In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Robert Woodford from The Marketing Junction about marketing in-house vs. outsourcing and how to do effective marketing in recruitment businesses.

The Marketing Junction offers outsourced marketing for recruitment businesses before this he worked at a variety of different recruitment companies over 20 years. He fell into recruitment, as many do but also fell into marketing after completing a degree in economics. He prefers the start-up life as a marketer as he terms marketing for larger businesses 'a glorified administrator' - this being exec or manager level. You often get told how things are done.

Robert wears many different marketing hats and is continually doing different things through outsourcing for a variety of types of companies. As a business owner, you have no choice to become sales to some degree. For Robert, he grew from consulting on companies to have to sell to get business.

What advice do you have for new freelancers?

If you are doing it because you've always wanted to great. If it's out of necessity and it's not actually what you want to do or passionate about, then be careful because it's hard work. Surround yourself with your 'competitors' as you will get good advice and people are more than happy to help.

What does the phrase recruitment marketing mean to you?

Robert loves recruitment marketing as you have an element of both B2B and B2C. Marketing within recruitment is so unique, you have 3 autonomous parts - the clients that are people, the candidates and the recruitment consultants who are the brand. So marketing within recruitment you are balancing all of those parts.

How do you define the ROI of marketing?

Robert often asks the question back 'how do you define the ROI of your telephone system or CRM? Because actually, you don't define the ROI because you just know it works. Within marketing, we all do Google Analytics but ultimately some things are just impossible to track. A lot of marketing is to do with solidifying relationships so can you actually put a figure on that?

Marketers add so much more to recruitment businesses than they are given credit for. They are often responsible for the culture because internal marketing is great. Again how do you measure that? Often in his reporting, he adds an anecdotal note - that could be internal views that show your importance but they aren't measurable. The challenge for anyone within recruitment marketing is that most CEO's in the companies are recruiters so they have never had to work with marketers before.