If you know me, you know that I am a big believer in the power of inbound marketing and marketing automation. I believe that there are some real strengths in the fundamentals preached by HubSpot, and I especially believe in the power of their (and others’) technology to help marketing leaders create and execute successful strategies.
I’ve also had the fun of leveraging HubSpot and other marketing automation tools as a marketing leader in recruiting to execute my own strategies.
And if there is one takeaway I can share with you, it’s this:
Most marketing automation platforms are super expensive and have way more functionality than what is needed (at least for all but the largest enterprise firms). Understanding that functionality and the specific needs of your staffing firm can help you choose the best marketing automation for your recruitment firm.
To help you, here’s a rundown of some of the best marketing automation platforms for staffing firms and their relevant capabilities:
When you think of HubSpot, you probably think of inbound marketing and marketing automation. The platform has evolved over the years. Today, HubSpot is a popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that combines marketing, sales, content management, and customer service.
Here are some of the notable functionalities that may be of interest to staffing marketing leaders:
Email marketing: Send/schedule personalized emails and access email performance in open rates, click rates, and deliverability. Each plan has tiers based on the number of contacts and emails you can send.
Lead management: The lead database includes a view of all marketing interactions of a prospect, including website visits and email clicks.
Nurturing: Automate drip campaigns to send the right communication after the contact takes a particular action.
Landing Pages and Forms: Build customized landing pages and lead capture forms.
Workflow Capability: Automatically trigger emails or tasks based on set rules.
Campaign planning: Manage marketing campaigns across channels, to see the goals, costs, and ROI tied to the campaign.
Reporting & Analytics: Create custom reports and dashboards to analyze web analytics, revenue analytics, and ROI analytics by a particular channel or medium.
Integrations: Integrate with systems such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, etc.
Acquired by Adobe in 2018, Marketo is a SaaS-based marketing automation platform. It offers similar functionality as HubSpot when it comes to email marketing, lead management, and workflows.
Here’s a breakdown of some of Marketo’s functionality:
Nurturing: Marketo supports nurturing capabilities, but the platform needs integration with a CRM or CMS to function optimally.
Reporting & Analytics: Reporting capabilities include high-level engagement analytics and revenue reporting. However, it requires some manual setup.
Integrations: Marketo doesn’t offer in-built CRM but integrates with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, etc.
Pardot (formerly known as ExactTarget) is a marketing automation solution that was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. It offers a range of capabilities like lead management, email marketing, and workflow automation.
Some notable functions include:
Email marketing: Pardot includes unlimited email marketing in all its plans.
Landing pages and forms: Pardot supports the creation of Landing pages and forms. However, landing pages are created on a subdomain, which is difficult to track and hampers SEO.
Integrations: Pardot doesn’t have a native CRM. You’ll need to purchase Salesforce or an alternative CRM separately.
Reporting and analytics: Pardot offers basic reporting capabilities. Advanced reporting is effort-intensive and requires paid add-ons.
Pardot offers extensive customization, which may be a plus for complex organizations but can mean an overwhelming amount of unnecessary features (and cost) for many staffing firms.
You read that correctly! You may not think of Sense as a traditional marketing automation platform, but the Sense platform has some tremendous marketing automation capabilities (and more to come 😉). And many staffing firms (like when I was a VP of marketing for a staffing firm) find it has the perfect balance of marketing automation capabilities, without the additional price tag you find with the aforementioned marketing automation platforms.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the marketing automation capabilities within Sense:
Email marketing: Sense offers the capability to create dynamic, personalized email campaigns, so you can send the right messages to the right people.
Lead generation and nurturing: Attract qualified candidates faster and deploy nurturing sequences after events, webinars, and ebook downloads work automatically to engage prospective clients.
Workflow automation: Trigger multichannel recruitment workflows based on a candidate’s profile data or when they complete a certain action in the journey to create the ultimate candidate experience.
Recruitment marketing: Automatically send relevant jobs to candidates in your database on their preferred channel, including texting and WhatsApp messaging. Sense also automated pre-screening and schedules qualified candidates directly onto recruiter calendars.
Data hygiene: Deploy data hygiene and ATS data enrichment to ensure your candidate data is up-to-date and robust enough to allow you the flexibility to design and implement impactful campaigns.
Referrals: Launch branded, multichannel, and automated referral campaigns for employees and alumni.
NPS: Sense can deploy automated NPS workflows for candidates and clients at your desired cadence, allowing you to update messaging and testimonials continually.
Want to see how marketing automation can lead to significant ROI for staffing firms? Check out our webinar replay.
It’s another way to boost ROI from your Sense investment. And when you combine Sense’s marketing automation capabilities with its incredibly robust set of recruiting and sales engagement functionality, it becomes even more compelling.
To see Sense’s marketing automation capabilities in action, request a personalized demo now.
