The Quest For Staffing Firm Perfection
Today we’re going to take a journey. A path to staffing firm success. But first, we need to make sure we have our supplies. We need to ensure that we have the detailed information on our business. This journey of marketing strategy asks you to understand where you’re having success and where you’re not having success. There are many paths to cross when on the journey of creating a winning marketing strategy, so let us pave the way for you.
Defining the journey
Essentially, what we need to do is always be true to ourselves. Many of us understand the data that goes into our business at a very high level, however, we don’t necessarily spend the time to dig deeper into that business data in order to find out where opportunities exist. Your marketing strategy should be focused on trying to find the opportunities for success. We do this by looking into the clients that we have, the locations we support, the people we have supporting those locations on both the sales and recruiting side, industry types, and skills and professions we excel at. All of this information is brought together so that we are able to read the sign posts. For more detail on building your marketing strategy, check out our five (5) part blog series.
Reading the sign posts
Reading the sign posts requires you to be objective with your information. If you go in looking for specific areas, many times you will find data that supports what you are searching for; however, in doing so, you may end up missing greater points and opportunities for success because you just simply confirmed your opinion and didn’t look for other opportunities that exist.
Reading the sign posts means taking your top recruiter and really being objective with the way in which they do their job and understanding if there’s room for improvement. The same applies to the sales team. The other part of this requires you to look at your data on the clients that you are working with. Are they all clustered in specific industries? This helps you focus your energy on the various industries that you have referenceable clients as well as increase opportunity for your messaging to be more specific to that industry. Additionally, you should look at all the positions you tend to fill for your clients. Do you tend to be better at project management, business analysis, and QA or do you happen to do better in development? Are you spending more time looking at new areas to grow into as opposed to enhancing what you are already doing? In order to read the sign posts of your marketing strategy, you must be objective when looking at this data. Really drill into where those opportunities exist.
Marking the path
Now, you have looked at your areas of current success and you have determined that either the industry, professions, or recruiting and sales staff all have different opportunities. Each of those opportunities need to be identified and structured in a way that allows you to take action. Using the recruiting example from above, you can see that there is a training opportunity with taking your top recruiter and pulling the information out of them in order for it to be used with your other staff. This also makes for a great opportunity for that recruiter to be a mentor. These different opportunities allow for you to capitalize on the best of what your team has to offer. Don’t make them have to create those training opportunities, but work with them to pull it off.
Additionally, you have now identified that you have a particular marketing prowess with certain industries. Create case studies around those industries to support what you’re doing. Target that industry with messaging that is specific to them. For example, healthcare has a different language than software, government, and retail. Use the language of that industry with your marketing efforts.
With professions, if you determine that you are having the majority of your success with development, your entire messaging around your staffing firm should change from great at doing everything, to being great at the development suite. Focus your messaging on the area in which you have the greatest success. Remember, it’s okay to have more than one great area, but be conscious of the fact that the market is now turning to experts within given areas and not to the general practitioners. Take advantage of the opportunities to refine your messaging. Your website, marketing materials, and the different targeted efforts that you make should also reflect this.
In order to mark the path, you need to make your mark on either a specific industry or profession. All of this will help with getting yourself to the glory.
Getting to the glory
Getting to the glory goes beyond looking at your data and understanding it. It requires you to take action. Assuming that some day you will do something is not properly utilizing the strategy. Identify the areas of opportunity, determine your messaging that coincides with that industry or profession, and ensure that you take it to the tactical execu
tions that are required to capitalize on that audience. The fact is, many firms bring their strategy up to the finish line, but they don’t cross it. This is due to them having doubt, and not having the capital to pursue the opportunity. If you want to get to the glory, you must act on these efforts and be willing to fail.
By determining your messaging differentiation and applying it to all of your marketing efforts, as well as identifying your target audience, you are able to create specific executions that deliver ROI and get you to the glory. We have now reached the end of our journey to staffing firm marketing success. If we can be of any assistance in your quest for staffing firm perfection, feel free to reach out. Good luck out there.