Scrutinising spend is not just a past-time for clients anymore

In such unprecedented economic times, recruitment is always the obvious place to reduce organisational overheads. There has never been such a critical time for recruiters to scrutinise every pound spent – from headcount to high cost marketing and recruitment agency expenditure. And there has never been a more important time for advertising agencies to support their clients through this process.

The obvious cost efficiencies can be delivered through the digital media channel - and even the most reluctant of clients can no longer question its well deserved place at the forefront of media strategy – but what is particularly important about this channel of course, is the ability to measure performance and ensure the spend is working as effectively as possible.

Campaign Management is the tagging, trafficking and evaluation of the performance of online media placements against campaign objectives. Tagging and tracking all online touchpoints within a candidateís journey from ad to application allows agencies to not only optimise the performance of their current campaign, but importantly, inform future campaigns and in time, reduce the level of media spend required to deliver against their objectives.

Previously a specialist preserve of larger recruitment advertising agencies who handle this capability in-house, the majority of agencies do not offer this solution at all. For some agencies however, outsourcing this service has allowed them to keep headcount down but also deliver new budget-conscious solutions to clients that continue to drive important revenue for the business.

Henry Keenan, founder of Tags Consulting, was responsible for developing TMP Worldwideís Campaign Management function and has unrivalled knowledge in this field. Henry has recently developed an outsourced Campaign Management solution to recruitment advertising agencies that will perform this function on their behalf. ìWith advertisers being far more cautious with their advertising spend than ever before, the ability to report back on the performance and return on investment of every advert placed online will be seen as a definite need for the justification of future advertising. By outsourcing Campaign Management, you have an immediate solution to this with very little investment and all the benefits of an in-house Campaign Management team and the associated cost savings of not having the salary costs associated to themî.

The future may remain uncertain to us all, so the need for assurance and confidence has never been so appealing. The assurance for clients will be in their choice of agency, bred from the confidence agencies have in the success resulting from their recommendations. Campaign Management will play a significant part in this – not only for securing cost-efficiencies for clients – but in securing ongoing relationships with clients overall.