3 common mistakes in media buying

In a recent blog post, we provided a comprehensive overview of programmatic advertising and its evolution in recruitment marketing. We also introduced our latest tool in the NAS suite
of proprietary offerings, NAS MediaPro, a programmatic job ad distribution and management platform designed to optimize your company’s recruitment media performance through a single, centralized command center.

Programmatic media buying makes sense for a number of reasons. What doesn’t make sense
is wasting your valuable time, resources and budget on strategies that don’t deliver targeted, quantifiable results. That’s why we’d like to reveal the three most common mistakes that organizations continue to make when it comes to media buying.

Mistake #1. Committing to annual buys
Historically recruitment media strategies tended to be mostly yearly events. Large (and expensive) annual contracts were put in place tying up the majority of the media budget for the full contract period. Perhaps there were some small adjustments that could be made to the product mix, but on the whole, you were locked in. You could still conduct regular metrics reviews and commit to make adjustments to the strategy for the next contract period, however, your current time and money were already spent.

Thankfully, recruitment strategies are evolving to focus on pay-for-performance media, including Programmatic and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). With both of the strategy elements, you’re able to make adjustments in real time and are not locked in to an annual contract.

Mistake #2. Many eggs, one basket
It’s a lesson we learned early in life and it still holds true: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Along with the evolution of the recruitment media strategy landscape, the makeup of the
pay-for-performance media vertical continues to change.

While there are still players that are bigger than others, more and more media are getting on board with the idea that companies now expect a pay-for-performance model. If the media is performing, the investment is solid and will continue. Conversely, if the media is not performing, there are other sites that can be piloted to determine if they perform better.

With the move to programmatic media buying, companies have the ability to diversify their spend easily. You’re not only not locked into large annual contracts, but you’re also not locked into a small number of media sites. The pay-for-performance model continues to grow and there is solid reason to anticipate the move toward this model will continue across the media landscape.

Companies who have moved to a programmatic media buying strategy are experiencing success with an average 20% increase in application volume.

Mistake #3. Manually managing jobs
In addition to the flexibility programmatic advertising adds to a company’s budgeting and media mix, it also increases the ability to use their budget more effectively. Programmatic allows for rules-based strategies that can spread budget across jobs efficiently ensuring that more dollars are funneled to harder-to-fill jobs and less is spent on those that are easier to fill.

Rules can also be set to turn the budget on/off if a level of application is not achieved within a set time period. If an opening is receiving strong organic traffic, there’s no need for any budget to be put towards additional applications.

On average, 6% of job postings receive 36% of clicks. Conversely, 49% of job postings receive 2% of clicks. One can easily see from these metrics that spreading the budget to where it’s needed (the 49% receiving minimal clicks) would be the best move.

For companies that have ongoing needs in certain areas (nursing, sales, IT), programmatic campaigns can also be set up to automatically pull those jobs in on an ongoing basis. This can be done by ATS category and/or keyword. There’s tremendous flexibility in how the campaigns are automated…and of course you’re not locked into that structure, either. It can be updated as needed, thus allowing your recruiters and your internal HR team the freedom and flexibility to invest their time most wisely.

Learn more about programmatic media buying and how to put NAS MediaPro to work for you!

• What kind of social media recruiter are you?
• Why You Need A Full-Service Recruitment Agency