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What are we all expecting to happen to our business in 2023? I know everyone’s talking about the R-word, and maybe you are going into this year with some uncertainty with everything else that’s happening.
That is why I wanted to kick off this year’s podcast with one of the key factors and focus that we all have when it comes to our business, generating leads.
Now, it’s very trendy at the moment, as I mentioned in the intro, for marketers to confuse people!
Demand Versus Lead Generation
As marketers, we like our jargon words, and some of you, you will have seen the conversation about demand generation versus lead generation and how we always have to start with demand generation first, and then we move into lead generation.
Do you know what?
Certain members of my profession like to confuse people 🤦♀️
I want to let you into a secret; It’s all fundamentally the same.
The premise of marketing is to generate demand for our service; that is its role.
To create demand for our recruiting service, we start with creating awareness among people that have a recruiting or career problem and don’t know who we are and how we can help them.
We then build on this as they enter our marketing funnel; you can find out more about marketing funnels for recruiters here in a previous post I wrote and recorded.
Topline: We are taking someone from unaware to aware consideration and then decision to work with us.
Please do not get yourself confused about, oh, well, is it demand generation? Is it lead generation? At the end of the day, you want people engaging with your business, leads you can talk to, and then you can convert.
I was talking to somebody about recording this podcast the other day actually and what I was going to do, and they suggested that you might want to do that as a webinar, Denise. This is one of our clients.
The Recruitment Lead Generation Triad
I want to give you some fundamentals of how lead generation works in today’s market; so you can kick off your activities in the right way this year.
I want to share with you the recruitment lead generation triad, which works especially well in today’s market. Now, some of you listen to this when you’re at the gym when you are walking the dog, or your drive to work; please do not write if you are in a car, go back to this and listen to it later!
Grab an A4 sheet of paper and draw a triangle.
At the top of the triangle, where the pointy bit is, I want you to put;
- content marketing machine.
- Then on the left-hand side, at the bottom, I want you to put current connections.
- Then on the right-hand side, I want you to put cold outreach.
I am going to talk about each of these elements.
Connections, Cold Outreach and Your Content Machine
Now, when it comes to lead generation, these are the three areas of focus that you need to consider this year because being a visible brand in the market is becoming critical, and that is where your content machine comes in. I’m going to talk about that in a second.
No matter who you are or where you are, I am sure you have some connections.
We were talking to one of our new clients this morning on one of our Superfast Circle calls, and he was talking about the fact that he’s actually got a CRM database with 40,000 plus candidates.
This is a clean database he can leverage, which currently he isn’t!
I suspect you have a database of connections, both candidates and clients; you aren’t leveraging.
Then the other thing that a lot of people I know are not as keen on doing, however, if you want to grow and scale your business, is cold outreach.
This is where the cold outreach, the current connections, and the content machine all work together because as you focus on each of these areas, I’m going to explain a little bit more about each one in turn, that makes a massive difference to you.
Your Content Machine is a Huge Convincer
Let’s start with the top of the triangle, with your content machine and getting attention in your market.
I was chatting with a client of ours the other day, and I was explaining the fact that if people can’t see you, you cannot sell to them. You have to be visible in front of your clients and in front of your candidates consistently.
Over Christmas, I sent a series of videos out on social media. One of them was Sharon. I made her go outside and record this video the week when it was something like -9 in the UK!
She was sharing our marketing audit checklist. She told people, “Look if you want a copy of this, drop a note in the comment box. Somebody did that, who’d been watching our videos. I sent him the checklist, and he became a client less than ten days later.
To be transparent, a conversion doesn’t always happen as fast as this, though you might be surprised how fast content can work for you.
Now, if we hadn’t taken that time to share that content on LinkedIn, on our social channels, in our emails, that person, that individual, that company would not be working with us.
That is the beauty of having a brand that is out online because what it will do is help you with your cold outreach, and it also helps you with those people that are already in your sphere of influence. They’re already on your database, and they’re already a connection on LinkedIn by creating content that is going out there that makes a massive difference to them because, suddenly, you are on their radar again.
With our Superfast Circle clients, one of the first wins they get is because they are posting on social media in the way we suggest, and then their past candidates and clients get in contact with them again. They say, “Oh, I see you’re on social media. I’ve got a role. I’ve got this, or can you help me with this job.” All of those different things around content will help you.
Now your content machine is very easy to set up. This is something that we help people in Superfast Circle implement. This is about the emails that you send. This is about what you post on social media. It might be about videos that you create. It might be about added resources and reports that you provide.
If people aren’t seeing you around, people don’t know who you are, that cold call you make, that cold outreach doesn’t have the same impact.
Fact: That you aren’t around, and people aren’t seeing you, your database will have forgotten about you if you are not using content to leverage your relationships with them, so that is number one, you must commit to building a content machine for your recruitment business.
Your Current Connections
Now, the next thing is using the connections that you already have. These may be connections in your database. I suggest that your CRM is always the best place to start because people there are more connected to you.
Then, of course, you’ve got your LinkedIn connections, and then, you’ve got people that may be on different social platforms that you’re connected to, on Instagram or on messenger or whatever that might be.
Mic drop moment 🎤
It is easier to sell to someone who already knows you. The marketing jargon for this is low-hanging fruit or gold around your feet.
These people are probably currently on your database and who you are not communicating with consistently. This is where you are really losing out because if you’ve got a database of people, then you can nurture those people; you can start to pull them through the funnel from being originally aware of you to be on your database to thinking, “Hang on a minute here, maybe we should be working with people.”
Of course, these current connections are probably people that you have placed, people that you currently work with, who are also a great vehicle to get referrals from.
The final part of the triad is cold outreach.
Cold Outreach
Now, when you are getting referrals from people or talking about you to others about the great experience they’ve had with you, and you’ve got your content machine, cold outreach will impact your business.
I know lots of us don’t like doing it; However, this strategy works.
Sara Blakely is the CEO of Spanx. In 2012 she became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire.
In a New Your Times article, she shared that one of her biggest clients was Nordstrom, and she got Nordstrom through a cold call that she herself made.
Cold outreach works as recruiters, you know this, and though we all want more inbound leads mastering cold outreach will elevate your reach and the success you rightly deserve.
The good news is there are many ways to use a cold outreach strategy when your content machine supports you.
The first strategy is cold emailing; we share more on this topic in a post I wrote on how to use cold emailing to generate recruitment leads here.
You can send out a cold email; you can still do that in the UK because if you send it to a business-to-business email, particularly for clients, that will work for you.
You can do cold outreach on LinkedIn. There are so many different ways that you can do that. You can do that through direct messaging and paid traffic which is a whole strategy in itself.
Do you know what? You can still do cold calling. Surprisingly, people will still answer their telephone when you ring them, and they will also answer text.
There are so many ways you can do cold outreach that works. Is it harder? Yes, it is.
You need to be consistent and give it longer, but honestly, I don’t know where we would be without doing cold outreach.
Several things for you to consider here. I think almost certainly I’m going to do a webinar on this. Keep tuned because I will let you know when it’s available.
Go back to the triad we shared earlier and review which of the three points you have in place.
You’ve got connections at the bottom left-hand side, right-hand side, cold outreach, and at the top, your content machine.
Start to work consistently on each of those elements; your lead generation and conversion will change completely this year.
Thanks
Denise
How We Can Help Your Lead Generation This Year
With our members of Superfast Circle, we give them a relevant lead generation strategy for their sector, including all the content and campaigns to use in each part of the triad. Book a call with us here if you want to find out how this will work for you.
