Our Dominate Your Sector VIP training programme finished last week and we were sharing some stats around conversions,spend etc and paid traffic.
Iain one of our VIPs commented that; “you measure everything don’t you?”
The truth? Yes, we do, though some things are more important than others to measure.
Vanity metrics versus what really matters
The ultimate measure for a business owner is how much money you are making versus how much you are spending.
For agency owners like yourselves it’s how many placements are you making and importantly at what profit.
Vanity metrics are those ‘things’ that don’t always translate into direct business. Like how many followers you have on Twitter or Instagram or how many people like your Facebook page, or ‘dare I say it@ how many followers your LinkedIn company page has.
Though it gives all our ego’s a boost and is a ‘nice’ to have, I have yet to see it translate into huge volumes of cash in the SME market.
[Hint: Peoples motivation to like and follow you is different to signing up for a free report.]
Once upon a time in a land far far away there was a KPI
The recruitment and staffing sector is a sales driven environment; normally fuelled by KPI’s ( Key Performance Indicators)and measurement. Nothing wrong with that.
It’s common to look at your consultant’s CV to interview ratio, CV’s out etc. These are all markers of predictable results.
Our own background was Pharmaceutical sales and all our sales representatives were targeted on their ‘call rate’ in other words the historical data predicated that if a representative saw 5 Drs a day it’s likely their sales target would be hit.
The good news is that KPIs work in marketing too, provided you look at the ‘right’ things to give you data on what will provide the results.
Let’s start at the very beginning
In the words of Mary Poppins (we were with 8 year olds last weekend telling stories and it seems to have stuck!); ” let’s, start at the very beginning…………” and look at how good we all are at sales conversion.
A question for you :If you have qualified leads coming into your organisation how many would you convert?
10 %, 20%, 30% 50 %??
Let’s be conservative and use Pareto’s principle of 80/20 and say its 20%.
Therefore, out of every 100 leads you could convert 20 (these are rough figures so bear with me).
If each converted lead eventually produced a fee worth £5000 then your 20 conversions would deliver £100K.
Considering these figures how much would you be willing to pay for those 100 initial leads?
This is the true power of marketing measurement.
Yes, there are finer distinctions to this like; how many email leads will convert and how long will it take? In a similar fashion to the number of calls translating into business you can use your own stats to predict what results you will get.
A few suggestions:
- How people find you ( Huge and many recruiters dont do it !!***)
- How many emails you send
- Open rates
- Click through rates
- How many people sign up for your report
Keep a track of all this data, and you will soon be ahead of other recruiters that don’t and consequently will know where to spend your hard earned cash.
Of course each sector is different and leads will come to us when they are ready to buy not just when we want to sell to them; pity I know!
As Iain our client pointed out we know our numbers………….
An example
In April we ran a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn. We used a landing page that had a 31.7% optin rate i.e. the percentage of people that landed on the page that gave their name and/or email address. By the way anything over 20% from cold traffic is good.
The cost per click was £3.97 we had 126 clicks and from that 40 new targeted email subscribers.
- Total cost £500.22
- Total cost per lead £12.50
Now we have more measures like ( similar to the list a above……..we share this on our programmes) this that we have been collecting over time that helps us confidently invest money to build a targeted list of staffing professionals, who are targeted to our offer.
Will any of those 40 people convert to clients? According to our internal measures yes they will over the next 0-8 months.
For instance, I know how many emails to send out to fill a webinar. I also know how many people are likely to come online and then how many will come on board as clients.
The good news is that when you start to measure data like this your marketing becomes more predictable; in a similar way to the number of dials your consultants have as a target, or the number of CVs they need to send out. They become metrics that deliver results.
So what will you measure now?
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