Date
24th March 2023
The job of HR professionals is a delicate balancing act: to help and serve the employees of the company they work for, while also ensuring the best interests of the company are met.
It's a challenging job, and to do it, HR professionals must be familiar with reams of employee and workplace legislation, as well as day-to-day functions like managing recruitment, annual leave and employee benefits.
To reach these professionals for HR tech lead generation, we find the best method is to offer them valuable, educational, and relevant resources. In this blog, we’ll show you exactly how to generate leads in HR.
What Is HR Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation is all about reaching decision-makers to sell your product or service. It's about finding new contacts to entice into your marketing funnel, with the aim of selling to them later on.
But how to generate HR leads? In the world of human resources and people management, lead generation works best when it's actively useful to prospects.
When you think about how to reach HR professionals, think about what they want: useful resources which will help them stay clued up on the industry. Here are our favorite HR lead generation strategies.
Which HR Marketing Strategies Should You Focus On?
Strategy #1 - Content Marketing
As a B2B tech marketer, there's a good chance you're already producing useful content for your target audience.
But if not, it's a great place to start. Content marketing is one of the best HR lead generation ideas, helping you build your brand as a thought leader and generating those all-important HR prospects.
Content marketing is also great for HR demand generation.
Have you heard of demand generation? It's not another term for lead generation, but a different part of the journey. Demand gen focuses on brand awareness, and is really concentrated on the upper parts of the marketing funnel, encouraging potential leads to seek out your brand rather than you 'selling' to them.
Content marketing works really well for email campaigns, too. Every email you send to a lead should offer them a solid reason to open it: make it useful for them by sending exclusive content, or a newsletter rounding up your recent blogs and events, for example.
Strategy #2 - Content Syndication Lead Generation
A lot of our clients come to us for fresh HR marketing ideas, having done all they can with other strategies, such as PPC and paid social media campaigns.
For a more measurable, rapid approach, you can try content syndication lead generation through a lead generation specialist (like us!).
There are tons of benefits of content syndication, here’s how it works. A content syndication specialist will distribute your content, such as an eBook, research report or recorded webinar, to new and relevant target audiences.
Top tip: You should only choose a content syndication specialist that owns their own content syndication platforms, and their audiences.
Many suppliers will outsource your campaigns to 3rd parties. That means they can't give you a traceable footprint of where your content has been hosted, where it's been distributed and how your leads have been generated.
We don't like those kind of suppliers, and neither should you!
To run a successful content syndication lead gen campaign you'll need to choose content libraries that are trusted and long-established sources of information for professionals. Essentially content libraries are a great place to find useful information, away from the advertising-heavy world of search engines. (Check out our HRTech Corporate content hubs for an idea.)
Each piece of content hosted on HR Tech Corporate is gated: that is, the prospect has to fill out a content download form, which requires their business details. Name, job title, company, and email address are standard, but you can also enhance your HR lead gen campaign to include more relevant data-gathering questions.
The lead generation agency usually delivers your leads to you on a Cost Per Lead (CPL) basis, so it's budget-friendly and shows a great ROI. A good supplier will authenticate each lead before delivering them to you, ensuring all contact details and job information is correct.
Strategy #3 - Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing is the art of pre-selecting companies you want to target, then going after them in an individualized way.
There are a lot of benefits of ABM, from reaching the right accounts to having more opportunities to personalize your comms. ABM works great, for example, for HR software lead generation, where personal, actively useful communications are likely to be appreciated by busy professionals looking for good sources of information.
The key to a successful ABM campaign dedicated to reaching HR professionals is to build a strong Target Account List (TAL). This can be challenging, but if you start with a handful of businesses you definitely want to reach, a lead generation specialist can help you grow your list using lookalike audiences.
You should work with your sales team to create your TAL. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons why ABM campaigns don't succeed; marketing's failure to involve sales and understand who the target accounts are.
Your sales team can give you a good idea of which companies to target, and they might know a surprising amount about the individuals. Besides, research has found that when marketing, sales, and customer care teams work together, it can bring a significant boost to revenue.
HR Lead Generation – How to Get Started
Firstly you should make sure you've got plenty of fresh, useful content to attract new prospects. eBooks and whitepapers are great, but so are instructional videos, product demos, free tools, and expert webinars.
Next, you should decide how to generate HR leads, and choose your suppliers.
HR Lead Generation - Types of Campaigns
There are several approaches to choose from within content syndication lead generation.
For example at Headley Media, the simplest type of campaign is a Single Touch. A Single Touch campaign sees HR professionals download one piece of your content before being delivered to you as new contacts.
In a Double Touch campaign, two pieces of your content are promoted to HRTech Corporates' audience of Senior HR and Business professionals, doubling their exposure to your brand.
With a Nurture Track campaign, your lead generation agency will nurture your leads for you, educating them on your technology products and services, and helping to warm them up toward a sale.
A SoftBANT campaign assesses leads based on two of the four BANT criteria; Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe. BANT helps to establish whether they're a good fit for your business, and what buying signals they're presenting. Then you can prioritize your leads according to when they're most likely to buy.
You can also enhance any of Headley Medias's lead generation campaigns, for example with ABM, Audience Intelligence, or Intent Data Targeting.
Nurturing Your New HR Leads
You'll also need to work out how you're going to measure your HR lead generation and nurture your new prospects.
When done right, HR lead generation campaigns will provide you with a high-quality list of relevant HR prospects to follow up with. However, before you send them straight over to your Sales team you'll need to 'warm' them up. That's where lead nurturing comes in.
There are so many different B2B lead nurturing strategies to choose from, so it's worth doing your research. Ultimately, you need to choose nurturing strategies that will work well for your HR technology solutions and your audience.
Another way to measure the effectiveness of your HR lead generation is to use lead scoring. Lead scoring allows you to prioritize your leads based on how warmed up they are.
You assign 'points' to a lead every time they open an email from you, or every time they engage with your social media, etc., then pass the leads to the sales team once they reach a certain score. There's more on lead scoring in our free lead generation toolkit.
Choosing an HR Technology Lead Generation Company
You have to be careful when choosing an HR tech lead gen agency: not all of them are what they say they are.
Some agencies will outsource your lead generation to 3rd parties, or won't authenticate leads properly – so you end up with a list of contact details that are inaccurate, out-of-date, or mysteriously sourced.
The best sign of a good HR lead gen company is complete transparency: they should be able to show you exactly where your leads come from.
They'll give you the full picture of the reader's journey, from the first time they download a piece of content onwards.
They'll also exercise rigorous quality control, authenticating each lead.
Aside from all that, you should look for a content syndication lead generation agency that specializes in human resources marketing and goes directly goes to the HR industry. A good content library is an invaluable resource for HR professionals: if you can tap into that, you can reach them more effectively than ever.
Use our Quality Lead Generation Checklist to make sure you're choosing a good lead gen supplier, or explore more HR lead generation ideas with us to find out more.
HR Lead Generation With HRTech Corporate
HRTech Corporate delivers high-quality and transparent HR lead generation campaigns by connecting B2B technology companies with Senior HR, People, Business, and Tech Professionals globally.
Our readers use HRTech Corporate as their go-to research destination, downloading the latest educational content from HR technology companies worldwide.
HRTech Corporate only promotes educational and authoritative from technology companies across the globe to help our audiences research, analyze, compare, and review their business and technology needs within the fast-paced world of HR technology.
