eBook: Marketing and PR in the Human Resource Marketplace:
What You Need to Know

43 pages

It used to be that brand advertising, a few direct mail campaigns and trade show appearances, coupled with sales calls and a little PR, was enough to stay competitive as a vendor in the Human Resource marketplace. No longer.

The HR marketplace is growing rapidly as organizations realize the competitive edge gained from high-quality employees. Our calculations suggest it is a marketplace worth more than $1 trillion per year and still growing. But this lucrative marketplace has attracted swarms of new companies offering products and services for all segments of the HR industry.

Competition forces all suppliers to become more efficient and cost effective. In some ways marketing has never been more difficult. Today, broad-based marketing messages and brand advertising are mostly ignored. However, anyone doing business has never had a greater opportunity to reach out to buyers directly in a more conversational manner, and on a playing field more open or democratized than at this moment in time. We're of course referring to the Internet.

And with all new methods come new rules. Rather than receiving marketing messages and sales calls, HR buyers are hunting for information and resources to help them identify their needs and distinguish the products and services that will help them most.

They are looking for people they can trust and people trusted by others. We know HR buyers use the Internet to find what they are looking for; they also depend on word-of-mouth recommendations from peers, which increasingly are also mediated by online communications, social media, and online community forums. Specifically, at the early stages of the buying process, they are using search engine technology and Web 2.0 functions to locate news and information they can trust. Key tools for reaching the new breed of HR buyer include online press releases, other forms of online content, and search engine-optimized websites.

The bottom line, then, is that suppliers of HR-related products and services who will succeed in today's HR marketplace are those who are readily available to help buyers in their quest for information online, develop a standing of good reputation among trusted advisors including industry peers, and have the mechanisms to develop direct relationships with prospects.

This eBook will walk you through today's HR marketplace to help you understand the changes that are taking place and help you see a future for your company in that marketplace. Then we'll show you how to make use of the most effective marketing tools available today and how to measure the success of your marketing campaign to satisfy the new mandate for demonstrable ROI. The eBook concludes by showing you how vendors in the HR marketplace have been employing these tools and how they have put HRmarketer to use to get the best possible return on their marketing investment.