Looking for your ideal HR marketing plan and marketing tactics to get more clients in the Human Resources industry?

In this in-depth post, we’ll be walking through a simple four-step framework to develop your optimal marketing strategy plan to get new leads or sales coming into your email box every day:

Use Market Segmentation To Become Super Attractive To Your Target Market
Create An HR Content Marketing Funnel To Attract Business Clients
The Right Marketing Mix For Your HR Business
Create An Easy Marketing Process To Improve Your Marketing Over Time

HR Marketing Plan To Get More Clients In The Human Resources Industry

Before we start, be sure to join our private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and companies in the Human Resources industry.

Please subscribe and share the show with any friends who are busy growing an HR-related business (recruitment, employee engagement, diversity & inclusion, general HR, etc).

If you work as a Human Resources consultant or in an HR tech startup in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – our HR marketing update and HR marketing services will help.

A Better HR Business

While you’re here, check out our podcast – A Better HR Business and read Best B2B Marketing Consultancies For HR Companies.

A Four-Step HR Marketing Plan To Get More Clients

Here’s the index for what we’ll be covering in this hefty post (feel free to jump ahead).

STEP 1: Market Segmentation To Become Super Attractive To Your Target Market

Trying to work out how use market segmentation to make your HR-related business stand out?

Take a look how this HR business describes itself on its website home page:

We will help you bridge the gap between vision and performance. We will enhance your existing or new business with our practical HR advice and leave you with sustainable HR programs for the future.

How does that make you feel?

Do you feel like you’ve discovered the Human Resources firm that’s exactly right for your business?

Does it feel like it deserves to become known as one of the recommended HR consultancy businesses in your region?

Take a few minutes, days, or even months to become laser-focused on the types and categories of clients that you want for your business.

Understand their needs, wants, questions, and concerns.

Also, consider what they don’t want or need.

You can spend months on this or you can sketch out a one-page outline during a lunch break – both approaches work.

In this section, we’ll look at:

How to segment your audience to grow your HR-related business.
A simple two-line formula to make your HR business stand out.
How to become more attractive by defining who you are not serving.
How to use this clarity to change your website and marketing so that it specifically addresses these needs, wants, questions, and concerns.
Other such methods of becoming more attractive to your target market.

Stop being all things to all people – connect with your people.

It will pay off for you.

Is Your HR-Related Business Blending Into The Background?

Have you ever been on holiday in a lovely foreign land and visited the local markets?

There were probably whole rows full of stalls selling very similar products.

You’d never been to these markets before so you probably had no emotional attachment to any of the particular shop owners.

How to make your HR-related business stand out

How did you tell them apart or decide where to buy?

I’d say that price was a big factor in your decision on which stall to buy from.

It reminds me of perfect market competition theory . . .

How to make your HR business stand out from the rest

For all those stall owners, it’s not a great way to do business, right?

Yet why do so many businesses do it this way?

Most HR Businesses Do Not Differentiate Themselves

Bring up those holiday memories in your mind, recall the crowded market, and see all those identical stalls stretched out before you . . .

Now read some meaningless mission statements from real HR firms.

Our range of comprehensive HR solutions address the specific needs of your organisation with the single-minded goal of making it easier for you to create and manage a work environment that delivers results and sustainable commercial growth.

Our highly experienced Human Resources Professionals supply advice and add significant value to companies on an as-needs basis.
And the one we saw earlier: We will help you bridge the gap between vision and performance. We will enhance your existing or new business with our practical HR advice and leave you with sustainable HR programs for the future.

“Comprehensive HR solutions; Delivers results; Sustainable commercial growth; Add significant value; Vision and performance; Sustainable HR programs” – sounds like a round of Business Buzzword Bingo.

If your business looks and sounds exactly like every other one of your competitors, then people can only really judge you based on price or reputation.

The big firms like Heidrick & Struggles, Ernst & Young, and others have reputation all sewn up with their swanky corporate offices, global reach, and huge marketing budgets.

So it comes back to price again.

In other words, if you look and sound like all the other stalls in the market, you’ll have to lower your price and hope that the customer randomly decides to buy from your stall.

Free Business Growth Presentation

10 Tips for Human Resources Consultancies

Looking for more ideas to help you grow your recruitment or HR-related business?

Here’s something that might help . . .

Check out my free presentation (no signup required) on 10 clever ways that successful consultancies are bringing in more business.

You can see the video and download the slides here.

How To Make Your HR-Related Business Stand Out

The first step in my four-step process to get new clients could be called Step 1: ‘Become Super Attractive To Your Target Market.’

I recommend taking a few minutes, days, or even months to become laser-focused on the types and categories of clients that you want for your business.

Understand their needs, wants, questions, and concerns. Also, consider what they don’t want or need (see the Real Life Story below).

You can spend months on this or you can sketch out a one-page outline during a lunch break – both approaches work.

Stop being all things to all people – connect with your people. It will pay off for you.

Now, you may be thinking that it’s really hard to work out your exact target audience or to work out what to say to them so let me show you a few little tricks you can use.

Segment Your Target Audience – Basic

Whenever I want a business to become super attractive to its target market, I always start by working out who it should be aimed at.

The easiest way is to come up with some ‘buyer categories’.

It might sound difficult but it is just a list of your main customer categories and some background information to guide you.

It’s important to break it up because all categories are different as they all have different needs and pressures and frustrations.

For example, for my HRwisdom business, I divided it into the following categories:

HR Professional
External Consultant To Companies
Business Owner
Student
Other

Super simple.

I did this because they were all looking for different things and, to be honest, I just put the Student category in there so they wouldn’t mess up my database.

HR professionals are usually in mid to large-sized companies with decent budgets and support behind them.

Business owners like you and I have a lot more to contend with so they are looking for different things – they’ll also want things that are quick, low cost or free so they can solve an immediate problem. They may well spend money on larger services later but they’ve got a lot of things on their plate so it may take time.

HR professionals will know what they are looking for and will be prepared to spend more because they are buying for a large corporation. They will, however, often be quite slow-moving as they don’t control the budget – they have to get approval from the powers that be. They also need a lot of proof to back up their choice – their reputation is on the line.

Do you see how that works?

Instantly, I knew, at a very basic level, who was coming to my website and what drove their behaviour.

I could also tag visitors, track their sign-up process, purchases, and so on using Google Analytics and my CRM.

Visitors then had pages, information, and special offers dedicated to them so they look super attractive to them when the time comes to make a purchase

See: 7 Advanced Audience Features in Google Analytics

Why not take a moment and think about how would you divide up your customer/client categories?

Where are they based located?
What are the typical characteristics of their business?
What are their immediate problems and longer term challenges?
What have you got to offer in terms of those specific challenges (no generic mission statements or jargon please)?

Welcome to ‘A Better HR Business‘ – the podcast which looks at how consultants and tech firms in the broad Human Resources field grow their businesses; and how they help employers get the best out of their people.

Please subscribe and share the show with any friends who are busy growing an HR-related business (recruitment, employee engagement, diversity & inclusion, general HR, etc).

Segment Your Target Audience – Advanced

Let’s start with the Marketing 101 approach and look at a basic method for segmenting your audience which can be very effective.

Simply think about the different roles and businesses that you want as customers and clients and approach them differently.

The advanced approach isn’t too complicated – it just adds more data to the process.

For example, this might involve putting all your customer/client details into a spreadsheet along with all the revenue each one has generated. Once they’re in the spreadsheet, you can slice and dice the data in various ways (you can even use a pivot table if you’re feeling brave).

You might look at:

Average/total customer revenue by industry.
Average/total customer revenue by business headcount.
Average/total customer revenue by location.
Average/total customer revenue by role in company of key contact.
Average/total customer revenue by role in company of project type.
Average/total customer revenue by role in company of use case/reason for using your services.
And so on.

This will help you to decide who and what to focus on when it comes to targeting the right types of businesses and people within those companies.

I will go into this in more detail in a separate post so make sure you’re on my mailing list to get more on this topic.

Check out the HR Business Accelerator.

While you’re here, be sure to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.

What To Do When You’ve Identified Your Target Market

Once you’ve given some thought to the different segments in your target market, there are plenty of ways in which you can play to your strengths and talk directly to these people.

For example:

Change your website home page so that the wording, layout, design, imagery, menus and content are focussed on your target market. Below, I’ll share a two-line formula that makes this easy.
Add self-selection to your website and menus (“Which of the following options best describes you…?“) to guide people to a tailored page or section of your website. (New post on this topic coming very soon).
Create use cases or case studies that address different segments of your target audience.
Create sections or pages within your website designed just for each target segment.
Create blog content aimed at each specific target segment.
Create webinars and videos that address specific issues for sub-sections of your audience.
Share social media updates that speak to different segments on different occasions.
Segment your email/CRM database according to the different target audiences.
Get more website conversion ideas from industry experts here.
And much more.

A Two-Line Formula To Differentiate Your HR Business

If you know your customer categories but don’t know how to express your value to those groups, here’s a handy two-line formula I discovered from business expert Geoffrey James that you can use to work out what’s so good about your human resources business.

For an HR-related business:

“Our clients hire us to provide [benefit(s) to the client.]. They hire us, rather than somebody else, because [something unique that the competition doesn’t have but the customer values.]“

Or, for an HR-related product:

“Our customers buy from us to provide [benefit(s) to the client.]. They buy from us, rather than somebody else, because [something unique that the competition doesn’t have but the customer values.]“

To go back to that example of a Human Resources consulting firm at the start of the main article, it might change from this . . .

“We will help you bridge the gap between vision and performance. We will enhance your existing or new business with our practical HR advice and leave you with sustainable HR programs for the future.”

. . . to this (after segmenting the clients into their most common categories):

“Our clients in the design & engineering industry hire us to generate faster and more effective staff performance improvement. They hire us, rather than somebody else, because our unique and easy-to-use performance management system is fully operational within days, not months.

Can you see the difference?

The original messages force the customer to figure out what it all means to the customer.

The second version isn’t perfect but it does approach it from the customer’s viewpoint.

Doing this little exercise means you will talk the language of your new customers and clients rather than coming up with generic slogans that don’t mean anything to anyone.

You can then use these targeted phrases on your website, in your ads, in person at networking events, and in all sorts of ways.

A Special Twist For Your Two-Line Marketing Proposition

Unsure what to put for the ‘something unique that the competition doesn’t have but the customer values’ component in the two-line formula above?

You could identify something your previous customers and clients told you was special regarding your:

Service arrangements or standards (but avoid slipping into clichés)
Pricing or billing arrangements
Specialty or area of expertise
Personalities and relationships
Product packages or service packages.

If you can’t think of something without it descending into meaningless generalisations (such as: “We offer the best service due to our extensive experience”), then coming up with new product packages or service package could be the way to go.

An example . . .

I once gave a talk at a conference to about 200 people on the topic of employee engagement. The previous week I had won a new client by explaining that the consulting work I could do was like an ‘employee engagement kick-start program’ – it wasn’t a formal package or program and I was only planning to do my usual consulting work but, in the potential client’s office, it was the easiest way to explain what I was offering.

In my conference presentation, I mentioned what smart employers were doing here and in other countries. I mentioned, only in passing, that my ‘employee engagement kick start program’ was based on these principles.

In the weeks after my conference presentation, I received a number of emails from audience members. None of the emails mentioned the theories or best practices I’d described, all of them asked for more information on my ‘employee engagement kick start program’ which, until that moment, had never existed before.

Packaging your services works.

It makes broad, generic consulting or ‘professional services’ more tangible. They can help you get your foot in the door with an organisation so you can offer higher-value services down the track.

They’re easier to understand and, therefore, easier to sell.

A Real Life Story

Let’s finish with a story that helps address the question of how to make your HR-related business stand out from the rest.

Years ago when CurrencyFair was still only a handful of people, I was madly working all hours of the day setting up both the HR function and the inbound marketing function.

In theory, this was a combination of 50% HR and 50% marketing but, in the reality of tech startup-land, it was more like 75% and 75%.

After a large fundraising round, our PR people got us wide-ranging press coverage saying that we were cashed-up and ready to hire more staff.

Cue the cold calls from local recruiters.

Now, unlike a lot of people, I have no problem with sales calls. After all, here I am writing a marketing blog. Sales calls win business which means more jobs, more employment, better society . . . and well . . . et cetera.

However, every recruiter that phoned me always pitched the same angle: lower rates. None of them had done any segmentation or research or even used a sales questioning process that allowed for exploration of my needs.

CurrencyFair had recently raised a lot of money (millions) so lower recruitment fees weren’t necessarily my most pressing issue.

My problem was time. I was working two jobs in one (HR and Marketing).

If one of the recruiters had differentiated themselves by presenting a time-saving service rather than a money-saving service, they probably would’ve got the gig.

Instead, some other firm got the job for some minor reason (all pitches sounded the same so it probably did come down to price).

The lesson? Segmenting and understanding your audience can win business and actually let you charge more.

STEP 2: Create A B2B Content Marketing Funnel To Attract Business Clients

The harsh reality is this: most people are tyre-kickers before they buy anything.

It is often reported that up to 95% of visitors to your website are there to research and are not ready to talk yet.

Of these people, up to 70% will eventually buy a product or service but it could be from you or it could be from your competitor.

If you don’t have information to give them right now, they’ll be long gone and they’ll spend their money elsewhere.

You have taken the time to understand your target audience so you know what they are thinking about and you understand their major concerns.

Content Marketing For HR Companies – What Content To Produce

People do most of their research online before deciding, so you should provide answers to their questions along the stages (cold, warm, hot) of the buying journey.

Answer their questions with your blog first and then branch out to other methods such as one-page checklists, free ebooks, and guides, videos, email series, infographics, or whatever works best for your audience.

Remember, you don’t actually don’t have to produce the information resources yourself.

Spend an hour Googling different topics and see what you can find. Worst case scenario, you could link to a resource from another company if they’re not in your geographic area or a direct competitor.

You know that most people are not going to buy from you the first time they hear about you.

Therefore, when they visit your website, you should try to get their email address in exchange for some of the useful information you found/developed in the previous step. That way, you can keep in touch with the prospect and continue to educate and inform them so that when they’re ready to start, they’ll contact you.

Further below, we’ll look at:

What information to give visitors and how to give it to them.
How to avoid the mistakes most HR businesses make with their blog.
How to use email properly. It has an extraordinary return on investment but most businesses ignore this powerful tool or get it wrong.
How to use retargeting properly. Retargeting (ads that follow people around the internet hopefully in a non-stalking kind of way) continues to evolve. The technology is really quite amazing and can be really effective when done properly.

Most business owners get scared of this step thinking it’s too hard, too complicated – but it can be surprisingly easy to do.

If you get it right, you can have things set up so that you can wake up every morning, look at your phone and see a whole list of new sales leads or sales orders sitting there in your email inbox.

It’s a good feeling.

While you’re here, be sure to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.

HR & B2B Content Marketing Funnel Guide

Take a look t this classic McGraw Hill advertisement from the 1950s:

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your company. I don’t know your company’s product. I don’t know what your company stands for. I don’t know your company’s customers. I don’t know your company’s record. I don’t know your company’s reputation. Now… what was it you wanted to sell me?”

In some industries, it often takes many follow-ups to make a sale.

Email and retargeting can do this for you automatically.

These days, before anyone buys anything, they go online and look around for information on their problem or on what they want to buy.

This means that up to 95% of visitors to your website are there to research and are not ready to talk yet.

Of these people, up to 70% will eventually buy a product or service but it could be from you or it could be from your competitor. If you don’t have information to give them right now, they’ll be long gone and they’ll spend their money elsewhere.

That’s why I’m such a big fan of follow-up, particularly email follow-up.

Email In Your Marketing Funnel

Used properly, email lets your prospective customer or client get to know you. It also allows you to keep in touch and stay top of mind for what can be over seven contact points required before the sale is made.

Email has an extraordinary return on investment. It doesn’t cost much to run and it can bring in some serious business.

However, most businesses ignore this powerful tool or they get it wrong.

Most business owners get scared of this step thinking it’s too hard, too complicated – but it can be surprisingly easy to do. More importantly, it can be a gold mine for new sales and business leads, particularly when you decide to combine it with advertising on places like Facebook and Google or even your local newspaper.

You might be wondering: ‘How should I use email?’

Start by offering them something of value (in the form of useful information) in exchange for their email address.

Having gone through Steps 1 and 2, it won’t be hard to come up with ways to entice people to give you their email address. You can then send them helpful information, sales coupons, free trials or whatever works until they become a customer or client.

Two Types Of Email (Plus One Other)

There are two main types of email: proactive and reactive.

There is a third type, cold email outreach, which we’ll look at further on in this article. However, Woodpecker (30 days for free) is the tool most commonly used for cold email outreach.

For an explanation of cold email outreach, see this article: How To Use Cold B2B Email To Generate More Sales For Your HR Tech Company.

Proactive messages are the ones you probably know about and may do already: monthly newsletters, coupon mail-outs, special offers, that sort of thing.

Reactive emails are underused but extremely powerful.

Here are just a few types of emails you can send:

Welcome messages
Set-up messages
Coaching messages
Technical advice messages
Inspirational messages
‘How To’ messages curated content messages
And many more such types of emails.

The thing to love about reactive emails is that they are pre-written and tailored to your audience.

Basically, a reactive email is an email that is automatically sent to a person upon a trigger event.

The most common trigger event is when someone first fills in an online form to join your mailing list. They might instantly receive a welcome message containing a link to the free resource you promised them.

Another trigger event (and, quite frankly, the coolest) is a timed, pre-scheduled trigger such as: ‘Send Email 3 Days After They Join Mailing List.’ That could be followed up with weekly or maybe monthly pre-written messages.

You could also add key date triggers such as the anniversary date of the person joining your mailing list or (if you asked), their birthday.

This means that you can pre-write a whole year’s worth of high-quality advice for prospective customers and clients that gets sent at pre-planned intervals.

For example, when Australia had its big skills shortage a few years back, employers everywhere were struggling to find good staff. They were hungry for helpful tips and advice on how to find and attract great people to their business.

To cater for this demand, I wrote a few short notes with handy tips and then copied and pasted them into new reactive emails to go out every few days.

To bring people into the mailing list, I came up with a lead magnet (as discussed in Step 2) and shared the link to that web page with potential clients in person, by email, and by social media.

It worked like a charm.

New sales prospects came into the mailing system every day and then the reactive emails slowly then warmed them up until they were ready to become paying clients.

You could definitely do the same.

There are plenty of email service providers out there to choose from and they are generally easy to use.

Check out:

Mailerlite (I use them – great light-touch email service. Use this Refer A Friend link to get a $20 credit)
Woodpecker (30 days for free) – This is used for cold email outreach. For an explanation, see this article: How To Use Cold B2B Email To Generate More Sales For Your HR Tech Company.

For larger, full-service software options, take a look at:

Whichever system you choose, have a play with it and then, over time, experiment with different aspects such:

How often you mail out
Plain text emails or fancy image-based versions
Which day of the week you typically mail
Adding attachments or just links
Salesy messages or just information
Tone of voice (formal or perhaps chatty?)
Length of the message
Other such aspects.

Finally, to get the actual form that people fill in to request information or join your mailing list, you need to build it in your email service provider (they all have easy templates to use).

However, there are some excellent new services that take this up a level and increase the odds that the person will indeed fill in the form.

Take a look at services that provide ‘landing pages’ such as:

Instapage

LeadPages

They are perfect to run with any online advertising you might do on Google Adwords and Facebook and they work well with most of the email service providers that then do the job of sending messages to your new prospects.

While you’re here, be sure to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.

Retargeting To Fill Your Content Marketing Funnel

Another new and powerful tool to not let your prospective customers just walk away and forget you is an online advertising option called retargeting (ads that follow people around the internet).

The technology is really quite amazing and can be really effective when done properly.

Basically, you put a little code into the back of your website (or get someone to do it for you), and then, whenever someone visits your website but doesn’t take action, you can have ads showing to them on other websites that aren’t even yours.

For example, the person looks at your Products website page, doesn’t buy and then they browse off to a gossip website to check the headlines for the day. Your ad could be showing on the side of the gossip website and it could act as a reminder or a prompt to take action and buy your product or service. Facebook has the same technology too so your ads can appear when your prospect is browsing around Facebook.

There are lots of ways you can capitalise on all the effort you went to bring someone to your website, even if they don’t buy or take action then and there. Just don’t let them leave and forget you – you’ve worked too hard for that.

I’d much rather focus on email than display advertising so I won’t dwell on it here.

If you want to try it out (it definitely can work) then I’d suggest starting with Facebook.

If you want to know more, go to Google and search for the main sites you want to retarget on or look at:

In the next step, we will be looking at how to get more business leads and sales on autopilot by using Facebook and other methods.

Step Two Marketing Funnel Summary

The odds are stacked against you: people who visit your website are highly unlikely to take action yet.

Therefore, you need to find a way to keep in touch with them – through email and retargeting.

Give the prospective customer or client a reason to give you their email address and then send them useful information and resources including special offers, free trials, and other such incentives to take action. You can pre-write most of these emails which means that you’ll be proactively marketing and delighting your potential customers and clients twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Test setting up a small retargeting campaign so that the visitor to your website sees your ads around the internet after they’ve left your site. These types of advertisements convert at a much higher rate than normal online display ads.

STEP 3: The Right Marketing Mix For Your HR Business

This is where you’ve done the hard work and put everything in place.

Now you’re just scaling it up to bring in predictable revenue.

You can use both free and paid methods but all of them will bring more sales and potential new clients and customers streaming to your business.

There are probably a hundred different ways to bring people to your business website. My advice for paid marketing is to get some information for your prospects together, get your blog and email system set up and running, and then choose either one paid marketing channel to test a small advertising campaign with a small budget.

Start small, learn the ropes, and slowly scale up when you see that you’re generating more revenue than you’re spending on ads.

In this blog series, we’ll look at how to grow your business with such marketing methods for HR companies as:

Appearing on external blogs
Publicity
Unconventional PR
Search Engine Marketing (SEM – such as Google Adwords)
Social Display Ads (such as Facebook or Quora ads)
Offline Ads (such as newspapers)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO – getting found in Google’s organic search results)
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Engineering as Marketing
Viral Marketing
Business Development (partnering with other companies and organisations)
Sales
Affiliate Programs
Existing Platforms (unpaid activity on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter)
Trade Shows
Offline Events
Speaking Engagements
Community Building

While you’re here, be sure to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.

With any of the marketing methods, you should always try to find a way to track which one brought your customers and clients to your door.

However, the key is to pick only one or two in paid and unpaid and just get started.

You can refine the system and add other methods soon enough.

After a while, you’ll see which channel is producing the best results for your business. You can then continue to refine your online marketing campaigns to get even better results.

Marketing Mix Options For Your Human Resources Business

This is where you’ve done the hard work and put everything in place. Now you’re just scaling it up. This is where it starts to get exciting.

You can use both free and paid methods but all of them can bring more sales and potential new clients and customers streaming to your business. These sort of methods are how all the big tech companies are growing so quickly but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do it too.

There is a big long list of things you can do to bring in your potential customers and clients. There are things like: Google Adwords and Display Ads, Affiliate programs, Website Sponsorship, Newspaper and magazine ads, radio, Social media (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), Blog, Email, Press coverage, Refer a Friend schemes, TV and more. With any of them, you should always try to find a way to track which method brought your customers and clients to your door.

Let’s start with a paid method that works well for finding potential customers as well as clients – Google Adwords.

Marketing Mix Option – Google Adwords

A little later we’ll look at Facebook ads and they’re excellent for many types of businesses but they don’t always work so well for Human Resources companies looking for employer clients.

That’s where Google Adwords steps in – it’s perfectly positioned to put your product or service right in front of people who are looking to buy right now.

Check out: Which PPC Metrics are the Most Important?

In case you’re worried, Google Adwords is probably easier than Facebook to set up ads and, like Facebook, you can start with a really small amount to test it and get comfortable before really opening up the throttle and taking it for a spin.

I recently met a guy who founded a website here in Ireland from scratch. He started the site in his parent’s house when he was unemployed during the recession. He set up the site and then spent just 5 Euro a day bringing in customers on Google Adwords. The site is now worth millions and is a household name here.

Google provides a number of tools and tutorials to help you get started.

If you don’t want to get involved in running your Google Adwords campaign, there are plenty of consultants and service providers that will do it for you.

Set Up Your Keyword List

Start by putting together a keyword list with just the keywords you think will be most likely to convert.

For instance, if you run a training consultancy in Alberta, you might start with keywords like this:

Training consultancy Alberta
Alberta training company
Recommended training firm in Alberta

Start by looking through the traffic stats in the Google Campaign Planner. Ideally, you’re looking for keywords that have enough volume to make it worth your time to optimise, but not so much traffic that the traffic is untargeted.

Also, take a look at the estimated CPC – the estimated Cost Per Click will give you a very good sense of which keywords cost more and have more competition, and which keywords are cheaper to bid on. Over time, this doesn’t matter so much because you’ll know which keywords work and which don’t.

Target only Google and not the rest of the syndicated search network.

The goal is to aim for the highest possible ROI (Return On Investment) keywords first, so you can verify that the campaign can actually be profitable in the best-case scenario.

Then once you’ve proven profitability, broaden your keyword base and experiment with less obvious keywords.

One way to build a strong keyword list is to look at your competitor’s keywords. They’ve spent thousands and thousands of dollars testing to find the best keywords and it can save you a lot of money if you just use their existing data.

How do you find data on your competitor’s keywords?

Service such as SpyFu and Keyword Spy not only give you keyword data but also ad and campaign data too. They may be able to tell you how long your competitors have been running any given ad and how long they’ve been bidding on a keyword. If they’ve been running a particular ad for a particular keyword for a long time, logic suggests that they’re doing that because it is a profitable combination for them.

With this data, you can pretty much tell what your competitors have tested in the past that has worked and what they’ve tested that hasn’t worked.

The goal is to sell just to your most likely buyers first. Yes, the volume will be low but, by starting with this narrow, proven range, you drastically increase your chances of building something that makes money from the beginning and allows you to bring in sales leads on autopilot.

Check out: How To Improve Your Google Adwords PPC Campaign To Acquire More HR Customers And Clients in 2019

Once you’ve given your main keywords some time to prove themselves, you can then scale up by adding more keywords. Add keywords in ‘side’ channels and markets. Add keywords that target the same type of person who buys your products, but might not necessarily be a dead-on relevant keyword. If you’re targeting the accounting market, for example, instead of using keywords like ‘accountant’ you might try keywords like ‘recommended tax accounts’ or ‘how to get my taxes filed.’

Finally, expand your traffic by copying your campaign over to the Microsoft AdCenter. Bing consists of a decent amount of web search traffic.

Start by making sure your campaign can actually make money. Then expand your reach and keywords to get as much volume as possible.

Quality Score

If you’re going to run some Google Adwords campaigns, you need to have a basic understanding of the Quality Score aspect.

Quality Score is one of the most important yet least understood aspects of the Google AdWords equation. The better your Quality Score the less you have to pay each time someone sees your ad and clicks on it.

The overall concept is that everything should be aligned. The more closely aligned your keywords, ad wording, and website page the visitors sees (the landing page) after clicking on your ad, the better.

Landing Page Quality

This is perhaps the number one thing that trips up business owners. In order to succeed in Google AdWords, not only do you need landing pages that convert, you also need landing pages that actually provide quality content to the user. It should address whatever question the user came to your site to have answered.

That’s why the process we covered of understanding your customers in Step 1 is so important.

It should be noted that contrary to popular belief, opt-in pages to join an email mailing list are not banned by Google. But if you want to use an opt-in page, make sure the opt-in page itself provides valuable information.

Having a poor landing page is one of the fastest ways to get a “Poor” quality score. However, just a good landing page isn’t enough to get a high Quality Score.

How To Improve PPC Campaign To Get More Human Resources Customers — Click the image to go to the article.

Click-Through Rate

Your click-through rate (CTR) is another important aspect of your Quality Score.

Always split test your ads to try and get the highest CTRs possible.

Even if your click-through rate is high and your landing page is good, if you’re showing up for unrelated pages Google still won’t rank your score highly.

Relevancy counts. Google’s goal is to give the search users exactly what they’re looking for.

Landing page quality, click-through rate, and keyword relevance are a few of the most important factors that Google looks for.

Of course, Google’s formula contains many other smaller variables such as website loading speed but if you focus on just mastering your landing page, your CTR, and your relevancy, you’ll cover the most important bases.

To help improve your click-through rate, pay attention to the ads that you write.

All else being equal in an AdWords campaign, the business with the higher click-through rate (CTR) will get more clicks, get cheaper bids, and earn more money in the long run.

In order to write your ad copy in such a way that people feel inspired to click on your ads, you may want to consider these options:

Keyword in Title: This brings more attention to your ad and reassures the person that you offer what they are looking for.
Mirror Your Competitors: Start by looking through all your competitor’s ads. What’s working for them? If all your competitors are using just one ad style, it might make a lot of sense to at least split test copying that style.
Test different headlines: There are a few time tested AdWords ad styles that tend to work pretty well in most markets. If you’re really struggling, start with a good old benefit statement headline. Tell them loud and clear what they’ll get by using your product or service.
Test using ad extensions for extra details or direct phone calls.

What Is The Google Ads Editor?

Most people start out in Google AdWords by creating campaigns in the online interface. But to really be profitable in AdWords, to be able to fine-tune your campaigns, and to be able to drive high volume, you’ll want to consider editing your campaigns in AdWords Editor.

AdWords Editor is a free downloadable program that allows you to create and edit campaigns quickly. You don’t have to wait for a page to load every time in between creating an ad or adding keywords.

All the changes are done offline, then uploaded all at once. That means you can create hundreds of ads or add hundreds (even thousands) of keywords at the speed of your computer, then upload it all online rather than having to load pages in between.

Most highly profitable AdWords professionals use either AdWords Editor, or their own versions of other offline programs.

Here are some of the things you can do in Google AdWords Editor that you can’t do in the online editor:

Mass upload campaigns – You can upload a big spreadsheet of keywords, ads and bids with thousands of different data points. Creating this in the online interface would take months.
Mass bid change – You can select any number of keywords or AdGroups and edit their bids all at once so that your ads appear more often or higher up the page. No need to go into each AdGroup and change bids one at a time.
Write multiple ads quickly – No need to click “Submit” after each ad. Just write all your ads at once, then submit them all at once and correct any errors all at once.
Easy keyword match type targeting – To change the match type in the online editor, you need to manually create brackets or quotes. In the offline editor, all you need to do is select all the keywords which have types you want to change and then change the type in a drop-down list.

This is just a small sample of what AdWords Editor is capable of doing.

There are many other smaller features that will help speed up your editing and increase your return on Adwords spend.

To get started, download the editor and follow the instructions.

Just remember two things:

Track all conversions and deactivate non-converters. Make sure you’re tracking all your traffic. You should know exactly which keywords are converting and which ones aren’t. Be systematic about tracking your traffic and taking out keywords that don’t convert.

Split test ads. Always have two versions of your text ads running. Run each text ad until you have statistically significant data on which ads are getting higher click-through rates and conversions, then delete the worst ad and create a new one. Then repeat.

Ok, that’s enough on Google Adwords, time for another way to bring people to your business: Facebook.

While you’re here, be sure to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.

Marketing Mix Option – Facebook Advertising

Now, before you say that Facebook won’t work for your type of business, I want to do two things:

Give you my quick take on some of the hidden powers of Facebook advertising
How to use Facebook to reach corporate clients and people who might not normally see your Facebook ads.

The thing to love about Facebook ads is the power of its targeting.

However, I will put a big caveat here to say that you need to test prospecting versus retargeting. Most of the time, retargeting will be your main focus but, still, Facebook continues to evolve so keep looking at your prospecting options.

Check out: 6 Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Facebook Targeting Using Google Analytics

The wrong way to use Facebook ads is to ignore targeting and just show an advertisement to all possible people in your geographic area.

Outside of the Human Resources industry for a moment . . .

Facebook’s targeting means that if you run a shop in Sydney selling black rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts, you can set up your ads so that they only show up for people who live in Bondi and like AC/DC or Metallica. See how good that is? If you put up a big expensive billboard on the side of the highway, your ad would be seen by polite old grandmothers, little children, church groups, and all sorts of other people who would never buy your black rock ‘n’ roll t-shirts. On Facebook, you can target the exact people you want buying your products or services.

I’ve run ads to reach French people living in London, I’ve run ads that are targeted at Irish people living in Australia who like Irish sport, and I’ve targeted Australians living overseas who like Vegemite – yes, that’s really possible.

Facebook is very consumer-driven, very B2C (Business to Consumer) but there are plenty of companies using it for B2B (Business to Business) to reach decision-makers in potential client companies.

Other than simply selling products and services, you can use Facebook ads for things like:

Increasing your website traffic
Building your email and customer list by promoting useful free informational content
Growing your social media reach by getting more followers
Building relationships and trust with your target market

I want to quickly run through a checklist to help you get more customers and clients via Facebook.

One thing to remember, Facebook seem to be addicted to making changes to their systems so I’m going to tell you some things now but don’t be surprised if some things look a little different when you go into it yourself.

Think about your target audience – who you want to see your ad. Decide on their ages, where they live, and what interests they have. Will they be fans of certain pages on Facebook?
Design your ad content. You’ll need a picture, a headline, some text and a call to action directing them what to do next. The content in the ad needs to be relevant to your target audience and should be as similar as possible to the web page the person lands on when they click the ad.
What do you want from that Call To Action? Typically, I’ll go for what Facebook calls a ‘Website Conversion’ like someone signing up for an email subscription or a purchase but you should have a think about it. If you go for Page Likes, you’ll build up an audience of people who like what you do so they are slightly warmer leads but this can be more of a vanity exercise than anything else.
If, like me, you want people to visit your website, you absolutely need to grab the special code that Facebook gives you to track the visits. It’s called a conversion pixel and you can get it from Facebook’s ad manager tool. Copy the code and paste into your website or get someone to do it for you. It’s a small task but it’s crucial otherwise you won’t be able to track what works and what doesn’t.
Now let’s choose the demographics of the people that you want to target. For example, a toy shop may want to target local women in the 25-to-35 age range who have children in the local playgroup. Your options include: Age; Gender; Interests; Education; Work; Home; Financial Income or net worth; Ethnic Affinity; Relationship; Generation; Parents or mums only; Politics; Life events.
Choose the countries, cities, or areas where you want your ad shown. If you only repair cars in North Melbourne, don’t show your ads in Sydney. Simple.
You can target the friends of those who already like your page. This can be handy for trust and getting referrals.
You can target people by their interests: this means you can reach people with certain interests, hobbies or the Pages they like on Facebook. Perhaps you could target people who like the pages of certain HR gurus like Stephen Covey or Marcus Buckingham?

Now, what if you struggle to find the right type of targeting to reach your potential customers or clients?

Remember that prospecting (searching for new people) on Facebook is hard because it is a social network, not a place to think about work. That said, I’d say you need to keep playing with the targeting a little more – call it: test & measure. Run an ad, see how it works, tweak it, then see if it improves. If so, keep that version as your new standard. Then, tweak it again, if there’s an improvement, keep the new version. If not, revert to your standard ad and run a new experiment – just like science class back at school.
Facebook retargeting and custom audiences are game changers in terms of reaching your audience and keeping the cost down while you do it.

Custom Audiences from your website might sound fancy but it simply lets you target your Facebook Ads to people who’ve visited your website and are thinking about what you sell. You can then show specific ads to them when they’re on Facebook later on. You can bring them back to your website visitors to complete a purchase.

You can also use custom audiences to find new customers who are similar to your website visitors.

Imagine you have some helpful information content on your website (I’m going to show you one way to do that) and next to that helpful content you ask them to join your mailing list. Let’s say they decide not to.

Bummer, you’ve lost them forever, right?

No. Because they’ve visited your website, that fancy ol’ Facebook conversion pixel thing I mentioned can then remember that person, allowing you to show tailored ads specifically to that person when they’re browsing around Facebook.

For example . . .

Let’s say you offer an employment contract service.

The potential client was on the employment law page of your website but didn’t phone you nor did she join your mailing list.

However, she’s been tagged by Facebook so now you can show her ads whenever she’s on Facebook. You might show her an ad for an introductory offer or maybe a special guide to reducing your risks before a government tax audit.

You can show whatever works – it just comes down to the old term: test and measure. Run an experiment with an ad to see how it goes and then make small improvements.

Remember, when it comes to advertising on Facebook, it’s like Google Adwords, you can start by dipping your toe in the water with a very small budget and seeing how it goes.

All you need to do is set up two ads, both targeting the same audience and see how they perform after a few days. If you’ve installed that tracking pixel or got someone to do it for you, you’ll be able to see which ad brought in more visitors and which ad led to more sales, sign-ups, bookings, or whatever is your end goal.

Marketing Mix Option – LinkedIn (Unpaid)

Let’s turn to a free method of bringing potential clients and customers to your business – LinkedIn.

There are probably hundreds of books and courses out there on how to get new business from LinkedIn so I won’t waste your time trying to rehash all that. I just want to show you one quick trick you can do to find new sales leads. It’s a trick that 90% of your competitors aren’t doing.

LinkedIn is a bit like a business version of Facebook. When you go onto LinkedIn, you’ll see all sorts of people posting comments and sharing interesting articles they’ve found.

It might sound cynical but the main reason people share these articles is probably so that they look smart, proactive, like someone who has their finger on the pulse. It’s an excellent thing to do and I’ve done it myself – it is a good way to raise your profile and get noticed by potential customers and clients.

However, there is a problem with this approach. What happens when someone actually clicks on the heading or the picture of one of the articles you’ve shared? Well, it opens up the article on the website or within LinkedIn, they read the article and then that’s that. They’re gone.

What if, in the 365 days that make up a year, you could write one interesting article and give it a really juicy, attractive headline?

The article goes onto your website, usually as a blog, and all of a sudden, you’ve got something that will not only interest people browsing around LinkedIn, you got something that will bring right to your front door – your website.

Now, what if we take that powerful improvement and add some extra oomph? Let’s try to collect their email address while they’re on your website or just fire off that fancy Facebook conversion pixel for Facebook ads. There are so many ways to do this and so much of it is either low cost or completely free.

One way is to put up a simple page that is attractive to your prospects and will bring them into your marketing funnel.

Go take a look at this very old HRwisdom page that I can share anytime on LinkedIn – back when I wrote (years ago!) it was a hot topic for Human Resources professionals and business owners – attracting and keeping great staff. I can share the page on LinkedIn with a brief introduction and invite people to come download it. Many of the people who will download it will definitely be very strong sales leads.

It’s actually surprisingly easy to come up with juicy information for your prospects in any field, in any industry. It has been one of my best ways of getting a constant stream of qualified sales leads for me and for business clients I’ve helped.

And if you think that it doesn’t work or that no one fills in that form, think again. When you set up the form, you’re ready to start collecting new sales leads twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The key thing to remember though is this: if you’re just posting random articles on LinkedIn to look all clever and thoughtful, that’s great but it won’t do half as much if you share things from your own website and encourage them to join your mailing list when they’ve arrived. Then you can continue to share good quality information with them whenever you want it (but do notice how I didn’t say “spam them”).

If you’re just posting random articles on LinkedIn to look all clever and thoughtful, that’s great but it won’t do half as much if you share things from your own website and encourage them to join your mailing list when they’ve arrived.

Just make sure it is easy for people to share your content. In many of my blog posts, the person simply gets to the end of the article and clicks on the LinkedIn button to make the sharing box appear. They could do the same thing for Twitter or Facebook. An even better approach would be to have one of those floating sidebar sharing things that keeps scrolling down with you as you scroll down through the article. That tends to get more shares.

Doing it this way is very easy and it brings you more visitors to your website and helps you collect more good prospects for your business.

Hang on, I know what you’re thinking . . . you’re thinking that this all sounds like too much work.

Well, let me show you a very nifty trick so you can produce an amazingly attractive blog post for your sales prospects in under ten minutes. So make sure you keep reading.

We’ve been looking at LinkedIn but this trick can work for Twitter, Facebook, or whatever social media site you like.

Like I said earlier, LinkedIn is a bit like a business version of Facebook. If we go onto LinkedIn, you’ll see all sorts of people posting comments and sharing interesting articles they’ve found. Remember the problem, though? What happens when someone actually clicks on the heading or the picture of one of the articles you’ve shared? It opens up the article on the website or within LinkedIn, they read the article and then that’s that. They’re gone.

What if you could write an interesting article and give it a really juicy, attractive headline? The article goes onto your website, usually as a blog, and all of a sudden, you’ve got something that will not only interest people browsing around LinkedIn, you got something that will bring right to your front door – your website. Then we try to collect their email address while they’re on your website.

But what if you’re not good at creating content like that or just too darn busy to come up with something nice and juicy like an ebook or free guide?

One of the most popular blog posts on my HRwisdom site was been shared by people on LinkedIn a lot and many of those have become clients for me or for my partners.

What did it contain? Were there thousands of carefully researched words that took me weeks to write, edit and publish?

No, it had a quick introduction of a few lines. Then, the now-famous Dan Pink video embedded into the page, and a few lines to close the article. Oh, and a little picture of the video for good measure. All of that probably took me ten minutes to do. Sure, I probably spent another 10 minutes browsing the internet to find a decent video but when you think about all the revenue this blog post brought in, that was time well spent – wouldn’t you agree?

Note that there was only a video – nothing to download. However, there was an email opt-in box in the blog sidebar. That way it’s there all the time ready for action.

And if you think that it doesn’t work or that no one fills in that form, think again. People in your target audience fill those forms in every single day. When you set one up, you’re ready to start collecting new sales leads twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The key thing to remember though is this: if you’re just posting stuff on LinkedIn to look all clever and thoughtful, that’s great but it won’t be half as good sharing things from your own website and enticing them to share their email address with you when they’re there. You can then continue to share good quality information with them whenever you want it (but do notice how I didn’t say “spam them”).

So, next time you email me to say that coming up with content for your website is too much effort, be prepared to hear back from angry Ben! Only joking, but do understand that anyone can do this and it can definitely win you new business regardless if you are a lawyer, an HR firm, a dog cleaning company, a local cafe, or whatever – it’s easy and it works.

Doing it this way is very easy and it brings you more visitors to your website and helps you collect more good prospects for your business.

While you’re here, be sure to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.

Marketing Mix Option – LinkedIn (Paid)

Stay tuned for my upcoming expert interview on using LinkedIn paid customer acquisition.

Marketing Mix Option – SEO

An entire industry exists to help businesses improve their performance in Google’s organic search results so I plan to address this topic in more detail separately.

Now though, it’s worth doing a quick review of your website to see how it performs when it comes to keywords, backlinks, and competitors.

I use the SEMrush tool as it provides a lot of great ideas, particularly in terms of content marketing.

You can put your website in here and see for yourself:

For more, visit SEMrush to see how you get rank higher on Google.

Marketing Mix Option – Capterra

Check out my in-depth article on How To Get More HR Tech Sales Leads From Capterra [See 15 Examples].

Here’s what the article covers:

What Is Capterra And How Does It Help HR Tech Companies?
How Much Does Capterra Cost?
How To Get Better ROI From Capterra?
Examples Of Landing Pages From Employee Engagement Companies Advertising On Capterra.
Checklist: How To Get More Employee Engagement Software Sales From Capterra

Read How To Get More HR Tech Software Sales From Capterra now.

Marketing Mix Option – Webinars

Check out my Q&A on B2B webinars for lead generation with webinars expert, Kris Sharma.

In the Q&A, we examine:

What topic will you choose that will prove attractive enough to your ideal sales prospects?
Who will host the event?
Who will present during the event?
What technology will you use?
How will you bring in attendees to the event?
What will you do to keep them entertained and informed?
How will you produce leads and sales from the webinar?
Will you host the event live or pre-record it?
Will you re-use any of the content?
And more.

Check out the B2B webinars information Q&A.

Marketing Mix Option – Your Company Blog

Check out my article, How To Write A Blog That Attracts More B2B Customers [15 Steps].

I’ll also be adding more on this topic very soon.

Marketing Mix Option – B2B Email Outreach

Check out my interview with B2B email outreach expert, Vlad Goloshchuk.

In the article, we discuss:

Is cold B2B email marketing worth doing? How does it compare to other marketing channels?
What if your HR business or product doesn’t serve one narrow, neatly-defined target audience? How can cold B2B email outreach be applied?
What should an HR tech company say in their email messages?
How to optimise the performance of a cold email outreach campaign?
Which tool to use? He uses this email outreach software.
Where to start when setting up a cold B2B email marketing campaign?

Check out the B2B marketing email outreach article.

Marketing Mix Option – Others

Make sure you’re on my mailing list as I will be adding more to this post soon.

We’ll look at how to grow your business with marketing channels such as:

Appearing on external blogs
Publicity
Unconventional PR
Social Display Ads (such as Facebook or Quora ads)
Offline Ads (such as newspapers)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO – getting found in Google’s organic search results)
Content Marketing
Engineering as Marketing
Viral Marketing
Business Development (partnering with other companies and organisations)
Sales
Affiliate Programs
Existing Platforms (unpaid activity on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter)
Trade Shows
Offline Events
Speaking Engagements
Community Building

We’ll also look at:

How to set a budget for paid marketing.
How to set up each method.
How to choose which methods to try first.
How to track which methods brought your customers and clients to your door.

Step 4: Bring Your Target Market To You – Summary

Ok, we’ve covered a lot of ground in this section, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn but the overarching thing to remember about it all are these key phrases:

What’s in it for me?
Who cares?

Regardless of whether you are doing free or paid promotion of your business, you always need to approach it from your prospective client or customer’s viewpoint. They are busy people with many different options to consider so your ads or information content have to clearly address a problem that bothers them and must lead them towards a solution. We’ve discussed ways of doing this. Remember the buyer categories and positioning statements? Be sure to spend at least one lunch hour working on them otherwise you’ll end up wasting a lot of time and money on irrelevant ads and informational content.

Regardless of which methods you prefer, the trick is to pick only one or two in paid and unpaid and just get started.

You can refine the system and add other methods soon enough.

My recommendation to you if you want to speed things up and you trust that you offer a good product or service is: choose either Facebook or Google Adwords and set up a small trial campaign and see how it goes.

When you do it – do two of everything. Namely: two ads, two headlines, two landing pages (where they go after clicking your ad).

After a while, you’re likely to find that one ad brings in more qualified sales leads, one headline performs better than the other, one landing page gets more sales or bookings than the other one.

Then, keep the winner, scrap the loser and start the test again with a new ad to go up against the winning ad, new headline against the winning headline, etc.

Sounds like a lot of work? It’s really not.

When it comes to Google Ads or Facebook Ads, it’s just a few extra clicks on the mouse and a few taps on the keyboard. And if you’re too busy, there are a bunch of different ways of getting it done so it doesn’t take up your time, including outsourcing it at low cost.

You can keep track of things with a nice, simple spreadsheet containing:

Your daily spend on Google Ads
Google Ad Conversions (phone calls, sales, service requests, Contact Us forms completed, email address submitted, etc.)
Your daily spend on Facebook
Facebook Conversions (phone calls, sales, service requests, Contact Us forms completed, email address submitted, etc.)
Total Spend
Total Conversions

If you want to get more advanced, you could add a few more columns to a simple spreadsheet:

Google Adwords Cost Per Acquisition (the amount you’ve spent divided by the number of leads or customer acquired – you choose)
Facebook Cost Per Acquisition (the amount you’ve spent divided by the number of leads or customer acquired – you choose)
Total Cost Per Acquisition

After a while, you’ll see which channel is producing the best results for your business. You can then continue to refine your online marketing campaigns to get even better results.

STEP 4 – Create An Easy Marketing Process To Improve Your Marketing

This marketing process step is great as it gives you an excuse to just get started and not get stuck waiting for everything to be perfect.

Get small things done quickly and then take small, light-touch steps to improve them bit by bit as you develop your own marketing strategy plan.

It takes the weight off your shoulders and it adds significant value to your business.

In this marketing process section, we’ll look at:

How to improve your website conversion and marketing by measuring and improving in small steps.
Free Google tools to improve your marketing such as Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and the Google Search Console.
Productivity tips and tools.
Marketing tools that make life easier.
What you can outsource and how to do it.

If you feel up to it, I’ll show you a couple of nifty things you can do with various marketing tech tools that will get you thinking (don’t worry, I’m a real technophobe so the things I’ll show you are very easy and maybe even a little fun).

Marketing Process Overview – Move Quickly & Improve As You Go

This final step is great as it gives you an excuse to get started and not worry about making sure that everything is completely perfect. But first, a story . . .

A Quick Story

I discovered this fable on my favourite website (Quora) recently:

“An old teacher of mine told me a story that stuck with me the rest of my life:

A pottery teacher split her class into two halves.

To the first half she said, “You will spend the semester studying pottery, planning, designing, and creating your perfect pot. At the end of the semester, there will be a competition to see whose pot is the best”.

To the other half she said, “You will spend your semester making lots of pots. Your grade will be based on the number of completed pots you finish. At the end of the semester, you’ll also have the opportunity to enter your best pot into a competition.”

The first half of the class threw themselves into their research, planning, and design. Then they set about creating their one, perfect pot for the competition.

The second half of the class immediately grabbed fistfuls of clay and started churning out pots. They made big ones, small ones, simple ones, and intricate ones. Their muscles ached for weeks as they gained the strength needed to throw so many pots.

At the end of class, both halves were invited to enter their most perfect pot into the competition. Once the votes were counted, all of the best pots came from the students that were tasked with quantity. The practice they gained made them significantly better potters than the planners on a quest for a single, perfect pot.”

In life, the best way to learn a skill, is to make a lot of pots.

What’s this step about?

In a nutshell, this step is not for sitting around over-thinking things.

This step is all about getting small things done quickly and then taking small, light-touch steps to improve them bit by bit.

It takes the weight off your shoulders and can help your business start to scale up faster.

Find Out What Your Website Visitors Are Doing

You might have a nice website but have you wondered how much good it’s doing you?

Check out: How To Convert Website Visitors Into HR Clients – Quick Tips From Experts

If you feel up to it, there are some handy things you or someone can do for you with Google Analytics that will help you get more business.

Don’t worry, I’m no computer programmer so if you’re shuddering at the mere mention of the words Google Analytics, I was the same but there are things that are very easy and even a little bit fun while you do some detective work.

By getting someone to install the free Google Analytics’ tracking code or doing it yourself, you’re in a great position to start answering some really important questions where the answers could bring in more business.

With Google Analytics data, you’ll be able to answer questions such as:

How many visitors am I getting to my website?
Which pages are they most interested in?
What actions are they taking? Are they clicking on the Contact Us page but not following through? Are they requesting some of our free information?
Where are our website visitors coming from? LinkedIn, Facebook, somewhere else? If you set up a simple thing called Goal Conversion, you’ll be able to track which sources brings website visitors that turn into sales or prospective customers and clients.
Which blog topics get more interest from online visitors? If certain topics are more popular, is there a product or service we could create to address this obvious need in the market?
Are your pages targeted enough towards your different buyer personas or customer categories that we discussed in the first step? Product or service pages with an unusually high ‘bounce rate’ could indicate that you haven’t focused that particular page accurately enough (a bounce is when they come to a page and click straight back out).

This may sound a little scary or over the top but the good thing is that there are template reports that Google lets you connect to your website to answer these important questions easily. I won’t lie to you: if you’re not good at tech stuff, you’ll probably want someone else to connect these for you. It’s just a few clicks of a button but I don’t want you to miss out on the benefits of these free reports just because of a little overwhelm.

You can browse the free Google Analytics report dashboards in their free gallery.

A few other handy technical tools can help you make constant small improvements.

While you’re here, be sure to join my private HR marketing newsletter for consultants and tech companies in the Human Resources industry.

Helpful Tools & Services

In the spirit of ‘Move Quickly & Improve As You Go,’ here are some of the tools and services that can make life a lot easier for you. Many of these tools and services will enable you to largely set your marketing to autopilot.

Is your website fast enough? Website speed is a big factor in getting found on Google. You can test your website with the Google developer tool.
Supermetrics is a fantastic online data tool I use to automatically pull in all the data I need to keep track of progress.I initially used it to automatically report on my Google Analytics results but quickly added Adwords and others.
Put your email outreach on autopilot with this email outreach software (their blog has good information on copywiting, GDPR, average reply rates, how to manage the sales outreach process, and more).
Usertesting.com is a paid service that allows you to capture videos of real people talking out loud as they use your website. You can ask these people questions or set them tasks to complete. Last time I checked, you could get five minutes of free UserTesting review time.
A nice easy way to see what people are clicking on your site and which sections are more popular than others without having to delve into actual data is by using a paid ‘heat map’ service like CrazyEgg or Clicktale. You’ll be able to visualise who is doing what (in aggregate, not individual visitors) and be able to make changes as a result. Google Analytics does have a free heat map option but I find it’s not as good as CrazyEgg for the sheer simplicity and ease of use.
Fiverr, Elance, Upwork, and VA (virtual assistant) companies are all ways to get work done quickly at low cost without you having to get too involved. One resource I highly recommend is this: your local university. As an ex-HR person, let me tell you that university interns offer an excellent way to get much of this marketing system implemented. Don’t wait for summer vacation time, if the academic year has commenced then contact them now. Offer an unpaid opportunity for specific projects that will look good on their CV (not photocopying and making coffee all day). I don’t know where you are I the world so I can’t comment on the employment law on your area but, as a general guide, you are allowed to have students do unpaid work if it helps their studies and if they are part of a university program (if in doubt, just ask the university). I have had some amazing work done by students who have had the opportunity to gain excellent jobs after university because of the work experience they had on the CV (same for me when I was a student).
PPC and Facebook companies. If you want to get busy growing your company with Google Adwords and Facebook Ads but you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry, there are many outsourcing options just a quick Google search away or you can can check out our services page.
There are a lot of methods for taking notes or keeping work organised. The big ones are things like Evernote, Trello, Dropbox, Slack, Pocket, Google Drive and more. They’re all excellent and I use some of them in different ways. One web app that I love is Workflowy. When working on different projects and tasks, not everything is nice and linear or falls nice and neatly into a box. So when I am working on one of the 5 steps, I need to be able to go deep into one topic but be able to come back out quickly and easily move into another area. Using Workflowy, I keep all my notes in a structured way and the easy sub-lists allow me to brainstorm or delve into areas within topics. I often make updates or notes or add in new articles I’ve read whilst on my commute in the morning and I’ll do that on my phone. Five minutes later when I fire up my laptop, there are all my Workflowy notes – completely updated with the additions I made just a few minutes before and they can be shared with other people easily.
There are plenty of companies that provide email and marketing automation software such as Hubspot, Marketer, Spokal, Mailchimp, Mailerlite (I use Mailerlite for this site), and others.
Need website development support? There are many providers that provide good quality support to free up your time.
If you want blank document templates to use for your free guides and documents for potential customers and clients, I’ve used Powered Templates, Creative Market, and Google Docs templates.

Start Experimenting

There’s a strong, consistent habit that all the high-growth tech companies around the world have – they are constantly experimenting to find small improvements.

Now, I know we are not large tech companies with endless resources and staff to call upon to develop a marketing strategy plan.

However, you can easily get into the habit of running small experiments to improve your business marketing and bring in more sales and leads.

You might choose to:

Test two versions of wording on your home page. One can be more ‘salesy’ and the other more low-key, casual. You can use paid tools (like VWO – Visual Web Optimizer), or you could simply put version A wording on your site for a month and then version B for the following month and see which performs better. I won’t go into concepts of ‘statistical validity’ but do consider whether there have been enough visitors to the page you’re testing. You may want to send traffic from Google Adwords or some other method to help speed up the test results.
Try different ways of getting people to join your email list. You might test the power of offering a comprehensive free guide versus a one-page checklist. You might be surprised to find that a simple list that took you a lunch hour to create brings in more subscribers than a big fancy guide that seemed to take forever to write (that’s the voice of experience talking there).
Test different ways of moving people through your website. You might change your ‘calls to actions’ on your various pages to all point to your Contact Us page or you might point them all to your Features page or somewhere else and then see which brings in more of the outcomes you want for that test period.
You should look to test paid advertising. Start with Google Adwords or Facebook and run two ads at the same time and compare their performance. You could send the traffic to specific product or service pages or you could send traffic to an email subscription offer like we looked at in steps two and three. Start small, test it out and see what happens.

Marketing Strategy Plan For Human Resources Companies

Summary

There are plenty of other ways to get this sort of thing done for you at a low cost.

By the way, this step of improving as you go doesn’t have to be all about the tech stuff. I just include this step so you can give yourself permission to get stuff done quickly that’s not perfect but is bringing you a lot faster to your goal than sitting around thinking about it ever did.

For example, this step might be to quickly get more information up on your website for your prospects. You can then share this on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other such places.

Overview of the Four Marketing Strategy Plan Steps

After realising that randomly bumping into people on the street is not the best way to regularly bring in more high-quality leads for a business in the Human Resources field, my mind turned to developing a simple framework to use.

Here is the four-step marketing strategy plan and flow that I use to get new sales leads or purchases coming into my email box every day:

Use Market Segmentation To Become Super Attractive To Your Target Market
Create A B2B Content Marketing Funnel To Attract Business Clients
The Right Marketing Mix For Your HR Business
Create An Easy Marketing Process To Improve Your Marketing Over Time

Step 1 involves taking a few minutes to become laser-focused on the types and categories of clients that you want for your business.

Step 2 – The harsh reality is this: most people are tyre-kickers before they buy anything. This means that up to 95% of visitors to your website are there to research and are not ready to talk yet. Of these people, up to 70% will eventually buy a product or service but it could be from you or it could be from your competitor. If you don’t have information to give them right now, they’ll be long gone and they’ll spend their money elsewhere.

This is where the word ‘autopilot’ comes into its own. You can have things set up so that you can wake up every morning, look at your phone and see a whole list of new sales leads or sales receipts sitting there in your email inbox. It’s such a good feeling. And again, it can be really easy to do. The big one here for me is email – it has an extraordinary return on investment but most businesses ignore this powerful tool or they do it completely wrong. Another new and powerful tool in this area is retargeting (ads that follow people around the internet hopefully in a non-stalking kind of way). The technology is really quite amazing and can be really effective when done properly.

Step 3 – This is where you’ve everything in place and now you’re just scaling it up to bring in predictable revenue. You can use both free and paid methods but all of them will bring more sales and potential new clients and customers streaming to your business. These sorts of methods are how all the big tech companies are growing so quickly but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do it too. There are things like Google Adwords and Display Ads, Affiliate programs, Website Sponsorship, Print and Radio, Social media (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), Blog, Email, Press coverage, Refer a Friend scheme, TV, and more. With any of them, you should always try to find a way to track which method brought your customers and clients to your door. However, the key is to pick only one or two in paid and unpaid and just get started. You can refine the system and add other methods soon enough.

Step 4 – This step is great as it gives you an excuse to just get started and not get stuck waiting for everything to be perfect. Get small things done quickly and then take small, light-touch steps to improve them bit by bit. It takes the weight off your shoulders and it adds significant value to your business. If you feel up to it, I’ll show you a couple of nifty things you can do with Google Analytics that will get you thinking (don’t worry, I’m a real technophobe so the things I’ll show you are very easy, and even a little bit fun).

Next Steps

Make sure you’re on my mailing list because we’re going to look at practical examples of these marketing strategy plan ideas.

My intention is to make it easy for you to better target your ideal customers and clients and bring them in faster.

As always, just hit Reply to my emails and let me know your thoughts.

Alternatively, learn about my marketing services for HR companies.

All the best,

Post updated April 2024. Originally posted November16, 2020

Best HR Marketing Plan For Human Resources Companies In 2024

A Better HR Business

A Four-Step HR Marketing Plan To Get More Clients

STEP 1: Market Segmentation To Become Super Attractive To Your Target Market

Is Your HR-Related Business Blending Into The Background?

Most HR Businesses Do Not Differentiate Themselves

Free Business Growth Presentation

How To Make Your HR-Related Business Stand Out

Segment Your Target Audience – Basic

Segment Your Target Audience – Advanced

What To Do When You’ve Identified Your Target Market

A Two-Line Formula To Differentiate Your HR Business

A Special Twist For Your Two-Line Marketing Proposition

A Real Life Story

STEP 2: Create A B2B Content Marketing Funnel To Attract Business Clients

Content Marketing For HR Companies – What Content To Produce

HR & B2B Content Marketing Funnel Guide

Email In Your Marketing Funnel

Two Types Of Email (Plus One Other)

Retargeting To Fill Your Content Marketing Funnel

Step Two Marketing Funnel Summary

STEP 3: The Right Marketing Mix For Your HR Business

Marketing Mix Options For Your Human Resources Business

Marketing Mix Option – Google Adwords

Marketing Mix Option – Facebook Advertising

Marketing Mix Option – LinkedIn (Unpaid)

Marketing Mix Option – LinkedIn (Paid)

Marketing Mix Option – SEO

Marketing Mix Option – Capterra

Marketing Mix Option – Webinars

Marketing Mix Option – Your Company Blog

Marketing Mix Option – B2B Email Outreach

Marketing Mix Option – Others

Step 4: Bring Your Target Market To You – Summary

STEP 4 – Create An Easy Marketing Process To Improve Your Marketing

Marketing Process Overview – Move Quickly & Improve As You Go

A Quick Story

Find Out What Your Website Visitors Are Doing

Helpful Tools & Services

Start Experimenting

Summary

Overview of the Four Marketing Strategy Plan Steps

Next Steps

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