Lifecycle Marketing For Recruitment and Staffing Companies

The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast

If you’re completely honest, does your marketing strategy cover the entire lifecycle of your customer, or is it more of a spray and pray approach?

A Deloitte study on 2020 marketing trends states:

“Marketers have recognised that to keep up with the competition, they need to evolve their approach and create a dynamic two-way engagement across all stages of the customer journey and product lifecycle.”

This blog post is all about lifecycle marketing, which we explain in more detail in our recent recruitment marketing report, the 8 Critical Marketing Trends for 2020 – the link to download the free report is at the end of this article.

But you’re here because you want to know all about lifecycle marketing in your recruitment company, so let’s get started.

What is Lifecycle Marketing?

Once you have identified your avatar, you must ensure that your marketing is making contact with your potential customers at the right points in their buying cycle.

Lifecycle marketing is the process of providing your clients and candidates with the type of communications and experiences they want, but more importantly that they didn’t know they needed until your email dropped in their inbox.

It is about creating demand at every level and getting your clients and candidates to think ‘they can help me’ about your recruitment company.

The 6 Stages of Lifecycle Marketing

There are six stages of lifecycle marketing:

• Awareness
• Engagement
• Evaluation
• Purchase
• Product and support experience
• Bonding/advocacy

You can see from the steps here that the ‘lifecycle’ of your marketing is potentially a lengthy process depending on the roles you fill. It is a world apart from the notion of contacting a client or a candidate only when you have a proposition for them.

How Does Lifecycle Marketing Work?

The modern world has made buying patterns unpredictable. Lisa Gevelber, Google’s vice president of marketing for the Americas said recently:

“Lifecycle marketing works by creating a series of open pathways from the customer to your business when the time is right. When your prospective needs your service they will unlock their smartphone and yours will be the company they reach out to.”

Why? Because you have nurtured them over time, at each of the six stages mentioned above. It’s exactly the same in the recruitment space too and you can implement this with both candidates and clients

Where Can You Start Lifecycle Marketing in Your Recruitment and Staffing Company?

With this in mind, does your marketing strategy need to be more pro-active, instead of reactive?

If your current customer marketing strategy lacks a clear beginning and end, and you want to implement lifecycle marketing, where can you start?

First of all, segment your different stages. Once you have clearly defined boundaries like this engaging with clients and candidates becomes more productive, and you can market to the right audience.

A critical tool you have at your disposal to implement a lifecycle marketing strategy is email. Many recruiters use email, but only to contact clients when they have a hot candidate, or they need more jobs on the board.

Consider an email funnel to nurture customers at every point in their recruitment or hiring cycle as detailed in the bullets above.

Finally

‘Lifecycle Marketing’ is covered in our recent report containing the 8 critical recruitment marketing trends for 2020, which are already helping recruitment business owners to increase client and candidate leads. If you would like then you can get yours here.

Denise