Digital marketing and social media has been “all the rage” over the last few years.  But since 2020 and the pandemic, it’s become critical.

Are you in staffing and are wondering how to attract job candidates to fill roles for your customers or how to obtain new clients to provide the employees that you do have in your candidate pool?

Neil Patel, with Neil Patel Digital Marketing, shares that 9 out of 10 consumers buy from brands they follow on social media.  86% choose a brand they follow on social media over competitors and 85% will buy from that brand more often.  With digital marketing and social media being utilized more than ever, competition is increasing as we move into 2022. For your brand to be seen and heard, you will have to fight for that presence.

Here are some tips to help you compete in the social and digital world:

1. Your audience is your number one concern. If you don’t understand what they want and need, how can you serve them?  Differentiate your brand from others and serve your customers and audience, rather than just churning out content.

How can you better understand your audience?  Alee King with Blogging Wizard shares these tips: 

• Survey your audience to better grasp their pain points
• Look carefully at their demographics
• Take part in conversations on forums filled with your target audience
• Respond to comments on your blog, and comment on other blogs with the same target audience
• Reply to all comments or questions on your social media channels
• Collect feedback (using one of the many user feedback tools available)

Once you get a feel for who your target audience is, you’re better equipped to help them. They want to deal with businesses who care – not just a faceless brand.  Which makes this a vital step in creating any social media strategy.

2. Differentiate your firm from the competition – respond to questions in a timely manner, timing is everything. If you have a potential customer reach out to you, do you answer in an hour, a few days or a week?  This is how I literally just selected a home health firm.  I reached out to a few companies after reviewing their online presence, reviews, location and other factors.  Out of eight firms I contacted, the one firm who responded back to me quickly, is the agency I chose to do business with.

But this decision wasn’t made by me from one phone call from their agency. This was after I heard from several staff throughout their organization from the Administrator to the Recruiter and Head Nurse.  I didn’t make my decision until I spoke with several people from the firm over the course of a few days.

I still had other agencies I was considering.  Some I did not hear back from with even an initial answer to my phone call until more than a week later.  This should be, but wasn’t surprising to me with my past experience in staffing.  Those who did not reply back to me simply did not have the staff to offer which is completely understandable.  The key point is, if you do have the resources available to fill a role, make sure you communicate quickly.  To be even more effective, introduce more than one staff member in your firm to your new client to indicate your entire organization’s commitment.

3. Create culturally relevant content – create content around moments and events that you and your staff already support. Leverage content with different people and cultures and create a win-win but make sure you truly care, your audience is smart and can tell the difference. Listen to what is drawing your audience’s attention on a daily basis.

4. User generated and educational content – about the products and services you offer can be very helpful for your current clients and for your prospects to learn more about who you are and what you do.

You know how you can search YouTube for some quick help in learning how to operate or clean a new coffee maker?  You can share how your staffing firm works for employees and clients to learn more about you.  Believe it or not, many people still do not understand how a staffing agency operates.  Many employees still think there is a fee they need to pay the staffing agency. Also, many clients do not realize the enormous amount of expense and not profit, between the pay rate and the bill rate.  Both are perfect opportunities to educate your job candidates and potential clients.

5. Social listening – It makes sense to pay attention to what your job candidates and clients are saying about your business and/or industry. With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn and other social media platforms, it’s almost impossible to track all the information or chatter that is out there.  There are companies available that offer “social listening tools” to handle that and provide your firm with data each time your brand, industry or relevant keyword is mentioned online.  Two firms who offer this service are Mention and Falcon.io. and this HubSpot guide lays out some of the best-rated social listening tools and how much each one costs.

6. Videos – you’ve probably noticed on almost every platform you use that videos and a distinct space for them to be viewed have been added. Smaller, bite size videos are seen on Facebook, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.  These platforms also reward the video creator by having them appear more often and show up in your audience’s feed.  Take some time and discover how you can use videos to enhance your digital marketing moving for your staffing agency.

Need staffing software to run your business?  COATS Staffing Software offers the best recruitment management options for staffing agencies. Create job openings that automatically post to social media and job boards such as Facebook, Twitter, Indeed, and Simply Hired.