5 Simple Marketing Tips for Staffing Owners with No Time or Budget

1. Make a plan

The best way to waste your time and money is to dive into marketing without making a plan first. The key to success is to define your marketing strategy first – aka, what you want your marketing to accomplish, and how you plan to accomplish it.

Start with a brainstorming session with yourself or with a team. I recommend getting out of the office and throwing ideas around. If you don’t know where to start, start with these questions:

• Who is our ideal customer? Ideal temporary worker?
• Where do they live?
• Where do they spend time online?
• What are our competitors doing?
• How does our service differ from competitors?
• How do people hear about us now?

Use this information to create a formal plan. You can find lots of templates and instructions online like this one, or this one.

2. List your business online

Do a quick test – Google “[Your niche] staffing in [your location]” and see what comes up. Are you coming up on search engine results?

If not, one of the quickest and easiest ways to get found online is to list your business in search engine local directories. Do Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and Yahoo! Small Business. You will definitely want to have a Yelp business page up as well, either free or paid. To get started, register or claim your business, add your location, post some pics of your product/service, and begin responding to customers’ reviews.

3. Focus on your website

If you are going to spend more effort on one thing from this list, make it this one. Your website is essential to your staffing business, because first thing a potential customer or employee does is Google your business. The look and function of your website tells someone immediately whether you are a legitimate staffing business or not.

If you are wondering whether your website is legitimate, ask yourself the following. Does your website:

• Tell people what you do in 5 seconds or less?
• Have clear call to actions/next steps?
• Have testimonials? Project examples? Recent placements?
• Have visual appeal?

If the answer to any of these is no, it’s worth the time to invest in making it better. You can do it yourself if you have a few technical skills, or you can hire a freelancer or a marketing agency that specializes in web design. Also, don’t forget to use Google Analytics to track the traffic to your website.

4. Have a social media presence

Social media pages are necessary for any staffing company, because it is another important way that you get found and legitimized online. I highly recommend you set up a business profile or page on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter at the least. (Instagram and Pinterest are optional – only do those if it makes sense for your brand and you can devote some time to making them look pretty.)

Make sure your pages contain the following essentials:

• An engaging, detailed description of what you do
• Your logo
• Link to your website
• Info about your firm’s story and your values, beyond the services you sell

As far as a posting schedule, there’s no one answer about what works best. I’d just recommend that you post consistently, and don’t make all your posts promotional or about you. Share relevant content or articles on your pages so that you look knowledgeable and helpful. There are also online tools to help you schedule posts across platforms like Hootsuite.

5. Use templates

My last piece of advice for low effort and budget marketing is to use templates. Truly, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to marketing! So much content exists for free on the web, and mostly it’s just a matter of adding in your info and maybe switching up the colors to match your brand. Here are a few good places to find templates for things like a blog post, a company description, a marketing email template, and more.

• Airtable
• HubSpot
• Coschedule

I hope these tips were helpful to you! Marketing doesn’t have to be super time consuming or expensive, but it should be thought out, structured, and measured if it’s going to be worth your time. For more marketing tips and ideas, check out our on-demand webinars featuring expert advice for staffing firms with our partners at ClearEdge Marketing: Marketing Bootcamp I, and Marketing Bootcamp II: Digital Marketing.