Marketing Strategies For Staffing Companies In The Era Of New-age Platforms

Satish Rajan Mar 04, 2024

Technology is evolving at an unprecedented pace and sometimes in unexpected directions. Everyone around seems to be already on, or scampering to catch up to, this bolting train. The paradigm shift of technology from being a support function in offices to finding its footing as an independent and fast-growing vertical seems to be coming full circle. Technology is now undeniably becoming an irreplaceable part of every business, all over again.

They are meeting user experience with open arms and collaborating to build customer pain-point-solving solution-led new-age platforms. Think of UPI. What, given the humongous size of our nation, was seen in the past to be an impossible endeavour or a fool’s errand, has now become a given. Think about food and instant delivery apps. They are giving jobs to the unskilled and the semi-skilled in never-before-like numbers and making consumers addicted to ‘real’ instant gratification. Even ride-hailing apps, ride-sharing apps, micro-finance apps, and a thousand other apps floating around are getting their fair share of downloads, installs, and monetisable attention.

Given this flurry of excitement and more importantly the cost-saving and cost-optimisation power of technology and tech-led platforms, it should come as no surprise that human resources, and consequently Staffing, has been a hotly contested space for industry-relevant platforms. While tech adoption might hurt staffing in the short run, this shift is going to build a more efficient system where associates will get better salaries, and staffing companies will make better margins.

This shift towards technology and platforms must be capitalised by staffing companies and even the companies that use one-time, short or long-term staffing services.

Here are five things that companies can keep in mind while creating the marketing strategy for the upcoming year:

1. Collaborate And Experiment

Rather than compete with new-age platforms and their technology, one should look for ways to collaborate and experiment to leverage their technical prowess and ground-level coverage. Resisting this change is a sure-shot way of being overtaken by competition, as must have happened to the owners of horses who didn’t think the automobile would last. Brands should be keen on tech experiments and platform partnerships where one can provide them with their services and candidate base, while leveraging their technology for automation, insights, reach and penetration into the market.

2. Consolidate And Diversify

Like with every boom, the tech boom, over the last couple of years driven by Covid and its aftereffects, has made us use too many tools and platforms as marketers. The three core tools covering the content management system (CMS), the customer relationship management (CRM), and the marketing automation system cannot and should not be changed often, as these take a long time to implement and then stabilise. However, tools used for design, analytics,

Webinars, SEO, social media listening/scheduling, etc., should always be the latest and greatest best-of-breed available in the market, and be treated as hot plug-in / plug-out systems to keep the marketing edge nimble and sharp. This helps optimise costs as well as extracting the maximum bang for the buck. As I said, traditional marketing was aim and fire, but new age marketing is to aim, fire and then jump on the fired bullet to iteratively tweak its direction and improve the chances of a bull’s eye.

3. Make Authentic Connections

Marketers need to build long-term bi-directional relationships with their B2B, B2C and B2E stakeholders, and evolve from the currently predominantly unidirectional broadcast model. Marketing hence needs to become the voice of the external stakeholders to the internal teams. In my experience, this proactive ownership of responding to the first post tracking the request and posting a ‘closure post’ to complete the loop, has helped us in more ways than can be counted.

4. Constantly Reimagine The Marketing Mix

Digital usage zoomed through Covid and then fell off a very steep cliff, and now we are seemingly returning to the pre-Covid trend line. The same is happening with marketing and their stakeholders. A crucial regular activity we need to do is to step back now and then and see the big picture, and how the marketing mix is playing into it. Especially for staffing companies that don’t have high margins to splurge on marketing, it becomes important to keep the marketing mix at the right size.

To sum it up, the current time is exciting for marketing in staffing companies. India needs to grow, and businesses need to unlock more value through innovations. Marketing of staffing companies needs to play a pivotal part in educating the market and stakeholders and helping them understand the value of moving to a value-additional mindset (because innovation is a key pillar for improving quality of life). We need to show companies the benefits of this future-facing mindset, which is also required for our nation and citizens to achieve their true potential.