Digital Marketing During the Social Care Recruitment Crisis

The UK social care sector has regularly faced challenges relating to staff turnover and high vacancy rates. The UK social care recruitment crisis has had a staggering effect on the care industry and in some cases, the level of care provided to service users.

Today our partners at ROAR Digital Marketing discuss using digital marketing during the social care recruitment crisis.

Contents
• The current social care recruitment crisis
• Digital marketing strategies available
• Conclusion

The current social care recruitment crisis
There is a crisis in social care recruitment and retention as positions are either left unfilled or see a high level of turnover.

Earlier this year, the social care recruitment crisis resulted in a total of 1.79 million roles in adult social care, with 165,000 left unfilled.

Additionally, the number of filled roles had dropped by 50,000, which is the first drop ever and puts the average vacancy rates across the care sector at 11%.

There are a range of reasons why staff shortages have risen so abruptly in the social care sector. Many suffered burnout from working excessively during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some are leaving for better-paid roles in industries like retail and other roles within the NHS.
As we see the NHS begin to plan strikes during the cost of living crisis to fight for fairer pay, it’s no surprise (in many cases) workers are looking elsewhere.

In June of 2022, Unison released a report titled ‘Social work and the impact of the Covid pandemic’. This was based on a survey of 3,000 social workers across the UK.

According to the survey, staff shortages (93%), unmanageable caseloads (90%) and long hours (80%) are significant concerns among social workers and their ability to do their jobs.

Digital marketing strategies to support during the recruitment crisis
Amongst the obvious, including a real living wage and better conditions for care staff working in the sector, there are many things agencies, employers, and recruiters can invest in to drive interest towards working in the social sector.

Digital Marketing has many benefits when it comes to attracting people and presenting campaigns and initiatives to people online. Investing in quality digital marketing could be a push for scoping up the newest talent in the social care sector.

Social ads: Social media can spread information regarding job openings and the organization’s hiring to active and passive candidates. In simple terms, ‘social ads; are advertisements that appear on social media instead of unpaid, organic promotional posts. These advertisements are sponsored and intend to get more eyes on a brand by targeting advertisements for specific audiences.

Using social media ads, you can reach those who aren’t necessarily spending their whole lives on typical employment platforms such as Linkedin. By doing this, you can target those who need a little more convincing.

When choosing to implement social media ads in your recruitment process, you must target channels that will reach your specific target audience. Additionally, you must generate ad content that can catch your intended audience’s eye.

For example, Facebook has the largest and most diverse demographic of all social media platforms. Via its Meta Business Suite (which is Facebook Business’ new name), you can target paid advertising using various factors. These include work status, industry, age, interests, gender and location geographically. Instagram and TikTok, for example, have a younger, more youthful audience which would be ideal if you were targeting younger graduates, potential apprentices or a more creative demographic. Additionally, Linkedin is home to many university students and graduates hoping to network and gain a role in the industry. Consider running a Linkedin paid ads campaign to encourage applicants. 71% of Linkedin users are younger people under the age of 34, which opens your roles up to a staggering amount of undergraduates, postgraduates and young professionals.

Example: Say you are trying to target graduates in social care. Target them on platforms they will be most active on. Consider Facebook and Instagram, which 81% of young people, aka Gen Z, say is their preferred social media platform.

PPC: PPC (Pay Per Click Ads) are advertisements that appear on websites and, most notably, search engines. You bid on terms (keywords) that you know your ideal audience will type into Google, that you would ideally want your ad to appear for. These will appear at the top of search engines and in other areas across Google.

However, the top result comes at a cost, as companies using PPC as part of their marketing strategy pay a fee each time their ads are clicked. But, the intention is to create profit/success via the desired conversion actions you wish users to take on your website – all resulting from your organization being found via your paid ads.

These will typically be the first SERP (search engine result page) results a user sees. This makes it vital to attract their attention with words and phrases that give them exactly what they want and match the users’ search intent.

Paid ads consist of choosing an area of focus you would like to appear for when users search related terms on search engines. By conducting keyword research, you can find keywords that users are searching for within the industry and use these to create targeted ad campaigns.

Once you have these key terms, It’s important to create ads with copy and language that relate to the user. Your ads are the bits of text appearing on the search engines when a user types in a keyword. For example, say your keyword is ‘social care recruitment’. You could create an ad variant that looks like the one below.

You create your ad variants in Google Ads, where you can establish your goals, track which ads are converting, manage your ad campaign budget and edit your campaigns.

SEO: SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is the process of optimising your content and website to rank for specific search terms. Ranking for search terms means on search engines, your website hopes to appear on the first page of search results or, even better, at the top.

To find key terms for optimising your website or content, you can conduct keyword research using tools like the ROAR DIY SEO Platform, SEMRush or Moz. To get started – Choose keywords with low difficulty and a good amount of monthly search volume, but most importantly, choose the keywords with the right user intent for the service/product you provide.

For example, if your goal is to recruit social care workers, you would most likely want to rank for search terms like; ‘social care roles’ ‘social care recruitment’ or ‘social care careers’.

If you are a business dedicated to recruiting social care workers, consider optimising your website around social care recruitment terms that would boost your authority and ranking. However, if you cover a wide range of industries, consider creating content around just one sector at a time by forming a topic cluster. In this case, it would be centred around social care.

To form a topic cluster, you first need to choose your central topic. This is what you will base a lot of your written content around further down the line.

Your central topic will inform your pillar page, which is a lengthy sales page or strong landing page you hope to rank highly on search engines and direct a lot of visiting traffic towards.

Once this is live online you can begin creating written supporting content that will direct readers to your lengthy pillar page. You need to create multiple smaller, more focused pieces of written content which cover questions or problems your readers may be having in relation to your central topic. These more focused pieces of content are called cluster content.

Once you have written your cluster content or related blog posts, you are ready to upload these to your site.

The vital part about using topic clustering as an SEO technique is to hyperlink from your blogs to your strong pillar page. Make sure you do this in each blog piece.

Hyperlinks will help search engines to understand the relationship between different pieces of content on your website. For more information and to get started, read our blog on > how to create content clusters for SEO.

For example, as your pillar page, you could create an ‘ultimate guide’ or ‘essentials piece’. This would need to cover all aspects of working in social care and be titled with something along the lines of working in social care – an ultimate guide. Then you could create some helpful supporting cluster content which all related and relevant to the topic.

Consider titles like what to expect working in social care, how to find roles within social care etc. Your cluster content should answer any questions or common challenges/misconceptions that your audience may commonly experience in relation to your central topic.

By using the content cluster technique and hyperlinking from written content to a strong landing page or sales page, you are actually creating an internal link framework across your website. An internal linking framework means linking different pages on your website to each other.

By linking throughout your site, you are allowing Google to locate your content and determine what type of content it is and who it is best suited for. This is all a part of SEO, and by incorporating SEO techniques correctly, Google and other search engines will use their search engine ranking factors to accurately place your helpful online content on their search engine results pages. You can achieve the top spots on a results page by using SEO techniques correctly.

By appearing higher on search engine results pages, you have a better chance of attracting traffic and clicks from searchers. Did you know? – The top search result on search engines receives 34% of the organic traffic, and position #1 is worth more than positions 2, 3, 4 and 5 combined.

Conclusion
As the social care recruitment crisis continues to cause chaos in the social care industry, the future of many social care positions hangs in the balance. But not all recruitment efforts must be standard job adverts and basic social media posts; consider implementing digital marketing tactics in your recruitment strategy and see the results it can drive.

Digital marketing strategies like paid social, PPC and SEO can significantly impact and drive new levels of awareness and traffic to your website, services and vacancies.

For support with your HR and recruitment, get in touch with Sapphire HR.

Alternatively, if you want to incorporate strategic and highly targeted digital marketing campaigns into your business strategy for 2023, get in touch with the team at ROAR Digital Marketing today.