Staffing Industry Spotlight: Kristin Kelley, CEO, Type Marketing

Staffing Industry Spotlight is brought to you by Ascen, an employer of record platform for staffing agencies. This episode features Kristin Kelley, founding partner of Type Marketing. Kristin shares insights from her 25-year career as a marketing leader in staffing, including her tenure as CMO of Randstad North America. In this interview, she explores the importance of integrating marketing and sales strategies, building authentic and impactful content, and how staffing firms can optimize their marketing budgets to stay competitive. Kristin also provides actionable advice on leveraging digital marketing to meet shifting buyer behaviors and achieve sustainable growth.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

Kristin Kelley, thank you so much for being on Staffing Industry Spotlight. The first thing we'd like to know is who you are and what do you do?

Kristin Kelley

My name is Kristin Kelley, but I go by KK. I am one of the founding partners of a marketing agency called Type Marketing. Our ambition is to be an agency for companies that play in the talent acquisition space, specifically staffing organizations looking to augment, supplement, or outsource their marketing strategies and teams.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

I know from your background, that you've been doing marketing for staffing companies for a long time as CMO or head of marketing for some really big firms.

Could you go to your background and how you got to this place?

Kristin Kelley

I started in staffing probably 25 years ago as the first marketer of a company that eventually became Randstand.

We were bought by a couple of acquisitions. In my last role at Randstand, I was CMO of North America, which included Canada and the US. I participated in many global CMO meetings and loved that opportunity.

I left Randstand in about 2019 to pursue private equity. I got involved with a couple of PE firms to use my skills as a fractional CMO and some of their portfolio companies that fell into the staffing arena, which really drove my ambition to eventually go out on my own and not only consult but build a company that could do that fractional CMO work, which is eventually what I did with Type.

But I also made a pit stop along the way at Career Builder, where I was their chief marketing officer and chief revenue officer for two and a half years.

So definitely have been in and out of fractional or full-time CMO at staffing organizations, big and small.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

Being the CMO of North America for Randstad has got to be very different from being a fractional CMO for a relatively small private equity-backed staffing company.

What was the difference in the type of marketing activities you would do at that high level versus what you did as a fractionally?

Kristin Kelley

I think the biggest difference is rolling up your sleeves. Obviously, at Randstad, we had big teams, very large teams of full-time internal people, and we also heavily adopted a model of outsourcing people.

So, there were many people to get the work done, and a lot of time was spent at that strategy level.

I will say, Randstad is, know, a titanic of company. So to implement change, adopt kind of new thinking, you know, took a while, so it was a lot of change management and strategic sessions, managing up in ways where you had some executive presence in board meetings and things like that versus the smaller companies where you have your hands much more on the end products that you're putting out, not necessarily just influencing the team to our building it.

So that is what I would say would be substantially the biggest change. What I will say, though, is, that the tactics that the Randstads of the world, it was very forward-thinking at the time, and I think a lot of staffing organizations don't know how to leverage digital marketing teams or they think of them as very separate than sales teams and what I did love about the Randstads of the world is they were more forward-thinking, and they had the budgets to try to build some of the things that you can't live without these days no matter what size staffing companies you are.

So we built a little team that disrupted how digital marketing would leverage spend at one point in time, we tried to disrupt ourselves. I always appreciated that type of thinking coming out of Randstad, as they were eager to take big risks even though they were a big company. With smaller companies, you just didn't have the luxury of testing and trialing many of these new things that were coming into the market.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

Yeah, there's a big difference in budget and personnel. I'm curious about these smaller companies. What marketing strategies do small staffing companies (with revenues of $1-50 million) use?

Kristin Kelley

I love the word playbook, and I do believe there is a playbook to follow.

I don't want that to sound cookie-cutter or one-size-fits-all because, if you compare one staffing company to another, no one company is at the exact standpoint of the evolution of the brand, their thinking, their budget size, their problems, or their acquisition strategy.

So, the tactics are similar, and I think there are a lot of things that we would tell folks to do. First of all, what is your strategy? You have to have a vision.

I am also super passionate about marketing strategies as they relate to sales. So often, those are separate strategies that really need to be interwoven.

So what is the strategy—not the marketing strategy–the business strategy? Then we'll overlay marketing on that, and from there, it is really helping them build an ideal marketing team.

Now, it's the team that should be outsourced as much as it's insourced, just based on their skill sets and how scientific they are, and how fast they can come in and out of projects. So it's strategy, it's team creation, it's budget recommendations.

How big should I have for a budget? Should I be spending? What percent of revenue should I be spending if I'm a light industrial staffing company or a professional one? And oftentimes, I think people forget that if you have an IT staffing company and you're selling into an IT buyer, the other IT companies out there selling into that same buyer are probably spending 20 percent of revenue on their marketing versus staffing companies that tend to spend well under one percent of revenue on marketing.

So you're not only competing with another staffing company, you're competing with everyone who wants IT decision-makers to spend money.

So, that budget piece is a big topic a lot of the time. Then it's kind of a content mix, a content strategy, a channel mix, and getting your name out there.

What we have seen is that the game has changed in terms of how people will acquire customers going forward. We cannot call people anymore. The big telecom companies have put spam alerts all over your phone. Google is now voicing the same concerns about cold emailing, making it very difficult for salespeople to reach out to people who don't know them or aren't warmed to them.

So that's a big piece of what we're doing for companies, as well as understanding how do you reach that same potential buyer in a way that you can sequentially repeatedly without falling into these big spam or being blacklisted.

So there's a lot of that sales outreach, marketing outreach work that we do, as well.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

I want to dive into the budget considerations a bit. What percentage of revenue should be spent on maximizing growth for staffing companies?

Kristin Kelley

if we could get people even to spend 2%-3% of revenue, that's pretty substantial in terms of how staffing companies just spend money today.

It's interesting because selling into it, again, that IT decision-maker example, the thinking from a staffing perspective from 10 years ago was that that was a sales-led conversation, that people buy from people; that they could talk their way all the way through that deal.

On the light industrial side, marketing led sales because it was always about being top of mind. If a shift employee didn’t show up, who were they going to call? The first brand that was sitting on their desktop or had the safety poster in the facility?

That has shifted a little bit because now the folks who are harder to reach are on the professional side.

So we always say spend more on the line that has shifted, but I would say anyone spending under 1%, you're putting yourself kind of in a backseat as it relates to how others are going to start to spend in the market.

I had a conversation earlier today [with a staffing agency] and they hired all these new salespeople. They spend so much money on bringing these salespeople in.

They have their list built, and now they're like, all right, go. The sales are like, what am going to say? So there's so much there that you could save money almost by applying marketing versus it being thought of as a spend.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

Let's say you get to an optimal 3% of sales that you're spending on marketing, what buckets is that spend going towards?

Kristin Kelley

So I think content is the largest right now, because content is the engine for everything else that you're going to do from a digital perspective.

So content, fuel sales enablement, give salespeople something to talk about. That should be well over half the budget, in my opinion.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

Could you discuss what content means?

Kristin Kelley

Yep, so it's everything from sales enablement. So what are my folks saying in front of a customer prospect? It's your blog and social media strategy.

It's your short-form content or digestible SEO-type content strategy. It's your thought leadership and PR strategy. Should you be doing that? And it's also your campaign strategy.

Everything needs to have a thread through it. So you're saying something that's value-based and can be delivered through all of those channels. But it starts really with one piece of content that, you know, is diced and sliced 100 ways.

To me, if people aren't spending on content, they can't really do any of the other things because they don't have anything valuable to put out into the market, right? That could also be proprietary research and surveys that people do too. That, to me, is the lion's share.

Then it's playing in the channels and making sure your distribution of that content is to the right person at the right time, at the right place that they're going to have some reaction to it. That's the second biggest piece.

The last piece is tooling. You hit on something I think is big right now. There are so many tools out there that could automate, replace, do, supplement, fix, or automate anything that we're doing today. No one knows where to begin or end, whether it's on the talent acquisition side or the client acquisition side, where to insert tools or automation into the product. People are just buying tools and trying to bolt them together to that MARTech piece. I think it's the third.

So it's what am I saying? How am I saying it? And then what technologies am I going to amplify what I'm receiving back in terms of signals or algorithms to stack, MQLs, or leads as they transfer over, and when do those leads fall off, re-engage with them to that tooling piece?

Those would be the big three.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

So, content creation is half the work. The other half is figuring out the tooling and delivery. There are many ways to deliver content: white papers, ebooks, blogs, webinars, or even speaking at events. What are the best ways to deliver content?

Kristin Kelley

So I think it's where they are in a strategy because they're all relevant at a different point in the sales cycle.

If your problem on day one is, "I need clients tomorrow because I'm a young organization," then we would say, "Let's develop content that's way down the funnel, and the sole purpose is to convert.” We're not going to be worried yet that no one's aware of you because if you have a controlled group of prospects, let's build content to convert.

If you're a three hundred million dollar company and you want to ensure that people are aware of you in a new market or when you have a new product or service, we'll tell you to play up way higher in the funnel.

So it could be PR content, thought leadership, speaking engagements, or podcasts because, at that point, you're just trying to create value for yourself and market to a larger audience.

So it depends on where they're playing and what their immediate and long-term goals are because quite honestly, that's for you to shuffle the type of content across the board.

But I also think there's always content that people have to have, like regular social media. If you're going to start social media, you've got to maintain it because if there are huge gaps, that's the first thing people notice.

Why? They didn’t say anything in a month. Why? Are they not talking about this? Why? Are they only posting holidays? It's the same with blogs. People go to a website, and there's a few months that you're like, oh, the person who did the blogs isn't here anymore.

So there's certain always on and I think feeds both of those sides, but we would never advise you have to do all of them at any given time. Based on budget and truly what's in the next 12 to 18 months is the type you know that you should be developing.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

That’s really interesting. The right strategy depends on what you're trying to achieve–if you want to convert more people, PR may not be the best approach…

One of the things that we've seen in content generation is it's very hard to create valuable content within your niche consistently. It’s especially hard to hand that off to an outside firm or even an internal person who is a non-expert. How do you manage the collaboration and effort required from both sides when working with a staffing company to create valuable content?

Kristin Kelley

Yeah, I think the content, first of all, has to be authentic to the company and its spokespeople. It could be a formal spokesperson who's going on media outlets.It could also be the person recording themselves on LinkedIn and posting that on the company feed. But there's a level of authenticity that makes AI scare me a little bit.

Because if it doesn't reflect who you are and what you would say, you can immediately tell that when you're not authentic, you're going to lose the credibility to have people come back.

So there's a whole tone area about it. So part of what I think is important is establishing your tone of voice. Are you casual? Are you formal? How would you talk about it? What do you want to talk about? What interests you?

You have to go deep or go home. Don't talk about 82 cyber topics. Pick two that you're passionate about, knowledgeable about, or maybe have a different perspective on. That's where we're going to keep developing themes for the company and its spokespeople.

Also, we also say take a risk, vanilla content doesn't help. So, have an opinion, and we always say it doesn't have to be white and black, it could be owned of that because you're going to then attract people that you want to attract, and you're probably going to repel the people that wouldn't be a good client down the road anyway, just because of the belief systems, now that might not be aligned.

So that whole personality is a big piece to finding valuable. And then, again, I think no one's going to be able to cover things in depth if they don't do it repeatedly, and everyone's trying to cover everything.

So there is a chance to create very valuable content if you repeatedly talk about it. Then I think it's just how you distribute it.

So video is a big thing right now, certainly like live cast, where you're truly giving it in an off-the-cuff, unrehearsed way, and it adds value to people.

The last thing we always say is: deliver it when it needs to be delivered. So there are a lot of tricks out there where you can see decision-makers going after what they're dying to read about that day because something happened in the news or something developed overnight.

And if you're able to pump content out that night, I do remember the Super Bowl audio commercial. The lights went out, and immediately, the commercial came out about dipping in the dark.

It's the same thing with content now. Something happens, and the first people talking about that the next morning are already earning the value and mental capacity of decision-makers.

So there are a lot of tricks there now. It's become very scientific again in terms of tone of delivery, and how you're delivering it, not just what you're talking about.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

That's really cool. I think that's really interesting with the idea of the strong opinion, that people should have a stronger opinion to attract the right people. Do you have examples of this?

Kristin Kelley

I mean, AI right now is a hot topic.

And if someone raps, well, what do you think the effects of AI would be on the recruiting industry? One answer could be, well, I think there are 12 ways that AI could have a place in recruiting versus that's kind of the watered down versus the person saying, you know what, I don't think it will ever affect how we recruit, screen or place because these things, but this is where like just really that strong focus opinion.

I think on the extreme side, the brand has an archetype, and we know like Virgin Airlines, that's a very bold red rebellious brand. You don't expect anything other than the CEO to have an opinion on every subject that crosses their path, and it works for them, right?

So you also have to know the brand's relevance and how far they're willing to take it.

But if you're a rebellious brand with a rebellious CEO, the expectations you're putting on that kind of content, I think people have to get comfortable having a say in how far they'll take it, but they can't just regurgitate the news because that's easy to find anywhere.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

To wrap things up, what do you think are the biggest mistakes that staffing owners make when it comes to marketing? Then what are the biggest lessons they should know about?

Kristin Kelley

This is the easiest one for me because I feel like it's what drives me. Staffing owners think, “Oh my gosh, I have a sales problem right now. I have to focus on sales. Come back to me in six months, and we'll talk about marketing.” They disconnect the two.

But there is no disconnection, and there's no one without the other. That is probably the biggest lesson I wish the people who disconnect those two, step back and said what could we do actually if you join those forces. That is far and above the biggest mistake. Then it’s just being afraid to try. The beauty of digital marketing is it should be risk-averse because it's easily trackable, and testable. You can shut things down fast, but you don't learn if you don't try so, and I think a lot of people hedge their bets and wait to see, and you know there will be people who rise to the front for the companies who take advantage of these things.

Francis Larson (Ascen)

Well, Kristin, some great advice from a seasoned pro. Thank you for all the good wisdom about marketing.

Kristin Kelley

Excellent. Well, thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day.