15 Marketing Strategies for Recruitment Agencies

1. Get your website up to scratch

The first thing that most of your potential candidates and clients will see is your website, which should be at the core of your marketing efforts.

Many people think creating a site that looks pretty is all that’s needed, but there are actually a wide array of other factors that need to be considered before the site is even launched, such as SEO and user experience. Get those wrong and you’ll be swimming against the tide from the get-go.

It can also be easy just to leave a website as it is after its initial launch, but refining the content and copy across your site on an ongoing basis is one of the best ways to ensure that you give clients and candidates exactly what they are looking for.

As well as generally optimising your website for the ultimate user experience, a website that is built with SEO in mind and has informed keyword research behind the content will perform much better than one without.

For example, if you are a specialist HR recruitment agency, and ‘HR recruitment Leeds’ and ‘HR recruitment London’ are both phrases with high search volume, then dedicating a landing page on your website for each of these locations will bring you more traffic and help your website to rank better.

It’s understandable to be sceptical about the power of SEO and whether people are actually searching for your niche in the industry, but the search volumes of key recruitment phrases speak for themselves. The phrase ‘sales recruitment agency’ gets 50 searches every month in the UK, ‘marketing recruitment agency london’ gets 100 searches, and ‘construction recruitment agency london’ gets 70 searches in the UK each month.

The interest is out there, and you need to capitalise on it to get ahead.

If you need more convincing, take a look at one of our case studies to see how we’ve used SEO to boost our client’s businesses.

2. Focus on inbound recruitment with SEO

Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on drawing customers to your company and building a sustainable relationship with them, instead of outwardly promoting a brand image towards people who might not be interested in your services. This technique seeks to target potential candidates who are talented and qualified for the kind of jobs that your company is promoting, meaning that your candidate pool is full of exceptional employees.

There are numerous resources available online about inbound marketing and recruitment techniques, but the heart of the strategy is all about creating the best possible customer experience at every stage of the recruitment process, ensuring that your candidates remain engaged and satisfied. This could be as simple as regularly contacting your candidates to promote a sense of community in your business, or holding events for clients and candidates to network and see the benefits of the services your agency offers.

When it comes to bringing new business to your brand, SEO, or search engine optimisation, is also a fantastic way to get the right kind of potential clients and candidates on your site.

An SEO marketing strategy uses data from search engines and their results pages to target precisely what users are searching for and improve how your recruitment website ranks on sites like Google.

Research from BrightEdge has shown that over 50% of trackable traffic to websites comes from organic search. That’s half of all the visits your site is going to get, all of which can be boosted by SEO.

You can optimise the copy on your website by including keyword phrases that your target audience are searching for or creating content for these topics, as well as doing things like improving page speed and building reputable links from other sources. 57% of marketing executives have reported that on-page content development is one of the most effective SEO techniques, so it’s certainly an endeavor that pays off.

You can teach yourself the basics of SEO, or invest in a company that offers specialised SEO services to recruitment agencies (wink wink).

Many businesses are now seeing the benefits of a search engine optimised approach to marketing, and it’s a fantastic way to get ahead of the competition and ensure that potential candidates can easily find you. It’s also a passive way of bringing in new business, as once you’re visible for the right kind of phrases new clients will consistently find you time after time.

3. Use email marketing

It’s easy to focus on trying to target as many new candidates and clients as possible with your marketing strategies.

However, an effective marketing plan for a recruitment agency is to reconnect with candidates or clients who already exist on your database using email marketing, as a way to generate more interest from an audience you know is looking for your services.

A good strategy to target these candidates is to create an email newsletter that lists insights into their industry sector, showcases new job opportunities or successful case studies and reminds them of how your recruitment agency can help. Lead magnets such as eBooks, free video content or access to webinars can all be used to gather email addresses and ensure that your list of subscribers are actually going to be interested in what you have to offer.

Email automation makes this strategy even more effective, as you can build personalised pathways of relevant messages for different groups of subscribers.

Begin by segmenting your candidate and client base into different groups, so you can tailor the content that each category receives and ensure that they find value in what you’re sending out. Then, put together different email series that respond to these groups’ pain points and offer personalised recruitment advice.

Whilst this first stage will be time consuming, you can then use email marketing software to create an automated response chain that changes depending on what the reader interacts with. For example, you could set up an action where, if a client clicks on an article about the best recruitment tools, the next email they receive will have more content about industry software and apps.

Segmenting your email list and personalising your reader’s experience will not only increase the amount of engagement that your content gets, but also help to build a stronger relationship with your customer base and firmly establish yourself in their minds as a reliable and helpful resource provider.

4. Take advantage of social media

Many recruitment agencies already use social media marketing as a way to reach more potential candidates and clients and drive a positive image of their brand. But nowadays, it’s not enough to just engage with social media marketing by uploading posts whenever you remember.

Planning your social media content in advance makes it easier to post consistently on your channels, which will increase engagement and help to boost the visibility of your posts. Consistency is key to success on social channels, and planning ahead will help you achieve the consistency needed to grow an engaged audience.

Having a schedule also makes it easier to integrate social media marketing into your wider strategy, as you can focus your efforts from multiple different approaches on one goal you are trying to reach.

It may also be worth investing in paid social media as a way of reaching potential clients and candidates who aren’t currently following you across various platforms. It’s a great way to build your following, increase conversions and improve brand visibility, as well as giving you a platform that gathers tons of useful data on which posts get the most engagement and what kind of demographics make up your audience.

The Digital 2021 Report revealed that on Facebook, for example, a user over the age of 18 typically clicked on adverts at least eleven times in a 30 day period. That’s a huge amount of engagement that you can’t afford to be missing out on.

The best social media strategies are all geared towards hitting specific targets. Not only does this make it easier to measure and quantify your success, but it also gives you a much clearer focus of what you are trying to achieve with each post, which is likely to make them more successful. Planning posts with specific aims in mind, and then scheduling these in tandem with other marketing efforts, will do wonders for the success of your strategy.

You can also use a social media tool to automatically post your content at peak times once it has been created, taking a time-consuming task off your hands. Some of the best tools in the business for scheduling and automated posting are:

Buffer

5. Choose your channels carefully

Social media marketing is an essential part of any company’s advertising strategy. But with so many different platforms to choose from nowadays, it can be easy to spread yourself too thinly trying to create content for multiple channels.

You’re more likely to find new candidates through social media, so consider the demographic that your potential candidates are a part of, and focus your efforts on the social media platform that they are consistently using. Clients can also be sourced from platforms like LinkedIn and maybe even Facebook, but this requires a different approach.

You should also consider the image and branding of your company when choosing social media platforms, and think about which options fit with the impression you are trying to make. LinkedIn is an obvious choice for sourcing and converting all kinds of leads, but platforms such as Instagram are a great way to target a younger candidate audience if this is relevant to your business and allows for more informal marketing strategies through regular posting, stories or livestreams, as well as engagement through comments.

Channel	Audience	Best for…
LinkedIn	B2B	Target hiring managers based on job titles, function, company size
Facebook	B2B/B2C	Best for consumer based advertising, but could also be great candidate focused job postings
Instagram	Mainly B2C, occasionally B2B	Best for visual content, building a unique brand image, targeting a younger customer base, sharing people-focused content
Twitter	Mainly B2C, occasionally B2B	Developers, art industries, connecting informals with other industry professionals

6. Use your data to gain new insights

A lot of time and money can be spent trying to figure out where the majority of your leads are coming from, which pieces of content they are engaging with and how effective your marketing strategies are. The good news is that a lot of this data can actually be found right under your nose, and allows you to highlight areas to target with your marketing and evaluate the best ways to connect with a wider audience.

You can begin by simply analysing your engagement on social media channels, to see which kind of posts do best, what time of day your audience are more likely to engage with your content, and how far-reaching your advertising on these platforms is. This will help to create a more refined social media plan that hopefully sees improved results almost instantly.

Google Analytics is also an incredibly useful tool to see how much traffic is coming to your website, which pages are performing particularly well and how many people are being converted into clients. Not only can this help you to identify what is working well and duplicate this strategy, but it also gives you insight into which pages need more work in order to perform as well as others.

Email marketing software can also be a useful way to gather data on engagement and find out more about what kind of content your audience is really interested in. Most tools give you insight into what links in emails are clicked on most, how long people spend reading your emails, what time of day you get the most readers and which emails perform the best, which is all information that can be used to refine your strategy in the future.

By tracking and evaluating the results of all your marketing efforts, you will be able to get a clear idea of which approaches work best for your business and refine your strategies further down the line to continue your success. Measuring your success also gives you something to celebrate and shout about, which in turn provides evidence that your recruitment agency is one of the best in the business.

7. Create new content

Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for recruitment agencies. It involves creating resources for your target audience that will get their attention and direct them to your website, which could be blog posts, videos, eBooks or even podcast episodes.

Using SEO and keyword research to determine what content you should be writing is very beneficial, as this allows you to target search phrases that you can easily rank on page 1 of search results for.

Finding a phrase such as ‘how to stand out in an interview’ relates to what your potential candidates might be searching for when looking for a job, provides a focus for a piece of content and can potentially convert a reader into a candidate. A similar phrase that a potential client may be searching for would be ‘business development ideas recruitment agencies’, which you could turn into an article, eBook or a series of short videos.

There are a range of different free and paid tools that allow you to gather data on the kinds of keyword phrases that people are searching for. At Growth Recruits we use Ahrefs to gather our data, but there are other options that offer a similar kind of service.

Check out:

By ranking for more keywords and focusing on keywords with a good search volume, not only will more people find your content but the overall ranking of your website in search results will improve as well.

Ahrefs

8. Target specific goals

Every recruitment agency’s overall marketing goal is to gain more candidates and clients and more exposure as a business, but it is hard to create a successful marketing strategy with such a broad goal. Instead, define several specific goals that you are trying to achieve with your marketing.

These could be:

Increasing the number of candidates you recruit each month
Growing your social media following by a certain percentage
Getting a certain number of clients to stay past the 1 year mark
Increasing the positions you fill every month by a specified number

Your marketing strategy for each goal might then include targeted outreach through social media, keyword research-based content production or creating a referral system for existing candidates to recommend your agency to others in their sector.

You can measure the success of this goal easily, and this in turn will highlight which strategies have been most effective and improve future marketing campaigns with this knowledge.

9. Revamp and repurpose existing content

Whilst creating new content is an important part of effective marketing, it doesn’t mean that you should forget about what already exists on your site.

Older content might not have been created with the same focused marketing goals that you now have in mind, but it is much easier to go back and edit blog posts or landing pages than entirely rewriting them or writing new ones. You’re also likely to discover a lot of useful content that just needs to be given a new lease of life!

Data from HubSpot has revealed that updating existing blog content or republishing it with new images and text can increase the organic traffic to that post by up to 106%. It’s an incredibly efficient way to get the most out of content that you might have previously spent a lot of time on and provide new readers or customers with content that they might otherwise have missed.

As well as editing older content, you can also repurpose data that you already have access to as a way to easily create new marketing content. Turn testimonials from clients and candidates into short case studies for a series of social media posts, or take statistics and quotes from reports and blog posts and repurpose these as infographics which can populate your site.

Here are a few examples:

Use your articles as scripts for short videos where you explain the content they cover in more detail
Take key statistics, pieces of data or quotes from your articles and turn them into infographics
USe elements of your article as the captions for social media posts
Transform an ebook into a article or video series

10. Make it personal

A brilliant marketing strategy for a recruitment agency to improve their brand image and create more content is to feature the employees or long-term, enthusiastic clients on your website or social media channels.

Real-life stories and experiences give you much more credibility as a business, and also improve your brand image by putting faces to the services that you offer. You can then use these stories when approaching businesses in a similar sector or companies with a similar hiring need.

Creating a website page or a series of posts that feature successful clients and their stories is a great place to start with personal marketing approaches, and also acts as testimonials for your company. You can also consider something similar for members of staff who are part of your company, and create content that outlines what they do and what life is like as part of a recruitment agency.

11. Start or feature on a podcast

Nowadays the podcast industry is absolutely booming, and it is possible to find or start podcasts for every topic, idea and career under the sun. If you have the time and the resources, setting up your own podcast to discuss elements of recruitment is a great way to attract potential clients and candidates and establish yourself as an expert agency.

You can also gain exposure by being featured on other, well-known recruitment podcasts, either through being a guest of the podcast host or getting your agency mentioned during an episode. If you’re interested in being a podcast guest, check out our article on The 17 Best Recruitment Podcasts to get an idea of the most successful shows currently out there.

Podcasts also open up another method of content repurposing, as you can use transcripts of each episode to create blog articles and social media posts. Descript is a great tool that turns audio files into text that you can then edit and resume in a variety of ways to get the most out of every podcast episode.

If you record video as well as audio with your podcast, you can also edit these into shirt clips that can be shared on social media or in your email marketing content.

Descript

12. Develop a personal brand as the business owner

Nowadays, having a distinctive personal brand is an essential part of career success. We all know the importance of developing a strong personal brand as a business, but you’re going to stand out more if you also have built up an individual following and established yourself as a prominent member of your industry.

The process of developing a personal brand is much the same as establishing one for a business; begin by identifying what it is that makes you stand out. Dig deep and decide on the values that drive your work, and then use these foundations to inform the messages you share, the people you work with and the online persona that you construct.

You should also identify the kind of audience you want to be appealing to and figure out the other recruitment thought leaders or specialists that these people already follow and engage with. You’ll build up a following much faster if you’re got a targeted approach and can seek inspiration from others who you know have been successful in gaining a dedicated audience.

Social media is a key part of a personal brand, particularly in recruitment where LinkedIn is such an important platform for the industry. You’ll benefit from developing a plan or schedule for the posts and content you share across your profiles, as this ensures your followers get regular updates and start to anticipate new insights. You should also make sure that you’re engaging with and supporting others through leaving and replying to comments, as this will get you noticed by more people and indicate that you’re active in the industry.

13. Take a PR angle

The difference between PR and more general marketing is that PR work focuses on maintaining a positive brand image and getting press coverage to reach a wider audience. If one of the goals of your marketing strategy is to increase your company’s visibility and connect more with potential candidates and clients, then using PR marketing might be a massive benefit to your business.

By creating relevant press releases, particularly if you have just rebranded or have a unique aspect that sets you apart from other agencies, you can grab the attention of relevant news and media sources which will massively improve your status in the recruitment world, and your public image. Getting coverage through PR also has numerous SEO benefits, as having high-ranking and prestigious publications linking your website will massively improve its ranking in search results.

You can read more about how a PR strategy boosted visibility and increased website traffic for one of our clients in this case study.

14. Provide relevant resources

We’ve already listed recruitment resources as a top suggestion for content creation. But creating a bank of resources for your audience is a brilliant stand-alone recruitment marketing strategy that can help candidates find you and attract new clients by improving your reputation as a leading name in recruitment.

Offering everything from general advice about job applications to more specific resources on the sector that you recruit for will help build up a bank of new content for your site, which can be distributed in many different formats. A series of blog posts can be compiled into a downloadable eBook or you could consider making video resources or delivering a series of webinars for a small fee that covers some key aspects of the recruitment process.

Offering resources for each stage of the recruitment and interview process is also a good way to make sure that your candidates are more informed and prepared, which hopefully means that they will be more successful!

15. Consider a partnership

A brilliant way to get more access to potential candidates and clients is by finding other businesses that share your target audience but offer complementary services to your agency, so they are not a direct competitor. By creating a partnership with this business, you can not only reach a wider audience, but also gain valuable industry insight and share data that will help to refine and revolutionize your marketing strategy.

Depending on your marketing goals, you’ll be looking for a partner who already has a following made up of your target audience. This tends to be easier if you’re an agency that specialises in recruiting for a certain role or industry, but more general recruitment agencies can focus on a specific demographic and find a brand or business that caters to this group.

A business partnership can be as simple as having another company that shares your content across their social media channels and recommends your services to their clients. It can also go further through creating collaborative content, creating ‘guest’ posts on each other’s websites or even organising events together to maximise visibility to your target audience.

The most fruitful business partnerships are ones where both parties have clear ideas of what they want to get out of the relationship. Whilst it is nice to just have business allies in the industry who share a target audience, having a strategy for how you are both going to benefit from the relationship will ensure that it doesn’t end up being a waste of time and resources.

Final Thoughts…

Marketing for recruitment is an area that is constantly evolving, and it’s important to consider that some strategies will work better for your business than others, depending on what your marketing targets are and who your potential clients are as well. However, by using some or all of the advice that we have shared in this post, you should be able to create a goal-orientated marketing strategy for your recruitment agency that strengthens your image, improves your content and massively increases the engagement you receive from potential candidates and clients.

If you’d like help with marketing for a recruitment agency or would just like more insight into some of the strategies we have shared in this post, get in touch and speak to our team about the range of services we offer.

About the author

Tom Mcloughlin is the Director of Growth Recruits. A passionate marketer, he loves sharing his ideas with the industry and helping people take that knowledge and use it to get extraordinary results.

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