Many HR services firms are frustrated at their inability to create successful demand-generation programs. The organization’s sales team struggles with frustration arising from their inability to get prospects to take their calls. One of the recurrent problems confronting salespeople making cold calls is getting through to a prospect who is unaware of the caller’s company or brand. Psychologists use the term “exposure effect” to describe how people after repeated exposure to something develop a positive disposition to that thing. Marketers apply this knowledge in building favorable brand images – which grease the wheels for successful sales calls. The proviso is that these repeated exposures must be targeted toward an audience that shares a problem that the organization’s product and/or services solve.
In too many cases the marketing team will employ traditional tactics which often overemphasize the use of “free” SEO. Some of the tendency on the part of Marketing to use free SEO originates with the organization’s business leaders as they are most familiar with this tactic. Frequently, there is a misperception that appearing high in Google searches is straightforward and that achieving this goal will result in a large pool of leads. So, when the business leader comes up to the marketing leader and asks, “Why don’t we come up on Google results when I search for IT staffing companies in Atlanta”, it sounds like a reasonable question – until you look at the underlying numbers.
Prospective clients don’t generally use Google when they’re looking to acquire HR services. Search volume is low and competition for a term such as IT staffing is high, which means you can spend a lot of effort trying to rank high on Google for a term that offers a small audience. Most searches for the term “IT staffing” are by job seekers, not prospective clients. Even for those searchers who are looking for HR services, free SEO uncoupled from an integrated growth strategy won’t provide the level of repeat exposure you need to help the sales team’s efforts. Immediately calling those “leads” who have used Google to find your website won’t likely yield anything – except more wasted time. This points out the need for marketing leadership to educate the business leaders that overreliance on free SEO as a mechanism to generate qualified leads is ineffective.
Unsolicited sales emails are also an overused tactic. It’s not unusual for an organization to blast a big list of former clients, or to purchase a list and then send an email, or series of sales emails. Even if the emails are well-crafted, it is unlikely that many recipients happen to be currently looking for an HR services provider – or that they will save the email for future reference when they are. The problem these emails pose to the sales team is that too often any recipient who interacts with an email – either open it, clicks on a link, etc. is sent to sales as a “warm lead”. Sales has learned from experience that these aren’t really warm leads and ignores them – and develops more cynicism about Marketing’s ability to generate leads.
What free SEO and email blasts have in common is that they target an audience consisting of organizations that often don’t share the problem your offering solves and don’t contain the messaging and provide the consistency needed that over time builds a connection to your brand. What passes as a marketing strategy isn’t a strategy but is often a loosely organized group of tactics including organic social, organic search, email, and content marketing that might increase traffic to your website but aren’t written and designed to create a psychological connection between the recipient and your brand. The result of these efforts is that the brand or company never gains enough traction in the prospect’s mind for them to be open to a sales call.
Diminishing the overreliance on using SEO to generate a pool of warm leads doesn’t mean eliminating it from the list of valuable tactics. An actual growth strategy might use SEO as an entry point that then applies remarketing tactics to the SEO contacts with educational content via paid social and email – nurturing prospects for your service using display ads – until they provide a signal that Marketing and Sales agree is a trigger for a sales call.
