A Look into your Staffing Firm Marketing Strategy for 2020

With 2020 in the immediate future, marketing strategy has become increasingly important. Many staffing firms have not spent enough time digging into their marketing strategy, and the forecast for 2020 is more problematic than recent years. As we look into 2020, we see an uncertain economy that brings complexity to our various staffing firms. The ability to grow your brand, increase candidates, and bring on new clients is certainly affected. However, that only makes staffing firm marketing strategy more important.

In every business class, there is a discussion of investing in an up economy and investing more in a down economy. For these reasons, it’s very important that people take a look at what their goals are for their business in 2020 and how marketing will deliver those goals. Now, let’s take a look at what we can do about your 2020 marketing strategy.

Importance of Your Staffing Firm Marketing Strategy
As I mentioned before, the marketing strategy is always important. However, when faced with a flat-to-down market, we’re looking at keeping consultants on billing, sharing our value with clients and consultants, as well as growing our brand/efforts for when we come out of any downturn. Marketing strategy allows you to pinpoint areas of vulnerability and apply tactics to drive possible outcomes.

Marketing strategy allows you to look into your business and define opportunities within both your consultant and client audiences. It should be the driver for opening new offices, increasing your client base, and growing within your existing clients as well as driving the candidates you need.

Creating Your Marketing Strategy
When we work with clients on marketing strategy, we begin with the simple concept of who, what, when, where, where, why and how (the 5 W’s and an H). Each play an integral part in your marketing strategy:

• Who defines the audience that you have and want to have. This includes both clients and candidates.
• What determines the offerings that you bring to the table. It refers to the services that you’re providing for the client and the actions that you would take on their behalf.
• Why is the value proposition, messaging, and differentiation.
• Where focuses on target markets, the industries you serve, and their locations.
• How and When is the tactical execution plan and the different elements that we’re going to use to implement on the strategy.

From the 5 W’s and an H, we have to look into our business successes as well as the things we weren’t successful at. This is to ensure that we are growing our efforts in the things that are successful and not duplicating the efforts that were not. You need to look into areas and opportunities for growth with all of your audiences. The marketing strategy makes an easier decision for what you are going to do in marketing. For example, if you are trying to get deep and wide with your existing clients, and you’ve never done anything on this before other than talk to the sales team about it, then you will find that there are a number of different tactics that can be applied to ensure the success of these efforts. The same can be said for acquiring new clients, growing new practice areas, expanding into new markets, as well as the approaches we take with candidates vs. consultants. Marketing strategy is all about setting direction.

What Does Success Look Like?
Whenever we sit down with a client, the question that always comes up is, “how will we know if we were successful?”. The easiest way to describe what success looks like is by setting up the proper ROI measurements for any effort you decide to take on. Are you looking to grow your social media presence? On one hand, you can simply look at followers, likes, and comments and can easily tell if it is growing. However, is that really what you care about? In addition to those elements, tracking applicants that came in from social media is an important part of determining success. Additionally, looking at how many clients or prospects that have reached out to you is another measure of success.

Each effort in your marketing strategy should have the ability to determine success and projections should be created from the onset in order to track against. Success should be measured by the applicant flow from recruiting efforts and client meetings, requirements, and starts for client centric efforts. Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of measuring success by outcomes that don’t produce revenue.

Are you attending the TechServe 2019 Conference? If so, join our panel discussion on November 7th at 1:30pm with Matt Eckert of Genuent, Theresa Zandi of Centurion Consulting Group, and Michael Paradise of Sysazzle.