Three marketing strategies for a successful job search

If you are struggling to find and land your first post-college job, integrate these 3 marketing strategies for a successful job search.

My first post-college job hunt didn’t go so well. I think that’s because I correlated the job-hunting process to the sales process. But for a successful job search, I should have thought about how I could integrate marketing into the job-hunting process.

What’s the difference? The difference is the approach. With a sales approach to job-hunting, I was trying to only tell employers they needed me. But if I had integrated a marketing approach, I would have focused more on showing employers how awesome I’d be as an employee that they would have felt a strong need to hire me.

3 Marketing Strategies for a successful job search:

1.Define your niche

Definition:

An advertising strategy that focuses on a unique target market rather than advertising to anyone and everyone. Let me explain with examples:

• Lululemon and Nike both sell leggings. But Lululemon initially focused more on reaching yogis while Nike initially focused more on reaching runners. Lululemon’s target market isn’t everyone who wants leggings. Their unique target market (niche) is yogis who want to wear leggings.

A brand doesn’t advertise a product to everyone because then it wouldn’t resonate with anyone. Instead, a brand advertises with a specific market in mind and people can choose whether it resonates with them.

How this results in a successful job search:

So many recent graduates feel like they don’t have any or enough experience and they are open to anything and everything. So they just about word-vomit anything and everything they’ve ever done in an effort to fill up their one-page resume and appeal to everyone. I’m here to tell you that:

1. You have more experience than you think
2. It’s less about how many previous jobs you’ve had and more about how relevant your previous jobs/internships are

Tip: Going on informational interviews with people will help you connect all of the dots. You can learn more about informational interviews here.

2.Write for your target audience

Definition:

A particular group at which a film, book, advertising campaign, etc is aimed at. Going off of the example above, Lululemon’s target audience is a yogi while Nike’s target audience is a runner. When they create products and market them, they are creating and marketing to these specific audiences.

How this results in a successful job search:

Your target audience is the recruiter or hiring manager at the company you are applying for. So while your resume, cover letter, and portfolio talk about you, they aren’t written for you…they are for your target audience (recruiter/hiring manager). 

Tip: Reaching out to the contact person for the job to ask questions will be helpful.

3.Integrate SEO tactics

Definition:

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The purpose of this is to tell search engines that your website, blog post, etc is relevant to what it is looking for.

For example, I want people who are looking “strategies to improve job applications” to find this blog post. So I would use these words throughout this post to show Google’s bots that this post is important to people looking up “strategies to improve job applications.” 

How this results in a successful job search:

Some companies use an ATS (applicant tracking system) to help sort through the large number of applicants they get. This robot sifts through applications and prioritizes the most important.

Tip: Download this FREE Career Roadmap to discover your path to your dream job.

What now?

Now that you know these three marketing strategies, it’s time for you to get started. Start with number 1 (define your niche), implement changes (apply to jobs that fall within your niche), and record what happens. Then move one to number 2 (write for your target audience. And don’t forget to Download this FREE Career Roadmap to discover your path to your dream job.