The Importance of Audience Building | Online Marketing for Recruiters

What is an audience?

In terms of online marketing, an audience is a group of people whose eyes you are able to get your content in front of, be it a blog article, promo video or a job ad. People you are able to target to source traffic and engagement from. Whether that be organically through your social media profiles & posts, group marketing, or using paid advertising with interest targeting, custom audience retargeting (based on users behaviours & interactions with your social media entities or website), email marketing and more.

Building your audiences

Building up top quality audiences is the absolute foundation to any successful online marketing strategy. Everything you do in your campaign efforts should be focused around building larger, but more importantly, hotter, higher quality audiences to target. Whether that be by building strong custom audiences to retarget with highly focused and relevant paid display ads or by earning a highly engaged list of social media followers who will help increase your organic exposure by actually commenting to, reacting to, and sharing your posts. This indicates to algorithms that your content is worthy of spreading to even more people’s feeds. When it comes to marketing organically on social media, it’s all about the engagement rate. I would rather have a Facebook page with 100 highly engaged followers than a following of 10,000 people who will probably, subconsciously swipe past my latest post.

Custom audience building is mostly about qualifying, filtering and segmenting people into focused audiences of highly convertible users. For example, your content marketing strategy may involve sharing a blog article in an industry group once per week, which may get around 100 click throughs per post. These 100 people can be considered warm now for showing interest in the industry & should definitely be put into a custom audience.

Now what if 10 of those 100 visitors then go on to click through to your job board and browse around your category pages? You can segment them into a custom audience for ‘job browsers’ and then into separate custom audiences for the individual job categories they visited e.g., ‘job browsers - construction - site manager’. This smaller audience of 10 is obviously hotter than the original 100 but of higher potential value to your business. Keep this up, preferably with other fresh traffic sources as well, and with just a little time you will build up some good size, high quality custom audiences of visitors that you know have actively looked for work in specific job categories in the past. Now when you get a new position in that category, you can target everyone in the relevant custom audience with an ad for the job, knowing they are highly likely to be interested and you will probably get at least a couple of applications.

What about the people who read your article but did not check out the job board yet? Now they are in a custom audience, you could retarget them with other, related blog posts that they might be interested in to keep them coming back, spinning around the marketing funnel and eventually, hopefully, they fall through it.

And like that, with time, a little effort and consistency, you could be building up strong audiences with a simple pipeline that converts casual blog readers to web surfers that you can target like a highly focused great white, with relevant content in the future. Or even better, automated custom job alerts via email if you can get them to sign up directly on your site.

Of course, I have only touched on a few types of audiences here for new and returning traffic as an example to give you an idea of the way of thinking you should be applying to your online marketing efforts. Naturally, audience building can and should be used for client acquisition too, this very well may even be of greater importance to your agency. We will discuss how we can use online marketing for business development in several articles in the series.

Naturally, if you are interested in using online marketing to build up your client and candidate base and would like to talk to someone with a wealth of industry expertise on the subject, then you can always shoot us a message and we will happily have a chat to help point you in the right direction.