If you want a steady stream of warm leads flowing into your recruitment business, then you’ll need to get up to speed on inbound marketing.
Even if you plan to outsource inbound marketing to a digital agency, or delegate responsibility to a full or part time employee, you the business owner still need to have a general understanding of how it works.
Many recruiting firm owners feel overwhelmed or intimidated by inbound marketing. Fortunately, it’s not that complicated and can even be fun. Let’s look at the six steps you must implement to begin generating leads and converting them into clients.
1. Email marketing platform
What is it? An email marketing platform is a software program that lets you send permission-based email broadcasts and build automated marketing campaigns.
Why is it important? Email is a powerful tool for communicating with clients and candidates and will be the backbone of your inbound marketing effort. You need a reliable mechanism for managing your opt-in email list and delivering your messages to people’s inbox while staying compliant with relevant legislation including GDPR.
2. Lead magnet
What is it? A lead magnet is the irresistible offer or bribe to your prospect that they will get in exchange for giving you their email address. It can take a variety of forms such as an eBook, white paper, webinar, case study, video, etc.
Why is it important? This is how you build your permission-based marketing list. People are very protective of their email addresses, so you need to offer something of value to your prospects to tempt them to share their contact information with you.
3. Landing page
What is it? A landing page is a specially designed webpage that you will direct your targeted traffic to and where your prospects will give you their contact info.
Why is it important? Directing people to a landing page is more efficient at capturing leads than directing them to a normal page of a website. This is because it is designed for one sole objective: to capture email addresses. The landing page contains nothing which could distract the visitor and have them clicking away before you’ve had a chance to capture their contact details.
4. Traffic source
What is it? Your traffic source is where your visitors will come from. There are many sources of traffic including SEO/organic search, pay per click advertising and social media.
Why is it important? Obviously if your landing page receives no traffic, you aren’t going to capture any leads. Therefore, you need one or more sources of traffic pointing to your landing page. The more highly targeted traffic you can attract to your website, the more qualified leads you will capture.
5. Automated follow-up sequence
What is it? An automated follow-up sequence, sometimes called an autoresponder, is a series of emails that is sent to people automatically after they opt-in to your list.
Why is it important? Automated email follow-up helps to build a relationship with your prospect with a view to converting them from prospect to valuable client. The beauty of this is that you can scale your website traffic while your “marketing machine” follows up with people automatically.
6. Ongoing lead nurture campaign
What is it? Once the automated follow-up sequence has been completed, that’s doesn’t mean we stop communicating with your growing database of valuable contacts. You’ll want to keep in touch with people and nurture those prospects.
Why is it important? Continual engagement with your prospects by giving them value through things such as email newsletters, podcasts or blogs can help to drive conversions long after they have first become a prospect. That’s because they start to “know, like and trust” you. Plus, if you’ve sent them good content, you’ll be positioned as an authority – someone who has expertise and credibility. Finally, you will build your brand and stay front of mind so you’re the first recruiter they think of when they have a requirement or are looking for their next career move.
Hopefully you found this overview of the inbound marketing process helpful. If you want a more detailed one-on-one chat about inbound marketing, and how to start generating warm leads on autopilot, you can apply for a free 30-minute Strategy Session here.
