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Search Engine Optimization THEN Blogging THEN Social Media Marketing

Tom Pick

By Peter Caputa.

I did a website analysis and custom demonstration for a local IT recruiting company recently.  This is a very successful company. They’re a leader in their field and they have a good number of recruiters working for them.

They’ve adapted to using online social networks (namely LinkedIn) to identify passive candidates in the last few years and it’s serving them well. If you know anything about recruiting, you know that identifying passive candidates (i.e., the ones not necessarily looking for a job) is the holy grail.

The theory goes that if someone is looking, they’re probably not the best candidate you can find. That’s certainly not always the case, of course. Nonetheless, many recruiting firms say they can find “passive candidates” and that’s their big selling point.

So, this recruiting firm is good at networking: online and in the real world.

But, they’re clueless when it comes to generating leads via their website.  Just like every other recruiting firm, they need to fill two pipelines. They need a pipeline of companies that want to hire them to recruit on their behalf. And they need a pipeline of candidates to fill those positions.

This “two pipeline” requirement is pretty unique to the recruiting industry. But, at the end of the day, they need to generate “leads” that get fed into some kind of offline sales process—just like most b2b [and many b2c] companies do.  They’re not much different.

Nonetheless, as I was identifying their needs; talking about where they are now; and what they’re goals and challenges are, one of the partners was skeptical about search engine optimization (SEO). He actually said to me, “No one searches at Google for a recruiting firm.”

Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve heard something like this.  These are usually the same people who say something like, “We don’t sell anything online” when I ask them about their internet marketing strategy. Many people haven’t really wrapped their head around how marketing is changing from push to pull and how it’s possible to generate highly qualified “ready to buy” inbound sales leads online.

If we’re on a demo and I’ve done my research, I can usually just show these people how many people are searching for their product and services at Google and which keyword phrases to focus on first in order to start generating some of that traffic. After a demo, usually people are at least a bit less skeptical.

I certainly would never suggest that 10,000 people start their day thinking: “I’m going to hire a recruiter today,” and then do a search in google for “IT recruiter,” then find a company in the results, check out their website and hire them the next day. However, it’s certainly reasonable to expect that a good number of hiring managers do searches at Google for “IT Recruiter” and then:

I could certainly see passive IT candidates exploring their options and downloading a market or salary report, attending a webinar on a topic of interest, or entering a programming contest.

In short, there’s no shortage of ways a recruiting company could start capturing leads on their website and building their pool of candidates and their pipeline of companies who have hiring needs.

Repeat after me: 
Leads. Leads. Inbound Leads.
They Want to Talk to You Now.
They Buy Much Faster.

(Can you come up with a better Inbound Marketing Haiku ?)

Unfortunately, “Leads. Leads. Inbound Leads.” isn’t going to happen without a comprehensive and coordinated internet marketing strategy.

The nice thing about SEO, blogging and social media marketing, is that the results are cumulative and compounding. Ultimately, they can be exponential.

However, if each of these online marketing activities are done in a silo, they’re a lot less likely to produce an exponential ROI.

A more positive way of explaining this is like this:

Ok. So, hopefully by now, you’re convinced that SEO, SMM and blogging can and should work in concert to generate leads for your B2B company.

From the examples above, you should see that they can have compounding and cumulative effects that lead to consistent traffic and lead volume growth .

You might still be wondering… “But, why can’t I start with SMM or blogging? Why is SEO first? Why is Blogging second? Why is SMM third? And if that’s the case, why are so many companies (especially recruiting companies) using social media and ignoring blogging and SEO?”

Why? Because they’re doing it wrong. And they just don’t know any better.

Yeah. I know. That’s not a good answer. Here’s why:

Not to beat a dead horse, but as the title of this post says, here’s the order of online marketing activities that will yield the best results for you, no matter what type of company you are, and especially if your company is B2B and has a traditional person-to-person complex sales process.

  1. Keyword Research/SEO
  2. Blogging
  3. Social Media

(And btw, we are hiring . And we do use recruiters for certain – not all – positions, in addition to our own efforts which have been the most effective so far. I don’t think we’d really work with a firm that wasn’t fully leveraging the process above. Why? Better prospects – whether you’re selling or recruiting – come to you. Also, like many other buyers, we usually start in search engines, blogs and social networking sites before we hire anyone.)

This article was originally published on HubSpot by Pete Caputa. It is reprinted and updated with permission.

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