Every stand-up comic knows that stand-up comedy depends on the art of audience analysis. Stand-up comedians change their sets while performing for different audience demographics, locations, and events. Hence, comics must become experts at reading the room and delivering an engaging performance. In the same way, job posting sites need to be constantly aware of their audiences to develop effective marketing strategies in real-time.
Digital marketing is a necessity for job posting sites. However, marketing can be extremely complicated and error-prone if you don’t understand your audience. Nowadays, you don’t really have to conduct long-drawn research to identify target audiences. There are plenty of tools available that can identify in real-time what your users like/don’t like.
The next step is boosting brand awareness and attracting more visitors to your site. And once they get there, you need to drive more engagement from job seekers and employers. A robust marketing strategy can increase the performance of generic and niche job boards.
Identify your job board niche
Before creating a job portal, you need to decide on your niche. Put simply, you need to find a problem, narrow it down to a specific audience and then solve that problem. Your job board can either have job postings belonging to a specific niche or for every type of vacancy. To create a niche job portal, you will have to gather research in the form of surveys from candidates and recruiters. Additionally, you can search for popular local job posting sites to increase your understanding of the local market.
Next, you need to find out how profitable your selected niche is. Choose a niche where competitor penetration is fairly low. Alternatively, if your selected niche has too few competitor job posting sites, the selected niche may not be very profitable. A good rule of thumb is to check for these three things –
- Whether the niche selected has low-ranking keywords – This means it will be easy to run a full-fledged marketing campaign to oust your competition
- If there is a lack of transparency from other competitors – You’ll be surprised at how many job boards can grab a hold in the market just by having genuine, transparent dealings with their clients.
- Check for low-quality job postings from the competition in that segment – With good quality job content, you will be filling a major gap in that market segment
Building a generic Job posting site
As an alternative, you can also build a generic job board. To build a generic job board, you need to post global vacancies along with local job postings. Running a successful generic job board can be difficult if you’re not fully established in the sector. Your competitors may have a better reputation, a better hold on SEO and stronger networking in the online recruitment industry. This means that your job board will have to put in additional efforts to advertise job vacancies and differentiate yourself.
Marketing strategies of competitor job posting sites
Don’t underestimate the power of thorough competitor analysis. It is important to analyze content posted by other job posting sites in your niche. Such content may include job content, blogs, infographics, videos, industry reports, and white papers. Use online search engine marketing tools like SemRush or Alexa to gain additional insights into the marketing techniques used by your competitor job posting sites.
By analyzing competitor metrics and monitoring competitor activity, you can gain insight into their strategies and effectiveness. Performing such analyses can help you in developing your own strategy.
Conduct audience research
The next step is to identify which segment of people have a high probability of searching for jobs in your niche. Consequently, you can also look for companies that have high job ad-spends for a position and a low number of applicants. E.g., nuclear physicists, C – level executives.
Audience research doesn’t end here. You’ll need to delve into your personal network. Engage with job seekers over twitter, or search through conversations on Quora and Reddit. You’re looking for problems from your potential audience that can help you build a more compact solution. Try collecting critical data such as age, location, work experience, qualification, and interests of your audience. You can use this data to begin building a target persona – or use sites such as makemypersona.com to help you along.
Building a target persona will help you channel your marketing communication better; so that you’re saying the right things to the right people.
Develop your job board marketing channels
Businesses are increasingly using content marketing to attract more visitors to their website. Videos are particularly helpful in attracting eyeballs and driving up brand recall. Platforms such as tik-tok, instagram, facebook watch are gaining popularity for their instant, consumable content. Even job boards have recently begun creating video platforms for jobs. Recruiters can now post job vacancies in the form of videos to boost their employment branding.
To fuel your marketing strategies, you need to develop the right content. An easy way to gauge which content would work for you is to look up social media marketing tools. These tools scour the internet to find content relevant to your keywords. Tools like Buzzsumo will drill-down further to give you an idea of social media engagement for content pieces surrounding your keyword. Use this information to build blogs, or formulate thought-leadership articles to establish credibility around your brand.
Testing and Tracking metrics
You need to carry out A/B testing over social media platforms to understand what works best for your site and what does not. Monitor how your audience interacts with your content, which type of posts generate the highest engagement, and which social media campaigns are worth investing more time and budgets. Paid promotions help your social media posts reach a broader audience and stay ahead of the competition.
Email marketing is another useful technique for marketing your content. Create subscription programs for potential job-seekers and recruiters who want to receive regular updates about your job board content. You can also send email updates about new services or features to your subscribers. But, ensure that you’re using the right email tracking metrics to understand the impact of your email marketing campaign.
However well you drive your marketing strategies, they will all prove futile without a user-friendly and job portal for your job postings. For this, you need a professional job wrapping solutions provider like Propellum to handle your job scraping and posting operations with ease.
Building Quality Job Posting Sites
Job wrapping solutions help you automate multiple essential job board tasks such as job aggregation, job data optimization, job feed categorization, and job posting options. Propellum also offers unique services such as:
- 24/7 customer support
- Recruiter-specific customization
- Compatibility with major ATSs and other recruitment technologies
- Global job data imports
- Multilingual job wrapping
- Frequent updates based on changing industry trends
Bear in mind that you need to develop a job portal that is not plagued by dead jobs. Dead jobs can increase user frustration, ensuring that they never return to your job board. Instead, your job board should be intelligent enough to gather and post the latest job openings automatically.
The right changes in job board development and marketing strategies could make you the go-to job board for job seekers as well as recruiters. Outstanding services and effective marketing are key to running a successful business in the digital era. Successful job posting sites have been using this approach for years. And to keep up with the best, every small and medium job board will need to keep the above points in mind.
