Welcome back for part two of the Audience Mapping blog post. As previously discussed in Audience Mapping part one, assessing and understanding your audience is crucial to enhancing traffic and driving leads to your site. Where are they coming from? What sites do they use, and how did they stumble across your page, blog, or forum? Do these unique visitors have something in common, such as a certain profession or hobby? If you want to successfully and thoroughly map your audience, these are some of the questions you should be working to answer. Once you uncover this information, you’ll be on your way to not only understanding your audience better, but also driving more interested users to your site and perhaps improving business as well.
 

Consider these suggestions to discover what makes your audience tick:

5. Do they embrace social media?
If so, what social networking sites do they spend the most time on? Are they interested in these sites for business or personal purposes? Where and when do they begin to interact vs. simply digesting information? Some of the larger social media websites offer follower/member demographic information that can help you determine whether or not your specific audience spends time on their site.  If your audience is more professional, consider starting with LinkedIn, whereas if you are staffing within the marketing/PR space, you may consider launching a blog and broadcasting your content through Twitter.
 
6. Who are their influencers?
Every industry has influential leaders. Learn who those individuals are within each of the markets you service.  What value do they provide to your audience?  How can you provide similar value?  Is there an opportunity to partner with an influencer?  If you are considering launching a blog and are not sure if you will be able to provide content on an ongoing basis, find out if any industry influencers would be interested in cross posting or contributing to your blog. 
 
7. Are there common denominators?
If you have multiple audiences with different behaviors, sometimes you can identify a common denominator that ties them together. As unique as their behaviors may appear from the outside, many audience groups have similar professional objectives. I am not suggesting that you group together all of your audiences, but if there is an opportunity to create a campaign that can be mirrored across each service segment, you will do less recreating and rather focus your efforts on scaling the campaign.

8. What can web analytics tell you?
Spend some time analyzing the backend activity on your website. First, this will provide you with details relating to existing high volume search terms, referring websites, search engine traffic and unique navigation patterns. Second, once you finalize your digital marketing strategy, you can use web analytics to set up specific campaign goals, enabling you to easily track inbound activity and results from the start.  Some great web analytics tools include: Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, and Hubspot.

More helpful resources on “Audience Mapping”

Social Media Examiner: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-simple-steps-for-creating-social-media-visibility/

What makes marketing within the staffing and recruiting industry so unique?

Let’s start by pointing out that every agency has at least two target audiences (hiring managers and candidates) each with different intentions: to hire talented employees and to find jobs.  Factor in multiple specialty areas and a variety of industries, and the target audience can become quite complex.
 
Audience mapping is the process of exploring the digital behaviors of your audiences before building out a campaign.  This exercise can be as elaborate or simplistic as you want it to be, though it’s vital that your information come from a credible place.  Throughout the mapping exercise, check in with people who have ongoing first-hand candidate and client interaction to ensure you are on the right track. But probably one of the most important aspects of this process is figuring out not only who your audience is, but what they want and where they are going to fulfill those wishes. 

The following list of questions will help you get to know your audience and further assess their needs:
 

1. Who are they?

Trying to appeal to corporate HR? Web Designers? Executive Assistants? Accountants? Java Developers? Traveling nurses?
 
Unless your audience is actively looking for a job or to hire talent, there’s a very slim chance that they will stumble upon your corporate blog, job board, twitter feed or fan page if it’s strictly all about you. Assuming that your prospects know your brand and will find you when the need arises is a mistake. Before building your digital brand, it’s vital that you forget about you and focus on your customers and prospects.
 
2. What information are they interested in?

To answer this question, you might consider surveying some of your current customers. I would suggest sending your candidates and clients a very simple survey through email and complement it with a written survey that can be filled out in your lobby while candidates are waiting for an interview. You could also poll some of your closer candidates and clients on the phone, which will allow for in-depth interaction. Are they looking for industry tips and trends? Do they want to network with other professionals within their industry? Would they value updates on your newest jobs? Leave an open comments section at the end of any written or email survey to allow for your customers to offer original ideas.  Some great internet survey sites include: Survey Monkey, Zoomerang, and Constant Contact.
 
3. Where do they get their news?

With thousands of mainstream and industry media outlets competing for the limited time professionals set aside to get their daily news fix, you can learn a lot by understanding which publications successfully and continually capture the attention of your audience. Consider calling into the sales departments of a variety of publications and tell the account representative that you are interested in learning more about their readership demographic.
 
4. How are they searching?

If you want your digital marketing activity to be found by your target audience, you should run a keyword search analysis to understand how they are searching via the major search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing). This will end up being the most important exercise, and depending on internal resources available, may require the support of an outside agency. Don’t guess what your audience wants based on how well you think you know your business. There are free and low cost tools out there that will give you accurate data. Some of the more popular tools include: Google AdWords, NicheBot.com, WordTracker, SpellWeb.com, and KeywordDiscovery.com.
 

You should be looking for keyword phrases that have high search volume and then consider more specific (perhaps local) phrases that will have less search competition, but are still close to your business. Once you target a manageable list of key search terms, compare this data with the information you’ve acquired from steps 1-3. Note: Much more to come on this in the search engine optimization (SEO) part of this digital marketing series.
 

Stay tuned for Audience Mapping-2

Part One

Introduction: What is inbound marketing?
 
The days of relying solely on trade shows, direct mail, print ads and cold calls are over. As human behavior continues to adapt to the “digital age”, the marketing game is rapidly emerging to allow for something that for decades executives have craved: low cost, high quality business leads and measurable results.
 
Though outbound marketing still remains valuable, the evolution of new media communications and inbound marketing is proving the highest short and long-term return for businesses across all industries worldwide.  Rather than draining your budget on traditional marketing channels with dreams of catching your candidates’ or clients’ eyes, holding their attention and then persuading them to buy, inbound marketing flips traditional outreach upside down. As a staffing or recruiting firm, you want job seekers and hiring managers to come to you.  By developing a strong digital marketing infrastructure, you will consistently show up in the heart of where your audiences are searching and eventually the leads will begin to pour in.  
 
Understanding Inbound Marketing: The Octopus Approach
 
In explaining inbound marketing, let’s explore natural survival instincts that have been in place for centuries. Take the octopus, one of the most fascinating animals of the sea.  As a large creature, it’s not easy for the octopus to attract prey without seeming overbearing. 

Rather than creating a scene by awkwardly chasing after food that is much faster than itself, the octopus understands its surrounding environment and changes color to fit in with algae- a plant that thousands of sea creatures feed off. With very little movement, the octopus waits patiently for hungry creatures to come feeding, and the rest is history. 

Photo: Octopus blending in with surrounding algae

Like the octopus, your ultimate goal should be to position your website or blog among the digital surroundings that your target audiences (job seekers and hiring managers) are feeding off.   Keep in mind, the difference between a well thought out inbound marketing strategy and the above analogy, is that once you do manage to capture the attention of your audience, it’s not wise to attack them. There is nothing more annoying as a customer than to find out that you’ve been tricked and blatantly sold to. Inbound marketing should be permission-based, meaning your audiences choose to come to you and then decide to stay for a while. To do this well you will need to invest some time and resources into studying the behaviors of your audiences, learning how online technology and search engines operate, and understanding the different inbound marketing channels available.
 
This marketing series will explore, piece-by-piece, some of the more vital channels available and how each can be adapted by staffing and recruiting firms to enhance digital inbound leads. The series will cover topics including, audience mapping, search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, community building, digital public relations, lead generation, streamlining process through technology and tracking.
 
Stay tuned for part two of our series, “Audience Mapping”.
 

Other great inbound marketing resources:
 
Inbound Marketing VS Outbound Marketing: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/2989/Inbound-Marketing-vs-Outbound-Marketing.aspx

Lead Generation Is About Being Found
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2009/02/24/lead-generation-is-about-being-found/

Wayne Gretzky was an Inbound Marketer
 http://pauldunay.com/wayne-gretzky-was-an-inbound-marketer/

As we continue to watch the demand for superior client service rise within the staffing and recruiting industry, it’s very exciting to see a number of Bullhorn customers featured on the 2010 Best of Staffing List.  The awards, published annually by Inavero, are organized by a 3rd party validation service and feature staffing and recruiting firms that have proven outstanding levels of customer service. This year the awards were presented by Careerbuilder.com.

Congratulations to the following Bullhorn customers honored for 2010:

Inteligente Solutions, Inc.

Kelly Services, Inc.

Mee Derby & Company

PrideStaff

Rx relief

SOS Staffing Services

TRC Staffing Services, Inc.

Insurance Relief

Employment Plus

Employment Trends

For complete 2010 Best of Staffing List visit: http://www.bestofstaffing.com/2010-best-of-staffing-client/

About the Survey
Approximately 17,000 staffing industry clients filled out a survey on their experience with their staffing firm.  The methodology behind the survey, Net Promoter Score®, was developed by Fred Reichheld, a former Bain consultant and client loyalty author.  The question at the core of his methodology is quite simple: “how likely is it that you would recommend this firm to a friend or colleague?”

The 2010 Best of Staffing List represents 47 trusted staffing brands that have proven to deliver extraordinary client service. Inavero reported that each firm scored significantly higher than the industry average and nearly 75% of the clients who partner with one of the firms listed above, rated their willingness to recommend that firm a 9 or 10 out of 10.
 

About Inavero
Inavero was founded in 2007 by Managing Partner Eric Gregg as iLoyalty, a research firm focusing on client and job candidate satisfaction surveys for professional service firms. In 2008 iLoyalty became Inavero to avoid any confusion with several other companies using eLoyalty. The name Inavero is derived from the two Latin words indicium and vero, which represents truth in data. We believe this is of the utmost importance in a research firm.
 

There has been a ton of discussion in the recruiting and staffing community around the value of leveraging social networks for recruitment.  Specifically, at Bullhorn many of our customers have asked us to provide job posting integration with social networks so that each time you post a job, it will feed out to your social media communities. We are currently working on our roadmap to enable this deeper, meaningful integration and look forward to launching something in the months ahead. 
 
In the meantime, there is a great way that Bulhorn users, who also use Bullhorn Career Portal, can easily connect their job postings with services like Twitter and Facebook.  Setting this up can be very easy and the following post will walk you through the process.  Please note: this will only work for new jobs.  If you are editing existing jobs, they will not get picked up by the RSS feed. 

In order to make this work you will need:

1) To be using the Bullhorn Career Portal

2)To have accounts setup on the social networks where you want to automatically post jobs(we’ll show you how to do this with Twitter and Facebook).

3) To know your Bullhorn private label ID.  If you don’t know your Private Label ID, you can contact Bullhorn support and they can provide it for you. To contact Bullhorn support to get your Private Label ID you can go to the support menu in Bullhorn, select Resource Center, and choose Submit a Ticket.

Finding your Bullhorn Career Portal RSS Feed

Every Bullhorn customer that uses the Bullhorn Career Portal to post jobs has an RSS feed for their jobs.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with RSS, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a technology that pushes information, say a listing of jobs, out to anyone who is subscribed to it via RSS.  That information can then be viewed on web portals like My Yahoo, iGoogle, with RSS news readers, as well as on social networks.  

1) Once you know your private label ID, all you need to do is copy and paste the URL below into your browser, replacing the YYY with your private label ID.
 
 
Here’s the URL to use:
 
http://public.bullhornstaffing.com/JobBoard/Standard/JobOpportunitiesRSS.cfm?privateLabelID=YYY
 
and here’s an example where we inserted Bullhorn’s Private Label ID into the URL.  We put the “96″ in place of the “YYY”
 
 
http://public.bullhornstaffing.com/JobBoard/Standard/JobOpportunitiesRSS.cfm?privateLabelID=96

2) Once you have that URL and paste it into your browser, you should see a page that lists your current open jobs.  I’ve pasted a screenshot of what that looks like in Internet Explorer 8 for Bullhorn’s jobs.
 

3) At this point if you are seeing jobs in this format, then you are almost done.
 

Connecting your RSS Feed to Social Networks

There are many social networks out there and many ways to connect RSS feeds to them.  We’ll cover two ways to do this for Twitter and Facebook.   And one of the ways we include also has a way to do this via LinkedIn.