Marketing Psychology: 5 Tips to Win Hearts (+ Examples)
Marketing is all about human behavior, so it makes sense that having an understanding of psychology could improve the way we approach marketing initiatives....
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Between the Great Resignation and a potential recession on the horizon, finding the right people for the right roles is as difficult as it is important. And there’s no one better suited to that task than a recruitment company.
There’s just a tiny problem, though: The recruitment industry is highly competitive. Not only that, but it’s becoming harder for recruitment firms to attract clients amongst the massive pool of competition these days.
So, what can recruitment companies do to set themselves apart from the crowd and land the perfect clients? The days of physical job boards are over: it’s time to invest in targeted pay-per-click (aka paid search or PPC) ads.
When you’re looking to land new clients for your recruitment firm, a paid search agency can do wonders to help you create a targeted PPC campaign. (Image: Rawpixel)
Before we dive right into PPC strategies, let’s discuss the reasons why PPC ads are a good investment for recruitment companies.
Based on our assessment, here’s how recruitment companies benefit:
Most recruitment companies have two audiences: new clients and job seekers. Most likely, the strategies you use to attract new clients for your recruitment firm and to find new talent for your clients won’t be the same.
As a recruitment professional, you already know the best strategies for finding the right talent for your clients. But when you’re looking to land new clients for your recruitment firm, a paid search agency can do wonders to help you create a targeted PPC campaign.
Here are some high-level PPC strategies for recruitment firms that will help you capture more clients and boost your ROAS.
The first thing to do to create a winning PPC campaign is to define your target persona. Without knowing exactly who your target client is, you risk advertising to the wrong crowd and wasting your ad budget.
To create the perfect persona for your target client, ask yourself and/or your team the following questions:
Once you have the answers to these questions, you’ll have the information you need to create a nuanced campaign that targets only the right audience. You can then use your target client persona to write excellent ad copy, segment your audience properly, bid on the right keywords (and exclude the wrong keywords), and ultimately create a converting PPC campaign.
Creating a strong persona will make the difference in how much you spend on lead generation and how you maximize your ROAS.
Categorize your audience’s pain points into distinct problem areas. (Image: Unsplash)
What good is a PPC ad offer if it completely misses the point of what your prospects want? Creating PPC ads around misdiagnosed client pain points — or leaving the pain point out altogether — is one of the most common PPC mistakes and a surefire way to waste your budget.
It’s essential to have a constant pulse on industry pain points to create an effective ad. Here are some ways to find this information:
Once you’ve identified the pain points (e.g., trimming recruitment costs, reducing the lead time on positions being filled, etc.), you can use them to write strong ad copy.
I googled the highly competitive keyword “recruitment firm in Philadelphia.” Below is a look at a couple of the top PPC ad listings as an example to see how they do or don’t target potential pain points.
This first listing from Peak Sales Recruiting does a great job writing ad copy that speaks to industry pain points. When you read the ad, you understand that Peak Sales Recruiting doesn’t just find salespeople. The firm finds salespeople who will hit aggressive revenue targets and meet sales goals.
It’s challenging for organizations to find good salespeople, and high sales staff turnover costs a lot of money. This ad does a good job showing the audience that this recruitment firm understands that and will go above and beyond to solve needs — not just find someone to hire.
Another PPC ad under this keyword simply tells you what the agency does. However, it doesn’t mention how they solve pain points.
Cheatsheet: Categorize your audience’s pain points into distinct problem areas. Then, write an ad that targets each of those pain points accordingly. Here are some common examples you can use as a starting point:
Once you nail down target personas and understand audience pain points, create an offer in your paid search ad that’s impossible to refuse. We talked about how you can speak to pain points, but there’s much more that goes into creating an offer that incentivizes clicks.
Here are some additional golden nuggets you can include in your ad copy:
Booya, your target prospect has clicked on your ad and you’re on your way to capturing a new lead.
The next step in creating a killer PPC campaign for your recruitment company is to knock the landing page out of the park.
First, make sure that landing pages have the same offers as your ad copy and as the keyword you bid on. If you said you were a “clerical recruiting agency” in your ad, then your landing page should be built around your clerical recruiting services. It may sound simple, but we’ve seen too many businesses that serve up an inconsistent ad-to-LP experience.
Black Crow AI
Geo-targeting is one of the best-kept secrets in paid search advertising. Okay, it might not be a secret — but it can be highly strategic if you do it right.
With a little bit of extra research on where many corporations in your niche are located, you can geo-target your ads to areas where many corporations need recruiting help. This strategy will reduce your ad spending.
For example, if you are a recruiting company that works for big technology firms, then it makes sense to create geo-targeted ads for locations like Silicon Valley, Austin, and Lehi, Utah.
There are hundreds of huge tech companies in these locations, and they are always looking for new talent. And anyone in these areas who need help with recruiting will start their search with a term like “recruitment company in Austin.”
Overall, geo-targeting ads provide the following benefits:
Don’t forget that you also need to create separate landing pages for different niches and different geo-locations.
The last thing you want to do is create an ad for “recruitment agencies in Austin,” and have your ad link to a landing page that’s all about recruiting for companies in Silicon Valley. It’s happened before. Don’t let it happen to you.
Creating a high-performing PPC ad isn’t a one-and-done process. To get the most out of your PPC ad spend, you also need to get your hands dirty. In other words, you must test your ads, analyze the results of different ads, and optimize ad campaigns for improved performance.
It’s easy to write one version of your ad copy and create one landing page and leave it at that. But, truth be told, you don’t know how an ad will resonate with your target audience. Taking an entirely different approach may end up bringing in better leads.
As such, it’s essential to test everything on your ads to find out what works best. Consider A/B testing the following:
As you continue testing different versions of your PPC ads, you won’t be guessing what you think will perform. Instead, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions about how to make your ads convert at higher rates.
This stat may shock you: 72% of companies don’t look at ad campaigns in a month’s time. (Be honest. Are you one of these companies?)
If most companies aren’t looking at their ad campaigns, it also means they’re not looking at how their ads perform. While this is a terrible marketing strategy, it does represent an excellent opportunity for your recruitment company.
If you keep a close eye on the results you get/don’t get from your campaigns, you can make tweaks to your campaigns as you go that will help you beat out your competitors.
Here are some tools you can use to track your campaigns:
Once you get into the habit of A/B testing your recruitment company ads and reviewing your results, you can implement a strategy to optimize your campaigns for improved results.
When optimizing:
While the strategies above will help you make an effective PPC marketing campaign, for your recruitment company, the truth is that creating a truly terrific PPC campaign goes far beyond a checklist.
What’s more, with everything you have on your plate, it’s easy to let monitoring your PPC recruitment campaigns fall by the wayside.
We’re here for you – no, really. All of our paid search and SEO digital marketing pros are senior-level experts — no juniors here. Let us take the lead and help you manage your paid search campaigns so you can get the results you deserve and spend more time on all your other tasks at hand.
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