We start with the Customer Journey, with the positioning of the company, Student StepUp (SSU), a specialised recruitment consultancy, and the identified target market segments.
Customer Journey stage
- Acquisition; need to raise awareness of company and proposition
Positioning
- Clear focus on client needs
- Quality / qualified candidates
Target segments
- Professional businesses
- Small >5 <50
- Medium <250
- Searching for advice on recruitment issues
- Searching for staff (graduates / interns or otherwise)
| DSM Approaches Chosen |
Advantages |
Disadvantages |
Priority |
| LinkedIn |
- Professional network
- Expected offering
- Access to multiple networks
- Opportunity to ‘broadcast’ blog changes
- Can use LinkedIn recruiter professional services allowing you to contact more people
- Provides a forum to network and build a strong system of referrals, ideal for people who cannot get out to networking events (GHI, 2009)
|
- Could be seen as informal to the clients
- Very competitive marketplace
|
2
|
| Search Engine Marketing and PPC |
|
- Potentially expensive
- Need to monitor closely
|
1
|
| Blog |
- Provides opportunities to engage audience
- Opportunities to demonstrate expertise to clients
- Potential of reaching thousands of targeted readers (Cannings, C 2013)
|
- Can be time consuming to get content on the blog
|
3
|
| SEO Natural Search |
- It is cheaper than PPC
- Clients could find it more credible than a forced advertisement
- Offers long term results that last (SWG, 2011)
|
- Slow burner’, it takes time to develop a well ranked, authoritative site
- Time consuming
|
4
|
Free Webinar
|
- Can have email sign up to it – allows to market email individual clients
- Allows you connect to clients from where ever the client is (Katina, B 2013)
|
- Could be difficult to get clients to engage with it
|
5
|
| Discarded Approaches |
Disadvantages |
Issues/Risks of discarding |
| Twitter |
- Twitter has a character limit to its posts (140 characters)
|
- Could miss out on user engagement
- Some people may only be on twitter so by excluding the use of twitter we isolate a market segment
- We miss out on free advertising and awareness that Twitter offers
|
| Banner Advertisement |
- Clients could find them annoying
- Customers could be worried about clicking on them due to the increase of online scams
|
- Potentially missing out on appropriate customers
|
Development of a well researched, high quality web-site is essential to support the PPC acquisition strategy, we need to focus on building that, and developing our own LinkedIn group and page. These three items, working together should combine to develop an effective network.
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