The number of automation tools on the market is increasing, seemingly, by the day. It’s easy to be slightly overwhelmed when you’re trying to work out what best suits your recruitment business, your team setup and your objectives. Not only that but what should your approach be when it comes to implementing them?
What marketing automation tools are out there?
The marketing automation tools available to you comes down to your budget. You’ve got the heavy hitters like HubSpot and CandidateID and then more budget-friendly options such as Force24. In between, you’ve got options like ActiveCampaign, SendinBlue and Mailchimp and you could possibly shoehorn HereFish into this category too depending on what you’re looking to do. Then you’ve got more focused tools along the lines of SourceWhale that helps to create sequential email campaigns.
There are so many options that if you’re considering a tool to help automate your recruitment marketing it’s worth drilling down into exactly what you want to automate, your priorities and your approach so you select the right tool for you.
What should we be automating?
If we had a penny for every time we’d been asked this question…well, we’d have around 39p.
The main activities that can be automated are:
- Email campaigns
- Content distribution
- Contact tracking and management
- Cold outreach
- Webinars
- Lead qualifying
There’s a temptation to run before you can walk when you start tackling marketing automation processes. In our experience, all that means is that you’re left with lots of half established processes and nothing is working quite how you want it to. Take HubSpot, the capabilities are huge and it’s easy to get caught up in the possibilities. This is where you need to focus and get the basics done right and ticking over before you move onto the next shiny thing.
What are the important things to consider when looking to automate your marketing?
There are always wider things to think about so here are our top 3:
- Staffing resource – who is going to take charge of the system and automations? It might be to start with this can sit with an existing member of your staff but as the automations grow the workload will grow. If staffing is an issue then now might not be the time to get stuck into this new project.
- More automation = more content – it’s always going to be challenging keeping up with the content demands when you begin automating. Now is the time to think about how you’re going to resource it. It may be worth building your bank of content now or you might have someone in your team whose responsibility is to create content anyway.
- Contact management – it’s likely that even if you have an all singing all dancing marketing automation system at some point you’ll need to pass over MQLs to whatever system your consultants are using e.g. Bullhorn. But how do you hand over those contacts and then make sure that that contact isn’t receiving double the amount of communication? Can you ensure that or is it a risk that you’re happy to take for now? Recruitment marketing is so uniquely set up, particularly in terms of systems, that this is an issue that needs thinking about before you crack on.
Sales vs. marketing automation
As we’ve just touched on, there’s a difference between sales automation and marketing automation. But should there be? Surely sales automation is focused on communication and, arguably, marketing might be better placed to do that.
Does marketing automation allow us to dip our toe into the, potentially frosty, waters of sales automation – providing templates, collateral and content for aftercare and follow-ups?
Maybe that’s a bigger can of worms that needs saving for a different day.
The holy grail of integration
With the tech stacks available in recruitment marketing right now it’s very unlikely that you’ll have 100% integration between your marketing automation system and your recruitment CRM. That seems like something we all have to accept for now. The question we want to leave you with today is, if we do accept that then what’s the minimum we want, or need, to be able to do?
This article was created off the back of a Lonely Marketers huddle with some of the most senior recruitment marketers in the industry representing £100m’s worth of turnover and established around the globe.
This is a regular feature of The Lonely Marketers community which TwoEnds is proud to power as we aim to complete our mission of building the best recruitment marketing teams there possibly can be. You can more recruitment marketing ramblings here.
