By Aaron Eastlack, Haley Marketing
For most businesses, especially staffing and recruiting agencies, qualified leads (on both the employer and talent sides) are critical to success.
The problem for 2019 (and near future): How do you generate job orders with new and reactivated clients, when many businesses are hiring at the same time you're experiencing a severe talent shortage across almost every industry and skill level?
The solution: You: by being strategically agile in your lead-gen strategies, and complementing those strategies with a strong brand.
Whether your goal is to pull in leads on your sales side, or to pull in the right candidate leads that convert into great placements, there are some effective ways to bring them in.
So, what do you need to pull together a solid and cohesive lead-gen strategy?
6 Essentials of a Lead-Gen Strategy
1. Know Who You Are Trying to Reach: You need to know your buyer persona.
For recruiting, you need to be able to identify exactly who you are looking for. Deeper than just the skills the employer is looking for, you need to identify candidates' career pain points, aspirations, and goals. Developing a strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP) can help you stay focused on landing the right talent to place.
For new job orders, you must be able to solve a problem, identify a pain point and do it in a way that differentiates you from all of your competition.
2. Lay the Foundation: You need a strong digital foundation.
A website that prompts conversions, provides easy to spot brand identity and provides value is your digital foundation.
Your social presence promotes your business in the digital community (if you don’t have one – you don’t exist to most consumers).
is what fuels your digital lead-gen, inbound strategy. Your content needs to be complemented by a distribution strategy that expands the reach of your content beyond organic pickup.
3. Get Out There! Your distribution channels should be optimized. What you share, when you share, how you share is essential to success. People are busy – and inundated with tech, ads and spam. You have to cut through the clutter.
Customized and segmented email campaigns (not just one monthly newsletter) hits a contact right on their phone and other connected digital devices.
Your social channels should be wide open, full of content and relevant to your audiences.
Targeted Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are extremely effective at bringing inactive leads by shortening that person’s journey to what you offer.
4. Drive People to a Contact Collection Point
Place, optimize and track multiple lead-collection points. Not all of them must be on your website (although a website offers a wide variety of ways to do so). Make sure your lead collection and follow-up processes are trackable and data driven. Chatbots, eBook landing pages, contact pages, talent request forms, newsletter signups, blog signups, job alert sign-ups and support tickets are all ways to collect a lead – some more targeted than others.
5. Develop Your Process
Diagram and document your inbound and outbound efforts. Have a follow-up and nurture plan for every inbound lead.
6. Nurture Your Leads
Marry your inbound strategy with outbound tactics like direct marketing campaigns that include multiple touchpoints like email, mails, phone calls, texts and more. Creating a positive and long lead lifecycle eventually depends on the human touch or connection that. Think friendship vs. speed-dating.
A final thought.
A successful lead-gen strategy should be fully integrated into your larger business strategy. If it’s not, you may see short term success, but it will be difficult to sustain. If there isn’t buy in from everyone on your team – leadership, sales, recruiting, HR, admin etc. – gaps and leaks in your marketing funnel will appear over time, causing lead loss.
The good news?
You can plug those leaks. It’s never too late to align a with a business strategy. And, you can nurture buy-in from key stakeholders and others alike if the strategy is truly aligned with business and professional goals.
Need a comprehensive lead-gen strategy?
From content marketing to PPC and direct marketing, Haley Marketing Group will work with you to develop a cost-effective solution to help attract, engage and convert prospects into clients and candidates.
About Haley Marketing Group
Haley Marketing provides website development, email and content marketing, social media marketing and strategy consulting to the staffing industry. We provide services to more than 1,400 staffing and recruiting firms throughout the world, ranging from solo recruiters to larger staffing and recruiting organizations with regional, national and international offices. Our mission is simple: to make great marketing more affordable!