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It’s absolutely pouring down up here in the Lake District, but the nights are getting lighter, and I always love that. Who doesn’t love that in the Northern Hemisphere?
Anyway, today, I want to talk about inbound versus outbound lead generation and marketing, what’s working currently, some of the recent trends, and how that might work for you.
[Excuse any strange typing errors; this is a direct transcription for your benefit.]
If you go to http://www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/blog, you will see a plethora of content that will help you with your recruitment marketing this year.
And if you haven’t accessed our video masterclass series yet, it might be an idea. Imagine a classic Denise and Sharon webinar. If you’ve never been to one of our webinars, everything we share in them is absolute gold and actionable content. We’ve put that into some easily consumed videos.
It’s brand new content, and it’s all-around how you generate leads and how to generate not just any old lead but the lead you want – and do it consistently.
We’ve shared our framework that we share with our clients that you could take action on straight away because by giving value in that way, we hope that you might come back saying, “Wow, if I get that for free, what do I get when I pay for it?”.
We’re sharing this particular idea with you is an inbound marketing strategy. Go to www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/clf. Pop your name and email address in, and it’ll be winging its way to you shortly after, and that is a classic example of inbound marketing.
I was recently on a HubSpot research post which was fascinating. If you don’t know HubSpot, it’s a piece of very whizzy software that will allow you to do all of your marketing. I am not suggesting that you sign up as a recruiter.
Other pieces of software might be slightly better for you. As a marketeer, it’s a well-known bit of SAAS. They do some amazing research and provide a lot of data about inbound marketing.
Hubspot Data: Blogging Provides The Biggest ROI
They talk about blogging and how providing content increases the number of inbound leads that people get into their organisation. One of the pieces that I think was interesting was that 56% of marketers who leverage blogging say it’s effective, and another 10%, so approaching 70% now, say it generates the biggest ROI.
Another nugget is that 54%, so over half of the decision-makers, say that they spend at least one hour per week reading and reviewing thought leadership content, which of course, you can create.
Next week’s podcast will be about podcasting, another way to demonstrate your thought leadership. There are many positive things about why you should be using content and how that works from an inbound perspective.
First of all, let’s talk about inbound and outbound marketing.
What is Outbound Marketing?
It’s probably very logical, but it’s important to be clear about what we’re talking about here.
Outbound Marketing is also called a push tactic, so you’re going out to your market, and you are asking them to work with you.
They aren’t coming to you.
That automatically sets up a slightly different relationship. Now, I have done so much cold calling in my past. I used to knock on doors many years ago as a medical rep. It worked, and it was great, and times were very different then.
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about Valentine’s Day and how we have to fall in love with our clients.
If you are reaching out to somebody ice cold, it’s not as effective as it used to be.
That has particularly occurred throughout the pandemic because reaching out to people was getting quite complex. Are you working from home or not? Are you on a mobile? Is the phone connected from the office? What’s happening? How come we can’t get hold of anybody?
I am not saying that outbound marketing doesn’t work. However, I don’t think it’s as impactful as it used to be. So consider inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing?
So, inbound marketing, people coming to you because you’re a thought leader, finding your website, giving you their Name and email address because you look like you know what you’re doing, and can help them by actually helping them. It’s not costing them anything – this is what inbound is all about.
It’s been around for years, but fascinatingly, in their 2021 research, nearly a third of marketers were saying that they were going to leverage inbound marketing for the first time, which does fascinate me because it’s been working for years.
It works for us; it works for our clients. I think it was something like 15% of marketers are saying that it will be their biggest investment in the next year.
Digital transformation is happening, and inbound marketing is an amazingly smart move. We often talk about the fact that we can automate so many things and do so many different things, which of course, is fascinating, but you need to get things working in the first instance.
So how can you make inbound marketing work for you?
Provide Value
One of the easiest ways to make it work for you is to offer something of value to your potential client or candidate and then follow up the process afterwards because what you’re doing is you’re saying to people, “Look, I know what I’m doing. I’m a great recruiter. I understand the sector, and I can help you.”
We live in a knowledge age, so if somebody visits your blog post, let them know what the next step is. Then there is advertising.
Use Retargeting
We’ve talked about retargeting and remarketing before, where once someone has visited your website, you then follow them around the internet, reminding them that you are there and you are the recruiter of choice for them.
A great piece of value-added content to offer your website visitors is a report that they can download. Then they go onto your email list.
What’s happened there is people have come to you. You can now communicate and connect with them and promote you, your brand, and your offer. That is the massive value of inbound marketing.
Here at SFR, we don’t do any cold calling now. The only time we pick up the phone to speak to people is when we’ve had some level of engagement with them.
Let’s say they’ve given us their Name and email address, and they’re now in our email database, watching our videos, listening to our podcast, or being part of our partner network.
These are the people we contact because outbound does work provided somebody has some degree of knowledge of you.
Awareness happens on social media. You get your content out there, and you’re starting to attract people.
This is the pull strategy rather than pushing against what’s going on. That’s the difference with inbound marketing. If you haven’t got inbound marketing in your business, I strongly suggest you do.
We notice a lot of recruitment software and CRMs are adding email marketing to their platforms because they know it’s working. It’s something we’ve been doing for years and encourage our clients to do.
We even provide the content that will work in your different email funnels as part of your Superfast circle membership.
In Superfast Circle, we write content and campaigns for you.
If you want to know more about that, of course, get in contact with one of us, and we can share more about that with you.
We’re still in the early part of 2022. Start to focus; inbound marketing is so much easier than it used to be. You can put a landing page up, which we talked about a while back. You can pull people into your database; you can start to network and connect with them. What a difference it will make for you.
How We Can Help
We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we give them.
Book your call and demonstration here if you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you.
Thanks
Denise
P.S. If you want to join Superfast Circle and would like to find out more, speak to us here.
