2 Major Reasons Why Healthcare Staffing Agencies Should Invest in Paid Ads
Working in the healthcare staffing industry is essentially a messenger’s game. You are the trusted middlemen between facilities and travelers— and you know what they say about the middle— it often gets overlooked. So how do you bring attention to your hard work? Paid advertising.
Paid advertising, broken down by pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-impression (PPM), includes engagement through Google Ads, Facebook, and other social and digital platforms. When used strategically, paid ads can significantly increase your visibility and amplify content cost-effectively to a larger audience.
Paid advertising can capture the curiosity of passive candidates
Let’s begin by addressing the elephant in scrubs. Anyone working in healthcare knows that there are a lot— a lot— of options out there for travelers when it comes to staffing opportunities. They know they have the power to be picky.
By utilizing paid ads, staffing agencies can cut through job boards' noise and occasionally bypass them to boost visibility and put relevant content in front of active and, more importantly, passive candidates. What’s a passive candidate? Someone who isn’t currently searching for a job but is inevitably still online, using social media, or simply browsing the internet. The average person spends roughly two and a half hours a day on social media. So, you're missing out if you’re not actively utilizing these channels. As Marketing professor and author of Contagious, Jonah Berger, says, “top of the mind means the tip of the tongue.” Even if they aren’t looking now, they’ll think of you when they are.
Passive candidates can be precious when looking to snag higher-quality hires. How? Because passive candidates are often content candidates— until they’re not— meaning they are statistically motivated by factors other than financial and are more likely to be already qualified, requiring less training. Your best form of advertising is ultimately your advocates, so you will stay relevant by building and nurturing a community.
It’s an excellent alternative to market research
Social media has changed the game for how user data is collected. If you’re seeking to conduct market research for an ad campaign, you may be able to utilize existing social media interactions. For example, you can connect paid social ads to an online survey or lead generation page to quickly test an idea in real time, allowing for any changes that need to be made. This approach to testing is extremely agile because it allows you to tweak and perfect various running lead generation campaigns to maximize results.
Additionally, paid ads can be hyper-targeted based on the data collected like demographics, location, behaviors, interests, and more. Higher accuracy data and targeting capabilities enable you to interact with more qualified audiences, including lookalike and retargeting audiences.
Popular platforms for paid advertising and their benefits
LinkedIn’s industry-specific variables are its primary benefit. In addition to standard demographic information, LinkedIn allows you to target your ads based on job title/function, industry, skill level, and degree type. This can be extremely useful when looking for travelers for a hard-to-fill role when job boards aren’t cutting it.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s industry-specific variables are its primary benefit. In addition to standard demographic information, LinkedIn allows you to target your ads based on job title/function, industry, skill level, and degree type. This can be extremely useful when looking for travelers for a hard-to-fill role when job boards aren’t cutting it.
Facebook
Many healthcare traveler community groups exist on Facebook and Instagram. However, according to Wearesocial.com, the average reach of an organic post on a Facebook page has significantly declined, reaching a new low of 5.20%. In other words, only one in every 19 candidates sees your non-promoted content. Creating strategies that include paid components allows you to maximize your audience's visibility. Facebook ads also cost a fraction of other digital marketing methods and still allow you to target candidates based on location, age, interests, and education level. Added bonus: Facebook will show ads to users who have previously visited your website.
Instagram
Instagram’s relationship with Facebook is a huge benefit because if you already utilize Facebook for marketing, you won’t have to start from scratch. Instagram ads are also non-intrusive, which may be why it currently holds the highest engagement of any other social media platform.
Furthermore, Instagram offers the best results in terms of ROI and cost due to the way it measures a campaign’s success. Instead of follower counts, likes or comments, it evaluates awareness, reach and recall. It’s an effective and far less time-consuming method compared to other platforms.
Google
Advertising on Google is an excellent way for staffing agencies to source quality talent due to its high intent and ability to simultaneously run multiple ads to reach numerous audiences through keyword targeting, audience selections, negative keywords, conversion tracking, and competitor research. Lastly, Google Ads can become geographically targeted, which is especially beneficial when looking for higher concentrations of travelers in certain areas.
The bottom line: paid advertising is always a good idea
To create an effective marketing strategy, you’ll need paid and organic advertising to work harmoniously. If this sounds overwhelming— well, it can be. It’s complex work. Don’t want to get bogged down in all the details? Omnio is here to help!
Want to learn more about how we can create strategic ads that guarantee to grab (and hold onto) new audiences to grow your staffing agency to the next level?
