Staffing agencies need a two-pronged approach to marketing: one part to attract clients, and one to attract candidates. To be successful, both parts should be tailored to the position, approach, and scale of the staffing agency; otherwise, any marketing efforts will be scattergun. 

This article details the key elements for inclusion in your marketing strategy and helps prioritize which to action first to grow your business.

What is a staffing agency marketing strategy?

A staffing agency marketing strategy is a plan designed to attract clients and candidates. A full strategy will include attention to establishing the agency’s brand, using digital and content marketing, using social media, and an approach to proactive outreach: all to increase the staffing agency’s growth and revenue. That said, considering these elements doesn’t mean every one belongs in your strategy or deserves equal weight. Focused strategies tailored to the agency are most effective, so consider:

• What are the agency’s goals?

• What is the timeframe you want to see results by?

• Where is the agency working geographically?

• Who is the primary audience you want to reach?

• What is the mix of services the agency offers?

Thinking through these questions will help you prioritize and design the elements of your marketing strategy, rather than trying to do everything and hoping something sticks.

Define your niche and value proposition

Focus and clarity are everything when it comes to marketing your staffing agency in a crowded market. Having a clear understanding of what your agency does best and who it serves means you can target your marketing efforts. This requires defining your target industries and client segments, and establishing the staffing models you offer. For example, you might target IT for startups and SMEs in the US, offering fractional positions and staff augmentation.

Research your market and client ideals

Defining your niche shouldn’t be about what feels comfortable; it should be based on research identifying the areas where you can reliably win and make a profit. To research the market, identify your key competitors and study what they’re doing, and look for analysis of market trends. This can identify areas that might currently be under- or over-served, or where change or growth could be on the horizon with investments or acquisitions. It’s also worth engaging closely with existing and potential clients to understand their pain points. For example, they might have identified sluggish time-to-hire when tracking their recruitment KPIs, or be struggling to hire in a specific location, or for specialist, high-level roles. Pulling all of this information together allows you to assess the best segment in which to target your services. 

Signals that mean a segment is worth pursuing include: strong and/or growing demand, persistent hiring problems, clients that need repeat hiring and have reliable budgets for it, and limited competition. After choosing the segment, you can develop an ideal client profile so you have a clear statement of the type of company most valuable and most likely to use your staffing agency to guide your marketing strategy.

Why staffing marketing underperforms

The most common reasons staffing marketing underperforms aren’t due to the choice of approach. Instead, underperformance tends to stem from weak targeting, overly generic outreach, and poor follow-through.

Targeting and channel focus

If you’ve decided your niche is large-scale private care providers in the healthcare sector who need temporary workers, it would be a mistake to contact all healthcare companies and buy ads across multiple platforms. This generalized approach would only dilute your budget and response rate. Better to only target companies of the right size that you know need temporary workers, and focus your advertising budget on key platforms related to the type of workers you are interested in, such as Doximity for physicians.

Experience and execution gaps

If you've managed to reach the right audience with your targeting and channel focus, it may be that underperformance is down to issues with your interactions with them. Key points to check include:

• Landing page: Your landing page should have a relevant and clear offer, be professional in tone, and have clear actions for potential clients to take. 

• Mobile optimization: Your website needs to be friction-free on mobile devices, as this is how most people will access it. Slow loading or strange formatting is off-putting and can make potential clients leave without making contact.

• Broken links: If your campaign sends people to non-existent pages or forms that don’t work, it reduces how likely people are to stay and looks unprofessional. 

• Overly generic cold emails: You should send cold emails tailored with information you know about the client/candidate and their needs; otherwise, there's no reason for them to respond. You can find this kind of information via their website or LinkedIn profile.

• Unsegmented automation: If you send emails out to everyone, it’s impossible for the content not to seem generic and impersonal, leading in turn to poor response rates.

Marketing channels that drive clients and candidates

As mentioned earlier, marketing channels for a staffing agency are best thought of in two strands: one for clients and one for candidates. In each case, pick your channels to align with who you want to reach, their needs, and how quickly you want results. In the following sections, we’ll look at organic channels and those owned by the agency, and outbound channels and those you pay for.  

Owned and organic channels

Owned and organic channels are the ones an agency can build over time and control. Important channels to consider in this category are:

• Website and SEO: You should have pages on your website targeting both clients and candidates so they get an individualised and professional impression. Your SEO is a valuable source of inbound traffic as it helps employers and candidates find you via online searches.

• Content you produce: This might include guides or blog posts on hiring advice, or reports on job markets and other areas of interest.

• Social media accounts: Your company’s social media accounts can be used to build the visibility and credibility of your business, as well as help with relationship building with clients or talent.

• Email newsletters: Sending out regular newsletters can help maintain connection with potential and existing clients and talent, and can also contribute to building your credibility if they have useful content and insights.

• Directories: Making sure your business is listed in directories helps establish its visibility where people usually look for staffing firms.

Tailoring the owned and organic channels you use, and the way you use them, to the specific clients and candidates you want to work with, will help you build inbound demand. However, this approach has to be built over time, rather than being a quick fix.

Paid, outbound, and relationship channels

If you want to boost your results in the shorter term while you develop your use of owned and organic channels, there are other options to include in your marketing strategy. Some of the best ways to help clients and candidates find you include:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: PPC is a way to make your company visible in places you know people will be searching. For example, you could set this up to target clients and potential talent when they search for terms relevant to your business using Google Ads.

• Social media advertising: This is a good way to target specific audiences via relevant platforms. For example, you can use LinkedIn advertising to reach the type of job hunters you need to source.

• Cold outreach: Cold outreach can work for developing potential clients or candidates, but it has to be done well to be impactful. Doing prior research to understand a client’s needs or a candidate’s career trajectory means you can approach them in a way that seems relevant and personal, and is much more likely to be successful.

• Account-based marketing (ABM): ABM means focusing your efforts to grow your client base on a limited number of high-value companies. Like doing effective cold outreach, ABM requires careful research to understand who works at the companies you’re interested in, and what they need and care about, before you develop your approach.

• Events: You can use events such as job fairs or webinars to develop relationships with potential clients or candidates. To run an effective webinar, first research the formats and topics that would be of interest to your targets.

• Engaging niche communities: Making an effort to engage with relevant professional or industry groups can be helpful in forging connections and gaining leads or candidates. 

• Referrals: Last, but not least, referrals from existing relationships can be a good way to grow your business that works with clients and candidates. To take advantage of this requires communicating your offer clearly to people you're already connected to, and you can also consider developing a referral program offering incentives.

Build separate funnels for clients and candidates

When designing your marketing plan, you have to develop distinct funnels for clients and candidates. You effectively have two audiences, and so should plan journeys appropriate to each, as the conversion path for a candidate job-hunting and a client looking for staffing solutions is different.

Client funnel

An effective client funnel moves a prospect from awareness to a sales inquiry you can convert. This might look like a healthcare provider seeing your LinkedIn content or advertisement, visiting your staffing page, reading about your temporary staffing service that includes testimonials or case studies, and then requesting a consultation. Your marketing needs to emphasize your expertise, speed, and results, backed up by evidence.

Candidate funnel

Your candidate funnel takes someone from spotting an opportunity to applying and becoming an active candidate. This might involve a nurse seeing a temporary role on a job board, reading the description, checking the agency via its website, including a relevant employee spotlight, inquiring and receiving information about the role, applying for the role, undergoing screening and interview, and then being matched with a position. If you want to attract top talent, your marketing needs to focus on the benefits of the opportunity, credibility of the source, and the ease of applying.

How to measure ROI and improve performance

Blog shares and follower counts feel good, but KPIs tied to business outcomes tell you far more about your marketing ROI. Taking a robust approach to measuring your ROI also puts you in a good position to evolve and improve your performance.

Tracking and attribution setup

Critical to measuring your marketing ROI accurately is tracking where leads and candidates have come from, so you need to set up systems that gather this information. The following are common modes of tracking:

• Google Analytics: Shows you how people interact with your website, such as which elements are working and make people stay longer.

• Google Tag Manager: Lets you add and manage tracking tags on your website; for example, you could record the action someone takes after visiting your staffing page.

• UTMs: These add campaign information to URLs so you can identify where traffic comes from, for example, if it stems from a paid-for ad or your email newsletter.

• Hidden form fields: These capture the source information when someone submits a form without them being aware of it. For example, a job seeker might fill in an inquiry form on your website with their name, company, and email, but it also captures that they found the form because they clicked on a specific LinkedIn ad.

• ATS or CRM integration: When you set up tracking and attribution, it should be feeding into your applicant tracking and relationship management systems. This means you can follow the source to see how it creates leads, clients, and placements.

Optimization and review cadence

The point of careful tracking is to gain information to help your decision-making and improve your marketing. After putting your strategy into action, you want to work out what your conversion rates are and the quality of your engagement. You should also work out your client retention rate. To get a more detailed understanding of what is and isn’t working from the perspective of customers, you can also try carrying out a survey of clients or candidates you have worked with. It’s a good idea to set up a regular review timetable for your marketing, for example on a monthly and quarterly basis, so you can identify and adjust what is and isn’t showing results.

Turn your marketing strategy into a plan

You’ve already made the strategic decisions once you’ve developed your marketing strategy, but to action it you need to turn it into a marketing plan. To work your strategy up into a plan, first identify its priorities and give each one actions with specific ownership. You should also plan points in time when these will be assessed and reviewed.

Prioritize tactics and workflow

Start by mapping your strategy onto concrete pieces of work: this means naming specific bits of content, website updates, SEO tasks, paid advertising and outreach, and planning it into a sequence for maximum impact.

Use systems and resources to execute

To be as efficient as possible, you should establish your plan so it's repeatable, rather than relying on someone to do it manually. For example, this could look like setting up automation rules so that when a new lead form is submitted, a CRM record is created, its source is captured, the relevant staff member is notified, and a follow-up task is created to get in touch with the lead. You can set up dashboards so you can quickly see leads or placements pending or active. An application tracking system (ATS) is an essential part of the recruiting software you need to manage the candidate side of a staffing agency. An ATS workflow can help you manage candidates smoothly when you’re working at volume. All of these systems mean you’re saving time and resources for decision-making and interpersonal tasks.

Fill the candidate side with Juicebox

Well-designed marketing will bring appropriate candidates that are already job-hunting to your agency. However, if you’re working on harder-to-fill roles that are niche or high-level, you need outbound sourcing to keep your pipeline flowing. Juicebox is perfect for finding high-quality passive as well as active candidates, as its search function gives you access to a pool of over 800 million profiles. Juicebox’s plain-language search uses AI to turn your criteria into a carefully matched shortlist with up-to-date contact details, and it can save you more time by managing initial outreach to those you’re interested in. 

FAQs

What are some marketing ideas for staffing agencies?

Identify the niche in the market that your staffing agency addresses and tailor your marketing towards this. You can use a mix of channels including those you have ownership of (such as your website and SEO, your social media accounts, and content you develop), as well as those you pay for and outbound (such as PPC and social media advertising, ABM, cold outreach, and events). Within your specific niche, you should market distinctly to clients and candidates, and tailor each to the needs of the audience, your goals, and your timeframe.

How do staffing agencies market to both clients and candidates?

Staffing agencies market to clients and candidates by treating each group as a specific audience with a distinct conversion path. Marketing to clients needs to focus on the agency’s expertise, speed, and results, backed up by evidence. Marketing to candidates should focus on the benefits of the opportunity, the credibility of the agency, and the ease of applying.

Which marketing channels work best for staffing agencies?

A range of marketing channels can be useful for staffing agencies, and you should select a mix of organic and paid channels, according to your target market (for example, your website content and SEO, social media, and paid ads). While doing this, focus on a few highly relevant channels for your audience, rather than spreading your time and budget too widely.

How do you measure staffing marketing ROI?

You can measure the performance of marketing spending by tracking the source of leads and candidates, and the conversion of these into meetings, placements, and revenue. Use Google Analytics and Tags, UTMs, hidden form fields, and integration with your ATS or CRM to identify the value of each marketing channel and adjust your strategy over time so you're focusing your budget on what is working.