When you hear the name Tesla, you think of Elon Musk. Apple is synonymous with Steve Jobs and Microsoft with Bill Gates.

Yes, these leaders are all billionaires and have run some of the most famous companies in the world. But they’ve also succeeded in building strong, recognisable personal brands.

As a start-up recruitment agency, it can be tempting to go all in with a flashy new corporate brand and website. After all, you want to launch into the market with a bang, right?

But actually, it’s worth taking your time and making it all about you for the first few years. At the end of the day, you’ve created your current network based on your good name – so use it!

Investing in your personal brand ­ that is, creating content under your name rather than your business ­ not only makes you more visible online. It can also build trust, confidence and an amplified network that you can transfer to your corporate brand down the track.

In our latest webinar, Managing Director Amber Loach provides fast and simple personal branding tips to help start-up recruitment agencies on their marketing journey.

Take a read through the summary below or view the full session now.

Personal Branding

Before you start putting your energy into a marketing strategy for your business, it’s worthwhile investing in your personal brand.

This frees you up to focus on billing and business development activity for the first few years, while still ensuring you remain front of mind with current and prospective candidates and clients.

Some of the different strategies for boosting your personal brand include:

Optimising your LinkedIn profile

• Clear headings, updated contact details, keywords

Sharing regular and engaging content

• Ensure content is interesting and relevant to your target audience
• Focus on consistency ­ try to post a couple of times a week
• Post a mix of content from job ads and polls to personal highlights and opinions on industry trends

Finding your voice

• Infuse content with your personality and don’t be afraid to be controversial
• Use colloquial language
• Don’t forget emojis and hashtags

As a small recruitment agency, your priority for the first several years should be leveraging the connections and network you’ve built over the course of your career. That’s why we recommend for you to initially focus 80% on your personal brand and 20% on your company brand.

Looking to the Future

Once you’ve grown your team to around four or five recruiters, we believe it’s time to switch the focus to your company brand. You now have enough support to deliver on incoming enquiries, likely the finances to invest in it properly and have sufficient time to dedicate to marketing activity.

There are a number of marketing avenues for start-up recruitment agencies to explore, all dependent on your business goals. For example, are you looking to grow your headcount in the next two to five years or increase your number of candidate leads? Perhaps you want to maintain the number of clients on your books but want to focus on cementing those relationships, or you might be looking to expand an account within a business.

Some of the marketing tools to consider are:

Search Engine Optimisation

• Improves your rankings on Google search results organically
• Long-term game ­ expects to see results after months, not days
• Big opportunity for a smaller, niche agency

Google Ads

• Cost Per Click basis
• Google will determine the cost of the click based on how relevant and interesting your ad is
• Better ROI when used to attract clients compared to candidates

Social Paid Ads

• LinkedIn – Cost Per Click, can be very specific, and good for targeting passive candidates and clients
• Facebook / Snapchat / Instagram – better for recruiting low-skill roles such as customer service or drivers

Email Marketing

• Need a good number of people in your existing CRM
• Expect a 30-35% open rate
• More important to consider conversion rate / click through

Automation

• Email content that goes out to clients and candidates automatically at key trigger points
• Very useful in Contracting space – for example, when a candidate is coming to the end of a contract

Marketing Strategy for Start Ups

Before getting started with any of these channels, it’s important to create a marketing strategy and activity calendar for your start up recruitment agency. When working with our clients, we run exploratory strategy sessions that cover a range of different topics from target audience personas to value propositions.

This is just a glimpse of what was covered in the webinar about marketing for start-up recruitment agencies – we encourage you to click below and view the recording and presentation slides to get a full picture of recruitment marketing for start-ups.

If you have any questions regarding the webinar or would like to chat more about how Prominence can help with marketing for a start-up recruitment agency, please get in touch with Prominence Recruitment Marketing.