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• Social-media advertising—running adverts on social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn. It works like pay-per-click advertising, but response rates are really low, click costs are much higher, and getting a decent return is pretty hard. But you can get lots of impressions for little cost, so if this is where your target market exists then it’s a great tactic for building brand awareness. • Group buying/social commerce—this involves offering a short-term deal that members of the group-buying website can take up. Most deals last for just 24 hours, and can have a huge response. If you’ve not seen it in action, sign up to
Groupon.co.uk or
LivingSocial.com, or for b-to-b, check out
Huddlebuy.co.uk. • Advertising—this is really a catch-all term for the various more-traditional forms of online advertising such as banners agreed directly with the site owner or buying space in other people’s email campaigns. From some forms of advertising you will get a direct response, but mainly it’s about building brand awareness within a very targeted group—the visitors of a particular website, or subscribers to a particular email. • Search-engine optimisation—selecting the right keywords, and building your site’s importance to get higher up in the search- engine rankings. It is one of the most effective ways of building your business online but getting to that top spot requires a lot of courage, time and hard work. • Google Base—also known as Google Product Search, this involves sending a feed of your product information to Google so that it shows your products in its search results. Once set up, there are no costs, and minimum effort; it just keeps going in the background. • Affiliates—using an affiliate network to build relationships with other websites that will promote you in return for a commission on any sales driven by them. This includes voucher-code sites and cash-back sites. A little time consuming to launch, but can really bring in the new customers. You have to make sure you’re incentivising the right behaviour among the affiliates though, or you may just end up paying more to get your existing customers to the site. (For a roundup of your affiliate options, see pages 16 to 19.)
• Pay-per-click—usually Google Adwords; either extending your long-tail keywords to recruit customers looking for specific items, or using the Content Network to place adverts on the sites your target customers are looking at. And if you’re not already on Microsoft’s Adcentre it’s probably worth testing that too. • eBay shop—selling your products via eBay. You get to tap into its huge traffic, and keep the details of the customers at the end of it. Amazon offers a similar service, but you have less control, and don’t own the customer. Depending on your product range it may also be worth looking at Etsy, Kelkoo, Price Runner, and so on. • Emailing your enquirers—every business has a list of interested people who’ve not yet bought something. Emails should be going to these people to encourage them to start buying from you. Not least because all the methods above are going to generate more email sign-ups, so the list should grow.
How to build your online recruitment strategy
As you can see there are many options for recruiting online, so here are the four key stages to working out what your online recruitment strategy should be.
Step 1: select your marketing mix Consider: • Where your target customers “hang out” online—if you’re selling men’s designer trainers, your customers are probably using social networks, magazine websites, YouTube. If you’re selling childrenswear, it’s more likely Mumsnet and magazines.
• How customers get to your website—analyse your web stats to identify where your new visits are coming from, and where the best conversion rates are.
• What you’re already achieving online—find the areas where there could be some quick wins.
• What “offline” relationships and knowledge could you leverage? You can identify quick wins here too.
For an easy and quick implementation also consider the skills you have access to. Most important, make sure you’ve got a good mix
of direct response and brand awareness tactics.
Step 2: Build the plan
Once you’ve chosen your tactics you need to make sure all your activity is working together to maximise the impact it will have. Put together a week-by-week plan of what’s happening when. Don’t forget to include what’s happening on the website and when you need to start preparing new tactics for launch. Once you’ve got the first draft, look at where you’ve got gaps, where you’ve got too much going on for it all to be feasibly completed, and also how well-aligned your activity is with your big online promotions, including sales, new ranges, last order dates and such. And don’t forget to set your key
performance indicators (KPIs); what level does the activity need to hit to be a success? Are you mainly after orders, sales, higher basket values, or a return on investment?
Step 3: Kick off the activity Get it all going.
Step 4: Monitor the results, and amend your plans as necessary You need to monitor the entire campaign against your KPIs. Remember you’re using a range of online tactics to do what you do offline with just a catalogue. Be careful that you’re reporting data that gives you the information you need to make the right decisions about future activity and the allocation of resources. Your first plan will not be perfect, so be ready to learn and make changes. Remember, however, to ensure you give each tactic enough time to be able to properly analyse the performance—for some you will need just one campaign, for others it will take at least a season.
Following these steps you could be well on the way to building an online recruitment stream for years to come.
Chloë Thomas runs IndiumOnline, an online marketing agency.
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