Have you ever wondered, “Why does no one know who we are?” Many staffing companies grapple with this question, despite their best efforts. The reality is that only a small fraction of your target audience is aware of your existence. This lack of brand recognition means most cold outreach attempts are directed at individuals who have never heard of you, leading to low engagement and conversion rates.

The Strategic Solution

10x-ing your marketing budget might seem like the only solution to get your name out there, but for most staffing companies, it’s not feasible. Instead, you need a strategic approach that aligns cold outreach with marketing efforts. Most staffing organizations don’t have large marketing budgets, but they do have extensive sales forces already using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Rather than completely transforming their organizations, they can harness their existing organizational structure and use marketing to enhance its capability and effectiveness. And it works: studies show that companies with aligned sales and marketing teams see significant performance improvements. For example:

  • Aberdeen Group Study: Organizations with high alignment between sales and marketing achieve a 32% annual revenue growth compared to a 7% decline for less aligned companies. (Aberdeen)
  • Forrester Research: Highly aligned companies grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable (Forrester).

Harnessing the Power of LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for achieving this alignment. By targeting specific firmographics and demographics, LinkedIn allows for focused marketing efforts. This means your marketing dollars are spent reaching the right audience. Moreover, LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator enables your sales team to target the exact same audience, ensuring that sales outreach and marketing messages are directed at people who are already aware of your brand.

Key strategies include:

  • Targeted Ads: Use LinkedIn to show ads to a defined audience based on specific criteria.
  • Mere Exposure Effect: Repeated exposure to your brand ads creates familiarity and reduces psychological barriers to engagement (Built In).
  • Sales Navigator: Align sales and marketing messages by targeting the same audience with consistent messaging.

Benefits of Alignment

When your target audience is familiar with your brand, they’re more likely to engage with your outreach efforts. They’ll answer calls, respond to connection requests, and engage with emails, leading to more meetings, job orders, and overall benefits for your business.

Here are some benefits of alignment:

  • Higher Engagement: Familiarity with your brand increases the likelihood of engagement.
  • Improved Conversion Rates: Consistent messaging across marketing and sales improves conversion rates.
  • Strategic Priority: According to a Gartner survey, aligning sales and marketing functions is a top priority for sales leaders, significantly improving customer acquisition and business growth (Gartner) (JIFFLENOW).

Implementation at Type Marketing

At Type Marketing, we’ve structured our marketing and sales alignment strategy meticulously to ensure a seamless transition from prospecting to closing, leveraging both marketing efforts and sales interactions. Here’s how we do it:

Prospecting Audience

  • Strategies and Methods: We show short video clips to a well-defined audience on LinkedIn, targeting them based on specific criteria relevant to our business. Prospects who watch at least 50% of the video are considered engaged and are added to the next stage of the funnel.

Engaging with Audience

  • Engagement Strategies: We boost social posts to the audience who watched our prospecting videos. Posting once or twice a week, we maintain a steady presence in their feed. This process continues through the nurturing phase.

Nurturing Audience with Ads

  • Nurturing Strategies: During the nurturing phase, the same audience continues to receive targeted ads. These ads build deeper connections and familiarity with our brand. We use a mix of educational content and promotional ads that inform the audience directly about what Type Marketing does.

Sales Outreach

  • Sales Team Involvement: Our account managers reach out to the exact same audience that our ads are targeting. They engage in social selling by sharing posts and directly messaging prospects on LinkedIn. This coordinated effort ensures that our sales team is building relationships with an audience that is already familiar with our brand.

Measuring Success

  • Influence on Prospects: We measure the success of our campaigns by talking to our prospects. From these conversations, we know they are not only seeing our content and ads on LinkedIn but are also being influenced by them. This influence is a key factor in their decision to work with our company.

Results

  • Investment and Return: Type Marketing has invested $12,000 in ads and acquired $300,000 in clients, yielding a remarkable ROI of 2400%. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our integrated marketing and sales strategy.

Our approach at Type Marketing showcases how aligning marketing and sales efforts can lead to significant improvements in brand awareness, customer engagement, and ultimately, business growth. By focusing on targeted engagement, continuous nurturing, and high-quality interactions, we effectively convert prospects into loyal customers.

Conclusion

The answer to why no one knows who your company is lies in the misalignment of cold outreach and marketing efforts. By strategically aligning these efforts, particularly through platforms like LinkedIn, you can significantly enhance brand awareness and achieve better engagement with your target audience.

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