Generating Leads for Your Staffing Firm When it Feels Like No One is Hiring
In the past, we have written several articles on best practices to generate leads for your staffing firm. Today, let’s discuss generating leads when no one is hiring. But is this really the case? Is no one hiring? These last seven months have certainly reshaped many of our sales and marketing conversations. Prospects and clients working from home has made it much harder on your sales teams to reach their targets. However, it’s important to remember that hiring is still going on and it’s simply just more difficult to get to them. Continue reading for more lead generating advice!
Why Use a Lead Generation Campaign?
To put this in perspective of why your staffing firm should use a lead generation campaign, salespeople, on a good day, attempt to reach around 70 prospects and connect with two or three of them. On the other hand, marketing reaches out to an unlimited number of prospects as often as you want as well as driving them back to your salespeople. You may be wondering; what types of business needs are addressed through lead generation? Let us ask you this: Are you trying to acquire new clients, expand within existing clients, and/or trying to reactivate past clients? Do you have hard to fill positions, want to generate referrals, and/or want to turn from passive to active sourcing?
Acquiring new clients is always at the top of the marketing food chain, therefore, we have to build campaigns of interest to the target audience. From direct marketing offers and calls to action, to thought leadership, to content curation, to panel events, and more, marketing should be working with sales to identify your target audiences and determine the best approaches to attract the audience. Stay tuned for more on how to build a campaign and target it.
With all of this said, many people forget that expanding within clients is one of the top targets for marketing. We track with our clients that the average staffing firm is actively working with two managers at any given client. The reality is that most of our clients have been between ten and hundreds of hiring managers. So, why are we working with only two? Marketing, working with sales to identify the expandable client base begins to solve that challenge and drive that number up. Think of the value that those two hiring managers have in your staffing placements, and then think what those numbers would look like if you were working with four or eight or even more. Expanding within your existing clients is one of the top initiatives to undergo when growing your business.
Reactivation campaigns address the issues of past clients and work to bring them back to you. There are several approaches to this, but tying marketing and sales together is the best approach to resolve it. Keep in mind that there are only a handful of reasons why a past clients is no longer working with you.
Now, let’s talk recruiting. On the recruiting side of things, we work with the recruiting team to build marketing that drives the candidates that you need for those hard to fill positions. We create referral programs to increase candidates from trusted sources and move from passive sourcing to active sourcing. Whether you are looking to increase sales or recruiting, marketing works to increase the volume, find more qualified business, and resolve the challenge of attracting the right candidates.
Lead Generation Concepts
We regularly get asked this pretty common question: Now that you have told us about the high level, how do we take that down a notch to what we would actually need to do? Well, let’s discuss this. There are simple actions to take to generate leads for your staffing firm. This includes:
- Generating case studies and white papers
- Conducting virtual events
- Generating meetings with subject matter experts
- Creating content such as a Podcast
- Hosting on-site events (*note that this does not apply to our current environment, we advocate social distancing at this time)
Along with this, there are many other lead generating services that we offer that we recommend your staffing firm to consider. Sales and recruiting enablement is a targeted approach that is customized to your business. It provides the knowledge and experience to deliver tangible results. 20% of your sales team drives 80% of your business. How do you drive success for the other 80% of your team? A lead generation campaign should include the following:
- Social Media
- Direct Mail
- Digital Advertising
- Geofencing
- Programmatic Display Advertising
- Events
- Website
- Tracking
- ROI
See an example of a lead generation campaign below.
Programmatic Display / Geofencing
Many of us, or all of us, have had the experience of searching for something on the web and then going to Facebook or another site and an ad for what we were searching comes up. Coincidence? No. Your suspicions that you are being targeted and followed around on the internet to serve advertising to you based on your actions on another site are being done. It is becoming much more common place and it now has value to staffing firms. Imagine targeting your audience by where they go on the internet or, more specifically, down to an address. We are able target the audience down to a 5foot x 5foot area and target our advertising based on where they go. Additionally, we are able to target locations across the web as well as our own websites to enable the advertising. By creating a marketing campaign and using geofencing and programmatic display, we can drive people to a desired geofence. As a result, some of those people will complete the Contact Us form on your website. This accounts for about two to three percent of your website traffic, so what happens to the other people we brought to the site? This is where the programmatic advertising picks up and continues to get them to come back to you. Additionally, we are able to see the analytics on the individuals to know what drove their clicks and how many times they clicked in order to determine the viability of a prospect.
Generating leads for your staffing firm feels impossible when it seems as if no one is hiring. We are here to tell you that is not necessarily the case. For more information on generating leads and creating a campaign, contact us.
About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations. www.sjhemleymarketing.com