Recently a startup I am advising asked me a fairly general question about how to market their services. So we went over what they had done so far and I listened to them reel off the usual things…webinars, advertising, etc.
Then she mentioned that they had bought a list of emails and sent out a blast message with poor results. This intrigued me because I an not a huge fan of lists that you have to buy. They are usually expensive and you dont know how they got them. The only ones I think are worth buying are those like from a recent industry conference that you know has fresh emails.
When it comes to lists I prefer to build my own. My weapon of choice is Email Grabber which lets me crawl any website and snag any emails it spots. I simply type in a domain and it does the rest.
Building a social recruiting startup? try crawling a site like Bullhorn that has thousands of 3rd party recruiters on it. I recently plucked 3k emails from their pages.
When I use a tool like this it lets me target “active” employers. What I mean is companies who are hiring RIGHT NOW. I know that when I crawl craigslist or a job board or another recruiting site I’m getting addresses of employers who have an immediate need.
The list my client was using was probably chock full of old emails and not the right contacts they needed.
Twitter is also a good way to find active hires. For my InstaJob app that I recently launched, I mostly just target recruiters on twitter because they post a ton of jobs on their feeds and my app is the perfect tool for them. So I simply follow, favorite and retweet based on keywords that I type in like “I’m hiring” or “we are hiring”.
I guess the point of this post is to really TARGET your marketing efforts to places you know your audience exists. Dont waste your time on general broad based ad options (especially print ads) where you cant accurately target your audience. Know where your target market spends their time and money…follow them there.
BONUS TIP: check out a tool called FollowGen that helps you grow twitter followers.
