Marketing Planning & Framework
Essentially, marketing can be boiled down to the following questions:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- What do you want them to do?
- How will you encourage them to take that action?
- How will you measure your effort’s impact on influencing that action?
Success starts with sound strategy, and getting it right is essential. The first step to getting marketing right is to have a “playbook” to give you direction. Otherwise, you risk wasting precious time and money if your activities are random and unstructured. Here are some tips on how to get started:
1. Brainstorm
Gather your team for a meeting, or even just a coffee break. For best results, get out of the office. Go somewhere you can think creatively and write down ideas for how to market your business.
Ask these questions to get started:
- Where do you need to spend the most time and money, sales or recruitment?
- Who are our best prospects for buying staffing services?
- Who are the buyers, and who are the influencers of the buyers?
- Who are our best prospects as future temporary employees?
- Where are they geographically?
- Where will we find them online? (Job boards, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram?)
- Are our services/products likely to be sought via internet searches?
- What words would people search to find our services?
- What in-person opportunities have the potential to reach our audience?
- How does our service differ from competitors?
- How do people hear about us now?
2. Delegate responsibilites
First determine if you have the in-house knowledge you need, or need to source assignments out to freelancers. Either way, assign tasks like writing blog posts, sharing articles on social media, writing website pages, tracking your website stats on Google Analytics, etc. to the appropriate people.
3. Create an elevator pitch
What can you tell people about your business, products and services in 30 seconds or less that keeps them interested and wanting more? Spend time coming up with your “pitch” and make sure your employees know it too. Sometimes it helps to print it out and hand it out to your team members.
4. Analyze your competitors
What is your competition up to lately? Do some research. If you spend time analyzing the competitive field to look for their areas of weakness or gaps in the marketplace, you can discover opportunities where your business will have the best chance to grow.
5. Identify long- and short-term goals
The long-term goal is to sell more of your staffing services or increase the number of hires/assignments. The short-term goals within that might be to build awareness of your brand, or to increase the number of people who visit your website.
6. Decide how you will track success
When you have your goals set, make sure you identify clear metrics to use as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and to measure ROI (Return on Investment). Is it number of call ins? Online contact form submissions? Website visits?
Tip: Set up Google Analytics on your website for free to track website traffic and behavior. Get started here.
7. Make a content plan
Where do your buyers and influencers spend time online? Pick a channel or several channels – organic search (Google), social media, email, etc – and understand that your content should be tailored to that channel. On social media, you’ll want to share relevant articles and information. For organic search, think about blog posts, landing pages and other written content that’s optimized to rank for staffing related keywords. Write it down in a plan.
Tip: Make a monthly Excel doc marketing calendar of things to post and articles to share/write.
8. Choose how you’ll promote your content
Search engine optimization is one way to promote your content on search engines, for example. Google Ads is another. A third is to cross-promote content that lives on your website through email, and through social media channels.
9. Know what you want your audience to do next
When someone consumes your content, make sure you know exactly where you want them to go next – another blog post, a contact us page, etc - and incorporate strategic calls-to-action like pop ups and banners that encourage them to take that action.
10. Write it all down
Using all the information you gathered above, make your marketing plan. Use a Word document, an Excel sheet, a table, a flow chart, a graph, an interactive graphic, a story board, etc. that visually represents your marketing plan. You can make it as detailed or high-level as you like.