marketing guide AWR www broadbean technology VOIP

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1 marketing guide s broadbean technology! www VOIP? AWR

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3 Marketing your services The fact that you are reading this means that you have taken a decision to go it alone. You are a confident recruiter who knows the business and can t wait to start earning more and be in control of your own career. Now is the time to create really firm foundations on which to build your business by spending a couple of hours asking all the obvious questions that may have been forgotten in your rush to success. We recommend you read this guide and start thinking about the issues raised. When you have some time, start working on the activities, which have been designed to help you really understand your market and feel confident about your marketing decisions. Remember the more you understand your current and future clients the more successful your company will be. Darryl Fordham Director Before you start Sit for a moment and imagine yourself in 5 years time. How will your business be performing? Will you have a large team and a city centre office or will it just be you in the study? How many clients will you have? How many candidates? Will you be working harder than ever before and reaping the benefits or will you be spending more time with your family and focussing on just one or two clients? There s no right or wrong and you need to be aiming for what you want out of life.

4 Market Evaluation Your market evaluation is about the bigger picture in your industry. As a specialist recruiter you have two industries recruitment and that which you specialise in e.g. engineering, retail etc. Having a realistic picture of your industry is essential to making wise business decisions. Activity 1 Know your industry Take a moment to think about your market and answer these questions. You probably know the answers, but you may want to do some research. 1. How big is your market? How many potential clients are out there? 2. How competitive is your market? How many recruiters do you compete with? 3. How has your field changed in the last 5 years? 4. What new opportunities have arisen in the market? 5. Have there recently been any significant threats or challenges? 6. What does the future look like? Is the field changing?

5 Competitor Analysis Every business has competitors, sometimes it s obvious who they are and sometimes it s not. Who are your competitors? Sometimes they look like you experienced freelancer, sometimes they don t anonymous multinational search engine. Your competitors are anyone who your (potential) clients could choose to recruit staff other than you and anyone who can attract the candidates. This means you competitors may actually be within the client s HR department or in a call centre half way across the world everyone who could do the job must be taken seriously! This is not about who is better, it s about who your clients go to. Activity 2 Checking out the competition List your top 5 competitors. It s quite likely that your previous employer will be amongst these as well as a web based recruitment firm. Put yourself in the shoes of your clients - where do they go for recruitment? Now add a strength and a weakness for each of these competitors. This could include strengths such as recognisable brand, long established, international experience and weaknesses such as impersonal, poor customer service, lacking specialist knowledge. Every company has strengths and weaknesses and being able to identify theirs will help you to identify your own.

6 What makes you different? You may be very confident in your skills but unless you can communicate what sets you apart from your competitors you may struggle to find new business. You need to be able to answer the question Why should we use you and not X? When you can answer that, you can be confident and convincing in your approaches. Activity 5 Discover your USP List 5 strengths you have as a company (and/or individual) i.e. reliable, an excellent negotiator, language skills, etc Compare these strengths with those you identified in your competitors (Activity 2). Are your strengths unique or are they the same as your competitor s? How do you compare? You may recognise immediately what you are offering is unique but it is more likely that you share your strengths with your competitors. Revise your 5 strengths with your competitors in mind. This may take some time and serious thought but it will be worth it. Activity 6 - Your Elevator Pitch This about avoiding boring long descriptions and instead have a planned pitch that gets straight to the point efficiently and impressively. In 150 words write exactly what it is you do. Make it natural and don t fill it with jargon. It should be about what you can do for them, not how brilliant you are or what you ve achieved. Finally try it. When running your own business it s very useful to have a trusted person who wants you to succeed but will be honest. Find that person and try your pitch. Take every criticism seriously - they will probably kinder than most clients!

7 Know your clients You are selling to a market you understand well, but when was the last time you really analysed who these people are, what makes them tick and what they really want from you. The better you know your clients the more successful your business will be. In the recruitment industry you have multiple customers. Although your contacts are working for a client they are not the same and have different motivations for choosing you as a recruiter. The client will rationally demand the best service at the best price, whereas the contact is more likely to be persuaded by personal aspects. On the other side you have the candidate who wants to feel confident that you are able to place him/her in the best possible position. Recruitment is all about relationships and you need to truly understand these relationships to be successful. Do your research, analyse and fast track your way to success! Activity 7 Your Existing Contacts/ Clients /Applicants List 5 contacts. Don t list the first that come into your head because they re likely to be memorable for a reason - choose the first 5 alphabetically. Are they similar ages? Are they mainly men or women? Do they work for large or small companies? Where are they located? Are they all working in your specialist industry or is there some variation? There may be more similarities that spring to mind in your list. Now you should consider whether this group is representative of your clients as a whole. Are all these clients London based whereas you actually have many across the UK and abroad? Is this group of 5 a true reflection of your contact base? If it is, great! If it s not, write down why it isn t. Do the same for your applicants and your clients.

8 Really know your clients Activity 8 Your Average Customer You ve made some generalisations about your customers and you ve recognised the diversity (or lack of) amongst them. Now you are going to create a fictional character who is your average customer or more accurately the average customer you want to attract. It may seem silly but s/he is the person you go back to when you have to make a decision about marketing would s/he approve? So we need to build our character and really think about their habits, their needs, their aspirations. What newspaper does he/she read? What supermarket does he/she shop in? What car does he/she drive? Where does he/she live? Country/city/flat/house etc. What s his/her favourite TV programme? What hobbies does he/she have? Golf, chess, ballroom dancing? If you answer these questions quickly and confidently you probably have a niche clientele. If you were more cautious in your answers you probably have a more diverse base. Go back to your list of 5 contacts (Activity 7). Could you give the same answers for everyone on the list? It would be surprising, if not impossible if you could but you re starting to truly understand both the similarities and differences in your contacts and you may want to make some changes to Mr/Ms average. The purpose of this is to help you align your brand. If your clients are Telegraph readers but your company image has Sun reader written all over it, are you heading in the right direction? Remember clients want to know what they re getting so if you re branding looks like a Parisian fashion house and you are recruiting for the building industry, they re going to be confused and confused clients are rarely clients at all.

9 Marketing Strategy Now you know who you are targeting you can start thinking about how to turn them into contacts/clients/candidates. It s always tempting when you start a business to invest in some impressive marketing materials and some prestige advertising but a smart marketeer has a sound, cost effective strategy and is patient when it comes to results. Online marketing Online marketing can be very misleading and a huge rush of visits to your site may result in no leads at all. It is easy to get quantity (a lot of which is paid for) in the online world but quality is a totally different thing and there are plenty of companies out there with 10,000 followers on Twitter but only a handful of customers. This doesn t, however mean that a website and presence on social media sites is a waste of time, on the contrary it can be the most important marketing channel your company has, but having them alone won t bring in customers. Your website People tend to think that they need a website but it is important to know what you are going to do with it. Is your site going to be a marketing tool or is just going to tell the public what you do. For some recruiters an up-to-date LinkedIn profile (see Social Media Marketing) is more useful than a website but equally some recruiters depend on their site to promote their services.

10 Advertising via Broadbean Broadbean is the market-leading job posting system that enables you to instantly distribute adverts to thousands of job boards. It s never been easier to manage candidate responses and, with comprehensive reporting, you can fine-tune your advertising to improve performance. Broadbean is fully integrated with RDB ProNet, enabling you to accurately track all your candidates from application to placement. As part of the RGS Global network you will have access to the services listed below and many more for no additional cost. Advert posting & management Post adverts to multiple job sites Post to over 70 free job sites Post to social media sites Post to international job boards Group adverts for easy expiry management Manage all deleting and refreshing over multiple job sites Archive adverts as templates for future use Easy link directly into individual CV databases Reports showing adverts posted and live adverts on job sites Real time online spend calculator Response management Candidate Ranking Auto forward quality responses Quick scroll through candidate profiles responses to lists of candidates Short listing and Hot listing system Automatic response option Response tracking Monitors weekly peak response times Monitors sector performance Auto credit spend and cost calculator Converts data into Excel format Client CRM Ad Courier Client Website Job Boards Aplitrack Consultant creates advert Advert content exported via Hybrid Advert distributed Candidate responses ed & source tracked

11 Useful information For any questions or comments please contact your personal account manager or alternatively call the main RGS number and we will put you through to the relevant department. The best way to contact Credit Management and IT is through the online support desk (SharePoint) and they will call you back. My personal account manager is: Mobile number: address: VOIP broadbean technology AWR $

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