With We Are Social and Hootsuite’s Digital in 2020 report revealing that there are now 45 million active social media users in the UK – an increase of 1.3 million – and social media advertising up 20% year-on-year it is vital that recruitment marketers understand how they can target their audiences effectively.
Here are three tips you can use to refine your approach.
- Your audience is more than a list
As technology continues to play an increasingly prevalent role in our professional lives it can be easy to forget at times that recruitment is a people industry.
Therefore it is vital that you ensure that people are at the forefront of your strategy. Developing candidate and client personas enables you to gain deep understanding of your ideal audiences’ behaviours and motivations. This will enable you to provide content tailored to their situations and gain an advantage over your competitors.
While it may be normal in your recruitment firm to list out key attributes of a typical candidate persona as, for example, an ‘ABC1 who lives in London, is married, a commuter and has a passion for tech’ this approach lacks that human element. I recommend giving them names to make them ‘real’, such as Matt the Marketer or HR Hayley as well as an image. This makes them far more relatable and helps bring them to life when you’re discussing them internally and developing strategies.
- Use your insights
The insights that you gain about your audience from you personas should be reflected in every aspect of your recruitment firm’s social media presence. These should be used to inform how you set up your target audience in paid campaigns, how you create and curate content, through to the customer service elements of your approach such as responding to any comments or queries left by potential candidates or clients.
You should also use the insights provided by the social channels you have a presence on, as well as any third-party scheduling tools you use to have hard data on how your audiences interact with your brand and its content.
Not only is it important to stand out among the 31,140+ recruitment firms there are in the UK, but with social media feeds becoming increasingly saturated it is vital that your business is able to develop a presence that sets you apart from the crowd and cuts through the noise. Here are just a few questions that you should answer to see if there are any obvious gaps or oversights made in relation to understanding your audience:
- What type of content performs best with your audience?
- How does your audience like to consume statistical information?
- Does your audience like humorous memes or GIFs?
- Are your competitors producing content which generates visible engagement?
- Is your ideal audience aware of all the services that you offer?
- Adopt a test and learn approach
When setting up a paid social campaign you should always pay attention to the forecasted results and use these as a benchmark to aspire to and exceed. While the forecast doesn’t factor in ad creative, such as the text and visuals used, it does give an indicator of expected performance based on your previous campaigns as well as current campaigns run by other companies targeting similar audiences.
You should also avoid the temptation of using a large budget straight away. Instead you should start with a small budget utilising A/B testing to evaluate its initial performance before assessing what changes or improvements you should make to the ads at the end of the test run to increase the campaign’s overall success.
The data gained from this test and learn approach is invaluable to ensure that you are producing content that is not only achieving your objectives but is most cost effective to ensure maximum ROI for your recruitment firm.
By adopting an audience-centric approach across social media you will be able to produce content that resonates with candidate and clients, increases brand awareness and generates leads.
