relationship.
This is the bit of marketing when it goes from being about messages to a constant process of email marketing, social media advertising, personal contact, direct mail, print adverts and public relations to build a brand, and ultimately create sales. Mostly it is doing step three each week and month until the messages become a brand in decision-makers' minds.
Thank you for reading this article.
Please note that I have written these books that you might find interesting:
Recruitment Hacks - https://amzn.to/3uPdhhn