I did a website analysis and custom demonstration
for a local IT recruiting company yesterday. This is a very
successful company. They're a leader in their field and they have a
good number of recruiters working for them.
They've adapted to using online social networks (namely LinkedIn) to
identify passive candidates in the last few years and it's serving them
well. If you know anything about recruiting, you know that identifying
passive candidates (ie the ones not necessarily looking for a job) is
the holy grail. The theory goes that if someone is looking, they're
probably not the best candidate you can find. That's certainly not
always the case, of course. Nonetheless, many recruiting firms say they
can find "passive candidates" and that's their big selling point.
So, this recruiting firm is good at networking: online and in the real world.
But, they're clueless when it comes to generating leads via their
website. Just like every other recruiting firm, they need to fill
two pipelines. They need a pipeline of companies that want to hire them
to recruit on their behalf. And they need a pipeline of candidates to
fill those positions.
This "two pipeline" requirement is pretty unique to the recruiting
industry. But, at the end of the day, they need to generate "leads"
that get fed into some kind of offline sales process - just like most
b2b [and many b2c] companies do. They're not much different.
Nonetheless, as I was identifying their needs; talking about where
they are now; and what they're goals and challenges are, one of the
partners was skeptical about search engine optimization (SEO). He
actually said to me, "No one searches at Google for a recruiting
firm".
Of course this isn't the first time I've heard something like
this. These are usually the same people who say something like,
"We don't sell anything online" when I ask them about their internet
marketing strategy. Many people haven't really wrapped their head
around how marketing is changing from push to pull and how it's possible to generate highly qualified 'ready to buy' inbound sales leads online.
If we're on a demo and I've done my research I can usually just show
these people how many people are searching for their product and
services at Google and which keyword phrases to focus on first in order
to start generating some of that traffic. After a demo, usually people
are atleast a bit less skeptical.
I certainly would never suggest that 10,000 people start their day
thinking: "I'm going to hire a recruiter today", and then do a search
in google for "IT recruiter", then find a company in the results, check
out their website and hire them the next day. However, it's certainly
reasonable to expect that a good number of hiring managers do searches
at Google for "IT Recruiter" and then:
- Download a white paper about "Successful IT Recruiting" or "The Benefits of Passive Candidates".
- Leave a comment (or subscribe) to a blog about IT recruiting.
- Bookmark a site on a social bookmarking site where they can look it
up later and where some of their contacts might discover it.
- Register for a webinar, a seminar or a newsletter.
I could certainly see passive IT candidates exploring their options
and downloading a market or salary report, attending a webinar on a
topic of interest, or entering a programming contest.
In short, there's no shortage of ways a recruiting company could
start capturing leads on their website and building their pool of
candidates and their pipeline of companies who have hiring needs.
Repeat after me:
Leads. Leads. Inbound Leads.
They Want to Talk to You Now.
They Buy Much Faster.
(Can you come up with a better Inbound Marketing Haiku?)
Unfortunately, "Leads. Leads. Inbound Leads." isn't going to happen without a comprehensive and coordinated internet marketing strategy.
The nice thing about search engine optimization, blogging and social
media marketing, is that the results are cumulative and compounding.
Ultimately, they can be exponential.
However, if each of these online marketing activities are done in a
silo, they're a lot less likely to produce an exponential ROI.
A more positive way of explaining this is like this:
- Blogging Supports SEO Efforts, especially On Page SEO.
Blogging is the quickest way to generate a lot of keyword dense well
optimized pages on your site around your keywords. People are much more
likely to link to a blog post than your 'services page' too. And links
are a critical part of rising in the search engine rankings.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM) Supports SEO Efforts,
especially Off Page SEO or Link Building. Social bookmarking sites like
Digg, Mixx, Reddit and a million topic specific ones at coRank; forums; blog communities like MyBlogLog; meme aggregators like Techmeme
and literally a few hundred other sites that could be classified as
"social media" can help you build links directly, just by usng these
sites. These sites are also places where your followers will promote
your content and where someone else might find your content and link to
it. In short, social media helps with link building, which is critical
for SEO.
- Social Media Marketing Supports Blogging by Driving Traffic
to the Blog. I frequently answer questions on LinkedIn and leave a link
to relevant blog posts I've written. Every month, Hubspot generates a
few leads that turn into clients as a result of this activity.
Additionally, every one of our posts has a quick link to Delicious,
Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. This makes it easy for our readers to
share our content on these sites. Every month, Stumbleupon is one of
the top 5 referers to our blog and our main site. Social media builds
our readership and helps fill the top of our marketing funnel.
- Blogging Supports Social Media Marketing. It works the other
way too. Our blog has about 4,000 RSS and email subscribers. A little
while ago, we added a button on our blog that points to our "Marketing Mavens"
LinkedIn group. When I log onto LinkedIn, it's hard to look at 5
profiles of marketing professionals and not see a "marketing maven"
badge on atleast one of their profiles. Our blog lets us more easily
connect with people on social networking sites by directing them to
what we're doing. I've also started using Twitter to communicate with
existing and prospective clients and have used my blog to drive traffic
to my Twitter page and build up my Twitter fanbase. (Yes, I'm tragically connected. But, so are many of our prospects.)
- SEO Supports Social Media Marketing. This one takes awhile
to take effect. But, HubSpot generates a good portion of our traffic
from search engines now. It builds our blog readership, our email list,
our webinar attendance. All the people that "opt-in" eventually
self-select into leads. Whether they become a client or not, we're
converting a high percentage of them into HubSpot fans. As a result,
our ability to promote our social media activities gets easier. When we
released Press Release Grader
the other day, a few blog posts and a few Tweets later, 20+ bloggers
blogged about it and many more Public Relations professionals told
their Twitter followers about it. As Dharmesh reported
the other day, 1,000s of people used the site in its first week. The
compounding effect of our SEO, blogging and social media activity
allowed us to launch Press Release Grader with a bang even though it
was minimal effort.
Ok. So, hopefully by now, you're convinced that SEO, SMM and
blogging can and should work in concert to generate leads for your B2B
company.
From the examples above, you should see that they can have compounding and cumulative effects that lead to consistent traffic and lead volume growth.
You might still be wondering... "But, why can't I start with SMM or
blogging? Why is SEO first? Why is Blogging second? Why is SMM third?
And if that's the case, why are so many companies (especially
recruiting companies) using social media and ignoring blogging and
SEO?"
Why? Because they're doing it wrong. And they just don't know any better.
Yeah. I know. That's not a good answer. Here's why:
- Search Engine Optimization is the Foundation. It
should be obvious from the order of the examples above that blogging
and social media marketing can have a huge impact on SEO. So, if that's
the case and you're going to do blogging and/or social media marketing,
why not take a few hours and learn how to do keyword research, on page
SEO and off page SEO in order to maximize the return on the amount of
time you're going to be spending blogging and doing SMM? Wouldn't it be
great to rank on the first page of Google for IT recruiting in a year
or so. Would it be cool to rank on the first page of Google for "IT
recruiter Boston" in 3 months?
- Blogging is Your Home Base. Once you learn the basics of SEO
and you launch and start building your readership for your blog, you'll
quickly realize that your blog is your home base. You'll start sending
people there more often than your website. It's where you publish your
smartest thoughts. It's where you rant after sales calls (like this
one). It's where you link to when you leave a comment elsewhere.
For this reason, it's important to start blogging before you go crazy
in the social media world. If someone finds your profile on Digg or
thinks your answer to their question on LinkedIn is solid, they're
going to want to check you out a bit more. If you send them to your
home page, they'll probably leave. They want more of YOU. Your blog is
your place to be YOU; to be a real person.
- Social Media Marketing is A Loss Leader Activity. Using
social networking and social media sites is the easiest thing to start
doing. There's no cost to get started. And everyone in sales should do
it in order to fill their own pipeline and support marketing for their company.
However, for most companies, I believe it's still a loss leader
time-sink activity, especially if it's done alone. We generate many more leads directly from our blogging and SEO activity than we do our social media marketing activities.
This is true for the majority of our clients too. However, social media
marketing drives a lot of new traffic. It fills the very top of our
marketing funnel. It builds brand awareness. It builds blog readership.
It supports SEO. It helps our sales team connect directly with
prospects and get introduced to other prospects through trusted mutual
contacts. But, it does not, for the most part, drive a lot of direct
traffic that converts into leads and sales. It's a trickle. For this
reason, my opinion is that it should be done, but that it certainly
should never be the first or only activity, atleast if lead generation
through your website is your goal.
Not to beat a dead horse, but as the title of this post says, here's
the order of online marketing activities that will yield the best
results for you, no matter what type of company you are, and especially
if your company is B2B and has a traditional person-to-person complex
sales process.
- Keyword Research/SEO
- Blogging
- Social Media
(And btw, we are hiring.
And we do use recruiters for certain - not all - positions, in addition
to our own efforts which have been the most effective so far. I don't
think we'd really work with a firm that wasn't fully leveraging the
process above. Why? Better prospects - whether you're selling or
recruiting - come to you. Also, like many other buyers, we usually start
in search engines, blogs and social networking sites before we hire
anyone.)
