Jan Jedlinski: Super excited to have the World Staffing Sessions going on for the fifth time already today. So Kelly should drop from Parker Marketing. We'll be talking about the five tips to drive ROI in your marketing strategy. I'm super excited about that. I think that's a super important topic these days, specifically for staffing and recruiting companies to make sure to have that figured out and ready to go for the next couple of months when the incoming economy bounces back and a lot of people start hiring again.

So I'm excited to have Kelly here. And, uh, yeah, I'll go over to Kelly to run the session. I'll be back later. To talk a little bit about our new product candidately, if you're interested in learning more about that feel free to vote on the polls to uh, basically express your interest.

And we'll be in touch with you and you can also visit Kelly's, booth, uh, on the expo session. If you're interested in learning more about Parker you can get in touch with Kelly directly over there or express your interest. And yeah, from there, I'll hand it over to Kelly to run the session and I'll be back later.

Thank you so much

Kelli Schutrop: Perfect. Thank you, Jan. And thank you everyone so much for joining us. Unfortunately through technical difficulties, it looks like I'm not going to be able to jump on camera. So, you guys can see my slides here, so we will go ahead and dive right in like Jan said we're going to be talking today about what is your marketing missing in 2021 top five tips for ROI.

So before we get started it's always fun to basically, you know, see who's speaking, especially because I'm not able to be on camera right now. So, I will actually share a couple housekeeping tips. I know that there is a live chat Q/A comment section. I don't have full visibility into that while I'm presenting however, I will following this presentation so we can dive into all of those fun details.

So, like Jan mentioned, My name is Kelly Schutrop. I'm the director of sales and marketing at Parker Digital Marketing Agency. And I would love to just share a little bit briefly about my background. So I am a marketing nerd myself. I've spent the past 12 years focused on marketing branding, PR communications and digital, and actually the last 10 years, I focused specifically on the staffing and recruiting industry, right? Like this fun, fun animal we call staffing and recruiting. And so you'll see there, I've got a family, has the name Chris' son named Indiana or Indy. He was actually born right as the pandemic hit. And so that's my counter of time for how long we've been in this, this unique universe.

We also love travel. I've I've attended a number of conferences, so I may have met you there in the past. But that is about me. I'd love to share just briefly about Parker. Like I said, we're a digital marketing agency. We were actually created within an executive search and consulting firm. So that's where a lot of my marketing passion for this space comes out of, I've been with this group of companies the last nine years.

And so, yeah, they've got an executive search and consulting firm in the Minneapolis market and ultimately we. Learned a lot of things, the fun way and the hard way with marketing and then we created Parker really to help train and educate other staffing and recruiting firm leaders on how to do this whole marketing thing.

So, why don't we go ahead and dive right in? What do we know? What we know is that everybody used to think digital transformation was years away, right? And then COVID hit. And all of a sudden it became our reality that people were going online to either confirm or discredit their decision to partner with us, right.

To partner with you guys as staffing or recruiting firm, owners and leaders. And so, whether you were thinking about marketing in the past, and that's a really big reason why you were able to grow your company, or it was not on your radar at all, it is more important now than ever to take that into consideration.

So I want to share briefly this proven process that we've seen work really well across the industry. Before we jump into those top five tips for ROI. Now, the first is building brand credibility. So that's making sure that your online presence truly shows up in a way that represents the best people on your team, right?

So if somebody, a candidate or a client has a great experience with an individual, but then they go to your online presence and it doesn't look good. That's actually going to hurt the relationship and hurt whether or not you may end up working with them.

Now the second is online visibility, right? So let's say you've got a beautiful website.

Your social media is active. Everything feels buttoned up, but if you are consistently going out and having to find new candidates, find new clients, and you're not able to attract people to you, you're just making your role more difficult than it needs to be. Right? So this comes to life through things like creating relevant content.

We'll get into that here shortly posting consistently on social in ways that people actually care about, want to interact with. And then of course optimizing your online presence.

And then Lead Generation is a topic that most people get really excited about because it's the closest to ROI. But at the end of the day, There's a lot of things that go into this, right?

It's everything from running paid advertising to creating downloadable content, to even automating workflows, to stay in touch with the right people.

So the top five tips for ROI starting off, we're going to talk about building a solid brand that people trust. And then we're going to move into showing up online in an authentic way.

Then moving into attracting great clients and candidates all the way through providing them an experience worthy of a referral and nurturing the people you can help them most. So let's go ahead and get started. Now, when we talk about building a solid brand people. It's important to ask yourself, how do you show up in the world, right?

Who are you? Who is your audience? What is your value proposition? I mean, at a glance, you know, every staffing and recruiting firm says, well, yeah, I know who I am. I do staffing. I do recruiting. I do a combo, both. But at the end of the day, what are your niches? Right? Most people are segmented by a few different ones.

It's either market. So are you global? Are you national? Are you in certain cities? You know, are you based in New York, but you follow your clients across the country as they have needs. And do you focus on certain functional areas? Right? Like sales, marketing, IT HR, or more on industries like healthcare or consumer packaged goods or banking.

And, and not only is it important to identify that, but I want you to think about all these things through the lens of how does that show up online? You know, am I making people scroll for a long time on the homepage to even get to the point of identifying what it is? I specialize in. So not only who are you in that sense, but also.

What is the messaging you want to convey? Right? What's the vibe you want people to see? Are you a high level executive retained search firm? Are you placing, you know, individuals in a staffing capacity in the healthcare space? All of these things come into play when it comes to how you present yourself online, and then who is your audience?

You know, you may be familiar with ideal customer profiles and buyer personas, but conceptually, have you taken the time to really think about who are my key clients and who are the people that I would love to replicate, right? Those individuals that any time they would call me, I want to make sure that I am servicing them to the best of my ability.

And you may have clients or candidates that you don't feel that way about, but they're a part of making your business run. So it's important to think about. What does that client company, for example look like, right? What is the size, what is their mindset? Who are the people within that, that I love to have conversations with?

And then ultimately those buyer personas, right? Like what do they care about? What are their pain points when they're reaching out to me, you know, it's easy to say in one sentence, well, they have a hiring need. What, there's more to it. Are they experiencing rapid growth? Are they in an industry that has incredibly passive talent?

Or are they in an industry where there's just not enough candidates in general, based on the roles that are needed. Right. We see this a lot in the healthcare space right now, for example. And then ultimately, what is your value proposition? So is this something where when somebody hits your online presence.

We do it staffing. We're the best at it. Our clients love us. Our candidates love us. You should work with us. You know, everybody can say that, right. And at the end of the day, a lot of clients and candidates for better or worse view this industry as more of a commodity approach. Now you and I know that so much of it is about relationship, great process, providing a great experience.

But if that doesn't ring true on your website, how do they know whether they should work with you or your competitor? And so that value proposition is really important. Now, one way you can think about that is through the StoryBrand methodology as an example this particular methodology. You as the staffing or recruiting firm are not the hero period, your client is your candidate is it's your audience.

Who's the hero at the end of the day. And what they are trying to solve is what's most important to them right now. They don't care that you've done a great job for 20 years. They just want to know, do you understand my problem? And then reinforce it with credibility. So naturally in this whole fun, complex world of staffing and recruiting, there's a lot of variety, right?

Your company may say, I would love my marketing to attract more candidates. Let's say you do healthcare staffing, or you do you know, light industrial staffing. That's probably where your mind's at, but if you're anywhere on the search side or you're working on placing different types of candidates in the staffing or consulting space, you may think a lot about the client side.

So I'll focus on that for now as an example, let's say you are trying to attract a company. Client who needs to hire you in your eyes, right? To do IT staffing, you may tell them, Hey, we get it. You are rapidly growing. You're finding it incredibly difficult to build your talent pipeline because at the end of the day, all of these IT professionals are getting hit up by recruiters.

5 To 10 times a day right now. And so it's an incredibly passive market and you're just having a tough time finding the right people. Well, that probably leaves you feeling stuck and frustrated and annoyed that you've spun your wheels and still have not grown the way you need to. Well, that's where we come in.

We've been doing this for the last 20 years. We work with clients in these ways. We work with candidates in these ways. And if you partner with us, here's the plan that we can take together to get you the talent you need. You know, if your website and your online presence and your sales team and your recruiting team has that kind of a message.

Naturally, it's going to resonate stronger than we're the best you should work with us. Right? So all things to keep in mind when it comes to actually building a solid brand that people trust. Now, the next step of this is evaluating your overall brand. And does it convey who you are, everything from your brand standards to your logo, to your colors, fonts, and messaging, right.

So is this something where you had a logo created some company chose colors? Yep. Bada Bing, bada, boom. This is what we've been doing for years. This is just how it. Or is it something where you've put a lot of thought into who are we, right. Like there's color psychology. Does yellow mean to you vibrant. Does green mean growth is blue mean trustworthy, right? All of those things. And does it live in a brand standards guide where no matter what, internal individual marketer, external marketer, individual, no matter who sees this, they understand. Okay. Here's how we use the brand, but not only these kinds of components that you see on the slide here, like the colors and the logo and things like that.

Even more so the messaging front, right? Why did you choose to have your website be written in a voice that is professional and thoughtful or why did you choose to have it be friendly and vibrant and energetic. You know, all of those things are going to matter matter when it comes to attracting the right clients and candidates.

So I just want to encourage you to think about, you know, in this whole grand scheme of the topic we're talking about today, of what is your marketing missing in 2021 top five tips for ROI? Most people assume, well, ROI means let's run an ad. Let's figure out who converted. Let's put more money into the ad.

Yeah. That's a really direct way to attribute marketing dollars, but there's actually a lot of indirect ways that attribute to ROI from marketing that are just harder to, to confirm. Right. So I'll give you an example and this really goes into the next slide here and making sure that your website resonates.

So let's say Bob reaches out to your company and says, Hey, I was referred by Janet over at XYZ. You've worked with them in the past. Let's have a conversation, right? You may think the only reason that person reached out is because Janet referred them and that may be the case, but more than likely that individual Bob has spent time on your website, he may even have spent time on some of your recruiter's profiles.

You know, all of those things together really add up. And when he comes in the door and wants to have a conversation as a potential client, he's evaluating the experience you're giving him he's identifying all right. If they sent me any sort of marketing collateral after that describes who they are, then I'm going back and sharing with my team.

Does that resonate? I mean, at the end of the day, marketing these days in this technology, you know, digital transformation era really is either confirmed, confirming or discrediting someone's decision to partner with you.

If you say, Hey, Bob, how'd you hear about us? And he said, well, it was a referral from Janet. I would encourage you to think about it deeper. What are all of the components and touch points that Bob needs to have both from a marketing standpoint and a people standpoint that are making that decision. Right. So let's dive into your website and identifying if it presents you well or not. So most staffing or recruiting firms, homepages you know, there's either a lot of taglines, a lot of jargon, or you have to scroll quite a ways to find out, okay.

We focus on. Finance and Accounting recruiting in this market, or we specialize in healthcare staffing in these verticals or in these functional areas, but you just have to make it as easy as possible for people to identify. Why does this matter to me? Right. And so it seems so simple, but that's a good piece of homework when this presentation is over.

It's to jump out to your site and look at it with fresh eyes. Are you a potential client? Are you a potential candidate? And are you having a great experience once you see the site, is the user experience easy to navigate, right? Are you making me work really hard to jump through hoops or are you feeding it to me?

Exactly. As I would see it, a practice area pages are another huge area to reinforce and build trust among people. So, you know, a lot of staffing firms sites will have a services tab. And within that, you might have an accordion dropdown that says we focus on Finance and Accounting. Are we focusing on it, staffing.

And here are a few roles that go within that and that's it, you know, like that may be all you share with them, but you've got a whole team of people and you've done this for years. Well, if that prospective company who's looking for the right recruiting firm or the right staffing firm sees that one page with those few bullets that you're providing, that's relevant to the searches they need filled compared to your competitor who has an entire page dedicated to it.

That speaks about why they're in the space, how they help companies, the actual roles they've recently placed either by logo or by, you know, size, right? Like this is the type of company, the revenue the, you know, the actual title like that, those credibility pieces as well as here are the people you're going to be working with.

You're going to work with Carl or Nate or Nick and here's roles that we have open right now. Who do you think that prospective client is going to pick up the phone and call first? It's not to say you might not get a conversation, but at this stage of the game, you know, we hear it all the time. All you need is an at-bat right.

As a staffing or recruiting firm, get me to client, get me to candidate, give me the at-bat and we will make the deal happen. You might not get the at-bat if your online presence specifically, your website does not put your best foot forward. So something to keep in mind on a very tactical practical note, this doesn't always mean you have to totally gut your website and start from the ground up.

I mean, if you did your site four or five, six plus years ago, it probably makes a lot of sense to do that. But if you just had a done a year ago and it doesn't have things like practice area pages or your team or relevant blogs, and those pages that speak to your audience, those are things that you can build into an existing site that can add immense value.

Right away and going back to the point I made a second ago, it doesn't necessarily mean that someone's going to say, Hey, I saw that landing page. And man, that's the only reason I called you. Right? Like everybody uses a variety of inquiries, if you will. Right. They're looking on LinkedIn. They're looking on your site.

They're determining what the gut feel is, is, is as they're talking to your team, but everything adds up. So just look at it as if everything is moving forward and plowing in the right direction. You don't want to end up giving them an obstacle that you could have controlled remotely.

Now as we continue talking about building a solid brand people trust this also comes to your overall marketing, right?

Your social media covers your descriptions, your marketing collateral. I want to show you guys an example. This individual, Joe used to be a CFO prior to recruiting for finance and accounting talent. And rather than having, you know, two sentences on his profile, his LinkedIn profile in the about section, or having it, just talk about his background, we've really honed it in here, right?

He's retained by boards of Directors, CEOs, CFOs, et cetera, in these types of industries. And these are the recent searches he's done. Now, if somebody is looking at him versus a competitor and the competitor doesn't have any of this information, even if literally they've made the exact same placements, let's say who's going to get the call, right?

Who's going to get the InMail reply back. Joe probably is. Now likewise, you can see that his cover photo matches in the middle of this page here, the cover photo of the company itself. So the branding is consistent at a glance. You can see great hire with confidence, finance and accounting, executive search.

Here's how I get ahold of Joe. Now that's real estate that you get to decide what to do with, if you're a recruiter or a sales individual on this presentation today, you get to decide what that is. And if you're a marketer or a leader in a staffing or recruiting firm at minimum, you get to decide what that is in a company profile.

But I have yet to meet a recruiter who says, nah, I don't want to use that on my profile if they think it's really going to help them. Right? So take those things into consideration as tactical as it is. It matters it's real estate. You get to own, you know, take advantage of it. Now, likewise with your marketing collateral, whether you call it a fact sheet, a pitch deck, a capabilities, deck sales, enablement, sales assets, you know, it's all under the same umbrella of if somebody has a conversation with Joe and goes cool, thanks, Joe, can you send me more information?

I'd like to review it, right? Whether this is a candidate who wants to know more, whether it's a prospective client who wants to know more, you know, what I hear by and large is I mean, we have materials like that, but it's been, it's been awhile. Right? And we're, we're updating them internally and. They probably could be better or maybe you're one of those rare companies that you're like, yep.

We had it done. And we absolutely love it. You know, we get great feedback from clients and candidates. If you're not one of those select you know, fortunate few think about that. Right? All of the same discussion that we just had about the website matters when it comes to anything people are experiencing about your brand.

So make sure you have up-to-date collateral that really reflects the pain points that your audience is trying to accomplish and how you can help them. All right. Now I would be completely remiss if I did not talk about the, one of the biggest, biggest components about building a brand that people trust.

And that is your team. Are you proud of the team you have in the market right now? Think about this during COVID a lot of companies, regardless of what area you specialize in. You needed to downsize and you likely needed to put your money in the producers. You're right. The people that are doing a really good job of making your company money.

And as you're starting to grow back up and build back up, I challenge you to really think about culture. Just as much as you think about production, who are the people that you are hiring? Are they going to do a great job representing your brand? And I would say the majority of staffing and recruiting firms that I talked to, you know, day in and day out are doing a good job of this because they want to protect their culture.

It's not enough anymore to say, well, Johnny recruiter or Jane recruiter does a great job, but they don't really play nice with others. Right? Most recruiters, most salespeople are people, people but just really think about that. You know, are you creating a culture that attracts those top performers?

Are you rewarding that excellence? Does it help you retain the best? Right. If you are one of the best in your industry, Excuse me in your cities. Are you going after those top places to work awards? You know, all of those things are really important because at the end of the day, a solid person in this industry, Can be pulled to a different company very easily.

Now we've got, you know, the, the classic one-year non-compete, which prohibits that a little bit more. But it's just something to think about. You know, if you've got a company that's got immense tenure, I want to say great job to you because there's something you're doing. That's keeping those people.

And if you've got a company that has immense high, high turnover, burnout rate start thinking about why, you know, there's a lot of variables. It's not always one, one magical thing you can change, but are you creating that culture, that rewards individuals and promotes them? You know, one, one example that I've seen work really well is having a volunteer committee or a fun committee or a diversity and inclusion committee, you know, things that help bring people together.

Likewise you can do things like employees of the month and naturally president's club has been a big topic for this industry for a long time, you know? So it's just something to keep in mind. It doesn't feel like it directly pertains to marketing, but I would argue there's a whole lot more to marketing than most people think.

So as we move out of building a solid brand, people trust in, into showing up online in an authentic way. Again, I just want to challenge you think about that brand that you've created, even though it may not be the quote unquote direct driver to ROI today, I guarantee you, it is impacting the way people feel about you and whether they actually partner with you.

So let's talk a little bit about showing up online in an authentic way. How does your company engage with your audience? Right? Is it through blogs, social media, eBooks webinars. I love this cartoon, what you want to say and what they're interested in and that little line between the two of relevance you know, this industry over the last.

10 or so years has really grown to realize blogging is important. Social is important, but unfortunately, what a lot of that has turned into is, well, we blog for the sake of blogging. Let's get one out every week do or die. And we post every single day. I'm social, just get something out. And I personally am a really big advocate for quality over quantity, right?

So even if that's two or three posts a week on your company pages or two blog posts a month, if it's that people care about and it resonates with them, that's actually what matters a whole lot more. And that's actually what gets more engagement and gets more eyes on your brand and creates that thought leadership.

So some examples of this would be creating a salary guide or an ebook that is around hiring trends in this weird post COVID world or creating webinars that are relevant to the pain points your clients and candidates are having. And at the end of the day, this is not. You know, I should say that the topics you need to speak about are not rocket science, right?

Like sit down for five minutes and jot down what are the conversations I'm having with my clients that keep up, keep on coming up again and again, right? Like what are the questions I'm answering for them? What are things that they're telling me? Those are trending things that your audience wants to hear about and wants to know either that A) you're involved in that conversation or B) you've got a solution to it.

Right? And so those are things to consider, as you want to show up in an authentic way. Now next we want to talk about going back to that team that you've created. I guarantee there's a few people on your team that you're like, man, that is a charismatic, vibrant individual who would present well if they're on video or they like to write, I know that's, I know it's a hard thing.

If it comes down to a recruiter or a sales person deciding to write a blog, Have a conversation to close the deal. It's not a comparison. They have to do the business. Right. But if you can capitalize on a few of those key people that get really excited to share thought leadership, it can help immensely.

So not only does this come down to individual branding, like Joe's LinkedIn profile and really looking at how your team is showing up online, how your leadership team is showing up online, how you are but also how they're showing up in day-to-day conversations. Right? So when we think about LinkedIn, it's busy.

Yeah. It, it just is, and video is becoming more and more of a trend. These days polls are a trend which, oh, my goodness. Polls can be a ton of noise or they can be really valuable. So I would just encourage you that however you and your team is showing up online, make sure it's authentic. So in a couple of examples and ways to do this would be you know, have your team focused on what your audience is talking about.

You know, like comment on interesting posts that a potential client or current candidate has shared or companies you're following. And you want to be a part of, because they're in your industry space, likewise with collaborations, you know, everybody's got their industries that they focus on and there's conferences, right?

So whether it's a healthcare executive forum or something like that, you know, finding the key people on your team that want to share thought leadership and developing topics that are interesting and then partnering with other groups, you know, all of those really just are authentic and they're a lot of fun.

So no matter what, I think everyone on your team should be engaging online. But again, a few key individuals, it's probably the best way to approach the brand ambassador mindset. Now let's talk for a bit about attracting great clients and candidates. You know, we could spend a whole hour just on this topic alone, but I do think it is very important to think about all of the other areas that go into marketing, right?

Like building your brand, showing up online and authentic way. But naturally great clients and candidate attraction is the closest to ROI. So let's look at just the different lead gen levers you can pull, right? So if you have a great website, if it looks awesome, have you optimized it now, this is really important these days, you know, a lot of times you'll go to a digital company or a development shop and they'll build a site.

It looks pretty, but there's actually no formal SEO. That's gone into it. So it's really difficult for people to find you on their own. So some of the things that go into SEO are keyword research, right? So we want to identify of the areas and services you provide. Are people able to search terms literally on Google and have your website be one of those that shows up.

Likewise there are technical audits that are really important to identify is the user experience. Great. You know, there's, there's so much that goes into SEO. And I know it's one of those things that feels either like, wow, it's like our magic dust. It works great. Or it's like, I don't know. I invested in at once.

And it did nothing. SEO has the longest runway compared to a lot of these different levers you can pull you know, for example, it can take months for really traction to activate with changes you're making on your site, but it's very important paid search, right? So whether we're talking about ads on Google or different types of retargeting through the Google display network, you know, these are cool because let's just talk about pay-per-click ads on the top of Google for a second individuals are expressing interest, right?

So they have, they're literally saying, I have intent of finding an IT staffing firm in Dallas and whatever pops up. They're curious to see what that is. And so it's really important that if you are investing in that kind of paid advertising, that you care a whole lot about where you send them to, after you click on the landing page, you know, we've seen so many times where people come to us and say, well, I've been spending money on paid on Google, but it doesn't really do anything. And, you know, we come to find that they were sending people to the homepage and the homepage doesn't have any level of detail about the thing that the person searched for in the first place. You know, likewise you know, it's just, it's just important to think about the types of ways you're getting in front of people with messaging.

You know, a lot of people will say, well, I want client leads. I don't want candidate leads. And I wish we lived in the world where you could formerly control that. But what you can control is the type of language you're using to entice your clients over candidates. You know, in that particular situation now paid social can be really interesting.

When we think about candidates on the side of health care, for example, you know, they spend a lot of time on Facebook. So Facebook ads can be really interesting. And then we think about, you know, The other types of roles that are more professional business in nature. Right? So if you're looking at finance or accounting candidates, for example, obviously you can target people.

So specifically, you know, I spent about a year as a recruiter and a sourcer before focusing on marketing for this space and Boolean searches, right? I mean, I know it's something that probably makes everybody cringe because you're like, ah, I remember those. Or maybe you're still doing them every day, but you know, LinkedIn ads target in a very similar way.

So you can identify somebody by location, title, industry, really, anything they plug into their profile, you can find them. And it's great because it allows you to proactively get in front of the right clients or candidates without them even knowing your brand. So there is more of a passive nature because if someone is scrolling through their newsfeed, it assumes that they're ready to take an action right there.

But at least you're getting in front of. Now, when we talk about the client side of paid social I wish you guys could see me. And again, thank you for your patience. As we don't have video up here on this, this happened platform for whatever reason, but you know, if you picture a funnel, you've got people at the top, which are in awareness stage, and then you've got people in the middle, which are at the consideration stage.

And then you've got people at the bottom, which is the decision stage. Oftentimes let's say you have a partnership with LinkedIn for your job slots and your recruiter seats. Right. And they threw in some budget for ads, along with your contract negotiations. This happens all the time and you get in there and you're like, okay, cool.

I'm going to target people. I'm going to run some ads. You know, we do it staffing. If you have this need, you should contact us. Well, that is a very bottom of the funnel ad, right? It's literally saying click here to have a conversation. If you think about how you and I interact on LinkedIn, if you've never heard of a brand, and they're asking you to schedule a call, you may not even have the need that they are talking about right now, much less.

You don't have any knowledge of them from a credibility standpoint. It is possible you will click if you have that need, but if you don't, it's unlikely. Now, if we think about middle of the funnel or MOFU is we affectionately call it in the marketing world you know, basically providing something to them that does not expect them to raise their hand and have a conversation right now, those types of paid social ads can be really valuable.

Now, what does that look like? That can look like a salary guide or an ebook or a webinar on demand. The common thread for all of these is that it's gated content. You drive them to a landing page and they need to enter their information. First name, last name, email, etc. And then they're able to download the guide or access the webinar.

Now, this is really great because it's not talking about you. It's not saying here's my IT staffing firm. You should hire us. It's saying, you know, here are trends for hiring and retaining great. It staffing talent in the post COVID market in Denver, you know, fill in the blank of what is relevant to your audience.

Someone may be very interested in looking at that, but they might not have a hiring need right now. But the cool thing that that does is it introduces the ability for you to know. Who's out there, you know, like they may already be on your sort list of people to get in touch with, or they might not have been on your radar at all.

And so now you introduce this concept of, okay, we know who's checking us out and we can go check them out. And yes, of course you can reach out to them and say, Hey, I saw you downloaded this. I'm happy to answer questions. But in a best practice world, that's where we get into marketing automation. And we'll touch on that as we get into the fifth point, which is nurturing the people, you can help them most of just how to transition a downloadable content and those warm leads, if you will, into actual conversations in the future.

So as we look at attracting great clients and candidates, Like I said, there's, you know, we could spend an hour on this topic alone. I mean, honestly, on each of these individual levers you can pull, but I want to encourage you to keep all of these in mind, if you're doing all of them and they're all working for you.

Awesome. At that point, it's a matter of doubling down on what's producing the most ROI. If you have dabbled in these in the past, but you're really unsure it. These are all areas worth exploring. If you're a staffing or recruiting firm, owner, or leader looking to drive clients and candidates. Now let's chat a little bit about providing an experience worthy of a referral.

I want to talk to you here. What is your process when marketing does create an opportunity? So if someone downloads that ebook, let's say and goes through a workflow, we'll get into that in a second and then fills out a form and says, yep, I want to have a conversation. Or let's say somebody shoots your recruiter a note and says, yep, let's have a conversation.

Obviously, if it's going to an individual recruiter, they're the one who starts that call. But if someone fills out a form, do you know where that form submission goes to? I mean, I know this is a really trivial sounding question, but that may be your number one homework. When you hop off this presentation and off this webinar, fill out the contact form on your company site and see, huh?

If a client wanted to get ahold of. Who gets notified of that because we've seen it multiple times where the website was originally set up and it went to some, you know, group inbox that a lot of people were supposed to manage. And then over time nobody manages it and you just don't realize, shoot, we missed some opportunities here.

Or it goes straight in the owner's inbox or, you know, someone who is more of a general manager in the company. What I've seen work pretty well with small size staffing and recruiting firm owners are that, that email goes out to some key leaders in your organization. And then somebody replies. Got it.

So within minutes, somebody's on the phone with that potential client lead, having a conversation. Now I can absolutely appreciate that. On the candidate side, this is a very, very, very different experience. You know, if we're talking, you're getting, you know, hundreds of applications because you're in the light industrial hour manufacturer area, or if you are a high level executive retained search looking for a CFO, you may handle those inbound leads very differently.

So for this discussion, I'm talking more about the client side than the candidate side. Now when those potential clients come in, who has ownership over that process, right? If Steve goes, got it, and he sends out an email and doesn't hear back and he gets busy and he goes on vacation, what happens? Does anybody know?

Right. And in some companies. I've seen them literally have a Google, a Google doc spreadsheet that those key individuals have access to. And they get the info in there. Now in other industries that don't require ATS is this can be a much easier closed loop system. Let's say you use HubSpot or Salesforce or something like that.

You know, someone fills out a form, it kicks into HubSpot, you know, that is their CRM and their marketing platform. It sends an automated emails. So the person has a touch point and then someone gets in touch there's notes in the system. The deal is created, you know, it's completely documented. That's a beautiful thing, but in this wonderful staffing and recruiting industry, we need applicant tracking systems.

And oftentimes, I mean, majority of the time that doubles as your CRM. And so. You don't always have the luxury of saying, yep. Everything's sinked into Bullhorn. The form was filled out and we've got a great process. So if for the time being, it needs to be a little bit more manual until you get a system down.

So be it. So anyway, all great things to think about when it comes to people coming in and marketing, creating those opportunities. Now let's chat for a little bit about nurturing the people you can help the most you know, the loaded question, who is your database? A lot of people, a lot of people are in your database.

You know, the person that your top recruiter reached out to, and isn't in a conversation with, and you've only known them for two weeks, that person's in your database. And so as the person that submitted their resume 15 years ago, who has since changed their email, choose their company five times and has no idea who you are.

Right? So whether you've got 10,000 people or 500,000 people it is a complex beast. And in an ideal world, you've got that thing segmented. It is clean. The recruiters and AEs that are putting in information are all doing it the same way. I know, I can't see you and you can't see me, but I would imagine that that is not the reality of most, most people I'm talking to, just because of the immense amount of data points that need to get entered and how many people are interacting with that system.

But I would imagine by default that you've got it broken down between clients and candidates, you've got their contact info. You got an owner over most of these individuals, hopefully, right. And someone that owns that particular relationship you know, how long they've been in the system, things like that.

So let's chat for a little bit about how to use marketing automation to not only increase your ROI, but also create efficiencies, which help your bottom line at the end of the day. So there's two main types of people in your database. We've got clients and we've got candidates. So let's talk about client prospects for a second.

These are individuals that are in your database. You may have found them because you sponsored a conference and you got the list. You've never talked to them, but you'd love to work with them, right? Things like that. Now you can create workflows for those individuals that provide things like the eBooks that you've created and the blogs that are actually relevant to your practice areas, to the thought leadership that your audience cares about as well as mixing in some sales messaging on the candidate side, same thing.

Right? So if you've got a salary guide, that would be interesting to either of those audiences it's important to start dripping content out to them. Now, I know this premise is not new at all in our industry of, you know, having drip campaigns, having sales, automations, you know, automating that process.

But I do want to encourage you. Yes. There's the sales side of it. Here's who we are. Here's how we can help. Or I see these are your pain points. Here's how we can help. But think about the marketing side too, right? Especially in this new era, you know, coming out of the pandemic, people are taking time to make decisions.

And so you want to nurture and develop that relationship through great content. Now, if we think about past conversations you know, this is honestly probably the biggest category of most databases. You know, here's a client you worked with once, but you don't work with them anymore, especially in the search side.

Right. You've done one search and nobody followed up on it. Staffing and all that's much less common, right. You're either working with them or you're not. And then. I mean, I guess it all depends, right? There's variables to everything. But then on the candidate side, maybe you placed them and they are in there, but you haven't worked with them for awhile or you just had a conversation and it's not active right now.

That is a massive opportunity. If you think about how much money our industry spends on ultimately getting new leads, whether clients or candidates compared to how many people they already have in their database, that they're not nurturing. It's massive. So think about that, right? Like how do you get in front of them with great information and build out workflows that touch them along the way.

Current partners. So on the client side, sometimes this ends up evolving to, you know, a monthly newsletter that keeps them abreast of the things that your company's doing and how you can help them on the candidate side. This can be monumental. So let's say for example, you focus on HR consulting, right?

So you're placing mid to very senior level HR consultants and they are currently out on contract. Now, how many touch points does your recruiter need to maintain over their six month contract? Right. There's a handful of them. I mean, yes, there's a flurry right in the beginning with the onboarding process.

But then what happens in one month? What happens in two months? What happens a month before their contract is up? Those are all opportunities that I would imagine your teams are discussing. Okay. You know, Jane. This is when you reach out and say, Hey, how's it going? If we're in the same city, do you want to grab a bite to eat right.

Post camp, post pandemic, pre pandemic you know, or did you know that we have this referral program? If there's anyone else like you, that you think would have a fun time working with our clients, let us know, or, Hey, your contract is actually coming to an end in a month. Let's touch base, you know, all of those touch points you can automate and they can still look like they're coming from the recruiter.

And they go to that person. And if that person replies, it goes straight into the recruiter's inbox, but it's all tracked in sync through your ATS and through your marketing automation platform. So that's a beautiful thing. And then alumni very similarly, you know, let's say you've worked with a candidate in the past, or you've worked with a client in the past.

How were you staying top of mind and relevant to them? I would say, you know, the, the undiagnosed goldmine of the staffing and recruiting industry is the database. It is your ATS. So those are all great things to keep in mind. You know, just one note. There are some companies that are small, especially on the search side, plenty on the staffing side that have not touched marketing automation, it's a phase two or three for them.

And then there are other companies especially on the staffing side that have invested already quite heavily Sense or Here Fish or something like that. And they've got a lot of workflows built out. This is not slowing down. I would say this is incredibly important for you to keep in mind because your competitors are starting to evaluate this as well.

Now let's not forget to measure and adjust, right? So with all of these different elements you know, top to bottom, whether you're building a solid brand or showing up online in an authentic way attracting great clients and candidates or providing that experience worthy of a referral and nurturing the people that matter the most, what happens if you just throw money at all this, and you have no idea if it's working, I guarantee you what's going to happen is you're just going to stop throwing money at it.

And either learn the hard way. Oh, shoot. It was working or learn the bummer of a way. Well, nothing changed. We just spent a load of money. So I would encourage you to review benchmarks. Right. So some of these KPIs that are common to, to review are how much website traffic are you getting? How many conversions are you getting?

What are your stats on LinkedIn? You know, how many ebook downloads, like what kind of measurements are you seeing with your marketing automation? I mean, there's so much that you can evaluate that. Honestly. It's kind of overwhelming. And a lot of the small, too small to mid-size firms, we're talking to you know, day in, day out, either have a marketer or maybe a marketing manager.

Probably outsourced or they're just not doing it at all. And so if you right now are just getting an exported spreadsheet out of Google analytics and you're like, well, I feel good that I get it, but I certainly never spend the time to look at it. It's something to think about, right. Set up a system that, that, you know, here are the key variables that I need to review.

I was actually just in a fireside chat with a friend Derek Pitek. He has got a company called Beyond for Growth and he specializes in EOS implementation, which is a business framework that helps businesses really thrive. And one of the things he said was if you are the visionary of a company and you're on a beach, you know, you're on an island somewhere, you got your drink.

If you could only look at one scorecard, you literally could not call anybody in your company, but you could look at one scorecard and it would tell you the health of your company. What would be on that scorecard now that refers to a whole lot more than your marketing, but your marketing is a big component of that.

And it's also important to keep in mind, go seasonality trends, right? If you hire a marketing firm or a Director of Marketing, and in two months, everything tanked you know, keep in mind link, is that overlapping with your slow season or was the month prior amazing. And the next month wasn't so great.

But what you didn't realize is that one of your key brand ambassadors was out on LinkedIn, posting a webinar, and it drove a ton of traffic to the site. You know, that's where these monthly and quarterly reviews really come into play to provide that narrative and that story behind the numbers. So it's not just, well, the line is up into the right.

I think that's good. Or the line is down into the right, you know, all hands on deck, what's going on. You know, I'll share a brief story with you guys. We, we have a client who as we were evaluating their, their Monthly traffic from organic, right? So people that were finding them through searches, as well as through referral sources you know, naturally there's numbers that add and flow.

But one month we saw a massive tank in their referral sources. And what we saw is that they had significantly less Traffic, you know, significantly less visits from indeed. And they had made a business decision to stop investing in indeed job slots or excuse me, you know, sponsored jobs because it wasn't actually generating the quality of candidates they needed.

Now that's a really big factor. If you just see your Google analytics doc and see your website, traffic tank 50%, that is like a scary choke on your drink moment. Right. But if you understand that your business goals are all around attracting client leads and the less website traffic that you're experiencing is because you're seeing less, not quality candidates visit. That's actually okay. As long as all of the client related measurements are up, so things to keep in mind. I also want to encourage you to do true annual planning because that matters as well. Like if, if you're just shooting from the hip and saying, well, I don't know. I guess we'll just keep blogging.

Like what good is that going to do? You know, this world is changing very rapidly, especially with what we've seen in the last year. So take a step back and say, okay, this is how our social efforts are impacting business. This is how blogs and eBooks and paid and our website. But do we need to really invest in marketing automation or has it been four or five years since we redid our site and it just doesn't resonate with our audience anymore.

You know, those are the types of things to bring up during that annual planning. And then I want to encourage you to create realistic expectations, nothing massive changes overnight. Yes. You can start a Google ad campaign and see leads the very same day. Yes. That absolutely can happen. But if you're doing things like optimizing your site for the first time or investing in really putting into place a true marketing automation strategy, those things are not a one and done they're ongoing.

And so it's really important to think about your marketing the same way you think about building a great team of recruiters and salespeople and leaders. It's going to be around for the life of your company. You may pull different levers at different stages to address different business goals. But if you're approaching it as a flavor of the month, no matter how great of a company you partner with, no matter how great of a marketer you hire internally and how great the strategies are, I guarantee it's not going to produce the results you want.

So think about it as a long-term play in, in benefiting and amplifying your business. So, just a few more thoughts to share with you, and then we'll open it up for Q/A and feel free to chat in Q/A now. And I'll be able to see that here shortly. Now we've addressed top five tips for ROI, right?

Building a solid brand that people trust, Showing up in an authentic way, Attracting great clients and candidates, Providing an experience worthy of a referral and Nurturing the people. You can help them most. I hope this was helpful. I also want to leave you with a bonus top 10 staffing technology trends our friend in the space and industry Maurice Fuller.

I know he was recently just on the world staffing session. And he created staffingtek and he also created this awesome list of top staffing technology trends. Now I won't go through each of these one by one for time sake. This would be a great screenshot. I know Jan and Jakob have done a great job of posting these after they've gone live, so you'll have access to it.

You can also find it on Staffing Tek. But these are some things coming down the pipe for our industry Mobile first staffing. Right? So making sure everything is optimized, whether it's a website or an app conversational systems like chatbots and ensuring that that ultimately speaks to your audience.

Smarter AI and Machine Learning, which is coming down the pipe naturally digital marketing is allowing you to drive client and candidate engagement data explosion. I mean, this really refers to you have so, so much information in your database and your ATS that you get to utilize as more and more technology comes out 5G, literally your phone and how to step into some cool new features like augmented reality around test driving roles hyper automation, digital engagement, autonomous staffing, remote first operations, all of these things basically say.

Things are going to get automated. You know, people want to be talked to in a certain way and you got to get in front of it. It can't just be one-to-one conversations from here on out. And yes, that will always be a part of our, our industry. It's very important. But if you're not automating and you're not thinking about how digital and just this whole new world is going to change the business, you're, you're a little behind compared to your competitors.

Right. So just start thinking about those things. And then remote first separations is interesting, right? This whole COVID process. Really just distributed or dispersed everybody to different parts of the country. And they're working from their homes. I know people are now starting to get back more into the office.

Some never left their offices. But it is important to ensure that your remote employees are getting a great experience, just like they would in office. Because at the end of the day, especially if we talk about the third audience, which we haven't addressed much in this presentation of your internal talent, right?

Your internal recruiters, sales team, leadership team, if they can work for anybody anywhere, why are they working for you? Right. So try to create an environment, whether that's you know, virtual happy hours or social distance get togethers. And, you know, as, as different things are changing in our you know, post pandemic, hopefully soon to be hopefully soon to be post pandemic world, it's becoming easier.

But just think about that. And then finally, I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes. "Rome wasn't built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour". I'm sure a lot of you on this call are high achievers and very great people at what you do otherwise you wouldn't be on here looking to better yourself and better your marketing in 2021.

And if you're anything like me, you get impatient with what you have or haven't accomplished yet. And the biggest thing to keep in mind is as long as you're taking steps in the right direction every day, day in, day out, you will get there. That's how you grew your company. And that's exactly how it is with marketing.

Parkermarketing.com does have a variety of free marketing resources. So, I'd be curious to hear in comments, you know, are you the type of firm that man, this is exactly what you needed to hear. And you got to start back at square one and reevaluate that. Or have you kind of smiled and nodded the whole way going?

Yeah. Yeah. We've, we've been doing a good job, but here's a few key things that I think we could double down on for the rest of the year and going into planning season even this fall that that's going to help create momentum for our staffing or recruiting firm would love to hear that. So I will pop out of screen-share mode.

And then we can go ahead and jump into some Q/A Jan. Does that sound good to you?

Jan Jedlinski: That's perfect. Kelly, thank you so much. Yeah. If anybody has questions, feel free to put them into the chat or in the Q/A section. There is two ways you can go on the right-hand side to your chats. There is a Q/A button, or you can just pop the question into the chat.

So yeah. Thank you so much, Kelly. It was a great session. I really agree with all of the points and I think they're super helpful. Specifically in these days, I think, you know, staffing companies and recruiting companies definitely need to step up their game specifically with their websites and their presentation.

And so I've, I see a lot of companies doing it really well. But I see a lot of companies that can still benefit from some of the points that you just mentioned today. So thank you so much for that.

Kelli Schutrop: Absolutely. And I'm scrolling through some of the questions you know, thank you everyone who mentioned that it was helpful with some good pointers.

Let's see, you know, I don't know that I see any formal questions, Jan do you?

Jan Jedlinski: No, I don't see any coming in. We can wait another minute. If somebody has a question or a specific thing you want to ask Kelly, please let us know. Otherwise we'll share to session, as a recorded video latest tomorrow or the day after in an email, maybe Kelly has some other uh, attachments that she will share with you, maybe the presentation or some bonus material that you'll be able to receive.

But otherwise, yeah. Thank you so much everybody for joining the session today.

Kelli Schutrop: Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much. I would love to see for those who are on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 to 10 how, how would you rate and rank your marketing based on these you know, top five tips, right? Are you, are you at a o1like, Ooh, we really got to get started or are you like, man, we're like a 9 I'm feeling good after seeing this?

You know, I don't know that anybody has it fully figured out, but I've seen some companies that are doing very well. I see somebody 6 6 7.5. Um, very good. That I would say that's a strong point for our industry. Likewise, if you want to write down, you know, areas that you want to think about, I would highly encourage you.

I mean, this is scheduled until 12:30, so I know at least it's on your calendar. Whether you stay on here this long or not, that's up to you, but spend literally even five minutes, like set a timer on your phone. I mean, I know I get lost on Facebook for five minutes in a hot second. So, you know, set your timer for five minutes and jot down a bullet point list of things that you want to be thinking about for your company.

And some of those may require you know, some really tough conversations with your current internal team, right? Like, Hey recruiters, you guys are awesome, but start talking about thought leadership or it may, you know, if you want to ping me on LinkedIn and engage there, I'm happy to talk shop. Cause you can tell I'm very nerdy and passionate about this industry. I do see one question please help us understand what autonomous staffing is in the 10 pointers. Yes. So let me, let me pull that back up on my side. And I will preface this by saying Maurice Fuller can go miles deeper than I can on that particular topic.

So that refers to placements increasingly being made without a recruiter intervention from job matching to job alerts. The process will move faster than ever before. That's what I had on the slide. So I can speak to that here shortly or briefly. You know, this whole process of autonomous staffing and AI, you know, there's so many industries that are like, man, is this going to be bad for us?

Like this is going to replace our jobs. And when I saw this in the top 10, when I was having a fireside chat with Maurice one of the things he said was actually, no, this should be a really exciting thing for the recruiting industry, because it will allow you to spend time on the higher touch. Like no recruiter gets into the industry going, man.

I really just want to do a Boolean search, man. I really just want to spend time scheduling all day long with hiring managers and candidates. No, you probably got into it because it's fun to talk to people and it's fun to help companies hire great talent and all sorts of things like that. You know, I see that Jan in the chat just shared Maurice Fuller's LinkedIn in case anyone's curious, but yeah, ultimately it means the things that can be automated that's coming down the pipeline.

So whether it is you know, you plug in the credentials that you need for a job. And instead of physically having to do a search in your ATS, your ATS already knows, here are the top 15 candidates. You should be checking out based on the skill sets listed the years of tenure, all of those things like that's, that's where autonomous staffing is starting to go.

So great question.

Jan Jedlinski: Cool. Yeah, that's fantastic. I think you know, even combinational..

Kelli Schutrop: We'll keep it open for just a couple more minutes before Jan shows us something really awesome to see if there's any other questions that you guys want to jump in. But I will say before Jan shows us this, so, candidate.ly, this tool, he's going to show us, he showed me and I've already referred it to our sister company that does executive search and consulting to check out because I have not seen anything like it.

And it's, it's really cool. I'm not being paid to say that. I just think it's a really awesome tool. So I think that'll be fun for you guys. Cool.

Jan Jedlinski: Thanks Kelly for for sharing that. And I'll, I'll briefly take a minute. It won't take long. I'll share my screen with everybody for just a brief moment.

We are working on what we call candidate.ly. So hopefully you're able to see my screen. You can go to candidate.ly. You'll find the website. We call it the store fornt for your staffing business. Essentially what we try to achieve is help you be more present, obviously create a better brand for your staffing business, by presenting candidates to your customers in a better way.

So what the candidate.ly Product will give you is essentially a storefront where you can present candidates, a short list of candidates to a particular opportunity to one customer, or give your customers access to a talent pipeline that is curated by your team. As you can see on my screen, this is an example.

Your profile on candidate.ly, highly branded in your colors and your header and your customers can essentially find the candidates that you are presenting. Get in touch with you for a direct chat, give you feedback, easy access to all the candidates that are available by your company. This both helps you with candidates, presentation and feedback.

So especially you don't have to constantly follow up with customers about specific feedback, and it also helps you to get some insights around the interactions with customers. And obviously it gives you a nice sort of, sort of, sort of say storefront to get a better brand in the market. So if you're interested in learning more about candidate.ly and getting a quick demo let us know, you can just go to the poll section and press yes.

Or you can you know, message me directly to jan@hellogustav.com. That's it for my side. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining. If you still want to stick around, we have the networking section on the left hand side. So I see there's still a couple of people here. You can go in there and network with your peers, or if you have any questions to Kelly, you can stay stick around and ask questions in the chats.

And also we'll post Kelly's information and her contact details in the email tomorrow as well as here in the chat. So if you want to reach out to her and her team, to learn more about Parker, please do so.

Kelli Schutrop: Thank you. Jan is great joining you and thanks everybody for asking great questions and being present.

Jan Jedlinski: Thanks, Kelly. Appreciate you joining talk to you soon.

Kelli Schutrop: All right, bye. Bye.

Jan Jedlinski: Bye.

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