Unhappy with the ROI on Your Marketing/Sales Spend for New Clients?

2017 Staffing & Recruiting Firm Marketing/Sales Survey Shows You’re Not Alone!

(Free: copy of the survey report and a seat at the presentation. Click here.) 

We recently completed, and will be publishing and presenting, the results of our findings from the 2016-17 Marketing & Sales Survey of Recruiting & Staffing Firms in April 2017.

While there’s an abundance of useful data for helping a firm realize more visibility, leads and new business, there were also a few “holy cow” moments, like the reveal of firm happiness with the ROI they are getting from their spending on marketing to employers.

It’s not very good.

In fact, two-thirds of the respondents say that they are not very happy with the ROI they’re getting, and only one out of ten or so say they are very happy.

No one, regardless of size or performance said they’re extremely happy.

I Suspect the Two Main Culprits Are ...

First things first.

If you are not happy with your firm’s marketing/sales ROI, then it’s time for change. 

Maybe that will come in the form of doubling your staffing agency marketing budget and then spending more on the exact same marketing activities you’ve been funding. This is not a recommendation, by the way, as it’s likely that you’ll end up twice as unhappy.

Or maybe it’s time to shake things up and spend smarter. That doesn’t mean that you’ll necessarily be spending less. It means getting the biggest bang for your buck and perhaps even investing more in those activities that deliver a great return. 

In situations where we are talking to a Managing Partner about reasons for their unhappiness with their marketing/sales ROI, we suspect two culprits at play:

• Spending on the wrong activities. When was the last time you did a deep dive on your marketing metrics to see the relationship between spending and results? If you haven’t done this or it's been awhile, then it’s the first critical step to finding out what works and what needs to be eliminated from the budget. 

You can also tie better ways to spend marketing budget on performance metrics. For example, one client ‘s data reveled that only a third of their new business was coming from referrals, which led to shifting more marketing dollars into referral and word of mouth marketing strategies and tactics because this is the lowest hanging fruit for new client acquisition.

• Marketing/Sales Misalignment. We also investigate the relationship (or lack of a relationship) between marketing and sales as a highly likely source of a poor ROI. An agreement on shared objectives and goals, lead definitions, lead generation campaigns, collateral materials, responsibilities, and having the right marketing technology in place to track and measure outcomes is fundamental to achieving a higher ROI from the marketing spend. 

There’s a wealth of information about the principles and practices of alignment, like The 5 Pieces of Marketing/Business Development Alignment for Better Leads, Faster Sales that you can see here.

Learn More from the Survey Report and Presentation

The United States Staffing Association, Recruiting and Staffing Solutions Magazine, and LeadG2 are happy to extend an invite to all staffing and recruiting agency owners and managers to the presentation of results on April 11^th, 2017. We’ll also record the webinar and make it available on our website if you’re reading this after the event.

We’ll be covering topics like marketing infrastructure and budget, best sales tactics, best strategies and tactics for lead generation, effectiveness of different content marketing tactics and a whole lot more.

Learn more and register.