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My suspicion is if you are listening to this podcast you might have found the original one which was “Principles of Lead Generation Part 1” and you were looking for part two! So here we are and today we are going to cover one of the reasons why leads convert more when they come to you and little about positioning and authority marketing and a few other things as well so let’s get into it.
So what is that about leads that come to us are more likely to convert?
It relates exactly to what we are chatting about last time because if you have attracted somebody,they are probably at the different point in the adoption cycle and they are more ready and willing so they have more of a buyer’s intent to have a conversation with you.
They can come to you in all different ways. It could be that they are coming to you through your email database because you’re regularly communicating with them. They could’ve found you through LinkedIn or a great way, of course, is they could have been referred to you.
Imagine if you’ve got a client and he or she has referred you to somebody else within the organisation or a business contact that they have outside of the organisation and particularly this works really well with candidates. Once a candidate has an amazing experience with a recruiter then they will talk to their buddies and colleagues at work about what you do.
So that’s one of the reasons why when leads come to you then they are much more likely to convert. They are much warmer. We’ve all done cold calling and some of you may still do it now. Personally, I haven’t made a cold call for a number of years because everyone that we talk to now is warm. They have been warmed up by the process that they go through as they engage with us at different stages of their own buying journey.
I’m telling you it’s a much more pleasant experience to ring somebody up that at least has a supporting chance of knowing you or are at a point in their own buying cycle where they want to have a conversation about what you can do to help them.
Now that leads in nicely to authority marketing. Now the trendy terms for this is ‘thought leadership’, becoming a thought leader, becoming a leader and a leader in your sector. Now you don’t have to be the world’s expert; that would be nice and there are ways to do that but all you need to do is be an expert in their world and that’s all about positioning.
As you position yourself as being the go-to person in your particular sector as a recruiter, you will start to attract people and it starts this swell of activity moving towards you. And that is a key thing that you must remember when it comes to how you generate leads. It will make life so much easier for you if you become positioned as the authority in your market.
A number of companies that you will see you have done this. Apple does it incredibly well. Marks & Spencer do it for certain things too. Even though I know that a lot of people don’t have a lot of positive things to say about M&S at the moment but if you are a lady listening to this you probably buy your underwear from Marks & Spencer!… That’s because they have branded themselves and they position themselves as an authority in that way. So that’s the key thing around lead generation. That’s one of the reasons why we really encourage people to focus on content marketing because content and knowledge are all about positioning you.
Now when it comes to positioning this is really key and I always call it the MMM strategy, the triple M strategy and that is ‘message to market match’. In future podcasts, I’m going to talk about avatars and creating your own avatar whether that be a candidate or client. The key thing to think about here is as you are marketing to your database and to your ideal client, you need to think about the messages that you are communicating.
What are their key challenges? What are the problems that they have? How are you going to relate to that? Because if you take some time to do this and you get it right, but even just the words and phrases that you use will make a huge difference when you focus on this.
Now the last couple of things, why are we doing all this? Well, lead generation is about influence. It’s about you as one entity influencing somebody else. So you want to bring people into your experience and you do that using some key influencing principles. If you haven’t read this book it’s a great book to read and it’s called ‘ The Psychology of Influence’ by a chap called Robert Cialdini. You can get it on Amazon. He talks about some key principles of influence which is all research-based, a fantastic book. It’s a flagship book in the market.
A couple of things around that are consistency and commitment. If people are regularly receiving communication from you, they see you in the market then they get this trust factor that starts to build for them – “I’ve seen that company before. I notice they post on LinkedIn. I noticed they’ve always got good content on the website. I open their emails because their emails are always good and always add value. Maybe we should start considering this particular recruitment company to work with.”
It’s a natural phenomenon. We love people that are consistent. People that turn up and do what they say. They are committed. That really affects us in our buying decisions and choices. Of course, we may find this out from a third-party reference as well but if we can demonstrate consistency and commitment with our lead generation, that will pay dividends. The beauty of online marketing is some of this can be automated and it can be done in a really cost-effective way.
So there we have it – some of the key principles of lead generation. This is part two. If you haven’t found part one we’re going to put a link to it over at superfastrecruitment.co.uk. The things we’ve covered here – we talked about the 80/20 rule, really important; we’ve talked about the seven points of contact theory; and the adoption cycle; how it’s all about positioning so that leads start to come to you and as leads come to you they are much more likely to convert. We make sure that our messages are aligned so we got a message to market match and we do it consistently and with commitment.
So this is Denise saying bye for now and will see you next time!
This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. If you haven’t heard Part 1, click here. Follow us on Google+
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