The benefits of outsourcing your marketing

By Chris Cranshaw - Founder & Managing Director | Halt

If you’re an owner or leader of a recruitment business that’s been fortunate enough to have experienced considerable growth post-pandemic, without investing in your brand and marketing, it’s very likely that your business is now experiencing some challenges with a reduction in inbound sales enquiries, high-quality new jobs, and candidate applications from your target audiences.

Investing in your brand and marketing capabilities is essential if you have ambitions to scale your recruitment business. However, so often this investment is minimal and done by individuals in your business that have other key duties and responsibilities.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have heard recruitment business owners say, “Our marketing has previously been done by XXXXXX in our operations/back-office team”. Even more alarming is that this approach and underinvestment in skilled marketing resources and capabilities often drives their opinion that they don’t see much value or ROI in marketing.

In the same breath, these same owners will go into great detail about how much they admire and envy other recruitment brands/businesses and competitors that, from the outside looking in, appear to have invested heavily in their marketing and brand exposure and are now snapping up more market share.

This situation forms the narrative for many of the inbound approaches we receive on a daily basis from recruitment owners and leaders who are weathering the storm of the current market conditions, and now needing to catch up and invest in their marketing capabilities/outputs to remain competitive in the market, and ensure their brand presence and proposition remain at the forefront in the minds of their target clients and candidates.

As the founder of Halt | Recruitment Marketing, Branding & Websites, I thought I would share some insight on the benefits and opportunities that come with outsourcing your marketing.

Services tailored to your needs, ambitions, and budget

When you work with a recruitment marketing agency, they will likely be able to offer you a variety of tailored outsourcing options, ranging from developing your marketing and content strategies, the creation and delivery of your marketing and social content, or managing and executing specific outreach and audience engagement campaigns.

While prices can vary based on deliverables, outsource plans can start from as low as ￡1k a month.

Fixed monthly costs — without the permanent employee costs

The total cost of a full-time marketer/team can be tricky to determine from the outset. Salaries vary considerably based on the position, location, and the level of skills and experience required. Add to that all the additional investment associated with a full-time employee, such as benefits/contributions, hardware/software, desk costs, outsourcing requirements, training, and much more, means the cost of a single hire in your marketing functions starts from as much as ￡50k per annum.

These additional costs are virtually eliminated when you outsource to a recruitment marketing agency, as you will typically be charged a flat monthly retainer/fee. This means you’ll only have to pay for the skills and experience you need, while also being able to budget and forecast against investment without any unexpected variations.

You get full transparency of exactly what you’re paying for and what you’re getting for your investment, which are linked to agreed deliverables and desired outcomes.

Access to a large team of experienced and skilled recruitment marketers

Attracting and recruiting one or several marketers that have the specific skills and experience in recruitment marketing is challenging enough

An established recruitment marketing agency will likely have been founded and led by an experienced recruitment marketing leader with a proven track record of building and leading recruitment marketing functions and achieving evidenced results for some of the world’s biggest recruitment brands.

These agencies will have scaled over time by building teams of skilled marketers and recruitment marketing specialists with vast amounts of experience, skills, and expertise. This means that by outsourcing to a recruitment marketing agency, it’s very unlikely you will have to worry about having the right available resources, as agencies will be able to handle all of this on your behalf.

It’s also not uncommon for these agencies to use networks of skilled freelancers or even team up and collaborate with other recruitment marketing agencies that specialise in delivering specific niche solutions.

Solve internal skill gaps

Even if you prefer to run your marketing function in-house, a recruitment marketing agency can still provide you with skilled marketing resource to fill any skill gaps that may exist. The ability to fill skill shortages allows you to address your team’s resource needs without investing in additional full-time resource.

You can also call on a recruitment marketing agency to deliver specific duties or roles should any of your marketers suddenly resign or take time off, even if it’s just a temporary need until you can recruit or source a replacement.

Dial up and down your marketing needs based on your requirements and budget

One of the major issues that many recruitment businesses face is the need to scale up or down, depending on how their business is performing and their peaks in demand. If your business is scaling, marketing strategies and outputs should remain a priority to support that growth.

To achieve this, your marketing function must be capable of scaling up. This can be challenging if you don’t have the capital and funds to support this. If you choose to assign more permanent marketing resource to your marketing outputs, only to experience a sudden drop in revenue performance, you may find yourself in the difficult position of having to downsize your marketing function through redundancy and restructuring.

A recruitment marketing agency has the resources to scale up and down based on your specific needs. If your recruitment business is struggling because your respective markets are showing signs of stagnation, then the agency can scale down with ease so that you’re not overinvesting. If you need to scale up, a recruitment marketing agency can tailor their deliverables and dedicate more resources to you at relatively short notice.

Less involvement and direction from you

Appointing a recruitment marketing agency should come with little to no fuss for you. While the initial onboarding process and set-up will require some of your time and resources, once the outsourced solution is in place, the wealth of experience that recruitment marketing agencies are accustomed to means that they can push ahead with delivering your needs with limited supervision or guidance from you.

Some recruitment businesses are hesitant to outsource their marketing because they don’t want to give up control to an outside party. However, the level of control you can maintain over your marketing is dependent on what you want. A recruitment marketing agency can take complete control over all your marketing, or they can simply complement and supplement your existing internal resource and efforts.

You can even keep your marketing function in-house and use an agency’s senior experts and leaders as a fractional marketing leader, providing guidance and mentoring to help develop, optimise, and transform your internal capabilities.

Get a fresh perspective

If you’ve had the same in-house marketer or marketing team for several years, your marketing strategies and delivery tactics may have grown stale and are no longer relevant.

If this happens, it’s because ultimately, you only know what you know. It isn’t easy to stay fresh if you’ve been working on the same brand and marketing strategy for years. It creates tunnel vision. By introducing a specialist recruitment marketing agency into the mix, you’ll also introduce a fresh new perspective.

Many recruitment marketing agencies have experience of working with a multitude of different recruitment businesses across a variety of specialties, industries, and sectors.

More often than not, they’ve likely developed strategies and delivered marketing solutions that have been entirely different than what you’ve historically been doing, and as a result, they can use their unique experiences and successes to provide you with a fresh take on how you can get the most of your marketing ROI.

Stay up to date with the latest marketing trends

A recruitment marketing agency can provide more than just a fresh perspective; they can also impart valuable knowledge gained through keeping up with the latest marketing tactics and approaches.

Since they are so preoccupied with creating, executing, and delivering their own marketing plans and activities, most start-up and SME recruitment businesses find it difficult to keep up with such developments. By the time they figure out what works, the fast-paced world of marketing has moved on, leaving them to replicate and follow in the footsteps of their competitors rather than be innovative and, dare I say it, not be seen as a 'disruptive’ brand.

“And here comes the shameless pitch” I hear you say...

If you’ve taken the time to read through this whole article, then investing in your marketing is likely on your business agenda at the moment.

If you’d like to discuss this further, feel free to connect with me and book a call in my diary to arrange a chat.

“Not on my agenda right now Chris, but certainly something for the future!”

Alternatively, if you’re simply curious about marketing options for the future, follow our Halt’s Linkedin page.