7 Creative Marketing Ideas to Break Through to Recruits

Hey, it's Richard Milligan, 4C Recruiting, and we are about to cut another podcast on Recruiting Conversations. Excited to share a great idea with you today that is relative to a season in recruiting. And so I find that as industries and businesses kind of ebb and flow, that your recruits become more busy in other seasons than in other seasons. And one of the problems that you have to solve is having conversations with people when people are in a busy season. So one of the things that I was able to do well in my career was creative marketing ideas to cut through the noise. And that's becoming more and more relative today than ever before. Because people are becoming more busy. That is an overused framework in society today. How are you doing today? I'm busy. That's how people respond. I don't have time, or I don't have time margin. So this is something that you're going to deal with probably forever as a recruiter, but sometimes it's just stronger in one season than another season. So it happens to be the industry that I primarily coach in, which is the mortgage industry, it happens to be extremely busy season for that industry. And so we're going to talk specifically about this because a lot of people are dealing with it right now. It's something that comes up in my coaching pretty regularly. So we're going to go live on the podcast here in just a moment. Give me 3 seconds here, okay? And we'll get our software started for the podcast in 3, in 2, and in 1. Welcome back. It's another Recruiting Conversations with Richard Milligan, and I'm excited to share another idea with you here today. You know, I am— these ideas that I share with you, the topics of these podcasts, a lot of times aren't premeditated or preplanned. They're really spontaneous in that the intention is to actually share a recent conversation with you Around some of the coaching that I do. And so it's typically relative to the moment, relative to an individual, and a lot of times that means it's relative to you as a podcast listener because you're in a season that anyone that I would coach would be in. So let's just talk about that season right now. What I'm finding is that a lot of people are saying, I'm having a difficult time getting people engaged in a conversation. Sometimes that can be just an initial conversation, and sometimes that can be just getting people across the finish line because of an issue called busyness. Okay, so one of the things that I know in society today is that we overuse that term busy. A lot of times it becomes a badge of honor to some degree of, I'm busy, right? It's like we wear that very proudly. It's like our our brand, it's our reputation. I remember there being a long season in my business where I actually felt guilty if I wasn't busy. Then I came to a place where I realigned and redefined what was important to me. In that next season, business was not a badge of honor. Other things were a badge of honor, like spending time with my family more than I invested into my business. We all have to deal with the tension of that in our own unique way. But if you are a recruiting leader, one of the things that you're going to bump up against again and again— and sometimes this can just be a season, sometimes this can be forever— you're going to bump up against people being difficult to get in front of because they're so busy. Now, with that said, one of the things that I did well as a recruiting leader was I was able to use creative— what I would call creative marketing ideas— to cut through The noise of the busyness. A lot of times busyness is just a cadence. It's a rhythm to life, right? It's like your rhythm to life is that you're always busy. And so because of that, as a recruiter, if you can't cut through that rhythm that people have in terms of busyness, you won't succeed at scale as a recruiter. So this is some problem that you have to solve, and the people that solve it best tend to Think creatively in how they approach people. And so we want to talk about some of those ideas today. But first and foremost, I want you to understand this: a large part of your success is going to be predicated on your ability to break patterns. Okay, so when I talk about busyness being a rhythm, kind of being a cadence, you have to break that pattern of busyness. You have to break that that cadence of having a lot going on with people. If you're going to actually cut past, break through that initial, I'm not interested, I don't have time to talk, I'm happy where I'm at, to break through that, a lot of times you have to break people's thought patterns. And how you do that is through creative marketing ideas. So I'm going to share some of these ideas with you, but one, I want to establish this piece of Why is this more relevant today than it's ever been for a recruiter? Because I do believe it's more relevant today than ever. I think in the past there were certain rhythms to recruiting that were more successful, right? Just dialing people, making the phone call, having a phone conversation— that was more successful in the past. Having a rhythm to even just messaging, however you message, might have been email, right? As technology's moved, so now it's text messaging. There's other places like direct message where you can DM people, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. There are all these places to reach people, but there are a lot of times a recruiter uses a rhythm of, I make a phone call, I connect on LinkedIn, I send a message, I then follow up with a text message. And you have to break that rhythm a lot of times to actually cut through the pattern of how people are used to being pursued. One of the things that we know, okay, like Microsoft did a study where, you know, a lot of people are familiar with this study because Simon Sinek has brought it up in some of his speeches that he's given here over the last couple years where he says that the attention span of a human being is now shorter than the attention span of a goldfish, right? The goldfish has a 9-second attention span. Humans are now at 8 seconds or less. And that information comes from a study that Microsoft did where what they did was they hooked up 112 people to these electrodes. And in that, what they determined is that the average attention span over the course of the last whatever decade or so, they were measuring it from 2000 to the current moment, is that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. Wow. Okay, and part of that, why that's relevant, is that we are multi-screen users today, right? You've got a smartphone, you've got a tablet, you have a laptop, you've got a desktop, you've got multiple screens on that desktop. Like, we're heavy multi-screen users, and so we're finding it very difficult to just filter out stimulus. I read a book recently that said that we are now in what they called the arena culture. The arena culture is this: we walk around seeking out stimulus, and we measure everything according to being entertained. This is the era that we're in. As humans, if we're having a difficult time filtering out irrelevant stimulus, Then what that means is that we're always busy. Our pattern is now not filtering out anything, and now we are just overly whelmed. We're overwhelmed in the busyness of the day-to-day. What we understand as part of this is that we're overly marketed to. I saw a recent stat about Facebook. There's 7 million— get this— 7 million advertisers on Facebook. There's over 2 million advertisers on Instagram. So when you start to just wrap all this around us as human beings, you realize this isn't just relevant in a season in my business. This is now something you're going to deal with forever. So it is a problem to be solved. And I love that framework. In business, there's either attention to be managed or there's a problem to be solved. This is a problem that you have to solve. So as part of this, let's just establish this fact. As human beings, we're being marketed to approximately 5,000 times through 5,000 ads per day. That was a marketing firm that did some research and found out that in this current era, as a human being, we're being marketed to at a level we've never been marketed to before. So that's the why of this. Now let's talk about the how. The how of this. How do we break beyond this initial crust of the individual and get past the busyness? I go back to a book that I read early in my career. It's an old book. I think the book was written— well, old is now relative. Let's just establish that. You get to your mid-40s, young and old are interesting how everything is relative to your age. I remember reading a book in my early 20s by Donny Deutsch and the book was titled Often Wrong, Never in Doubt. Donny built a really large marketing agency, a media agency, and in that agency, he developed their success model on the premise of these creative marketing ideas. One of those things that stuck with me that I remember reading in just like my maybe early to mid-20s was him getting his first multi-million dollar transaction, which was like a Tri-City car dealership. Don't ask me why I remember these things. There's just certain things that my brain remembers. I remember this. And in that story that he shared in the book, what he did was he was the first person to present their agency offering. And it was out of like 4 or 5, maybe 6, 7 different companies. But I believe he was the first one to present. He knew he was at a disadvantage because the last person to present is the one that's most memorable. So he immediately began to strategize over how he became more memorable. So he identified the day that they were actually going to make a decision around this multimillion-dollar budget that they had for media. And on the morning of that day, he had actually went and purchased a vehicle from a from a wrecker service, from a lot where vehicles are— they go and they die, right? And so he bought this car and he had someone take that car apart in pieces, and then he paid a delivery company to deliver the car that was now in pieces and kind of stage it to where it was actually put back together. And so as they did this, different pieces of the vehicle had taglines on them. So maybe the front bumper of the car You know, had a tagline on it that said, go with us, we'll point you in the right direction. The steering wheel was delivered with the car and said, go with us, we'll steer you in the right way. Right? He sent the bumper of the vehicle as part of— had a message mapped on it, put on it that was, go with us, we'll always have your back. Right? So, and what happened in that is that he actually got the deal because of the creativity that he used to break through in what would be a creative marketing idea. Now, how is that relative to what we do today? Well, you need to put in your toolbox some creative ideas, some creative marketing ideas that actually break patterns for your recruits, that actually capture their attention. This is bigger than what you think it is. This is more powerful than what you think it is. The reason why I know this is because I did this. Let me give you some examples here, some very practical examples, and I'll give you kind of a list of things here at the end. One of the things that I did, okay, now I spent 15 years almost inside the mortgage industry. One of the things that I did when I was recruiting someone, if I couldn't get engaged in a conversation, was I would take a creative marketing idea to try and engage them. So I went to GoDaddy. And I defined several URLs that were short URLs that people would think were cool. So for example, loveslending.com, and I could put a first name in front of that, richardloveslending.com, and I would buy those websites in bulk based off the first names of my recruits. So I would take— I took words like loveslending, the local lender, your lender, and I simply would stack first names in front of that. So richardloveslending.com, Richard the Local Lender, Richard Your Lender. And I would send that to loan officers and branch managers with a little note, a little text message. Could have been a text message, could have been an email, could have been a handwritten note, but the note would say something along the lines of, hey, came across this cool website and thought of you, so I bought it for you. What's a good email address that I can reassign it to you at? Okay. And that little technique right there, Was one of the most powerful techniques that I had in my arsenal because it broke a pattern. People would then contemplate, wait a second, I know he's— we talked on the phone once, or I know he's been trying to call me, or I know he's messaged me 3 or 4 times on LinkedIn. That's pretty crazy that he thought of me and bought this website. And one of the reasons why that particular idea was powerful is that most loan officers had a very generic website. It might've been You know, www.the name of the lender, you know, ABC Mortgage Company forward slash Richard Milligan forward slash app forward slash loan officer 12976, right? Those are some of the websites that they were using. And so when I gave them this website, they were able to redirect the richardloveslending.com to that website. But now they're giving a much easier framework for people to remember where their application is or how to actually connect with me. When I was buying these, and on GoDaddy, this is still true today, when you buy websites in bulk, you can buy them for around $3 to $4 apiece. Okay? So 50 of these would cost me a couple hundred dollars max to break through some patterns. So it's worth pausing here and just saying, what are some creative ideas that I can incorporate into my recruiting efforts to break patterns for recruits so that I can actually engage in a conversation. Okay? Let's just run through some of these ideas. The website, that's a phenomenal idea. No matter what industry you're in, that's a great idea. Now, now that I've given that idea out, there'll be a couple hundred people that will do it. So let's go on to some other ideas because you're going to have to have some additional tools in your toolbox. Here's a great idea. A Starbucks QR code for coffee. Great idea. What's a cup of coffee cost at Starbucks? $5. Okay, so I can get— I can go to Starbucks if I've got 5 of my top recruits I'm trying to have a conversation with, and for $25 I can get 5 $5 Starbucks cards. And I simply take a picture of the QR code and I can text message that, I can email that, I can direct message that through any social platform and say Richard, thought of you today as I was grabbing my cup of coffee. Wanted you to have a cup of coffee on me tomorrow morning. Hope all is well. Okay, that's a pattern breaker. Look, one of the things that I used well that I still recommend using today is books. I do think books are pattern breakers for people. Like, there's just something about a book. I don't think I've ever thrown a book away. Like, if you came in, you looked at my library, and you looked at the boxes of books that I have, I just don't have the heart. There's something about a book that I just can't throw away. And so one of the things that was a pattern breaker for me is that when I'm flying places, most times I have to— there's only a handful of airports that I can— I fly out of Oklahoma City because I live on the north side of Oklahoma City, so I'm going to regularly go into places like the Denver Airport. And in the Denver Airport, if you've been there, you know there's a bookstore there. So anytime I went through an airport that had a bookstore, I was skimming the front of that bookstore looking for books that I could actually take a cool picture with someone and then send it to them. Let me give you an example of this. A great book that I've picked up, and I would recommend the book to most leaders, is a book that's titled Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work. It's a book by an entrepreneur that built a multimillion-dollar organization, sold it, and he talks about the journey of that. There's some things in there that are definitely aligned with my values. My value system, my belief system. Having a vision, the importance of that, understanding your values, the importance of that, treating people the way that you want to be treated. And he really walks through contextually, very practically, how he did that in his business. So that book, I took a picture of that book in the Denver airport. Now, if you're in Denver and you're not from the mountains, having a mountain backdrop when you're up against a window is kind of a cool backdrop to have. So I would go take a picture with me of the book and the mountain backdrop, and I now had that photo, and I could send that book to someone, and I could also text message them a copy— I mean, text message them a picture that I had taken with the book to say, hey, I picked up this book when I was in Denver recently. Wanted you to have a copy of it. And I would buy that book by the cases, and then I would send it to people that I was trying to have a conversation with. It was a pattern breaker. Sending a book was one thing, but when I sent the photo of me with the book and the mountain, the mountains in the background being in Denver, I was breaking patterns with that. So a lot of people, they only focus on the creative marketing idea. They don't really understand the why of this. When you send that photo, it causes people to pause. Wait a second, he thought of me. He actually took a picture of a book. He's in Denver. I now have the book. He signed the front of the book. That's a more powerful breakthrough idea than just phone calling somebody, text messaging somebody, direct messaging somebody. Here's one that I've used extremely well and one that someone actually used on me recently, which is this: take a Snippet. If you don't have Snippet, you really should have Snippet because with Snippet, you can actually just take a snip of someone's face by just dragging and dropping an arrow across their LinkedIn face or their Their Facebook picture, and you can save that and you can add what is known as a callout, or I call it a thought bubble, where you add a message. So I recently had somebody do this to me. They went to my LinkedIn page, my profile picture, they took a snippet of it, they added a callout to it, and it said— the callout said, hey Milligan, I left you a message, call me back. And I was like, whoa, wait a second, that's me. I got the text message, like, that's a picture of me. And it's got a thought bubble or a callout on it with a message to me. I'm like, that's kind of cool. What were they doing? They were breaking a pattern for me. I was busy, they'd left me a voice message, and now guess what? They got a phone call back immediately. Here's a couple of other ideas. A lot of people don't know in Facebook Messenger that you can leave a voice message. Most people realize you can leave a video message there, but what about a voice message? Again, that's a pattern breaker. Most people don't know you can do that. A lot of people don't do video messages on LinkedIn. They're like, video message? What do you mean? Yeah, you can sync up a tool called BombBomb with your LinkedIn, and now I can record a video message and I can message you, direct message you a video message on BombBomb. Great idea. The moment that your face pops up in somebody's messaging box, they're gonna go, wait a second, how'd they do that? It's a pattern breaker. Okay, so in this, there are lots of ideas. One of the things, once I got someone to a place where they knew me, I knew them, if things begin to stall out, I would then reach for some very creative and non-cost-effective pattern breakers. So let me give you an example of that. I would send a Chicago-style pizza from Peoria, Illinois in dry ice. It wasn't crazy expensive to do it, $35 to $40 to do it. Okay, but it was a Chicago-style pizza. It wasn't just a regular pizza, it was Chicago-style pizza. I found a place in Peoria, Illinois. If you want the address to that, you message me. I'll give you the name of the company and the address of the, of the company that does this. But it's actually a pizza shop, a real Chicago-style pizza shop that does pizzas and will actually ship them in dry ice for you. Had a barbecue place in Kansas City, same thing. Could actually prepare a meal, put it in— this company puts, prepares it and ships it in dry ice to somebody. And so I would intentionally send some of these things out on a Friday, especially if I knew a little bit about their situation— working mom, working dad, kids in the house. Something about Friday is kind of a finish line. And I would make sure those things would arrive on their front porch on a Friday because basically they were eating dinner on me. It was a pattern breaker as much as it was anything. Okay? So there's some stretches on some of these things. I mean, I recently saw a marketer who said, One of their pattern breakers was going to Amazon and finding people's wishlists. So if you didn't know that, if you don't have your privacy settings set up correctly, if I have your email address that's tied to your Amazon account, I can actually see your wishlist. And this marketer was buying things for C-level executives off their wishlist and sending it to them saying, hey, I thought of you when I saw this. And it's just kind of one of those moments where it's like, God, are you speaking to me? Because I was looking at that, I was thinking about getting that, and someone bought that for me and sent that to me. So that's a pattern breaker. Here's a really great idea. A cool pattern breaker would be to go find the top 10 TEDx talks that the specific title of the person that you're trying to engage should watch. If you're in the mortgage industry and you're trying to get in front of branch managers, what are the top 10 TEDx talks that every branch manager should view? If you're in the real estate community, what are the top 10 TEDx talks that every real estate agent should see? If you're in the insurance industry, what are the top 10 TEDx talks that every agent should see? That's a pattern breaker. One of the things that I'll leave you with is this. I read, and I use that contextually now. Reading is no longer reading. Reading is listening. I listen. I listen to a lot of books, okay? So I'm listening to 3 to 7 books a month depending on the length of the book, the length of the books that I'm listening to. Audible.com is my go-to for that. A lot of people don't realize that in Audible, when you're listening to a book, in the top right-hand corner there's a little box with an arrow on it. When you tap that box, it will give you an option for sending that book to someone. So a great pattern breaker is to use that. I have used that, I would dare say, 10,000 times where I've actually read a book, thought of someone that that book would be interesting to, and I've clicked that little button and it says— and it creates a message that says that this book— it'll give you options to email it, to text message it, to put it into any of these other platforms, and it'll pre-form a message there. And the message says Here's a link to this book this person just listened to. You're entitled to a free copy of this book. If you don't have audible.com, download it now. But regardless, it was a pattern breaker. People would get a book via text message. They'd be like, wait a second, I've never seen that before. How did that happen? All of these ideas will work for you if you will use them, and they will help you engage people into a conversation where you haven't yet. So if you find yourself in a rhythm where everyone's busy, where no one's available, move towards this as one of the tools in your toolbox. It will work. I know it will work. I coach people to this. They're blown away by how these strategies actually work. So identify 3 of these. I always love this idea of having an action plan. Identify 3 of these. That you will, from a lean startup mindset, try. And when I say lean startup mindset, try, try 50 of these and then determine whether it worked for you or not. But as Brian Tracy once told me in my early 20s, an idea not activated on in 24 hours is a dead idea. This is only a good idea right now. If you make it practical and you apply it in your business, it will change your ability to engage more people in a conversation. That's what we're all about. So break through people by breaking patterns through creative marketing ideas. If you want more information around this podcast, you can actually find more podcasts like this at recruitingconversations.com. I do a lot of LinkedIn content, so every single day I'm active on LinkedIn at least one, if not as many as 3 to 4 times. A lot of my content gets dropped there in short form. Which is 1,300 characters or less in a daily post. Would love to have you follow me there as well. And so, hey, if this brought value to you, shoot me a line, drop me a direct DM somewhere, and would love to just know that you're finding value in the ideas that we're sharing here on Recruiting Conversations. So until I talk to you again in the next podcast, have a great week, everybody. There you have it. Breaking thought patterns, breaking this busy cycle that people are in, and cutting through people's inability or unwillingness to slow down and have the conversation with you. It's something that will make or break you as a recruiting leader. Here's one thing that I didn't talk about in the podcast I'll share with you here. One of the things that these creative marketing ideas do is they actually position you extremely well if you're recruiting producers because producers see the creative marketing piece as an interesting value-add from a leader. They get the fact that if they are a sales rep of any sort, that these creative marketing ideas are going to be a conduit for them to actually grow their business. Aligning with a leader who has the ability to think outside the box is something that's very attractive. So I encourage you to lean towards this where it may feel uncomfortable for you, where it may feel a little audacious and a little bold. It is. And at the end of the day, our options are to settle for not having any engagement or to move towards the boldness factor and then to increase the engagement. There will be people that will say, that was kind of interesting but odd that you did that. And that's going to be okay because those people wouldn't be aligned with you anyways if they didn't like your creative marketing idea, if that creative marketing idea was aligned with you. So as an example, the books idea, okay, whether it was sending an actual physical book, whether it was sending a book through audible.com via text message, that's me. I'm always, you know, learning. I'm always growing. Personal development is one of my top core values. And so that's, that's who I am. Think about that. The idea of going to a bookstore at an airport, taking a picture with the book, text messaging that with a copy of the book, if that's you, then that's you. If you're not a believer in personal development, if you're not a believer in always growing and you came to my team, you came to my umbrella, I would probably annoy you. It's part of my value system. Part of this, a great takeaway as well, is to just ask yourself that question. Is that idea inside my value system? And sometimes we need to pay attention to tension that an idea creates for us to identify whether it is tension because it's out of alignment with my value system or tension because it's outside my comfort zone. 2 very different pieces. Tension inside this place where it's not aligned with my value system, not a good idea. Tension where it's just like, I've never done this before and I'm not sure what kind of results I'm going to get, is a different kind of tension that I consider boldness. It takes courage to activate on some of these creative marketing ideas, right? Because not everyone's going to respond and we realize that. Okay, be in tune with both of those. And I would say where there's tension and that this is not aligned with my value system, don't, don't do it. Where there's tension and it just simply is I need to be more bold, okay, press through that. I always challenge the people I coach, you should have a boldness quota, should be 5 per day. You should be bold 5 times per day. Courage is what it's going to take if you're going to be a successful recruiting leader. Thanks for watching my video, gang. Look forward to bringing one to you again soon. And until that happens, have a great week.