The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing: Rick Maré & Nicole Clarke

How to get the most from your new website is always a discussion point. Whether its SEO, advertising or content to drive ROI. But should we first take a step back and ask what the data is telling us?

Joining James Whitelock this week are Rick and Nicole the founders of Shazamme.

Rick and Nicole discuss how recruiters should be making data-driven decisions and how much money is wasted on marketing that doesn’t work.

Episode Transcript:

00:00.85

ThinkinCircles

So welcome back everybody to the marketing rules podcast and it’s my pleasure to be joined by the team from Shazamme. How we doing we got Nico and we got we got Rick, who are joining me from the other side of the globe on my morning there afternoon. How are you guys doing?

00:17.37

Nicole

Fantastic James, how are you?

00:20.66

ThinkinCircles

Or good or good. It is a pleasure to have you on board. So, I tell you what for those who aren’t familiar with Shazamme give us an introduction into Shazamme first and then we can dive a bit into your both your background So who wants to who wants to take lead on telling me about Shazamme.

00:37.25

Nicole

I will take the lead on telling you about Shazamme so very quickly. Both Rick and I have been in recruitment website technology now for over 12 years and really had an opportunity to start with a blank sheet of paper and. Figure out. How could we solve all the problems we’ve seen with recruitment website technology across the globe while working with start-ups through to some of the world’s largest brands and everyone in between so we took it back to nothing and scoped it all out and created everything that we knew could fix. Things that we know were broken. It needed to be easy enough to edit and update and create job boards and everything you want. So, I could do it and that’s saying something. So, it’s all drag and drop and Canva really was the inspiration around. Well, why can’t recruitment websites be like Canva drag and drop and. Then we just solved all the support issues by installing chat support and so we’re lucky enough now to have over 280 clients across the globe multilingual capabilities and people are loving it. So, it’s a breath of fresh air and exciting.

01:45.87

ThinkinCircles

Good stuff. Amazing! As you were taking a lead, Nicole, tell us a bit about your background in recruitment and how you, how you came to chime me in the first place.

01:56.37

Nicole

Yeah, that’s good. So, wow I’ve recruited for myself in multiple businesses. But I’ve never actually been a recruiter However I have been working with recruiters in a marketing as. Perspective and website perspective and advertising perspective for over twelve years which gave me a real passion for recruitment marketing and as you know James, we’ve spoken about this before. Yeah, if you can get these pieces, right? It makes a big difference to a company’s success online and I’m passionate about helping. Recruiters be more successful by using their brand.

02:34.96

ThinkinCircles

So ah, brilliant, good stuff. Amazing! Rick, give us your potted history if that’s possible. Okay.

02:41.31

Rick

Great. Yeah, it is possible. It is a checker history. So, I’ve done a bit of everything in in my career I ran a chocolate biscuit factory ran a housing company ran a tech company a fintech company before it was known as fintech. But where the journey started was in around 2006, I started a start-up called job x it was a job board to compete with one of the largest successful job boards in the world called seek and they own lots of other job boards around the world. And both Nicole and I were pretty much starting the same time. Nicole was for a company called ‘Jobs Jobs Jobs’ and I was running job x and y, we were going head and hence we’ve known each other for a long time, and that was a bit of fun. It was. But then the global financial crisis hits in 2008 and recruiters just disappeared. They didn’t want to spend assent on advertising because you know there was no jobs.

03:47.59

Rick

So, we used the technology back then to start what was really the first version of what we’ve got today which was you know a recruitment website platform and we evolved that over the years into you know the First. first responsive platform then first mobile app platform. And we had you know a lot of success, but technology was always you know fallen behind the rest of the industries out there. You know, not hr tech but you know e-commerce sites and other sites. So yeah, it certainly was very frustrating. That I could never do anything that I can do today and that’s again supporting what Nicole said our mission here was that Nicole and I not techies we should be able to do exactly what we want to do if we were running a recruitment business and that’s essentially what we’ve achieved.

04:39.13

ThinkinCircles

Ah, cheers. Thank you for that Rick is that I didn’t realise you’d run a biscuit factory at some point in the past.

04:48.30

Rick

Lots of fun chocolate biscuits.

04:49.65

Nicole

50

04:51.19

ThinkinCircles

We’re going to talk a little bit today around data-driven marketing and how to make the most of that. So, you guys obviously have built a platform that that can support this so why don’t you give me big. Bit of a set the scene for me around how marketed should be using data and to make to make decisions when it comes to their website. Their marketing. You know what? what tools they should be considering what the data points they should be considering. Maybe Nicole this is a question for you.

05:26.96

Nicole

Yeah, so I’ll do the intro and I’ll pass over to Rick to talk about the, the opportunities from a tech perspective so like anything as we know in this world. A lot of people are spending money on a lot of different types of advertising and marketing and job boards and. Paid advertising and unfortunately you know most times people don’t know what’s working for their brand. They’re just throwing money at these things hoping that it sticks and guessing that maybe they’re getting something from it. But as we know. wasting money is not a great thing to be doing and you want to make sure that your brand is appearing in the places that are going to get your quality applications. So really, the ability to track to understand where your job seekers are that are applying for jobs. Coming from and reinvesting the money in the places that aren’t working for you and that can be. We’ve got a few clients that are very sophisticated in how they’re tracking all their data points and they know now what job boards are returning the best application and quality rate. Over the ones that aren’t and then they can decide to choose to funnel money where it’s working, and you know is it PPC or pay-per-click advertising on Google or YouTube or Facebook what works for your brand and as we know James different.

06:54.75

Nicole

Platforms work differently for different agencies and different industry sectors. You know TikTok. For instance, you know you need to try to analyse and try everything to see what’s giving you quality results. So, I’ll hand over to Rick You can talk about you know the setting up and the structuring and the opportunities to track.

07:13.58

Rick

Yeah, so thanks to God it’s great I just wanted to add something to it, and this is probably fundamental to the platform that we’ve developed. We’ve obviously as you know we’ve been doing this for 12 years.

07:14.29

Nicole

Managed data.

07:29.93

Rick

The biggest issue in the past was that recruiters or marketers could not move fast enough with their technology and their platform to do campaigns and to really you know, get things up and running very quickly. So, what we’ve seen now, and this is not because we’re driving it is because our clients are driving it. They’re becoming a lot more innovative in what they do So we probably don’t know half the things or probably 70% of things that our clients now do because they’re all doing it themselves because it’s so easy, so you’ll hop on a client side and suddenly, you’ll see after they’ve created all these campaigns for their clients, and they’ve thrown video. They’ve thrown. Pop-ups. They’ve thrown quizzes on there. They’ve done things that we could never have imagined that our clients would come up with and that’s probably part of this this whole discussion around data and content and analytics because. They can now do things. They’ve never been able to do before so they can use that to then market their brand socially to a degree that done outside the recruitment industry well. But in the recruitment industry has never really been able to be done because of the complexities and the and the. Antiquated technology. So, we’re seeing some amazing things happening and on top of that We we’ve sort of perfected the tracking of those campaigns. So, for those who don’t know about UTM codes, UTM are the tracking codes.

09:03.27

Rick

When you do campaigns and there’s 5 different codes so you can really slice and di based on different campaigns different sources different banners, pages, etc and we track all of that all the way from the first click right? to the last click. Of that session so that you can really become innovative in how you attract people you don’t no longer need to attract them to an actual job because you’re tracking them where they come to a landing page or a pop-up or a quiz or a poll you can still track. All the way through to an application and that’s obviously key in measuring what works and what doesn’t work so we feel like we’ve put a bit of fun into marketers to explore their brand which they’ve never been able to do before.

09:55.10

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, mean that that all makes sense, right? and, it’s stuff that marketers should have been doing for a long time I got a couple of questions around that one is, how. How would you encourage marketers and maybe businesses without the Marketed and encourage them to continue measuring stuff because what tends to happen is a business gets very enthusiastic about all this right at the start about what they can and can’t measure. And then over time they just lose the impetus to continue looking at these stats and then, they realise they haven’t looked them in in it in a year and they go, and you go to them. Oh how? well’s your website doing I don’t know I haven’t looked it in in the in any year. So how do you keep that moment going.

10:48.89

Rick

You’ll go for that 1 looks like there’s a bit of so look what we what we absolutely encourage is the concept of the marketing dashboard now.  everything should flow automatically into. An analytics marketing dashboard. So that one you automatically get a report sent to you every week so that you don’t ignore the stats in it that you don’t rely on someone to collate manually. So, one of the things that we have seen people that invest in. Creating a marketing dashboard much more informed as to what’s working and what’s not and they don’t need to put a great deal of effort into it because it’s all happening in the background all their social is coming together all the Google analytics is coming together all the paid and socialism all coming together to one dashboard. So that is what we certainly encourage people to do and the companies that we see doing that well are reaping the rewards because they don’t need to have someone collating you know data every week for hours and hours and hours and knowing that it possibly won’t get looked at.

12:00.97

Nicole

I was also going to add to that? you know it’s baby steps like this and I think this is the thing that people need to come back to and remember your brand online now is all you have really in a digital space that reflects who you are and what you do. So, it is worth investing whether it’s an hour a week an hour a fortnight just to jump in and look at that data and a good example was sitting with a client the other day.  a small client but highly competitive in their space and they’re wondering why you know they’ve been with another web. Site provider for a very long time. They’re not ranking very much at all for anything that they should be ranking for, and they were quite shocked when I sat down and took them through an SEO report and just showed them what they were appearing for and what their competitors were appearing for and gave them some strategies and some tips and tricks on. How they could really hijack some of that traffic for themselves and it was really you know just by looking at that data and having a look a look at your competitors. What you can pick up that’s going to help your brand be more successful so people should dedicate. At least an hour of fortnight to look at look after their brand.

13:18.54

ThinkinCircles

Ah, yeah, That’s a great tip. The next one is the one I suppose you might get asked for the time and I know we do is you know what you should be measuring from your perspective around the you know about your platform. You know what are the data points that. Make sense What are data points that you know that are that are keys to return an investment that are keys to engagement. What? What would you suggest that people be looking at what are these data points for.

13:44.74

Nicole

So, I’ll start and then let Rick add his piece. So, for me, the fundamentals are for starters from an SEO perspective. Are you showing up for the keywords you want to be found for like that’s important and if you’re not, you need to create content. That is going to help people find you if that’s what you do because they’re looking for you and the search engines want to send them there if it makes sense to do so. But if you haven’t got it set up right in the beginning, you’re missing that opportunity. You know, understanding what you want to be found for is so important and a lot of people miss that the other is of course if you’re spending a lot of money on job boards or other advertising methods. You need to be tracking. What’s returning giving you an ROI because so many people are wasting so much money and even you know and people talk about you know, recruitment marketing as you know James, you know if you don’t understand recruitment. You can’t possibly be a good. SEO optimizer or marketer for a recruitment agency because you just don’t get the opportunities. You know that there’s potentially 3 silos you’ve got your job seeker silo your employer silo and potentially you’re trying to recruit internally as well. So, you need to measure who’s coming to what.

15:13.61

Nicole

Pages on your website and they are finding you for what you want so where are your applications coming from. Are they converting or are they bouncing off the site and use that to sort of analyse well you know. Is it worth spending money on this job board because everybody comes here and then they leave the site straight away and there’s no applications coming through or this one that we’re spending a lot of money on is you know we might only get 12 clicks and, but we get 12 applications a month and it’s highly relevant. So, I think it’s just understanding your business and what’s converting and where people are coming from is very important and all the traditional Google analytics are people bouncing off pages. What can you do to fix that?

16:03.50

Rick

Ah, look you Toby agrees with what you’re saying and on top of that I guess it depends on what type of business you are and what you’re looking for so depending on the stage. So, if you’re a start-up you may not care so much about certain things but so depending on what industry what stage of your business are you may. What more clients versus candidates versus people working for you if you’re in a growth phase. So, I guess understanding the stage of business is at and what matters to you is important as well because there’s no use if you’re getting let’s a thousand candidates and you don’t have the staff to. Then place them so it’s a bit a bit of juggling to figure out the most important parts for your business and then investing in in those areas. I think, the best thing to do is to. Put a strategy in place to go. What do you want out of your digital strategy is it client candidates or people working for you and then focus on dissecting those opportunities and the channels that you can use and then measure through Google analytics and other tools to see what’s working and what’s not because for some people YouTube might be better than LinkedIn for other people. TikTok may be better than linking so you really need to test all those segments based on you know what? you think gets you your best return and then measure us.

17:31.85

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, yeah, again, some great advice. You’ve mentioned SEO a couple of times.

17:44.56

ThinkinCircles

Where do we sit with SEO on this day. How important is it how much relevant should we put towards it is it the that the dark art it used to be, can we just can we can we hack it? What are the changes that Google is making that we can you know you know make it more relevant to us. You know. What’s the state of play with SEO and websites today.

18:09.95

Nicole

Wow. There’s a lot.  the first the first thing is if you want to be found for something. You don’t have content on your website for that specific thing you’re never going to be found I think SEO is very important I don’t know about you, but we get a lot of leads. Organically. That are finding us because people that we know from a recruitment perspective. People are googling for a job just like they say plumber in London you know to try to find someone to fix a broken pipe or whatever. The biggest mistake that I see recruiters make is if you’re an engineering recruiter and you just have a sector called engineering on your website you go are you an engineering company. Are you going to build me a structure. You know there’s silos that you need to create the biggest most important SEO engineering jobs is what you do, and engineering recruitment is what you do, and you need to break those down for the sectors that you want to be found so that is important but it’s about. As you know it’s about user experience. You want somebody to type that specific thing in click it come to land on that page and go oh my gosh. This is exactly what this company does and there’s the people the recruiters who specialize in that there’s the jobs for that industry.

19:36.33

Nicole

There’s a form I can fill in and it’s all in 1 place and it converts which Google loves seeing form submissions and things like that SEO still companies out there that websites aren’t secure. you know, like if your website isn’t secure. No one’s going to want to send anyone there because they can have their data. Stolen, the next one important for SEO the biggest which is the heart of what recruiters do is the jobs if your jobs are sitting on a separate domain or they’re framed in or they’re not pulling through all the relevant data with jobs schemas and all the things that. You know, quite sophisticated behind the platform you’re missing an opportunity where each job should almost be like a little blog article being pushed out every single time It’s posted to tell people that you’re relevant for those sorts of jobs. That one’s important we are finding conversational language now. Is apparently something that Google’s looking for. we recommend and the trick I’ve sort of given people when they’re trying to write a blog or some content and just fill in the blanks or refresh some stuff is you know, read what or speak. What you want to put on your website into a Google doc and it will voice type it for you and you’re going to get great natural language that you can then you know tweak and then put onto your website is a good one. if a q and a is on the websites were.

21:12.50

Nicole

We’ve got a lot of voice search going on now. So ideally, you want to make sure you get yourself onto the maps. That when people are looking for a sales recruiter in London and that’s what you do you want? you know one of the voice-prompted Alexa or series who probably all going to pipe up now. To read out that company’s name and then the other one obviously important Google my business if you’re not if you’re not updating Google my business, you’re listing which is free regularly and posting content to that. Just like you do.

21:49.73

Nicole

Social platform, you’re missing huge opportunities there because Google owns Google so there are a few. There are few of mine anyway.

21:57.49

ThinkinCircles

Some great tips stuff I didn’t even know to be honest I didn’t know the stuff around the for that natural language.so that’s some’s some great tips. So, a follow-on question from that. Really and then I and then I will let you go is, is again you mentioned job Boards. Surely, the goal is if you’ve got your website doing what it’s meant to be doing you got your se doing what you? what? it’s meant to be doing. You know how much reliable how much reliability should be putting on to sticking our stuff on the job board because we really want to attract direct traffic. So where do we? What’s the situation.

22:33.97

ThinkinCircles

Do we do you know? do we really want to as recruiters want our websites to be taking over that branded traffic away from the job boards in time if we’re doing it properly is that is that that is that the goal.

22:48.44

Nicole

Ideally, I mean I think there’s always going to be a place for commercial job boards. But I think it’s finding which ones are working for you as a brand. Ideally yeah, you do increase the traffic that comes through to your website because that’s your brand. And at the end of the day if you ever want to sell or get someone to invest or whatever else. That’s your storefront. You know that’s you. So, from a perspective of investment. You know, creating a campaign page and maybe. Doing some advertising pay-per-click advertising that drives traffic back to a high converting landing page can be very beneficial for a brand and people should give that sort of thing a go because it can create good uses. But yeah, all traffic should be driven back to your website. Each recruiter should be sharing jobs onto their social media platforms from the job ad itself. So that click results in people coming back to that job on the website where hopefully then you can engage them with lots of other great things. I think it’s a bit of a necessary evil people have been trying to move away from paying for job boards that keep putting their prices up all the time. But if it works for you and it makes sense, and the conversion rate makes sense. Why not you know? But your brand is the most important.

24:05.57

ThinkinCircles

You sure I couldn’t agree more? It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you this morning your afternoon. Hopefully we’ll have you back in the future. But for now.to say? Thank you very much if anybody wants to know any more about Shazamme or you guys will include all your details in the show notes. But Nicole Rick thank you very much.

24:28.74

Nicole

Thanks so much James.

24:29.75

Rick

Thank you, have a great day.