Over the past few episodes, you’ll notice we have been talking about getting your marketing in place and ready for that really busy end of the year, all those tasks and projects you could do in summer that will make a huge difference.

Today, I want to focus on your website.

One of the reasons I want to do that is we’ve had several new people join Superfast Circle, and one of the first things we do is support them to get their website working as a marketing machine.

Many people that join us do have very nicely designed websites. However, they’re not always aligned to being a marketing machine which is what we want; marketing is about creating demand.

Your website is your authority place on the internet, and you want to ensure they’re working hard for you. What’s great about websites is that you can make minor tweaks to make a difference in their performance.

These are things that statistically are proven to work around influencing strategies and real practical things that people often forget to action.

Let’s talk about your website. The first thing that we notice is a company’s contact details aren’t everywhere they could be on the website.

Now, I know you have a contact us page, and remember that human beings are fascinating and inherently lazy!

We love to save energy.

If something isn’t in front of us, we sometimes can’t be bothered and click off. In our distracted world, you will lose out if you haven’t got your telephone number, email address, and social media icons everywhere on your website.

Here’s the thing; Many people miss having their telephone number in their header bar. Remember that when people first land on your website, they have that first-third experience if you’re on a desktop where they don’t scroll down.

I know many people will access your website by mobile, so ensure they see your telephone number and the best email address to contact you through.

Today people want to learn more about you from your social channels.

One of the things that people like to do is check you out and say, well, who are these people? They’ll go and look at your social media profiles and likely check you out on LinkedIn.

The second one, which may freak some of you out, I know because we do tend to work with a lot of micro, smaller businesses, very, very good recruiters, but they do tend to hide.

We were talking to one of our lovely new clients yesterday, and he went very quiet when I said, right, what you need to do as well is get a photograph of yourself on your website. On your about us page.

This page is s one of the most trafficked pages on your website, which we have noticed with all our clients.

Recruitment is a relationship business; It’s people buying people and people selling people, and people developing their careers.

Ensure your about us page is filled out and that there is a picture and information about you.

You have to get over your ego on this. I don’t like having pictures taken. However, I do it because it’s part of our business. Make sure there’s a picture of you on your about us page. You explain who you are. You explain your journey. You explain why you’re a good recruiter, what your passion is, and maybe some of your values.

People like to see a face. We’re wired as human beings to look at one another’s faces. That means that people are going to want to look at your face. You will have a picture, hopefully– we’ll talk about LinkedIn profiles another time, but hopefully, you’ve got a picture of yourself on your LinkedIn profile. Make sure that that happens on your about us page as well.

Now, the next thing, and I’ve talked about this in the past, is to have a blog page, or you might want to call it an insights page. This is a dynamic page on your website, which is an easy page to add.

If you don’t have one, and many of your lovely website designers don’t always think to ask because they’re all about design. They’re not always about marketing, unfortunately.

Make sure you have a blog or insights page where you can add content. This is going to help you in so many ways. First of all, they are very easy to create. You can put blogs up there to your heart’s content. The great thing about doing this is it gets you out to a wider market.

If you were to Google our website name, you’ll notice there are multiple references to us. There are multiple pages. If you’re googling recruitment marketing, you’re googling value propositions for recruitment companies; you’re googling lead generation, we are going to come up because we have currently probably, I think, just shy of 450 pages on our website.

Having more content on your website like that will make a huge difference. Now, people are looking for insights and information about either building their careers or building the talent pipeline. They are going to go and look for value on your website, and they want to check you out, “Has this person got the expertise to help me?”

That’s where having a blog is so beneficial for you. If you’ve not got one, someone’s going to go look at another website. Yes, you might keep the clients that you currently have, but when it comes to new clients, they’re going to go and check you out first off, and this is one of the criteria that they’re looking for.

This is an uncomfortable conversation, probably for some of you to hear, but that is the truth. That’s one of the reasons why we provide content for our Superfast Circle clients; we provide lots of content for them, so they can fill their blogs up with all the value that they need.

That is really important, having that on your website. It is not going to cost a lot to switch it on, and it’s going to be pretty easy to fill it with content.

The next thing that is really useful, because we are in that knowledge age, people want value, is to have a page on your website called resources or downloads.

On that page, you can have lots of information, guides, reports, all the things that, again, are shouting out to the market that you know your stuff and that you are the recruiter that they should be working with and that you can help.

If you go to our website if you want to have a look at a template of how it works. You will notice that on our website, we’ve got several things that you can access.

Click the images, and you can go and download reports, you can go and watch a webinar of ours, you can go and watch some other videos, lots of different things that you can utilise.

The next thing that is important, and this is something that Seth Godin, the legendary marketer, always talks about, is people need to be led.

You need to give people the next step by telling them what to do.

So this is why it is important that you have a call to action on your website, and not just one, that you have multiple calls to action so that people know exactly what to do. This is another place where you want to have your telephone number, your email address.

At the end of every blog post, you’ll notice on our website; when you go and read the transcription of this post, you’ll notice at the bottom there’s always something that says, “How we can help you.”

It literally takes me seconds to write, which means it’s only going to take you seconds to write as well. I normally relate it to the post.

For instance, when this blog goes up at the bottom, it’s going to say, “How we can help you.” We’ll talk about how we, as your virtual marketing directors we support our clients to get their websites working properly.

We’ve got two people that are having new websites built at the moment. We are working and liaising with our client, and so everything is set up, so it’s going to work for them; This will probably be at the bottom of our call to action.

Imagine if you’ve got a post up about interview skills. You could talk about how you’ve got a report on interview skills, or if they want to have a conversation with one of your recruiters, then here’s a telephone number to get in contact.

It’s making the next logical step for that person; this is how a call to action works.

Task: Make sure you have lots of different call to actions on your website.

The final thing to talk about is how to capture somebody’s name and email address. Depending on the size of your organization, you’ve probably got anywhere between hundreds or thousands of people visiting your website.

Not all of them are going to pick up the phone and speak to you. Remember, we’ve talked about the buyers’ cycle before. Not all of them are at that phase of the buyers’ cycle where they think, “Do you know what? I need to change my job, or we do need to use a recruitment company to help us recruit.

However, what you want to do is grab their contact details.

One of the easy ways to do this, and we’ve talked about the downloads page before, is to direct them to go and give you their name and email address for some useful content.

People call it a lead magnet. Sometimes people call it a valuable free offer, whatever your terminology is. Some people call it an ethical bribe.

This is content you give in return for somebody’s name and email address, and then you can start to market to them over time.

Some of you listening to this podcast will be on our database and might have known us for years.

We know there are some people on our database that are never going to buy from us, but they like to listen to what we’ve got to say.

However, because we’ve got those people, it’s like the law of averages that are never going to buy.

We’ve also got some people who think; “Do you know what? I think I’m going to work without Denise and Sharon. I quite like them. I like the vibe. They obviously know this stuff, and I could do with someone giving me direction and creating content for me.”

Now if you could do the same process on your website, what a difference that would make.

Here is a ninja tip, something that works incredibly well in the B2B environment. That is having something that appears on your website when people go to leave.

It’s got a very aptly-titled name. It’s called an exit intent popup. What that means is as people go to exit, that is their intent. You’ll easily remember it now.

If somebody’s not been to your website before, then an image will pop up and say, “Before you go, download our latest report. Then you get their name and email address, and then you can start to market to them.

Google exit intent popup. There are loads available that you can buy pretty inexpensive, depending on your website. If you have a WordPress website, there are lots of WordPress plugins that will work.

If you go to our website, if you’re brand new to the podcast at the moment, it is an opportunity to watch one of our webinar master classes.

You put your name and email address in, and then you’ll be emailed by us, and we’ll give you the recording and go and watch it. You may not be ready to work with us just now. You might be just checking out what’s available, but I’ve got your name and email address in, and I can send you some really useful content. I can nurture you until you’re ready to buy, you’re ready to have that conversation.

We’ve talked a lot today about your website; you’ll notice it’s all about capturing that information from people. It’s about demonstrating your expertise, and it’s about making your probably very attractive-looking website really start working better for you.

Hint: This is the call to action I mentioned earlier in the post! As your outsourced marketing directors, we can support you to get your website delivering the brand presence and leads you want. To find out more, book a call with us here www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call

Thanks

Dense

The post Are You Missing These Key Elements on Your Recruitment Website? appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today, let’s talk about your services page. For Recruiters, we’re talking about a page for your candidates and clients to visit.

Here they can read about you and decide whether they work with you.

Regarding your services, you have candidates and clients, so you need a page for each, and they are similar in some of the key areas you need to cover.

Let’s assume that we’re talking about candidates as a first point of call, and the first thing is, on your page, you need to meet them at the conversation going on in their head.

What happens for many people is that they land on your website, check you out, and want to know.

For a candidate, they might be thinking, Should I go or should I stay? What is the best next move for my career?

At the moment, it might be can I earn more money and what the opportunities will be if I join this company.

A pre-framed paragraph that demonstrates that you understand your customers. When you do this for your candidates, you connect with their pain points. Then talk about how you help them.

For instance, if you work exclusively with candidates, if you do a career consultation, if you can represent them to other organizations they want to join, then highlight all that on your services page.

Then talk about the features of your service for candidates, and then also talk about the benefits. Offering a Career consultation is a feature; that’s something that you do for somebody.

What does that mean? What you do, a career consultation means that we help you plan and map out how your career could look in the coming months and years.

That way, you have a real focus and direction, and we can help you find the right role for you. Just classic features and benefits; make sure that you do that.

Use bullet points because people find bullet points very easy to read and use subheadings, and where you can avoid the classics of industry jargon.

That’s not going to be particularly helpful. Then, of course, you need to have a call to action. Have a link, a button, “Book a call with one of our consultants here, and we can talk to you,” there might be something else underneath that says, “Upload your current CV, and we will get back to you.”

Make sure there’s a strong call to action around that, and of course, have your telephone number there as well.

A video will work well in this situation as it improves connection.

Share the overview of the candidate pathway that you use. What happens when a candidate starts working with you? Why not share some of that, or get them to give you the name and email address and tell them you’ll send it to them?

Fact: Great customer service in the recruitment sector will make a huge difference to your relationship with candidates and if they choose to work with you.

Finally, share case studies and testimonial snippets about how you have helped candidates. We live in a review society, and people will generally read your reviews before they contact you.

When we’re talking about clients, it’s the same. You need to understand your clients. It would help if you started communicating how you help clients.

Think about the features and benefits that you use. Again, think about subheadings, and talk about your different services.

Many of you might have a contingency service, and some might be looking at retained. Whatever it is, talk about the different options.

For instance, you may offer a consultancy as a separate service.

Always explain both the features of your service and the benefits it brings.

Here, share a case study, a link to a case study page, or a soundbite or snippet from someone who has worked with you.

You can link to your case studies page, and you can link to your testimonials page, but make that page do the heavy lifting for you. Of course, you can have a situation where people can upload a job brief. I would want to talk to somebody first because you don’t want a job that nobody else can fill landing on your plate.

You want to be having a conversation and a meeting. Ensure you’ve got a button where someone can click and book a call with you there, too.

The services pages on your website are straightforward.

Make sure that you ;

Thanks

Denise

We help our clients hone their marketing copy based on our marketing services experience over the last sixteen years working in the sector.

This is all part of being a member of the Superfast Circle community. If you want to have a quick demo and conversation to work out if this is a fit and match for you, book a quick call here.

The post Recruitment Websites 101: Making The Most of Your Service Pages appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Many of our clients and potential new Superfast Circle members are updating their websites.

This a good idea because your website is your authority presence and storefront online and should be given the special attention it deserves.

It is the first place where people find you after.

This is the first time you can have a real impact with someone in a channel you own.

I want to talk to you about how to hone your website and ensure that your homepage is doing everything possible to promote you and your brand.

First of all, let’s talk about what’s the conversation that’s going on in your candidate or client’s head. We talked a bit about this with your about us page last week. If you haven’t accessed that podcast, you can find it here; accelerating your about us page.

When people land on your website, they’ve got several questions going on in their heads. The first one that might surprise you, because often, they may find you from Google, is– Who are they?

Many recruitment companies have different names; they don’t always have recruitment in their domain name.

They could be called something like Watson Smith, Kennedy and Bowman. We don’t always put who we are and what we do in our domain name.

First, when someone lands on your website, they want to know who you are. Are you a recruitment company? Then they want to see what you do.

What they mean by that is, which particular sector do you serve? Are you the type of recruiter that deals with executive roles? Do you deal with leadership or management roles, or do you deal with apprentices?

Then the conversation moves to, “How can you help me?”

That is something that not everyone communicates on the website.

Then finally, “How good are they?” and “How can I get in contact with them?”

Now, that probably sounds quite logical; you may think that you have all of those areas covered, and my experience of looking at different websites across the web is not everybody ticks all the boxes when it comes to these critical information pieces.

Let’s go through the homepage and think about some of the things you might want to be thinking about that are visible to people.

If people land on your website, the first thing is to have your telephone number within easy reach and an email where people can email you. I always think having your social media icons is good because people like to check you out online in today’s interconnected world.

It might surprise you when you look at other websites how few people have their telephone numbers visible, on the navigation bar, at the top of their website.

I am sure you have a Contact Us page or your website’s footer where you have contact details. Now, remember that many people do not have a lot of patience, and if you are not hooking somebody in, in that first third of your website pretty quickly, they’re off, and they’ll go and look elsewhere.

Don’t make it hard for people to find the information they want; obviously, most recruiters we work with want people to pick up the phone and speak to them.

Ensure you have a telephone number on your homepage in the header bar where people land. If you are doing international recruitment, ensure you have the relevant codes if someone’s dialling from abroad.

Ensure you have the best email address for them to contact you. I would also ensure you have your social media icons, depending on your location.

As people scroll down your website, you must have your value proposition. This tells people who you are, who you help, and why you and this is important to have very high up on your website.

Also, what you would ideally have, depending on the markets in which you work in exec search or not, is a job search function.

Here, you can have a button, whatever you want to do, or a search bar, but you must have something that says, “Looking to recruit? Looking for a new role?”

Make it simple, so it’s click, click, click for people, and they can go through and find the information they want.

Depending on your particular website builder, you will often only have just three lines at the side related to the responsiveness of your website.

However, it has been shown, time and time again, that having a full navigation bar helps people navigate to the area they want to access.

Not everyone is super tech-savvy, and it’s really good to have things highlighted, so people can go exactly where they want.

They can find and go to your services page, blog page, and contact us page, all easily visible on your navigation bar.

Make navigation easy for them.

Content is another thing to consider when people are on your website’s home page.

From a design rather than marketing perspective, it is in ‘vogue’ to have websites led by large designs with minimal content.

Yet people need to read who you are and what you deliver, especially when you are a micro or small SME.

A focused paragraph that speaks into the pain that your clients and candidates are going through and how you can help them.

If you want an idea of how that might look, go to our website, which is superfastrecruitment.co.uk, and scroll down the homepage.

Our text highlights exactly who we are and what we do, and if you look at our header banner, a picture of Sharon and me overlaid across is exactly who we work with.

We say, “We help micro and small SME recruitment search and staffing companies globally market their brand and increase placements by providing all the training, consulting, content, and resources they need.”

In a relatively short sentence, state what we do.

Then as you start to scroll down the page, we have what we call a hero bar.

We’re giving some social proof, which is something I’m going to come onto next. You need to have some social proof about who you are and how you help people, so some testimonials, or whom you’ve worked with, and there, we’ve got the fact that we’ve got content published on recruiting blogs, on UK Recruiter on Recruitment Grapevine, Recruitment Agency Expo.

We’re on iTunes, part of the Life Coach School and a TEAM service provider. If you imagine someone lands on a website, they’re looking for some validation about you.

If you’ve got something like that, then absolutely make sure that that is on your homepage. As you scroll down our homepage, we encourage you to download our marketing checklist.

Then, as you go further down our website, we have a big block of text. It works well. Our website ranks on the first page of Google for multiple search terms, and there’s a reason for that, it’s because we have good content, that’s keyword aligned to our market.

Then, what we talk about is our services. Now, this is where you guys need to ensure that you have your services highlighted here and the sectors you serve that need to be on your home page.

Next, have testimonials; you’ll notice we have a scrolling bar. People are looking for social proof in today’s market because they have many choices regarding which recruitment company to work with.

Next is value add content from your blog, which I hope you have; we will talk about that next week, then have some blogs at the bottom so that people can see, “Oh, some useful content here that I can access.”

People will land on your homepage, and you want them to go and click through to other site areas, but they won’t always email you or pick up the phone immediately.

That’s why it’s great to use a really useful marketing tactic as part of your strategy to build your database.

This is known as an exit intent popup.

Whether you like popups or not, the fact is they work. In a B2B environment, the type of popup that works well only appears when people leave the website.

We have one that we are changing, so I’ll tell you what it is now, but it might have changed by the time you listen to this podcast.

When you go to leave our website, if you haven’t been there before, or it’s been a while since you’ve visited the page, as you go to close the browser, up will pop an opportunity for you to download one of our popular reports.

At the moment, it’s our automation report so you can download that now; it will be something else in a couple of weeks.

Suppose you had something like that popping up on your website as people go to leave. In that case, you stand a chance of grabbing somebody’s name and email address, who then can go into either your candidate or client marketing funnel, and you can start nurturing them to start working with you.

You could put your latest salary survey or a workplace report. You could put something useful for both candidates and clients, and you could get them to tick whether they’re a candidate or client, and then they can go into a different funnel.

Your homepage needs to look good; of course, it does, and it’s the first time people come across you in a more intimate setting, so it needs to work from a marketing perspective to create more demand for your service.

When people land on your website, they must know, “What’s the next thing I need to do?”

That may be to download a report before they leave the website. It might be to grab your phone number. It might be to click through and look at the different services. It might be to register their CV or Resume, something else you can have on your homepage, or to go and visit your job board.

Make sure you’ve got multiple options on your homepage, which can help create that marketing process and move people through to the next stage of their journey as they consider working with you.

Thank

Denise

With our Superfast Circle members as their virtual marketing directors, we support them in creating their website with marketing in mind; if you want to find out how we can help you book a call with us here.

The post Recruitment Websites 101: Honing Your Home Page appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today we are starting a series about making the most of your recruitment website and beginning with your about us page.

Now, this page on your website, believe it or not, is one of the most visited pages. This page stands out when we look at the data from our client’s websites.

From our own perspective, we run four or five different websites for our own brands and businesses. On every single website that we have consistently after the homepage and after our blog, the About Us Page stands out as one that gets a huge amount of traffic.

Now why is that?

Well, that is the case, and it’s the same for everybody because we live in a connected world. People want to know who they are working with.

They want to know more about you and your brand.

They’ve landed on your homepage, and maybe not got all the information that they want, so they’re going to click About Us, and they’re going to go and look at you and check you out.

Because what they’re doing is validating in their mind who these people are and how they can help me.

Some people I know have not even got an About Us Page.

If you haven’t, hopefully, after you have listened to this podcast, you will create one.

Don’t just slap any content on it; add useful content.

I will give you four areas to consider so that you make sure that you accelerate the ability of your About Us Page to help support you and your brand.

As you do that, there’s a theme to utilize because your About Us Page isn’t about you.

You don’t need to talk about your personal life or what football team you support.

What you want to make your About Us Page relate to is about you and your brand and how that can help your ideal client or candidate avatar.

Always remember that every page on your website is there to demonstrate to people how you can help them.

Let’s share these four areas.

Talk about who you are, maybe, how long you’ve been in business, why you started the brand, and why you got into recruitment in the first place.

You could use a timeline.

Many of you I know who listen to this particular podcast have been around for a few years, and you’ve just started getting into marketing.

How about talking to people about your journey and story over the last few years?

I know some people that listen to us, and many of our clients have been in business for ten, twenty and one clients that have been in business for over thirty years.

Here you can talk about your passion for recruitment and how you love ensuring people are in the right role with the right company.

Secondly, the second thing you want to cover is what makes you and your brand unique. I’ve alluded that you might have been around a long time. Maybe you have sector expertise in the marketplace that you’re serving. I don’t know; perhaps you used to be an accountant, maybe you used to be an engineer, perhaps you used to be a pharmaceutical sales rep, whatever it was, and you thought, “Hang on a minute here, recruitment isn’t done well. I could do this better.”

This is something that will make you stand out.

How about how many people you’ve placed, the type of service you deliver, and how you consistently support people?

You can discuss many things here about you, your brand, and what makes you unique.

Third, let’s talk about your brand values and beliefs. We may have touched on these in a couple of the other sections that I’ve just mentioned, but really, people want to know about you, what you stand for, and what the experience of working with you will be like.

Make sure that people know about your strategy, the processes you will use, how you support candidates and clients, how fast you can work, and the speed you can deliver.

Finally, you want to consider why customers should choose you. Here you can talk about the number of candidates you’ve placed and the number of clients you’ve helped.

You can also put some of your testimonial snippets here, and you can talk about maybe the guarantee you have with your service.

Communicate these important pieces because your candidate and client’s brain is looking for this.

They are looking for unconscious ticks in their mind.

Are they any good?

What experience do they have?

Ah, they’ve got real experience of the role I want to gain next and about my career.

We have been working with our recruitment clients for over fifteen years, helping them develop their marketing and websites to attract the candidates and clients they want. This is part of our role as your outsourced marketing director as a Superfast Circle member; if you want to learn more, book a call with us here.

Thanks,

Denise

The post Recruitment Websites 101: Accelerating The Impact Of Your About Us Page appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

(This is a direct transcription; please excuse any typing mistakes.)

This blog post and podcast were stimulated by a conversation I had with Vanessa who is a recruitment business owner that is in the delightful position of updating her website, and she wants to write new copy for the various pages.

We had a conversation over email about some of the things she needs to be thinking about and it got me thinking that many people are currently updating their website.

What happens when someone lands on your website? Hopefully, they are going to be engaged with you, and they are going to read what you have written that convinces them to take it one stage further. That is why it is important to have some fundamental principles on how you write website copy for your recruitment website.

There are 7 key principles that I want to cover today:

This is really important. This came up a few days ago when I was running a training session for a client of ours who had some recruitment business owners present at an event she was running. We talked in depth about knowing your target audience. This audience is often called your avatar, your persona and these are the ideal people you want to attract to work with you as a recruitment company, and they could be candidates, and it could be clients.

You are probably thinking, “Well, of course, I know what my service offering is.” But you need to be able to understand that and to explain it to people. People are going to land on your website, and they haven’t got a lot of time. They will be flicking through different pages, so they need to know specifically what it is that you do and how you could help them.

In other words, you need to make sure your website copywriting is benefit rich. What does that mean for them? Let’s say you have a CV-to-interview ratio of 3:2 which are great figures, what does that actually mean?

It means for a client that depending on how many CVs/Resumes they see, they know that they will interview a very high percentage of them.

If you are a candidate, you’re going to help them with their CV. They also know that if you put them forward to a dream employer for them, there’s a fair chance that they are going to get an interview which you can help them with as well.

So it’s really understanding what your service offering is and what the benefit of that is for your clients and for your candidates. You need to communicate that. Don’t leave it to chance as many people do. Make sure you make it very specific.

What makes you stand out? What specifically is it that you do for your clients and candidates which is slightly different from other recruitment companies?

I have a good friend that wants to move jobs, so if anyone is an arts recruiter (think national gallery management roles), then please get in contact with me because I have a friend in mind, and I am trying to find an arts recruiter online. It’s been quite an experience ‘trying’ to find a recruiter online.  Working out from the websites I have seen exactly who the recruiting service is for is a challenge. #vagueandunclear.

That’s where having a great value proposition works. People land on your website; they know who you are and what you do.

If you are stuck, have a look at our home page here on our website. We are specific on exactly what we do. When you land on our website, you know that we provide marketing consulting and Superfast Circle; That’s what we do.

It’s clear and transparent; then, people can make a decision.

What does that mean? That means writing about the benefits people will have by using your service, not just the features. Cast your mind back to your original recruiter training. You’ll remember all about features, advantages and benefits. We might even do a podcast on this as for people over the next few weeks. It’s thinking about the fact that you talk to people about the benefits of some of the different features of your service.

Let’s just use something random here – If you are buying a car, to give a great example, we have a 4X4 car because we have a dog, and the fact that it has a big boot is a feature. The advantage and benefit for me is it has a large boot, and I can get a dog crate into it. If in doubt, think about the phrase ‘which means that’. “Denise, this Q7 has a large boot……which means that……………you can easily fit a large dog crate inside”.

Consider the benefits; what do your candidates and clients want from your service?

I am a copywriter who writes emails and does all sorts of things. I love writing; however, over time, I have learned that short sentences, phrases and words land better with people. Why is that? Because people have a short attention span these days. They are going to land on your web page, and they are going to have a very quick scan of what you have written. They are likely doing this now on a tablet or on a mobile phone.

Imagine this is a hot candidate you would love to bring into the fold, to be a candidate you can place. They might be looking at your website as they go home on the tube or during their lunch hour. They need to be able to read what you have to say quickly. One of the best ways to do that is through short sentences and short words, making it punchy.

People forget this. Often you will see people so desperate to cram everything in that they have large blocks of texts that people read, which, as we mentioned, no longer goes down well as it’s much harder to read and pick out the salient points. So the thing to think about is having bold, strong headlines that pull people through the copy.

For instance, it could be, “Are you a CRM Manager that is looking for a new challenge?” That could be a bold headline that will help to pull people through the copy. If someone is looking for a new challenge, they will continue to read.

Make sure you have bullet points and subheadings.

Lots of people forget to do this on their website. But at the end of the day, you need to have a call to action for people who have landed on that page. Now whether that is to download a free report that you have, pick up the phone, send an email or search on your job board to find out what vacancies are available, people need to be led.

This may sound surprising, but people do need to be led. Tell them what you want them to do. And put this at the end of your website copy.

I am a great believer that people can write their own website copy.

Thanks

Denise

What if you had access to two virtual marketing directors experienced in working with the recruitment sector with a track record of achieving consistent results? You can. If you want to find out how we can help, book a call with us here.

The post The 7 Basic Rules Of Website Copywriting appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

(This is a direct transcription please excuse any typing mistakes.)

One of the latest articles on Google’s Webmaster Blog is about search and how this is going to change drastically in April 2015. It is all around mobile and if you don’t have a mobile friendly website, or a website that can be accessed from different devices, watch out because you could drop off the face of Google.

Today’s topic is about search marketing and mobile friendly websites and how Google is finally going to do something about it when it comes to search engine rankings.

Is your website responsive In other words, can people view the content of your website whether they are on a mobile device, a tablet or a PC?

Why? Because on April 21st, 2015 there will be changes.

If you have a look on the Google Webmaster’s Central Blog you’ll see that starting April 21st and I quote verbatim:

“Starting April 21st, we will be expanding our use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant, (when Google uses that word it usually is) significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easy to get relevant high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

Basically that means that if you have a website that people can’t see very well then you may struggle with your search engine rankings. That is particularly important for websites that have been around a long time, that have got good rankings then that could be a major thing for you.

There is worldwide population of 6.8 Billion, 4 Billion of them have a mobile phone and they use it consistently. A fascinating piece of information for you – 50% of people go on multiple devices at the same time at least 2 or 3 times a week.

We’ve all done this haven’t we? We sit and watch TV and something comes on – I remember a while ago I was watching Queen and they have new guy called Adam Lambert and he’s all the rage and I really like Queen and I thought ‘Where are they on?’ So I was watching the program I think it was New Year’s Eve or something like that. So then I took the tablet out and started looking how I can get a ticket to see them.

If you think of your own behavior, it is something that you do a lot. Now imagine that your candidates and your clients are doing that as well. I think depending on the age group that you serve, then we are all on mobile devices and we access information and we search.

So Google wants to give the user the best possible experience that it can. So what it’s now going to start doing is to penalise you in your search engine rankings. It doesn’t say that but what it’s going to do is it is going to pre-select for its users and people that have a mobile friendly and responsive websites.

What’s going to make a good mobile responsive website? Well, Google will tell you what makes a responsive website – obviously one that downsizes depending on the device that you are looking at.

There’s about 4 or 5 different things you want to think about. Let’s just go through them in order.

Make it nice and seamless so people know what they are doing. Make it logical where they are going. So if you’ve got your candidates section or your clients section, you’ve got your job board and your vacancies and your blog so people can go there and find out what they are looking for.

Another thing is around buttons. Make the buttons friendly, bigger so guys with bigger hands can click through. Make sure the buttons are friendly for people to use.

Something else I always suggest when coaching people around blog posts is to make sure that you space out content– so you notice all our blog posts are spaced out quite well because the last thing you want is this thing bunching up on the website and people can’t read them. And the other thing you can look at and your web developers would be able to give some advice on this, is maybe a click to call. So there’s an ability to do that as well from your web developer.

So April 2015 will be a landmark month and it would be very interesting to see how that affects people because many people have switched over.

We’ve been suggesting our viewers and listeners get a mobile friendly website. I think we’ve been talking about this to our clients for 3 years and people are now starting to realize that this is going to be so important particularly if people are searching for you online which of course they will be. People are looking for recruitment companies as the market is getting more buoyant. You need to stand a sporting chance of getting found. One of the great ways of doing this from a search engine perspective nowadays is get yourself a responsive website.

So this is Denise, in summary – April, big month for search and make sure you that rise to the top rather than sink to the bottom. Speak soon!

Click here to view the Google Wemaster’s Central Blog.

P.S. Do you need help with creating content for your responsive websites? To find out how we can help, fill out the contact form here and add the word content in the title and we will get in touch.

This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+

To accelerate your marketing at speed, you need to know your starting point and be clear on what good marketing looks like.

That is why we have designed a complimentary Marketing Audit Checklist that you can download here.

As an ambitious recruitment organisation, THE marketing strategy to master is email marketing. It will consistently deliver both candidates and clients.

In a special complimentary training Webinar,  we give you the template for writing emails we use for our clients and the exact 4 campaigns that are working now.

The post Why Your Website Might Disappear From Google On April 21st appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Hi there listeners! Let’s talk about inbound marketing for recruiters in 2015.

Obviously inbound marketing is a very trendy jargon word but what we are looking at here is how we attract people towards us rather than have to pick up that phone and do the cold calling that many of us hate. Personally I’m quite cool with it because I just love talking so maybe there’s something a bit different about me but as a general rule of thumb, people say “How can we pull people into our organisation rather than having to push out people?” These are some of the things that we wanted to talk about. There might be some different things here that we are going to mention as well.

First thing is brand dominance. We all buy brands that we know, like and trust. We are cycling towards the end of the year and we are having a group of people come up and stay so therefore we suddenly decided we need to re-decorate and we need to get some nice things in the lounge. What does that involve? It involves buying things.

So we know we need some lights and various other things, so what do we do? We know we’re going to get them from Marks’ or we’re going to get them from John Lewis or something like that because we know it is a reliable brand we can trust. They market themselves very well. They are front of mind for us. Imagine that is the sort of brand presence that you want for your recruitment organization and you can get it.

I’ll never forget when I worked in the pharmaceutical sales industry and there were certain well-known brands when it came to recruitment that people always contacted if they wanted a new job in the industry. I won’t mention names here but there were some really big players and people would always contact those individuals. It’s all about brand dominance and you can do that through a number of areas.

We are going to just very quickly talk about websites. You need a good looking website. It’s your shop front. It’s your John Lewis wonderful window dressing. It is what will entice people into your brand. It starts the engagement piece.

You’ve got to have a decent website and one of the good things nowadays is that you don’t have to pay a fortune either. You can get a good looking website for probably half the price that you used to years ago. So that’s another element which I won’t go into in this podcast but basically you need a good looking website, you need something that communicates your brand with some good copy on it and you need it to be responsive so you need to be able to access it form any single device that they may have.

So we’ve talked about brand dominance. We’ve talked about your website. Now let’s talk about Content marketing – which is quite important. Why? Because it works. It’s about positioning you as an authority. I’m not going to talk too much about that but you can look at our website on some great blog posts on content marketing and how that works. It positions you as an authority and it will bring leads into your business. Content marketing can be anything from videos, a podcast like this, text – all those types of things will bring you that authority status.

Obviously for recruiters, we’re talking social media and we’re talking specifically LinkedIn. Depending on what sector you are working in, LinkedIn is vital for your business. It’s where a lot of people hang out. Some recent LinkedIn survey data talked about how the majority of passive candidates still use social networks or are using social networks increasingly to look for their next job.

So what other channels can we look at when it comes to inbound marketing? Here’s something a bit different for you and that’s having a referral program. People ask “Well, how does that work as inbound marketing Denise?” Well, it does because you can set it and forget it. If you have a system and a process, and you know “Well, okay, that this is what I need to set up… “

We have one fantastic client that we work with that uses this really well. At certain times of the year they run a referral program. They have some outrageously fantastic prizes that they give away, but you don’t have to do it that way. If it’s always promoted in your email footer, if it’s always promoted in your blog post, if it’s constantly mentioned on the back of your business card, if you drive people through social media, then that referral program is always there.

If you make sure that when people answer the phone it is something that is mentioned, that will start to bear fruit all the time and that to me is an inbound strategy because it is a set it and forget it strategy that you put in place that is always there. People know Smith Recruitment has a fantastic referral scheme and I know I can get my M&S vouchers or I can get my Apple vouchers if I refer people to them. Referral programs is something that’s really important.

We talked about social media. Twitter can be great depending on what sector you are in. One of the things I always say to people is the thing about Twitter is a lot of journalists hang out on Twitter. So if you are in the recruitment sector and you comment on different things you can be a bit outrageous sometimes, you might attract the PR type of person to come along and ask you to give a comment on something. One of our clients ended up on local through it so it is well worth looking at that as well.

Paid advertising works. Paid advertising could be anything. That could be your advertising on job boards, it could be advertising on a deed. It could be advertising on whatever way you want to do it, through LinkedIn, through pay per click, or a new one which I think will be a big thing in 2015 is Facebook advertising. So watch out, I’m going to talk more about that next year. That’s important and obviously LinkedIn advertising as well. You can do the pay per click ads within LinkedIn.

The other thing are white papers. We do really well with white papers. White paper is some content put into a PDF or something like that, that you send to someone who brands you as an authority. People go and download it. We have our ‘5 Strategies’ series reports. People get to consume that information and what’s great is they are consuming information because they are giving you their email address. Which means they’ve raised their hand and said “I’m interested” and then you can start to market to them over time which brings me on to the next one which is email marketing.

No matter what anybody tells you, email marketing is huge. It is a great inbound strategy. You can set up your campaigns. They could be sent out on auto pilot so that you don’t have to worry. Or you can outsource it. We do email marketing for people. We actually write campaigns for people but you can do it yourself. We also teach people how to do that.

So imagine you’ve written out a long campaign. It is all in your auto responder series. We’re going to talk more about that next year and that can be a great way to bring in inbound leads. Suddenly people are getting an experience of you all the time? That’s what inbound marketing is all about.

So we’ve talked about brand dominance, content marketing, LinkedIn, white papers and email marketing. One of the other things that I wanted to mention is webinars. Webinars are relatively new for the recruitment sector but imagine running a webinar. You can actually automate webinars as well. You can have webinar recordings so you’ve got a great way to do content.

Imagine if you had a webinar and people came along to your website and they knew they could opt into a monthly webinar. Literally it could be a simple sort of content, it could be on interview skills. It could be on anything at all. Imagine branding yourself as the recruiter of choice by doing something like that?

So this is Denise just running through the infographic that you will have seen on ‘Inbound Marketing For Recruiters in 2015’ and this is based on our assessment of working with clients over the last 12 months and what’s working for them. So very top line, we’re giving you those 10 key areas you need to be thinking about, having a strategy around for your inbound marketing in 2015. So this is Denise saying bye for now!

This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+

To accelerate your marketing at speed, you need to know your starting point and be clear on what good marketing looks like.

That is why we have designed a complimentary Marketing Audit Checklist that you can download here.

As an ambitious recruitment organisation, THE marketing strategy to master is email marketing. It will consistently deliver both candidates and clients.

In a special complimentary training Webinar,  we give you the template for writing emails we use for our clients and the exact 4 campaigns that are working now.

The post Inbound Marketing For Recruiters In 2015 [Infographic] appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Infographics are a popular way to promote your content and stand out in a busy recruiting marketplace. We provide infographics as part of our content marketing packages. Interested? Email us here.

(This is a direct transcription please excuse any Typo’s.)

Hi there listeners! This is Denise from Super fast Recruitment and today I am talking about an infographic. If you are on iTunes head over to www.superfastrecruitment/blog and just use the search bar and search for infographics. You will find a very attractive looking infographic on the 10 Elements of a Successful Looking Website.

A lot has changed in the last couple of years. We are often asked – What does my website look like? Is it good for marketing? Will I make more placements from it? So I thought it was time to give the key stab points to people of what you should be looking at with regards to your website.

In no particular order, I am going through these ones in turn. There are 10 key elements that I would suggest that you need to focus on.

With today’s environment, people are viewing things on their iPads and smartphones. What a responsive website basically means is that it will resize according to what device it is being viewed on. I have an iPad that I use all the time. I also have an iPhone. If I am using one of those devices, the website will resize.

Just imagine that you have a candidate looking in their lunch hour for a job, then you’ve got to make sure they can view you. If you don’t have a responsive website, they are likely to go off to the next recruiter.

Brand and imagery is important because no matter what we say, we are all drawn to things that look good. If you’ve got a nice good looking website that represents your brand and the value that you can give, you will be more successful.

There’s no point having a shoddy little website these days. It’s just not going to cut it anymore. The environment is far too competitive that you need to invest in a good looking website. The beauty of that nowadays is that you don’t have to pay a fortune. You can have a good looking website that’s going to do what you need it to do.

What is it that you do for your market? How do you do it? Why should the client be working with you? There’s a lot on our website about value propositions. So go and have a look at that if you’re stuck at how exactly it all works.

Depending on your market, some markets are quite competitive. For instance, ours is very competitive. We do have testimonials on our website. We also have case studies in the back end that we will share to people if they want to know about us.

You can imagine a lot of recruiters are quite competitive. They don’t want people to know that we are working with them and we’re the marketing company that’s helping them attract more candidates and clients. It’s just the way that it is but that might not be the same for you.

Social proof is a big element when it comes to people making decisions so make sure that you have some form of social proof.

Google loves content. In one of the other podcasts I talked about the new way to use keywords and you can use this on your content in your blog.

Whoever is reading that page should know what to do next. That could be your telephone number,’ click here’, ‘download this free report’, ‘pick up the phone and talk to us’, ‘have a free consultation.’ Whatever that might be, make sure you have a call to action

An ethical bribe could be a free report or white paper. If you land on our website, you’ll notice that in various strategic places, you can sign up for our 5 strategies report which is really useful. It tells you everything you need to do to start marketing your recruitment company successfully and that is really easy to do.

What happens of course is with that ethical bribe, it’s an influencing strategy known as reciprocity and that means ‘You give me something, I give you something.’ That works really well so that’s something in 2015 you need to be thinking about. What’s my ethical bribe for my clients and my candidates?

Depending on whether you are a head hunter or search consultant or whatever you want to call yourself, then you may or may not decide to advertise jobs. However, people go online looking at job boards for positions and they will also look on your website so you have to make sure you have your jobs displayed that people can view and then have a process in place where they can contact you.

You are listening to this podcast. You may be looking at an infographic. You will see videos of Sharon or occasionally videos of me on the website. You will also see text. We are using multiple modalities because people respond to different things whether that be reading something, watching something or listening to it, it’s all the way that our senses work.

If you can include more multimedia on your website, I guarantee you will stand out from other recruiters.

One of the ways to get found is to have good content. Make sure that your web pages are optimised and that when you are putting great content on your website, you’re sharing it around all the different social media channels. You’re sharing it on Linked In so people can come along and find you.

So this is Denise and that’s all about the 10 Elements of a Successful Recruitment Website when it comes to marketing context and hopefully you’ll enjoy the infographic as well.

This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+

To accelerate your marketing at speed, you need to know your starting point and be clear on what good marketing looks like.

That is why we have designed a complimentary Marketing Audit Checklist that you can download here.

As an ambitious recruitment organisation, THE marketing strategy to master is email marketing. It will consistently deliver both candidates and clients.

In a special complimentary training Webinar,  we give you the template for writing emails we use for our clients and the exact 4 campaigns that are working now.

The post 10 Elements Of A Successful Recruitment Website [Infographic] appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.