Every business needs a steady stream of new customers to scale, and that’s where most businesses struggle.
While the latest studies suggest that the top three most used channels for customer acquisition are website (89%), email (81%), and social media (72%), not each of these channels works for all businesses and sectors.
There is no universal solution that can ensure a constant flow of new clients.
“If I had a one-size-fits-all marketing solution, I’d be retired and counting my millions!” says Haley Marketing Co-CEO David Searns.
In an interview with agency directory DesignRush, David shares insights on the winning channels that staffing firms can leverage to attract and secure more clients, offering practical advice and industry expertise to boost business growth.
Who Is David Searns?
David is the co-CEO of Haley Marketing, a company specializing in content, digital marketing, and web design exclusively for the staffing and recruiting sectors. With 28 years of experience, David's team empowers staffing firms to enhance their visibility, recruit effectively, and maintain a strong industry presence. Before his current role, David served as a Marketing Director for a New York staffing agency.
Given that the line between sales and marketing in the digital world has narrowed over the years, we started our conversation by asking David about the role marketing plays nowadays and if it was only about generating more clients.
David doesn't agree marketing is only about lead generation in 2024.
“While lead gen is part of marketing, marketing starts long before a lead is generated and continues well after the sale is made.”
David believes that today's marketing is about capturing attention, crafting the right messaging, supporting sales outreach, improving the customer experience, and ensuring client satisfaction.
As a company that mainly focuses on assisting staffing companies, David says they start marketing initiatives by asking two core questions:
- How’s business? To learn if clients struggle to win business (sales) or find the talent needed to fill the job orders they have (recruiting)
- What are you doing now to scale? To better understand their sales and recruiting processes and determine where improvements in their marketing could make an impact
“More often, we will discover that there are specific gaps in sales, recruiting, or their current marketing initiatives that need to be fulfilled,” David explains.
Our conversation touched upon the challenges most businesses face – making the first connection with their target audience and getting them on a call.
Hence, we asked David if they have a universal strategy that gives great results. While he believes there is no such, he says the closest to a one-size-fits-all solution is the AIDA model.
“Our clients live in an industry that is highly fragmented and super-competitive. To stand out and capture the attention of the target audience (whether that audience is employers or job seekers) is extremely challenging.
With AIDA, we start by evaluating the best ways to capture the attention and interest of the people our clients need to reach. For some of our clients, we’ll turn to paid ads, SEO, and social media.“
Learn how to generate more staffing sales with conversion funnels by watching this video by Haley Marketing.
Skill Marketing Equals More Sales
Haley Marketing’s latest survey shows that staffing companies are increasingly utilizing skill marketing to get more sales.
Therefore, we wanted to know if this can be applied outside of the staffing industry, in terms of selling the product or service to clients that don’t immediately or necessarily require it through some specific marketing strategy.
David said this was possible and noted:
“If a company takes its most valuable product, then selects a highly-targeted list of potential clients, and promotes that specific product to those specific customers — showing exactly how the product is fit for the customer, they are effectively doing skill marketing.”
Most companies, DesignRush included, have been offered staffing services via cold emails many times. In light of this, we asked David what are Haley Marketing’s go-to channels for getting more clients to businesses in this industry.
He noted that most of these unsolicited emails in the staffing industry lack value and AI ad automation makes them even worse.
According to David, lead generation businesses should adopt a multi-channel integrated direct marketing campaign that incorporates:
- Physical and digital mail
- LinkedIn Outreach
- Cold Calls
For clients in specialized industries, they encourage mixing integrated direct marketing with event marketing and OPS (other people’s stages)
“We want our clients to show off their expertise via speaking at conferences, on webinars, and podcasts, and then integrate that industry visibility with direct marketing to their ideal customers,” he added.
Branding Is Challenging in 2024
We delved into the challenges of creating an "irresistible" brand and asked David what it takes for a brand to join this group.
As he stated: “I think the most irresistible brands are the smaller companies that demonstrate they are the perfect match for a very specific type of customer.”
Speaking from a branding point of view, we also discussed how “giving back to the community” influenced the brand awareness of Haley Marketing’s partners.
This is David’s input on community engagement:
“Giving back is a powerful strategy — both for driving sales and internal recruiting. We see more and more mission-driven companies that are tying a social cause to their value proposition. No question that resonates with people.
Giving back to the community — whether that is your local community, well-known social causes or non-profits, or the community of the industry you serve — does a ton to demonstrate warmth to the people you want to win as customers and the people you want to work on your team.”
If you need assistance handling your next branding project, try partnering with some of the best branding agencies listed on DesignRush.
Haley Marketing has built over 1,700 staffing and recruiting websites.
As the experts in the field, we asked David about the key indicators they consider when assessing the state of these types of sites.
Six features make a good site stand out, David explains:
- Clarity
- Easy of use
- Well-defined CTAs
- Functionality
- Speed
- Aesthetics
“A great staffing website looks good, tells a great story, and is designed to get people where they want to go in as few clicks as possible," David adds, and I couldn't agree more.
Check our video to discover the top five reasons why users leave websites and find the solutions to enhance your user experience and keep your visitors engaged.
The Creative Part of Marketing Projects
Out-of-the-box thinking is something experts we interviewed agree it’s a must-have criterion for successful marketing campaigns.
Hence, we asked David how he approaches the creative part of his work day-to-day and where he finds inspiration.
“I’ve always believed that you are only as creative as your frame of reference. While there are certainly some truly original thinkers out there, most of us demonstrate brilliance by applying things we’ve seen elsewhere to our work,” he said.
For David and the team, the key to innovative thinking comes down to two things:
- Exposing yourself to lots of ideas (read, watch YouTube, listen to podcasters) in and out of your industry
- Getting to know your customers as much as possible
Though he said he isn't much of a creative person, David tends to be the most creative when not working. In fact, the more he can create space to just think, the higher the quality of his ideas will be.
It's all about delivering the WOW effect, we agreed.
