You may have noticed an ad campaign I recently ran on LinkedIn. It was targeted at recruiters to encourage them to think about improving the quality of their recruitment marketing.
The first one (in the picture above) was accompanied by a short story about an accountant called Trevor to illustrate the point being made in the ad.
When I started looking more closely at the reactions, I noticed something I’d not seen in any of my other LinkedIn posts over the past 10 years.
Normally, most of my social media engagement comes from recruiters (and by most I mean around 90%) – but this time I couldn’t help but notice a lot more seemed to be coming from non-recruiters.
Then, as I ran the other 11 ads over the next 4-5 weeks, I saw a similar pattern. Lots of comments and likes from non-recruiters, all of which were positive.
So, here’s me, trying to attract the attention of recruiters in the hope that I can persuade/cajole/shame some of them into buying our copywriting training – and the threads are getting hijacked by people who aren’t recruiters and aren’t ever going to be buying this type of training.
Then the penny dropped. But before I could jump to a conclusion, I first had to make sure that it was actually happening – so I did some counting.
I counted all the ‘likes’ from 5 of the 12 ads. In particular, I counted all the likes from people who didn’t work in recruitment, HR or any business or service affiliated to either of those two.
I was right. The percentage of non-recruitment people liking (and commenting) on these posts had jumped from around 10% to just over 42%. And in case you’re wondering, the numbers across the 5 posts were a total of 1,172 likes with 497 of them coming from non-recruiters.
Why were all these Operations Managers, Developers, Accountants, Engineers, Marketing Execs and Teachers commenting on an ad campaign that was basically taking the piss out of bad writing practice?
The only logical answer I can think of is because these people are the consumers of your job ads. The very types of people you’re trying to attract.
They’re your customers.
And they’re telling you something.
Here are all the other ads in the campaign…
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