Nature vs Nurture: Staffing Firm Lead Generation
You look at your sales team to determine if they were born to sell or taught to sell. Nature vs Nurture is certainly a real argument. It also applies to your lead generation. What kind of leads are we talking about? Tradeshow leads? Career Fair leads? Website leads? Applicant leads? Outbound marketing client leads? Inbound social leads? All leads are leads, but what do we do with them? Have you ever questioned the follow up of your team on a lead? That’s a rhetorical because we all have.
Nature Leads
An original incoming lead is what I am going to refer to as a nature lead. The minute one of these leads come from our website, from a social media conversation, from an email campaign, from an event, we presume that our sales or recruiting team jumps on them. For those leads that get immediate results, it is easy. What about all the rest? Over 90% of leads die on the vine. They are sitting in your system and they have limited follow up from the team and are likely providing no value. Why is that? What are you doing about it?
Nurture Leads
This is an easy concept that everyone seems to have a hard time doing when it comes to staffing firm lead generation. Nurture campaigns are ones that understand that not all leads are created equal and understand that you need to add water, sun light and some love to make them turn into business. Taking the leads that you have received (sitting in your system) and creating a content marketing (DRIP or drip) campaign that provides additional reason and opportunity to convert a lead into business.
What is a DRIP or drip Campaign?
There are two definitions for DRIP (drip) campaigns. For those of us that the love the stock market, the term comes from dividend re-investment program. The other definition refers to drip irrigation. They are both applicable and provide understanding into what to do. If you consider your leads that have had no traction as the dividend and you simply reinvest energy into it through a content marketing campaign then you will see results.
Example of DRIP (drip) Approach:
DIVIDEND: 500 leads that came from your last email campaign or website efforts
RE-INVESTMENT: Create a content marketing campaign that has 7 to 10 steps. Create a few emails that are either case study focused or recent industry news or a new report that you have developed. Be sure to include a strong call-to-action. You want to get them to understand that you are investing in them and you need to create some level of loyalty. Create a mailer and social media posts and direct social media outreach through things like InMail to continue the effort. Integrate calling and any other efforts that drive interest and conversion.
PROGRAM: Create a timing to the campaign that needs to be followed. There are tools out there to implement the distribution of these items and they vary in sophistication and cost.
What Should You Expect?
Right now, email campaigns that are non-targeted are seeing results of about 8-10% open rates and click thru rates of about 1%. Sounds pretty bad, but keep in mind that these leads are targeted and the numbers improve dramatically. They already reached out to you once and they have some understanding of who they are. And, at worst consider that 1% is still better than dying on the vine. Staffing firm lead generation is critical to your business. Happy hunting and don’t let your system fill up with wasted leads.
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.