Marketing Strategies for 2021: How to Run an Online Training Event

The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast

Hi there, everyone, this is Denise from Superfast Recruitment, and here we are in January: New Year, New Start.

I’m very much a forward-thinking person, so let’s think about how we will grow our businesses this year.

How are we going to bring in more clients? How are we then going to find the candidates that are precisely what our clients want – how can we do this?

Over the course of this series, we started way back at the beginning of December, we’ve covered different strategies that are working; specific recruitment marketing strategies.

We talked about low hanging fruit, we looked at lead generation, we’ve talked about direct mail, about business blogging, and we’ve also talked about paid advertising. Now I want to talk about online training events.

Before I do that, if you’re new here, welcome, it’s fabulous to have you. To go along with this series, we encourage people to go and download our free marketing checklist. So if you haven’t yet, go and do that, you can find it here.

So, let’s talk about online training events.

Online Training in a Post-Covid World

Last year was significant in many ways.

Obviously, we had COVID; we had a lot of businesses and a lot of people struggling. However, there was a massive shift in the market, particularly around technology, remote working, and video conferencing.

I saw an online marketers comment that “technology and online marketing has accelerated probably seven years in seven months” this year, due to Covid.

People are much more open to different things since Covid; they appreciate that things aren’t quite the same.

People have had to embrace online working, skills have been up and down because people have been on furlough. There’s so much that has happened, that there is that massive gap for online training, and I think particularly when it comes to the recruitment sector.

Now, many of our clients have leveraged this by running online training events.

Let me just share a little bit about this and how this might work for you because it’s so positive in so many areas.

It really does anoint you as the expert in your recruiting field. Let’s be honest; if somebody is inviting you to come along to their master class or come along to an online training event, there is an expectation that person knows what they are doing and that they will be able to give you some advice and some strategies.

And that’s exactly what you can do as a recruiter.

Online Training – Technology Explained

The technology’s always been a challenge, but there are so many ways that you can do it now we have Zoom.

Obviously, there is also Microsoft Teams. There is plenty of webinar software out there.

This year, we swapped to using Zoom webinar because it was really useful to have everything under the same platform. Zoom really got their finger out and made their software so much better this year as well.

You’ve also got live events; we are now doing live events on Facebook and LinkedIn. Imagine if you can use this technology to create a training event.

Now, how might you do that?

Well, you will know what your candidates and clients are struggling with, and maybe what you could deliver for them.

For instance, for clients, it could be upscaling; it could be how to build and recover your culture. It could be how to interview for clients as well, because for many clients if they’ve lost people, or there’s been a shakeup, and they need to recruit new people for different parts of the business they might be a bit rusty on their interview skills.

The thing about online training that is amazing is that you might not even have to run it yourself.

Calling in the Experts

One of our clients is brilliant at doing this. What they do is they go out to the market, they find an expert, and then they bring that expert in and say, will you run a session for us?

This works so well because it taps into something known as the halo effect. If you have an expert, the perception is you know this expert well, which you may do, or you may not.

You can ring people up and say, “Look, would you come and run something for me?” Most people would do it for nothing as well. This is what’s known as the halo perception. People see you with somebody else.

Obviously, they can talk about their services on the training as well, but also it helps you to build an audience. Then, as time goes on, you can market and talk to that audience.

We had one client who has run a number of training events, and amazingly, they ran them all across COVID. They’ve made placements from them. They’ve increased their database, probably by well over 300 or 400 people now of good potential clients as well. They’ve done this by running a training event. Now, you’re going to see this happening more and more.

Recruitment is a sector where you can leverage that ability to train, particularly when people are thinking about developing their careers, when business owners have been in a pretty rocky place, and they need some support and some help. You could probably partner with someone. Look out for this, because this is going to be happening more and more.

We’ve always run webinars and in honesty, the last couple of webinars we run at the back end of 2020, there was standing room only. We broke through the barrier of the number of people on previous webinars, and that’s because there’s a huge thirst for it.

When there’s a thirst for something, it’s a really good idea to leverage it too.

Think about this year; we’re only in early January, there’s still time to put things in the pipeline, and this same time to just test it out.

You can go live on Facebook and send an email to people and say, “Look, I’m going to be live on Facebook, on our business page, click here, and come and listen to me doing a CV clinic or a talent management clinic at four o’clock this afternoon.”

It’s amazing just to see what happens because with Facebook, you can present face to camera, and you can give people some really invaluable help.

I’d suggest if you can use something like Zoom, you can get people to register; that way you know who those people are. Then this is the important thing; you can follow them up afterwards.

Next Steps?

Online training works because people love events. Also, I think people realise that this online training is okay.

We can get some great information and go back and watch it again. It’s never going to take away face to face events, but really as a marketing strategy for recruiters, I think it’s going to be a fantastic strategy for you to stand out in your recruiting sector.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of blogs, and they’ve been useful for you. Remember, they’re all based on strategies that are working now for you. Dial some of it in, even if you just dial in half of the ones I’ve talked about. What a fantastic difference that would make to your client and candidate acquisition this year.

This is Denise saying bye for now.