by David Searns, Haley Marketing

If you're too busy to read this post right now, I'll sum it up in one sentence:

Firms that sell strategically and market aggressively during a recession come out on top.

How should your firm be marketing in times like these?

There is no magic, one-size-fits-all, works-in-every-case, silver bullet sales or marketing solution. The economy is in rough shape. Business is down. And there is less overall demand for staffing services.

And in some cases, we have to use trial and error to figure out what marketing strategies work best.

But don't get me wrong. Some things ARE working, and I'll share a few ideas in just a minute. However, before I get to what does work, let's consider what's NOT working:

• Order taking is not working. You can't sell staffing by being transaction oriented. You have to sell solutions.
• Increasing call quotas is not working. While boosting quotas can temporarily increase sales, it's nearly impossible to sustain.
• Price cutting is not working. You may get more orders, but you may wipe out your profits--and you'll attract the worst clients. Even worse, you can't easily raise your prices when business improves.

Doing the same old things is not working.

The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result. The economy has changed. Staffing has changed. And if you want to continue to be successful, your business has to change too.

So what does work?

While no one solution will be right for every business, here are three strategies that can help you generate more job orders in the coming months:

Sell more strategically.
Your clients are facing the same business challenges you do. They don't need temp help, but they do need ways to reduce costs and drive revenue. And that's exactly what you sell!

Teach your sales team to sell solutions that improve efficiency, drive productivity, eliminate capacity constraints, and reduce labor and associated personnel expenses. Change your business from providing staffing services to offering workforce efficiency consulting.

Be more visible.

In your market, there are prospects that don't know your firm. And there are clients you don't have time to call. Now is the time for more marketing. Your sales reps can only contact so many people per day. Marketing allows you to reach more people, more often, for less cost than cold calling. By investing more aggressively in marketing, you will not only attract more business in the short term, you will also recover significantly faster as business improves.

Aggressive marketing makes more people aware of your firm. It signals to buyers that you're successful and you must be doing something right. And it reminds people of the value you can provide. During a downturn, the only way to grow is to take business away from the competition, and you do that by being more aggressive.

Ideal marketing tools you should consider right now include: direct mail (personal letters, greeting and note cards, and postcards), e-mail (e-mail newsletters, e-cards, personal e-mails, etc.), video marketing, public relations and simply spending more virtual face-time with your existing clients.

You can even combine strategies 1 and 2 to maximize your impact.

Focus on hard-to-find talent.

Most recruiters already know this, but even in a down market, some jobs remain hard to fill. What are those jobs in your community? Engineers? IT professionals? Accounting and finance specialists? Medical device production staff? Truck drivers? Contact tracers?

Become a consumer of local job postings. Study the trends and see what positions remain in high demand. Then either train your recruiters, or hire recruiters with the right experience, to make your firm the top local expert at finding those kinds of people. No matter how weak the economy becomes, staffing firms that can recruit hard to find people will always have a market for their services.

Aggressive and focused: a winning combination in today's economy.

The bottom line is that the best marketing we are seeing right now is marketing that is both aggressive and focused. Marketing that has a specific goal, is being measured, and is integrated with sales and the operations of the staffing firm. Companies that are making those kinds of marketing investments are having far fewer struggles than those who are simply continuing to do business as usual, hunkering down until the dust settles, or trying to downsize their way to success.

Looking for more resources to help your staffing firm thrive in this economy?

Visit our COVID-19 Recovery Resources web page, packed with business strategy and marketing ideas to help your staffing firm stand out, stay top-of-mind and sell more.