Today, I want to talk about using Meta in your recruitment marketing. Meta is the new name for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg, and all his colleagues’ companies. I wanted to talk about meta-advertising today because it’s not something that people talk about an awful lot regarding marketing strategies for the recruitment sector.

At the end of January, we ran a social media marketing webinar where I shared data that shocked several people about the number of people who have various social media accounts.

You may or may not be aware there are 8 billion people on the planet, and almost half are on some social platform.

To give you an example, let’s talk about Facebook.

In the UK, there are approximately 67 68 million people. Would you believe that over 34 million of them have a Facebook account? Over half of the UK population has a Facebook account.

The percentage data in Australia is similar, so it’s half the population. In Australia and New Zealand, it’s something like your population is 30 million, and over half of the people have a Facebook account.

When you look at the US, the US at the moment has something 333 million. That figure’s changing all the time. Believe it or not, 243.5 million of those, according to the latest data I’ve got, actually have a Facebook account.

That is fascinating.

We think that over half of the population in various countries has an account on social media.

Because of that, you could say, “Yes, well, Facebook’s different to LinkedIn. It’s not a business platform.” However, your market is there. How you message and communicate with them means you can get in front of them. I wanted to share some thoughts and ideas about using Meta as an advertising platform.

Here, we’re talking about Facebook and Instagram regarding advertising. The user data from Instagram is similar to Facebook.

I think we’ve got something like 35 million users on Instagram. The US is probably a bit less, 170 million, but still approaching half of the population has a social media account, which you could utilize to improve your brand awareness and make offers to people.

Let’s talk through how Meta might work for you regarding advertising. Some things to be aware of are the opportunities you probably don’t even realize and how you might want to use them in your recruitment or search business.

Facebook, Meta, Instagram, and various other things have happened over the past few years. You’ll have heard about the iOS update. We are currently going through the process of cookies on browsers, particularly Chrome changing.

This is all to do with privacy policies. However, don’t worry about it because in your copy and how you write and create adverts on Facebook, that will not be an issue because it enables you to speak into your market.

The other thing about Facebook advertising that I know some recruiters have been put off by is that recruitment, because it’s employment, and there are different legislations around employment, you have to highlight that you are a recruiter or work in search.

You click a button. Does it impact you a great deal? Not really.

You might lose access to some targeting options, but not many. Let’s get all those things out and start looking at the opportunity.

The key opportunity is that half of the population of most countries in the Western world has a Facebook account.

Logically, therefore, there have to be some of your candidates and clients on Facebook.

Don’t assume that people don’t read adverts on Facebook. They certainly do, particularly if they are compelling and you are getting in front of the right person.

Remember that when looking at things like Facebook and Instagram, too. I would suspect that some key decision-makers you want to get in front of could be over 30.

There is a huge population on Facebook that’s over 30. Imagine if you were getting your brand awareness posts and your conversion posts in front of those people. What a difference that could make.

Let’s look at targeting options on Meta.

What I love is there are multiple ways to target people. You can target people through their age. You can target them through gender. You can target them through their interests.

Let’s say you’re an engineering recruiter. You could target people within your local geography. Let’s pluck an idea out of the air here. Let’s say you are based in Scotland and service all of Scotland as a recruiter. You could create some Facebook ads and target people between a certain age and an end age.

You could do that around Scotland, and you could do it to people interested in engineering. How easy would that be?

You are sitting somewhere in Scotland, and something flies past you about engineering opportunities, engineering recruitment, etc. You are much more likely to look at that. That is a huge opportunity.

Let’s say that you are a recruiter, and you are recruiting in Europe, and you want to target people in Germany, France, or wherever. You can do exactly that on Facebook. You may be a UK recruiter who has roles in the US. You can target people within different states of the US.

Of course, you can use images, videos, and all those different media to get in front of your market.

Let’s say that you have a database of clients or candidates.

You can create what’s known on Meta as a custom audience. You can upload your spreadsheet CSV file to Facebook as a custom audience and create your advert so the advert is only displayed in front of those people.

How cool is that?

Taking that even one step further, what can you do because of Meta’s amazing AI capabilities?

You can tell them, “Look, I’ve got a list of my customers here, all my candidates. Can you go out and find me an audience of people that are exactly like this or are a close match?”

Let’s say you’ve got specific clients or specific candidates; you ask Facebook to create a lookalike audience.

Now, this is quite common. You can do this on LinkedIn as well. You can do it on Google AdWords. Creating a lookalike list of people you can advertise to depends on your account size.

In addition, you can target interests and behaviours.

There are multiple behaviours you can use. When we advertise, it’s to people interested in recruitment. They’re a small business owner. They are interested in marketing so that we can display our adverts in front of these people.

You can see all the different opportunities here now.

The other thing that you can do that is incredibly useful is you can use something called the Meta Pixel. You might be wondering what exactly the Meta Pixel is.

They’ve just renamed it, that’s all.

This is where you can retarget audiences and people that have visited your website.

As a reminder of how retargeting works.

You’ve had that situation where you’re buying something for your significant other, and suddenly either the phone or the doorbell rings, or you’ve got your mum trying to FaceTime you or something, and you stop what you were doing.

However, you visit a website, and then, who knows, life happens, and you forget about that particular company.

This is where advertising to people who have visited your website and not taken action works.

As an advertiser on Meta, you can set up the Meta Pixel on your website, which will recognize the IP addresses of people visiting your website. Then, when it comes to targeting your ads, you can say, “Please show my adverts to anyone who has visited my website.”

That could be a game-changer for you.

Imagine that you are a candidate. You’re considering moving. However, you’re not quite ready yet. Consistently, you are seeing adverts from a particular recruitment company. You’re starting to think, “Hmm, these guys could be the ones that could help me. I like the content they share, and it’s helpful.”

Who do you think that candidate will contact when they first decide to move?

Highly likely you if it’s your adverts that have been appearing in front of them for some time. I won’t get into too much of the detailed tactical things about how you do Facebook adverts.

There’s plenty of content online about that; however, this is a quick overview.

You create something called a campaign; You’ll be used to doing that with marketing campaigns.

Each campaign has different sets of adverts, which also have multiple adverts.

Getting the ad together is not as hard as people make it out to be. It’s just a case of starting them and moving forward.

The other thing I like about Meta adverts is that they are inexpensive to start with. Regarding things like Google Ads, they’re a little bit more expensive. LinkedIn ads are a LOT more expensive.

On Meta, you can say, “Okay, I’m going to do this campaign. I’m just going to have a go at it. I’ve never done it before. I will put $/£100 into this campaign.”

Then Meta will distribute that $/£100 amongst your ads. What it will do is it will see which ad is performing better. Facebook is amazing at things like that; see which ads perform better, and you put more money towards that. You can see how you could start advertising on Facebook and the Meta group of channels for a few pounds or dollars a day if you want to test it.

Imagine you’ve got people that are visiting your website. You could retarget them. You’ve got lists of candidates and clients that you could utilize.

You could let Meta go out and do its thing and find people similar to your current audience. There are so many things that you could do.

For our clients, when we talk about advertising, we would always suggest that you get your basics done first, get a website that is communicating value, have your offer nailed down, know who your audience is, know the messaging that you want to put out there and then start doing advertising like this so that can make a difference, particularly when you’re a micro business.

Thanks

Denise

As a member of Superfast Circle, we can teach you multiple marketing strategies that will work in your sector. We even have a tech expert who can teach you about Facebook advertising; if you want to find out more, book a call with one of us here.

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