Part 2
Welcome to part two on our journey to help the staffing industry embrace social media. My focus here is mainly on bigger staffing companies in Scandinavia who is operating in several countries like Poolia, Manpower, Adecco, Proffice and AcademicWork (just examples there are some more). Let’s continue this journey by examining the opportunity the industry have with social media marketing. Remember there is no one size fits all regarding this topic and you need to develop your own edge by executing and learn.
The Relationship Account
We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a cash reserve for future events when we need to make withdrawals. With social media we have the opportunity to make deposits into the relationship account with our customers on a scale that never has been possible before, but this is not easy, it takes sweat and hustle to reach great results exactly as the existing sales process you have today. You are on the right track being social when you are doing this thoroughly by building real relationships by out carrying your competitors instead of pushing your message with social media.
Measure Your Deposits
We can understand the relationships we are building online and offline by using the social thermometer perspective. If I only had one minute to explain what social media is all about I should use this picture.
- Don’t have a clue about you: They have no relationship with you yet, they don’t know that you exist.
- Aware but don’t care: Aware of your brand but have never bought something or never taken some kind of action yet.
- Single action: Some kind of action maybe they have made a single purchase from you. Maybe they subscribe to your newsletter.
- Frequent action: You have a relationship with the customer and they are repeating purchasers of your stuff.
- Advocates: On the top you find the real advocates of your product and service, this is the dream for every marketer to reach this relationship with the end user.
We will talk more about the social thermometer later when we are mapping our audience. The reason why I gave you a glimpse about this here is because I want you to understand what social media is all about. If we are applying this to the industry, I can’t see any staffing company having this perception, can you? Please let me know then. Because I can only see push marketing from companies who are doing social not being social (part 1).
You Reap What You Sow
Depending how much deposits you are putting in to this relationship account you can reap different types of interest. There is no quick fix here, building relationships are long-term investments. It’s always a challenge to replace account managers or human resource managers who have established a strong relationship with customers, because they have traveled together and made many deposits into the relationship account, and it’s in those moments we can experience the famous line; our customers are not buying what we sell, they are “buying” our people (it’s an expression). It takes time to establish know like and trust. Social media marketing can help B2B companies humanize their logotype and letting the company becoming a more significant part of the real relationship, so when people leave, companies don’t need to start from scratch again with the relationship in the same extent.
Old School
When I’m looking at the Industry today I can see how the competition is fierce and majority of the companies is thinking old school tactics to developing relationships with the customers. Last year I did a consultant work for a staffing and recruitment company and I become aware how many different phone calls the customers get from this industry every day. I’m not saying you should quit working the phones to book sales meetings, I think you should leverage new ways to enhance the opportunities to meet your customers where your competition is weak and where your customers don’t have their defending guard up.
New School
Mainly the recruiters and HR managers in the industry is using LinkedIn to find new candidates and connect with people. Account managers are using LinkedIn like as an extension of their CRM system to find information regarding potential customers and connect with existing ones. This is good, and also cheers for the companies who are executing and trying to shape their edge by providing their staff with LinkedIn knowledge how they could enhance this platform. I really think this is a step forward, but I also know that this is where you starts sliding from the path of “being social” towards “doing social”. It’s happening because you jump into social media before you have the whole picture.
It’s your turn
What do you think? Please contribute and leave a comment!
Related posts:
About Mattias Gronborg
+1 for part 2
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like