Time to think a little differently about how you buy media.
I’ve been buying media space for a long time now. I consider myself lucky that I am involved during a progressive time in recruitment advertising yet I can still remember what it was like in print heydays. With age comes experience so they say.
At Wave we’re currently talking to clients about looking at their media buying a little differently. For a long time it came down to using an agency who could buy media ‘a bit cheaper’ for you. A few quid here and a few quid there. This made sense back in the 90s when media budgets were in the millions. A 5% saving (which is what we made our name on for years) equates to a £50,000 saving, not an insignificant sum to save that’s for sure.
However in 2016 budgets are rarely that high (even on a global basis) and so saving 5% on a £350 single posting isn’t quite as appealing.
So, why bother using a media agency at all these days? Well more and more we’re looking at a multi-channel approach to your media buying, something more akin to a commercial marketing strategy. That’s where the real benefits come in.
We are still currently saving many of our clients 5% on their bookings and are happy to do so for you; we are confident in our promise that we will save you money on your recruitment. We can however do a lot more, if you will let us. We believe that the real benefits come in the form of lowering your overall spend and driving the best talent to your career site, and that’s not always solely through the job boards either.
With 70% or so of all job searches starting on Google, we advocate a ‘Google First’ approach to our strategies. That is, we want direct organic traffic arriving on your career site. Take some time to think about the main roles you recruit for – now do a Google Search for it and see where you rank… I imagine most of you did not even appear. But what if you did – you’d be bypassing every other piece of media and recruitment consultant going. Impossible I hear you say. Well no it’s not, not if you have an effective SEO strategy.
Job Aggregators have cottoned on all too quickly, and stats from Indeed put them on around 80million job searches a month. Shows the power of a good SEO strategy. Most of them will already drive significant traffic to your career site and often with a small (ish) level of investment you can increase that tenfold.
Social media is a rich source of candidates too, you’ll tend to find they are more engaged with your brand and spend longer looking around your site.
And we’ve not even mentioned the much maligned but still very successful job board. They get a rough deal, they really do. But they still have the audience you want, and that audience is ready to move, so the job board market should still command a significant proportion of your budget.
With the analytics available to us now, we’re better equipped than ever to test the performance of the media we’re putting you on, from traffic through to completed hires, and that’s changing the way we’re doing our recruitment advertising. Previously we could never track how well things were doing, now we can monitor where they are coming from and what they are doing when they land on your website.
My point is, if you want to save 5% on a few job postings, we can do that for you and so many other agencies can do the same. If you want to start saving significantly more and attracting the talent you really want then, well, now you can. If you’d like a free audit of your website and recruitment strategy, give me a call and we will have a look for you.
