Digital marketing in Leeds: two jobs in one budget, and most plans only fund one

In Leeds, digital marketing is usually two jobs funded as one. The first is winning customers, and in this city that customer is most often another business buying through a committee, often inside a firm where the words get signed off before they are published. The second is filling vacancies, because Leeds competes hard for finance, legal, technology and operations staff and the employers doing the competing are large. Most plans budget for the first and treat the second as somebody else's problem, which is how an agency ends up judged on leads while the board worries about headcount. Run them as two briefs, with their own channels and their own numbers.

This page is about those two briefs and the order to spend in. Choosing and verifying a supplier is covered in our note on how the Leeds agency market works, and the mechanics of buying paid media are in the note on briefing a digital media agency in Leeds.

Why the customer brief here is slow, signed off and sold to a committee

Leeds runs on financial and professional services, law, a substantial public sector and health presence, retail head offices, a growing technology sector, and a large back office and shared service base serving national businesses from the city. The consequence for marketing is consistent: your buyer is a committee rather than a person, the sale takes months rather than days, nobody is making an impulse decision, and in a regulated firm the publishing step has a compliance step in front of it.

That pushes the budget towards a particular set of channels. Search works, especially the informational searches a committee member runs while writing a business case. LinkedIn works, from the accounts of the people who actually sell. Email to a list that consented works, because a long sale needs repeated contact. Events and webinars work because they produce the one thing a committee buys on, which is a person they trust. Broad reach social and display outside remarketing rarely earn their place in this kind of account.

One paragraph on sign off, because it sets the pace: a firm authorised in financial services has to have a promotion approved before it goes out, and a solicitors' practice has publicity rules and client confidentiality to respect. Put the approver's name and a date on the content calendar rather than discovering the step in week three.

The hiring brief, which is a digital marketing brief

This is the half that goes unbudgeted, and in Leeds it is often the more valuable of the two. The money already exists: it is sitting in recruitment agency fees, and it is usually a larger number than the marketing budget.

• Treat the careers site as a product. A page for each role family, written to be found by somebody searching the job title plus Leeds, carrying the salary band, the hybrid pattern and an honest description of the work. Generic culture pages do nothing.
• Mark up the job pages properly. Job posting structured data is what lets a vacancy appear in job search results, and most corporate applicant tracking systems either do it badly or not at all. Check yours.
• Own the review and listing sites. A candidate reads those before your careers page. Keep the profile current, respond to reviews like an adult, and make sure the interview process described there is the one you actually run.
• Use paid social here even if you do not use it for the product. You can target by job title and current employer, which is precisely the thing that makes it a poor fit for a committee sale and an excellent fit for hiring.
• Measure it like marketing. Applications per vacancy, cost per application, source of hire, offer acceptance rate and time to fill. Compare the total against the agency fee you would otherwise have paid.

The order to spend in when the sale needs a committee

• One. Tracking and the enquiry record. Know where an enquiry came from and what happened to it, in your own system, before you spend anything on getting more of them.
• Two. The pages that answer buying questions: how it works, what it costs or what sets the price, who it suits, what happens in the first month.
• Three. The search demand you can realistically win, which for a B2B firm is specific and low volume rather than the category word.
• Four. The consented email list and something worth sending it monthly.
• Five. The LinkedIn presence of the named people who sell, which is a time commitment rather than a line item.
• Six. Paid search on the narrow set of terms where somebody is ready to act.
• Seven. Everything else, once the first six are working.

What you hire and what you buy in

Leeds has an unusually deep labour market for this work, because the large employers and the agency scene have trained a generation of content, analytics and paid media people here. That makes build or buy a real choice rather than a theoretical one.

Function	Usually better in house	Usually better bought in
Content and subject knowledge	Yes, because it needs your experts and your approvals	Writing and editing capacity at peaks
Paid media	Once spend is steady and large enough to occupy somebody	While you are still finding out what works
Technical and site work	If you have developers who can take direction	Specialist audits and one off fixes
Design and video	Rarely, unless volume is constant	Nearly always, per project
Analytics and reporting	Yes, because it has to be trusted internally	Setup and instrumentation

The numbers for each job

Judge the customer brief on qualified enquiries, cost per qualified enquiry, pipeline influenced and win rate by source, and accept that the first two of those are only honest if step one in the spending order actually happened. Judge the hiring brief on applications per vacancy, cost per application, source of hire, time to fill and acceptance rate. Report them separately. Blending them produces a number that looks fine while one of the two jobs quietly fails.

Leeds digital marketing: the questions behind the budget

Should recruitment marketing sit with human resources or with marketing?

The content and the judgement sit with the people who do the hiring. The channels, the measurement and the site work sit with marketing. Give it a named owner on each side and a shared number, because split ownership with no shared metric is where this work stalls.

Is paying for LinkedIn worth it in Leeds?

For hiring, usually yes, because the targeting matches the task. For a committee sale, the organic posting from your salespeople tends to do more than the advertising, and the paid budget is better spent promoting one genuinely useful piece to a tightly defined audience than running a steady campaign.

Can one agency handle both briefs?

Some can, and it helps that both use the same channels and the same tracking. Ask specifically what recruitment work they have done, because many agencies have never built a careers site or looked at job posting markup, and that is the part that matters.

What does a regulated firm need to change about its content process?

Add a named approver with a deadline, keep a record of what was approved and when, and build a pipeline with several pieces in it rather than a calendar with one piece due each week. The approval step is the reason to work further ahead, not a reason to publish less.

How do we compete for staff against London salaries?

By being specific about the things a salary comparison hides: the hybrid pattern in writing, what the commute actually is, the work itself, who you would learn from, and how progression is decided. Candidates discount vague claims and reward precise ones, and precision costs nothing.

What a candidate and a buyer are both told about you

Two different people are now asking assistants about your firm in Leeds: a buyer asking who does this kind of work in the city, and a candidate asking what it is like to work for you before they apply. Both replies are assembled from pages you do not control, including review sites, local coverage and directories, and both are being read as a summary rather than as one source among many. Knowing what those two answers currently say, and which pages they were built from, is the cheapest market research available to a Leeds employer. Both can be put to the assistants and the replies kept on record, which is the job AI Knows Us does.