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David Searns | Co-CEO I am an idiot. Last week, our team at Haley Marketing hosted our annual Staffing Industry Executive Forum Recap webinar. Each year, we do our best to review the mountains of takeaways we gather at the SIA conference.
This year, Haley Marketing sent four team members to attend the Exec Forum, and each of us was asked to recap the sessions we attended. Just come up with 3 to 5 bullets for each session.
Sounds easy, right?
It is.
Except when you forget to summarize THE PANEL YOU WERE ON! Doh!!!
So, if you missed the recap webinar, you can watch it here:
https://www.lunchwithhaley.com/2025/02/13/sia-executive-forum-2025-recap/
As for my session, it was titled Getting the Most Out of Your Marketing Investment, and I was thoroughly honored to be on stage with these amazing people:
- Christian Barbato, VP Marketing, Staffing Industry Analysts
- Maria Sweeney, Fractional Chief Marketing Officer, The Mom Project/ClearEdge
- Matt Rivera, Chief Marketing Officer, Day & Zimmermann/Yoh
- Vinda Souza, Chief Marketing Officer, RefAssured
These are truly ROCK STAR marketers, and here’s the missing recap of what we discussed:
Q1: What are the most effective ways to ensure marketing efforts are getting in front of the right audiences, whether that’s clients, candidates, or internal talent?
I was asked to kick things off on this one and began by emphasizing the importance of focus – truly understanding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). I also talked about aligning marketing strategy with audience type.
For example, when the focus is talent, marketing strategies will need to include plans for both active and passive talent—looking at ways to maximize job spend ROI for active candidates (with tools like programmatic job spend management) and leveraging digital marketing for passive talent (SEO, PPC ads, social media, reputation management, and automation platforms).
For most companies in 2025, the focus is sales, and the best strategies are integrating marketing with sales through a journey that may include as many as 45 touch points (lots of which are “no click” touches that reinforce positioning).
This led to our second question....
Q2: What are the top metrics every staffing firm should track to understand if their marketing spend is actually paying off?
For this question, Vinda and Maria took the lead.
Vinda recommended evaluating overall marketing program spend, balancing customer acquisition cost versus lifetime value to really understand ROI.
She emphasized the importance of brand investment, which can feel intangible but is essential for long-term success. She advised the audience to recognize the value of an organic marketing mix and to understand that not everything can be measured.
Maria shared that staffing firms need to consider that marketing budgets will vary for different lines of business. She talked about the importance of sentiment and qualitative measures in brand building, and the importance of having a mix of digital and non-digital content to move the needle.
Matt noted that as staffing companies we often get short-sighted, and that marketing investments need to be measured over the long term when building a brand. He also noted that the service experience needs to match the marketing message.
My two cents on this topic was that brand building is essential for larger clients (those over $100M), and for smaller companies direct response and sales-enablement marketing tend to be more cost-effective.
Our third topic was about the challenges of tracking marketing results.
Q3: What are the biggest challenges in marketing attribution, and how can staffing firms make sure they’re accurately tracking what’s generating revenue and placements?
This was a topic that got all of us engaged.
Matt shared that tracking customer behavior is essential. Staffing companies need to capture the right actions that lead to business outcomes, so they understand what the sales (or recruiting) funnel really looks like.
He also added that we need to understand when a customer is willing to share their information. Knowing when to ask people for information is critical to audience engagement.
Maria recommended that staffing companies tie all initiatives back to key objectives and results (OKRs) to ensure impact. She said that success requires strategic planning and connection-building, and that companies need to emphasize collaboration and aligning efforts across sales, marketing, and leadership.
Vinda let us all know that there’s no “tech silver bullet” and that marketing (and attribution) success is rarely achieved through one tool or strategy. She recommended journey mapping to determine all the touchpoints that lead to a conversion (for a specific audience), then evaluating the costs of each of those touches and their impact on the ultimate lifetime value of the client conversion.
As for me, my contribution was that in B2B marketing, customer journeys are non-linear – we often expect a straightforward path, but the human element makes it unpredictable.
I shared a story of a company whose CEO insisted that their marketing was not having any impact, and all the new sales resulted from outbound sales efforts.
We convinced this organization to set up a simple Google form to track the source of all sales calls. 30 days later, we learned that more than 60% of sales leads came from the website and digital marketing.
Christian reminded the audience about the importance of creating sales enablement content—things like case studies or industry-specific sell sheets that help the sales team to tell a better story and increase conversion rates.
To keep this article from getting too long, I’ll close with one final question we were asked to address:
Q4: If a staffing firm has limited marketing dollars, what high-impact, low-cost strategies should they focus on first?
My response was to look at three things:
- Website optimization: 98% of visitors don’t self-identify – how can we engage them?
- Strategies for driving repeat visits and increasing engagement. A returning prospect is twice as likely to engage with your company.
- Creating more opportunities for audience response and interaction.
Maria recommended that staffing companies ensure their websites are fully optimized for user experience and conversions. She recommended analyzing on-site behavior to improve performance.
She also suggested a micro-organic strategy through employee advocacy on LinkedIn – leveraging internal voices to amplify brand reach.
Matt’s advice was to ensure your network is optimized for brand growth. He suggested activating recruiters and employees as brand advocates to expand reach and balancing organic and paid strategies to maximize visibility.
Vinda advised the audience to focus on building credibility and positioning their organizations as industry experts. She noted that higher-end staffing firms command premium rates, and that showcasing expertise is a cost-effective way to drive sales and improve margins.
Thanks…and apologies.
I want to thank Christian for inviting me to be part of this panel. I also want to thank my fellow panelists for their incredible wisdom and graciousness on and off stage.
And my apologies for this woefully incomplete recap! There were simply too many nuggets of wisdom offered for me to capture them all in this issue of SMART IDEAS! |
