As part of our ad agency, we help companies acquire business leads online.
Below we explain a recent lead generation program that we devised and executed for recruitAbility, a high-growth recruiting and tech consulting firm that helps companies with direct and contract hires, as well as employee retention strategies.
Background
We began working with recruitAbility earlier this year on a content marketing strategy to grow their audience and attract inbound leads to therecruitAbility.com and recruitAbility.ai. We also launched a branded podcast for recruitAbility.
recruitAbility specializes in industries such as artificial intelligence, data science, machine learning, cybersecurity, and software. In 2020, recruitAbility ranked No. 1 overall in the micro category of Austin Business Journal’s annual list of the Best Places to Work in Austin.
Challenge
Most of recruitAbility’s new business comes from leads generated by their partner program and referral network. To complement these efforts, they wanted to find a way to efficiently scale their lead gen campaigns online via paid media.
Prior to 2020, recruitAbility discontinued their paid search campaigns on Google due to a high avg. cost per lead (CPL). Also, they discovered a portion of leads actually were job candidates instead of companies looking for executive search help.
recruitAbility asked us for a new approach in Q3 2020 to grow their leads within specific ad spend and performance parameters.
Solution
On paid search, we knew avg. cost per clicks (CPCs) on keywords related to executive recruiting—and job-search terms like “CFO search” or “CTO search”—trend higher due to competition. Also, there are few reliable ways to filter out job seekers, who often search these terms. So there would be a high likelihood of wasted ad spend if we bid on these non-branded keywords.
“Creating impactful content and understanding how to leverage the content to drive successful business outcomes is where 3rd & Lamar Media really differentiates themselves. The lead gen campaigns exceeded our expectations and set a new performance baseline for us.”
–Nad Elias, CEO, recruitAbility
Our hypothesis was that by running lead generation campaigns via paid social, we would generate more efficient performance, particularly since recruitAbility benefits from a library of highly relevant content to use in these campaigns.
Also, we believed LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities would help limit clicks from job seekers. LinkedIn’s context as a professional networking site fits recruitAbility’s brand better than Facebook, which also offers lead ads.
Once we focused our efforts on LinkedIn, we assessed recruitAbility’s existing content to identify the best blog posts to include:
- How to approach compensation for remote employees
- How to hire remote workers
- Salary ranges for top talent in AI, ML, and Data Science
- How to close a job candidate without paying more
- What job candidates value in offers compared to pre-COVID
- Cybersecurity salary ranges
We then separated out industry-specific audiences into their own campaigns so that we could determine which sectors performed best. We also used a prospects audience and a lookalike audience based on existing leads. This allowed us to evaluate campaigns at different stages of the funnel.
Results
recruitAbility’s lead gen campaigns on LinkedIn outperformed their paid search campaigns from prior years across every meaningful metric:
- Avg. CPL declined by 46%
- Avg. CPC declined by 39%
- Avg. CPM declined by 67%
- Avg. CVR% improved by 15%
These new leads were predominantly hiring managers and key decision-makers who we added to email nurture campaigns and to recruitAbility’s e-newsletter list. Also, these new leads helped recruitAbility expand the seed audience that it uses to build its lookalike audience.
Does your company need help with B2B or B2C lead generation? Contact us at [email protected].
