Category: Marketing

Outbound Marketing for Job Boards – Part 2

by Maddyin Marketing

Read Outbound Marketing for Job Boards – Part 1

Welcome to Part 2 of Outbound Marketing for Job Boards! In this post we’ll go over outbound marketing tactics that will definitely cost you. But fear not! Many of these options don’t cost a lot, and you can pick and choose what best suits your business and your budget.

Outbound Marketing for Job Boards (That Will Cost Money)

 

Online Advertising:

  • Plain text (e.g. AdWords
  • Display ads (images)
  • Videos (e.g. Youtube ads)
  • Social Media

Most advertising systems will let you set spending limits so you can stick to a budget. As always in digital marketing, it’s important to track your results and improve on your messaging and/or methods based on what you learn from the data.

Many social networks will also let you post display ads, some in the usual leaderboard, banner, or skyscraper formats.

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Outbound Marketing for Job Boards – Part 1

by Maddyin Marketing

This summer we’ve talked a lot about social media, SEO, and inbound marketing. As we shift into fall, I’d like to turn your attention to outbound marketing for job boards.

We’ll divide this into two posts, the first of which will cover low-to-no cost methods of outbound marketing.

Outbound marketing gets less attention these days, as it’s the more traditional route than its digital-first sibling, inbound marketing. But as I outline these marketing tactics for job boards, you’ll that some use the same digital channels as your inbound marketing, and some may be older yet incredibly useful methods.

Low/No-Cost Outbound Marketing for Job Boards

These methods don’t have to cost you a dime, but some are made easier through marketing software, a VOIP plan, or printing some business cards.

Phone & Email Campaigns:

Not everyone naturally gravitates to picking up the phone and calling people, but it’s still an effective way to connect with potential customers, as is email. Some campaigns will combine both emailing and calling prospects, as well.

There are a couple rules of thumb to keep in mind, whether you’re phoning or emailing prospective customer.

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9 Alternative Inbound Marketing Tactics for Job Boards

by Maddyin Marketing1 Comment on 9 Alternative Inbound Marketing Tactics for Job Boards

We’ve gone over the basics of social media management, how to generate inbound traffic to job boards, and how to optimize job board content on individual pages, so now you might be wondering – what else is there?

My answer may delight and/or frustrate you, but the truth is: lots!

Content, SEO, and social media are the foundations of inbound marketing, but there are seemingly endless ideas on ways to drive traffic to your website. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the ideas and discuss how they might apply to job boards specifically.

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On-Page SEO for Job Board Content

by Maddyin Marketing

I briefly mentioned on-page SEO last week, but it’s a topic that deserves a post all to itself, especially when it comes to job boards.

Job boards are challenged with marketing to two audiences – their job seeking users and the people doing the hiring. Much of the content on a job board is made up of job posts. But those job posts don’t hang around forever. They’re up for 30 days, 60 days, maybe longer, but they usually do expire.

The impermanence of so much of your job board’s content makes it vital that you go beyond job posts if you want to your site to be discovered by your target market through search engines, regardless of what jobs are currently published there.

We’ve previously outlined ideas for what that content might be – research, advice, interviews, news, highlights of your job content, etc. We’re not only talking about hastily-compiled lists or self-promotion, but authentic, valuable articles, images, and videos that will interest and benefit your audience. You need your content to be unique. If you’ve established who your target market is and learned about them, and settled on your own branding and messaging, you’re ready to start creating it.

Publishing your awesome content for job seekers and recruiters will improve your SEO, but there are a lots of ways you can optimize it on its own.

What Your Content Looks in Search Results

SEO for job board content
Search engine result for “start a job board”

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Generating Inbound Traffic to Your Job Board

by Maddyin Marketing

The concept of inbound marketing is based around getting people to come to you, to discover you, and seek you out.

This is different from outbound marketing, which includes more traditional methods like exhibiting at tradeshows, airing commercials (on TV, radio, even YouTube, etc.), print advertisements (in magazines, newspapers, billboards, mailed flyers and brochures, etc.), outbound calls (telemarketing!) and emails.

These methods are usually regarded as more disruptive, in that you are interrupting the target audience to communicate your marketing message. They also can cost more in terms of services and production, and they tend to be more difficult to track direct ROI.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is tailored more towards the Internet user of today. If you want to learn about something, you Google it. If I want to buy a new laptop, I’m going to check out the prices and specs online first. I might read reviews or ask on social media if anyone has any recommendations or experience with the model I’m considering buying.

The same goes for job search, recruiting, and all sorts of business challenges.

The number one task of inbound marketing for job boards is:

Be Discoverable!

“Build it and they will come” does not apply to online businesses in 2016. You need to make yourself discoverable through the content on your site, basic SEO, and your messaging and branding. This is in addition to your job board-specific content.

First thing’s first: Who are you? Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do? Why should they do it? How can they do it?

You need all those questions answered. And they should also be answered for anyone who arrives on your job board.

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Retail Inspiration for Job Boards: Black Friday & the 90-Day Campaign

by Jonathanin Marketing

This week’s blog post is brought to you by Jonathan Page, Careerleaf’s Director of Sales & Marketing.

Taking Inspiration from Retail and Applying it to your Job Board Business

Sometimes you find inspiration in strange places. In 2015, Careerleaf took inspiration from Apple and their famous once-a-year only Black Friday sale.  We thought that it would likely go unnoticed among the business of the season, however it was our most successful outbound campaign of the year. I am certain that Apple’s marketing team has already begun their countdown to Black Friday, but have you?

Whether you go with Black Friday or something else there are two key ideas I hope you’ll take note of:

  1. 90 days from now you need to have a campaign in market to encourage your customers to complete purchases before the close of the calendar year
  2. Have fun and take some risks – you’ll never know unless you try.

Careerleaf’s Black Friday Adventure

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Social Media Management Basics for Job Boards

by Maddyin Marketing2 Comments on Social Media Management Basics for Job Boards

So far in our blog series on social media for job boards, we’ve covered:

By now, you understand the value of social media, how to investigate and test which platforms work best with your audience, and how it can help your job board, its customers and job seekers.

Now, here is your guide for creating a streamlined social media management routine for your job board.

Your tasks fall into three major categories: curation, scheduling, and monitoring.

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Social Media vs Job Boards?

by Maddyin Marketing

I have a pet peeve about superhero movies and comics with “versus” in the middle. Superman Vs Batman. First they fight…then they become best friends! And fight crime together! But I get impatient. Can’t we skip the contrived drama and just get to the part where they actually being productive and making a difference?

In researching my previous posts on using social media for job boards, I came across the “Job Boards vs Social Media” theme more than once. It’s disappointing, because for all the good each does on its own, they’re more powerful when they’re working together.

The recruiting industry has collectively been through the “job boards are dead” rhetoric (which continues to be untrue), as well as the “social media recruiting = answers to all your problems” narrative.

Social media is great, and it can help job boards and recruiters reach candidates and better serve their customers. Is it the answer to every problem? Er, no. Is social media vs job boards really an either/or question? Nope. It’s a false dichotomy, and a myth you should be dispelling for your customers in your content and marketing.

social media and job boards

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Get Comfortable Using Social Media for Business

by Maddyin Marketing

If you’re using social media, er, socially, using it for business sounds like an easy prospect. You’ve got a handle on the nuances of posting to Facebook compared to Twitter or Snapchat. However, attaching goals, measuring and testing the success of your activity brings new angles and challenges that using it for fun does not.

Conversely, if you’ve never used social media, you might have a clear idea of what you want to get out of it for your business, but fail to grasp what the social experience is like for the people you’re trying to reach. And that can impact your ability to use social media to effectively meet your business goals.

It’s never as simple as “hey, get that person aged 18-23 in here and make them do the social media stuff!”. Even they – though some may call them “digital natives” – will have something to learn.

What Makes it Social Media

First off, how do we define social media? Does it have to be an app? Is it a website? Does an animated gif qualify?

I would define social media as a type of platform – which is usually in the form of a website, an app, or both. The part that makes it social is the ability to somehow connect with other people using the platform. Adding someone as a friend or following them gives your account a connection to them within the system.

Then comes creating or sharing something. Text, images, videos. You use the platform to publish media content, and its social functionality presents it to the people who follow you, or makes it possible for people unconnected to you discover it through things like hashtags, your location, or your connections to other users.

Each platform has more ways and unique ways to interact with content and other users, but I’d say those are the basic characteristics of what defines social media.

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Testing Social Media Marketing for Job Boards

by Maddyin Marketing

Think back to school, and learning about the scientific method. Roughly, you start by asking a question. You do some background research, come up with a hypothesis, and design an experiment to test that hypothesis. Through your experiment, you make observations and collect data, which you then analyze to help form a conclusion about your hypothesis and the initial question.

If your hypothesis is “I think my job seekers are on Twitter”, or “I think I can increase my traffic by posting to Facebook”, then that’s where you’ll begin.

(Apologies to any actual scientists who object to my oversimplification of the scientific method.)

Decide on Your Social Media Goals

For any kind of testing, first figure out what you want to know. What am I testing? Am I testing out my messaging? The type of content I share? When I share it? Where I share it?

Even before we answer those important questions, we must establish our end-goal in using social media in the first place. You’ll likely think of many, and you may want to track all of them. When you’re getting started, it may help to think of your goals occurring in stages. For example, you might approach your goals in this order:

  1. Gain followers
  2. Increase job seeker traffic to main site
  3. Increase job alert email sign-ups
  4. Increase job views
  5. Increase applications
  6. Increase job seeker returning traffic

For now, let’s assume our end-goal is to gain followers on our chosen social media platform, and increase job seeker traffic to our site. What we want to test is which social media platform performs better at achieving our end-goal.

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