Every carrier in the nation is looking for the “magic bullet” that ends their recruiting struggles. We have finally found it. The number 1 tip for driver recruiting success is…
Build your own audience of truck drivers!
Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year by carriers paying 3rd party platforms to have access to the platform’s pre-built driver audience.
Stop spending your entire budget on someone else’s and start building your own.
- What Does it Mean to Build an Audience?
- Why Building Your Audience is so Effective
- Where to Build Your Driver Audience
- How to Start Building Your Audience to Recruit
What Does it Mean to Build an Audience?
In the simplest of terms, building an audience is gathering information from people in a desired demographic for future marketing purposes.
For driver recruiting purposes, this means recording the data of all the drivers that show an interest in your company.
Building an audience manifests in different ways.
The most traditional method of audience building is creating a spreadsheet with everyone’s information. Every time a new driver interacts with your company, you add their information to the spreadsheet.
However,
There are many other easier and more effective ways that we will discuss later in the article.
Why Building Your Audience is so Effective
Meramec Solutions analyzed the data across multiple campaigns that utilized other company’s driver audiences and campaigns that built an audience for the carrier.
The carriers that relied on their leads coming from a recruiting platform averaged a cost per lead of $21.95. These campaigns relied on multi-carrier apps to boost quantity.
Campaigns that targeted an audience built specifically for the carrier saw an average cost per lead of $14.84. These were all direct leads, no multi-carrier apps were needed to achieve such a low cost per lead.
Direct leads correlate with more driver recruiting success.
Advertising to another platform’s pool of drivers is an easy way to reach qualified candidates. These recruiting platforms will sell you on the idea that no other company can get your ads in front of as many qualified drivers as they can.
All these recruiting platforms are doing is reaching out to their network of drivers with your information via email, text, call, and social media. They are also sending these same drivers the job opportunities from every other carrier that works with the platform.
Build your own audience of qualified drivers and you will not have to compete for their attention.
Plus, drivers that sign up to receive updates from these platforms never respond to an ad from your company. They respond to an ad from the platform about your company.
This distinction is important because drivers who respond to an ad from a platform, even if it is about your company, may not know who you are when you call them.
But,
drivers who apply directly to an ad from your company will be expecting a call from you.
Where To Build Your Driver Audience
Before you determine how you are going to build your audience of drivers, you need to know where you build the audience.
There are two types of audiences you need to be building. The first type is a core audience database of drivers who have submitted their information to your company. The second type is drivers who interact with your web presence.
Your core audience needs to be on a spreadsheet. This is because you will be able to upload the information onto many different platforms (Facebook, MailChimp, etc.) and market to this audience or look-a-like audiences.
Outside of the core audience, you need to be tracking everyone who interacts with your web presence. Often drivers will research a company / available job, but not submit their information. You still want to market to these people even though they did not formally apply.
Build this secondary audience using tools such as cookies, Facebook Pixel, and Facebook custom audience builder.
How to Start Building Your Audience to Recruit
If your company uses an applicant tracking system then your core audience is already built. Simply export all of the drivers in your ATS onto a .xlsx file. This file can now be uploaded to any marketing platform and used to market to.
If you do not use an ATS you will need to create a spreadsheet manually. This can be done in tools like Excel or Google Sheets. Make sure that the first row is the information headers, do not just start listing everyone’s information.
The bare minimum information your spreadsheet should include is the driver’s first name, last name, email, phone, and state.
To build the audience of drivers who interact with your web presence, you will need to place trackers across your different content. Trackers are great because they automatically collect people’s information and update your audience without you needing to do any work.
You need to place these trackers on your website, premiere social media posts, and on the paid ads you are already running. If you are primarily focused on Facebook ads, this can be done in the “Audience” tab of the Ads Manager.
Conclusion
Building an engaged audience of drivers is the number one tip for driver recruiting success. Successfully following this tip will lower your company’s cost-per-lead, increase your contact rate, and result in more hires.
More hires = more money.
Want to start building your own audience but still unsure of where to start? Fill out the form below to speak with a Meramec Solutions Recruiting Specialist!
