# Customer Acquisition

# Headlines

• Hitmarker attracts people to the website in a number of different ways: (1) through a strong social media strategy, (2) with great SEO, (3) by posting a huge quantity of high-quality esports jobs, (4) with paid advertisements on Google, and (5) via frequent customer recommendations.

• Traffic is converted into users by requiring users to create accounts to perform the two primary functions of the website; namely posting esports jobs and applying for esports jobs. Users are then upsold paid features; namely promoting their esports jobs and getting access to candidate services.

• The approach has worked well to date, and continues to help us break our own records month after month (July-September 2019 was Hitmarker's best ever quarter in terms of website visitors and user signups), but there are more avenues the business could explore to maintain or even accelerate growth further.

# How has Hitmarker acquired traffic?

Hitmarker has multiple ways of getting people to the website:

We have primarily acquired traffic through a consistent social media strategy, meaning social accounted for 22% of all traffic in the first nine months of 2019.

Our strategy revolves around half-hourly posts advertising jobs on our Twitter, and daily posts recapping the week’s highlights on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

We also produce our own unique daily content in motion graphics form, looking at the top jobs of the week, the job statistics from the previous week, spotlights for candidates, polls, and the most viewed jobs of the week.

In addition to this, we produce infographics that are shared around the wider esports scene and linked back to from multiple valuable sources.

# SEO

A sound SEO strategy means that organic search has accounted for 29% of all traffic this year, largely thanks to our rank #1 for the prolific "esports jobs" search term within the US and UK. The majority of people now come to us via Google search and Google Jobs.

Our strategy began with an evaluation of the core search terms for esports jobs, and an audit of the website to ensure we were showing up in all of them. From there we put together thousands of words of unique content in a Career Advice section for candidates and a Recruitment Advice section for companies to make the website show up in more general searches.

# REFERRALS

Our backlink strategy saw referrals accounting for 24% of all traffic.

Referrals form a huge part of our audience because we offer a free-to-use embeddable jobs feed to partners who have strong brands and a large volume of traffic.

Our relationships with Dexerto, Esports Insider, Tracker Network and the University of California, Irvine, in particular, bring a lot of referral value to us.

Dexerto regularly highlights our job posts and company news to their audience of 15,000,000 unique users per month, Esports Insider does the same to their almost exclusively esports executive audience, while Staffordshire University and UCI encourage their students to create Hitmarker accounts as part of their courses.

# DIRECT TRAFFIC

Jobs of high quality in relevant locations are a strong source of traffic for us, with the strength of the listings found on the website bringing users to the site 23% of the time so far this year. We also work hard to leverage the social audiences of our clients (some of whom have followings in the millions), so that they do the promotional work for us.

Being consistent in terms of our approach to aggregating and posting new jobs each day has allowed us to build a loyal base of users who come back day-after-day until they find employment.

We typically upload ~35 new esports jobs between 10am and 12pm GMT/BST every day of the year, meaning that by lunchtime in the UK and Europe, and by breakfast time in North America, there are always a lot of new opportunities on the site for people to browse and apply for.

# PAID ADVERTISEMENTS

Paid ads made up just 2% of our user acquisition last year.

Since January 2019 we have spent less than £150 per month on Google Ads to plug the few remaining gaps in our SEO strategy, and to ensure we appear at the top of the results page for all key search terms.

# RECOMMENDATIONS

In addition to everything else, we are now seeing more and more people recommending us to their friends and colleagues on their social accounts.

# How have we converted traffic into customers?

The primary conversion method we use on the website is requiring a user to create an account to apply for jobs, even when a job application redirects the user to another website to apply. This means that as long as we keep posting desirable jobs our candidate database will continue to grow.

Converting companies into clients is more of a sales and business development task, and to this end, we have regularly had somebody making connections with key people in the industry and selling them on the benefits to Hitmarker through LinkedIn and other channels.

As time goes by more companies are becoming customers organically and initial conversations with the more influential companies in the space are becoming much easier due to their existing familiarity with our brand.

# Will this approach change in the future?

We have been pleased with the growth of our traffic and the customer base to date, but there are many more avenues for us to explore in the future to ensure this level of growth continues.

Primarily, we are aware that until very recently we have done very little “offline” marketing, such as sponsoring events, sponsoring teams, or exhibiting at networking events. Investment will allow these channels to become more viable and will undoubtedly be additional strong methods of customer acquisition.