Resetting our Marketing Playbook

There is something about fresh starts.

In the last three years leading marketing at Wave, I’ve lost count on how many times I revised our strategy, how I planned and replanned what and how best to grow Wave’s brand and increase our inbound leads. But it has never felt more important as it feels right now.

You could argue that this is standard for any solid marketing strategy, that as a marketeer, you should be reviewing your plan regularly, looking into the results, tweaking this, improving that. And as a twenty-year-old company, Wave was never shy about moving at pace and changing things as needed.

I should also say, for those that won’t know, that my background as a graphic designer makes research and experimentation the core of my methods. Iterations are my normal.

The current economic and human crisis has made everyone question the way they go about business. And for the past few months, while in lockdown and sharing a working desk with my partner and our two-year-old climbing up our backs for every video call, has made me question the way we did marketing at Wave.

A few things I’ve learned:

1 — PPC can be a money pit

I’m pretty sure this is a controversial stance but digital advertising, on the likes of Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are awfully expensive. While we could see some immediate returns, with a significant spike in traffic to the website, for example, conversions still require a lot more than just getting an advert online.

The temptation is big, the idea of reaching a bigger audience is definitely appealing. But when you’re trying to sell a product like our recruitment software, where the client needs to do a fair amount of research and go through a whole product educational and sales cycle, the immediate conversions are tough to see.

And here is the thing, there is a lot you need to take into account to create a successful advert. Your copy is important, your visuals are important, where you lead the person to, what happens when they land on that page, after they leave the page (wink! wink! Retargeting). And guess what, everyone network is different, so multiply this by five!

2 — Off-site content is kind of a big deal

Everyone knows this by now, updating your website with regular content is good for SEO, it will make it rank higher for your keywords and in the long run, increase your ranking and traffic to your website. It’s also a long game, but we are ok with that.

But where we’ve been seeing really promising results is by getting our content in other websites apart from ours. Sure, inbound links are a strong SEO strategy, but what we found is that people that see and engage with our content on these websites are more likely to come back to our website and stay for a while, learning about our tech and other content.

3 — Nothing beats exclusive content

We’ve been publishing industry-leading reports, from our WaveTrackR data, for a couple of years now and these have been one of our most successful pieces of content.

Thanks to these, we’ve been establishing a reputation for an independent source of recruitment data and consistently building up a good mailing list and social media following.

And, while creating this content requires a lot more than just pulling the numbers out of the system and processing them on an excel spreadsheet, the data-driven character of this content is what makes it so unique.

Since the pandemic it the UK we’ve been publishing regular updates on LinkedIn, some kind of a diary of what was happening in the recruitment industry. Watching this data was both a humbling and exciting experience. On one side, we could see the real impact the industry was suffering; applications dropped massively, some clients stopped posting jobs completely. But on the other hand, we felt some kind of moral obligation to make this data public. We believe that knowledge is power and in making better-informed decisions and hoped that this could help recruiters. I hope it did.

4 — Conversions take their sweet time

It’s probably the lesson that took me the most to learn. Conversions on the recruitment technology space take time, some a long time. Expecting overnight results is naive, I’ll concede that, but I think it comes with the territory to want to see some sort of immediate results out of the work the team put so much effort in.

The reality of it is that conversions take time. We’ve seen new leads come in that have been exposed to our brand for months, for a year! Consuming content here and there, on emails, on blogs, on reports, on social media posts. Yay Marketing team for keeping the brand awareness going. But it’s still longer than I expected.

5 — Tracking is fun

I won’t go into too much detail into what kind of activity to track, but this is where knowledge is power couldn’t be more accurate.

Marketing automation is one of my pet peeves. Knowing who visits your website? What pages did they visit? Where did they come from? Did they enter from an email? What email? Social media? Which post? Image? Text? Report? Collecting this information helps to make informed decisions on what to do next. It’s no coincidence I’m continually revising what we are doing.

What comes next?

Content is still king. And we believe we have a lot of knowledge to share.

Moving forward, we are making our content one of the core activity pillars at Wave. We are doubling down on email personalisation and automation. Increasing our written content in the form of blogs and reports, both on our websites but especially by publishing to external sites. We want to establish Wave further as an industry source by leveraging our data and 20 years of experience in the recruitment industry, in the form of webinars, podcasts and video content.

So, onwards to this new iteration of our playbook. And if this one doesn’t work out, there is always another one after that.