What is the right tool for your marketing efforts between setting up a referral program, using promo codes, or channel tracking?
With the right marketing program in place, we can powerfully generate word-of-mouth and track which channel is yielding the highest ROI. Yes, you can achieve all that from referral, promo codes, and regular digital marketing tracking—so lets see what each one specifically is in the context of marketing for the staffing industry.
Referral program:
This is when you incentivize an existing user on your platform to share your platform with their network. The most popular example of a referral program is Uber, who gave out $10 for every additional rider a user invited to their platform.
A referral program could be two-sided or one-sided. Two-sided means both the existing and the new user gets rewarded. One-sided is when only the existing user gets rewarded.
There are two ways to go about implementing it:
1. Tracking Code: This only works for two-sided reward program. You give a unique code to each existing user. Your platform then asks new user when signing up if they have a special promo code they can enter to get discount. This promo code helps the companies track who referred this new customer.
2. Link tracking: This works for both two-sided and one-sided program. Every user gets a unique link that includes the unique referral code embedded within the link. The user can share this link on their social media or via other channels. When a user visits this platform using this link, we drop a cookie on their computer and track if that user ever signs up on the platform.
How we do it on Wolf
We support a link tracking one-sided program. We only allow incentivizing when a client joins the platform. However we track both candidates and clients signed up by all your users. The referral link is attached as an additional parameter and hence it could be attached to any of your landing pages, any custom landing page you might have, or to existing jobs posted on the platform.
Promo codes:
This is when you create unique promo codes and distribute it to your marketing channels. When a user signs up using that promo code they will get the offer associated with those promo codes. Promo codes are most effective when your audience is price sensitive and giving discounts will lure new users in. Promo codes almost exclusively work on the client side (buyers on platform), since you are incentivizing them with a discount.
How we do it on Wolf:
We allow you to create a promo code on your platform. You will need to attach it with a job type and provide a special hourly rate for the promo code. For example: The standard hourly rate of a middle school math substitute teacher on your platform might be $35/hr, but you can create a promo code offering a middle school math substitute teacher for $10.99/hr or $0.99/hr. You can choose the promotional hourly rate you offer. You can also put an expiry date for this special rate after which this promo code would not be active. The platform will automatically supersede the timesheets submitted for that job type, with the new special promotional rate if the client has used that promo code. Promo codes don't work with Proposal mode.
Channel tracking:
This is when you are investing in marketing and would like to track which sources are giving you the right and the most amount of clients & candidates. Which source is converting the most or giving you the highest profits? Such attribution and tracking are now possible and easier to do than ever before. Platforms have many ways to automatically detect the channels which are referring users. However, we can make it more accurate by using special UTM (tracking module used by most platforms) parameters within the url of the platform. We can customize the url for each marketing campaign, and within that each channel, each medium, each ad, or each piece of content. Here is a handy tool to create custom. (if you copy the url you will see what we did there).
How we do it on Wolf:
Every landing page on your website, jobs, candidate profiles, blogs, portfolios, or any other public page are automatically tracked and we are able to send this source data to any analytics platform of your choice (we recommend Mixpanel). Even the activities within the platform are tracked, allowing you to analyze which source got you the most clients or candidates that actually resulted in successful business.