The marketing tightrope
Marketing a job board is akin to walking a tightrope with two contentious children hanging from either end of your balancing rod. On one side you have your employers, wanting more exposure, better candidates, and yes, their logo in a prominent location. On the other side you have your job seekers, wanting some sort of response from employers, a really great (or at least well-paying) job, and lots of stuff for free.
The challenge? Too many job seekers and you’re most likely spending too much on marketing; too few job seekers and you have employers jumping ship.
The answer? A few well-chosen metrics that can guide you, and a careful, thoughtful, and multi-channel marketing program. Here are my nominations for the metrics:
- Ratio of unique job seekers per month to active jobs per month.
- Average number of applications per job.
What?? That’s it?
Well, I can certainly come up with plenty more – but most of what you need to know is contained in these two. Think about it. If you know the optimum number of unique job seekers to jobs, you can keep your marketing spend ‘just right’ (of course, you have to anticipate sales increases or decreases – easy, right?). And if you know the right number of applications per jobs (i.e., the amount needed to retain your employers), then you can evaluate the quality of your job seeker traffic.
Easy to lay out, difficult to execute – but if it wasn’t challenging, we’d be bored, right?
So what are your metrics?
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