Pint with Paiger

Join Darren as he speaks to Lauren B Jones, Founder of Leap Consulting Solutions, about her journey from musician to starting her own business in the middle of the pandemic and useful advice she can give to those just starting their careers.

Do you feel imposter syndrome, self-doubt or confusion over building your personal brand as a marketer? These are just a few of the things Darren chats about with Daniel Evans from JCW Group. Daniel talks us through how to overcome imposter syndrome and turn it into a driver for success.   

Going into all things marketing, we talk about Dan's relationship with his consultants, how managing expectations is key to any successful marketing function and whether he is Team University or Team Work.  

If you're interested in personal branding, sales and marketing alignment or turning your marketing career around, this is the episode for you!

Join Darren as he speaks to Ramli John, Managing Director at ProductLed. The pair dig deeper into what ProductLed really means and the do's and don'ts that go with it. Ramli started his career in marketing before becoming a consultant and finally landing at ProductLed back in 2020. You can also follow along on Ramli's journey with ProductLed in the highly informative slack community and newsletter here.

Join Darren as he speaks to Jo Lee, Managing Director at Marmalade Marketing. Jo has been a marketer for 20 years, 16 of those within the recruitment sector. 4 years ago and 6 months after having her second baby, Jo decided to start up an agency - Marmalade Marketing as we say there's no right time to start a business. Darren is talking to Jo about her journey to being a business owner, her opinion on 'the colouring in department' and how recruitment marketing has shifted since the start of the pandemic.

Join Darren as he speaks to Ricky Wheeler, the Global Marketing Director at cube19.

Ricky has been doing marketing for 20 years, beginning his career at a web design company and running events as a DJ on the side. Both aligned into event management and marketing which turned into a marketing role at Broadbean for 8 years, where Ricky crossed paths with Darren. He is now the Global Marketing Director at cube19. 

Ricky talks through his process for getting buy-in company-wide, his opinion on the term marketing girl and how the relationship between sales and marketing will affect marketing activities. 

Join Darren as he speaks to the CEO & Co-Founder at Staffing Future, Jack Copeland. 

Having lived and breathed staffing technology for the past 15 years, a fellow ex-broadbeaner Jack started his career straight from school into a sales role crossing paths with Darren in the early 2000s. He worked at Broadbean for just shy of 10 years before moving out to the US to head up the US division.

Jack shares his thoughts on sales and marketing working as one consistent unit, how he utilises LinkedIn for social selling at Staffing Future and the impact Covid had on his business and the companies he's worked with over the past year. 

In the season finale of Beer with Darren, I am joined by Kristie Perrotte talking all things automation and creating warm conversations.

Kristie has 16 years of experience in recruitment marketing. She worked her way up and now owns her own business called Thrive which specialises in sales and marketing automation. Having worked at a large company, she was given a large budget to work with and try different things out. However, being in a large company you are also restricted by the speed things can progress. Since the pandemic, we have seen the impact automation and AI can have to speed up processes and the technology has caught up with the slower businesses.

As recruitment and sales will continue to be 'people buy from people' but automation should not be feared it should be encouraged to start off the process of selling. Some of the best recruitment companies operate and try both B2B and B2C strategies from other industries than just recruitment. That's where the automation element comes in. Covid has forced us to look outside of our comfort zone of calling and past the vanity metrics we typically used.

Why should consultants spend so much time on the phone if they can add an automated element to get warmer conversations and close deals?

What is automation and how do you use it?

Having the ability to post content, share content and scaling that. Recruiters are busy and being pulled in many directions so having it automated to save them time. Thrive automates emails with the real benefit of reactivating your database to contact dormant leads you may have available. A lot of older databases are unlikely to be used because data can be outdated and intent can be questioned. So Thrive assesses the customer sales journey which can be sales or marketing emails alternated. It also lets you extract your contacts from LinkedIn to search for their work email address to then feed those prospects into an automated journey. Adding scoring to accumulate intent is helpful in finding the warm leads.

Companies spend a lot of money seeking new leads that often exist already within your database, to begin with. It's just getting over the issue of sales and recruiters hatred for CRM's.

How do you use lead scoring for recruitment?

Looking at the different actions on the journey and scoring them accordingly. They start with a minimum of 7 interactions and over the course of those emails, they get scored for different actions such as opening, clicks, case studies etc. You look overtime at the score build-up and the journey they follow. If you know the customer and their pain points, ensuring your messaging fits their values, regardless of whether it's automated or not, if they are delivering value, they will be opened.

The most successful email campaigns?

They tend to be the ones going to clients as to candidates tend to get a worse open rate for newsletters.

Things a marketing team can help with:

In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Robert Woodford from The Marketing Junction about marketing in-house vs. outsourcing and how to do effective marketing in recruitment businesses.

The Marketing Junction offers outsourced marketing for recruitment businesses before this he worked at a variety of different recruitment companies over 20 years. He fell into recruitment, as many do but also fell into marketing after completing a degree in economics. He prefers the start-up life as a marketer as he terms marketing for larger businesses 'a glorified administrator' - this being exec or manager level. You often get told how things are done.

Robert wears many different marketing hats and is continually doing different things through outsourcing for a variety of types of companies. As a business owner, you have no choice to become sales to some degree. For Robert, he grew from consulting on companies to have to sell to get business.

What advice do you have for new freelancers?

If you are doing it because you've always wanted to great. If it's out of necessity and it's not actually what you want to do or passionate about, then be careful because it's hard work. Surround yourself with your 'competitors' as you will get good advice and people are more than happy to help.

What does the phrase recruitment marketing mean to you?

Robert loves recruitment marketing as you have an element of both B2B and B2C. Marketing within recruitment is so unique, you have 3 autonomous parts - the clients that are people, the candidates and the recruitment consultants who are the brand. So marketing within recruitment you are balancing all of those parts.

How do you define the ROI of marketing?

Robert often asks the question back 'how do you define the ROI of your telephone system or CRM? Because actually, you don't define the ROI because you just know it works. Within marketing, we all do Google Analytics but ultimately some things are just impossible to track. A lot of marketing is to do with solidifying relationships so can you actually put a figure on that?

Marketers add so much more to recruitment businesses than they are given credit for. They are often responsible for the culture because internal marketing is great. Again how do you measure that? Often in his reporting, he adds an anecdotal note - that could be internal views that show your importance but they aren't measurable. The challenge for anyone within recruitment marketing is that most CEO's in the companies are recruiters so they have never had to work with marketers before.

In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Paul Rawson about scaling up businesses via marketing and the newly famous account-based marketing approach.

He has been in marketing for 20 years. Starting out in retail and then moved internationally in 2005 working in China, the Middle East and Singapore. Entering recruitment in 2008 into Fircroft, growing the marketing team from 1 to 17 people. Then starting his own recruitment company onto working at Rullion. But now Paul has moved sector swapping recruiters for lawyers at a private equity-backed law firm.

What are your tips for marketing in recruitment?

Marrying those two things with well-networked recruiters makes it easier to scale up the business.

Many recruitment offices didn't have a marketing element and you got stuck in a place where you can't get £20k to build a website despite a huge turnover. Marketers are consistently proving the ROI of each activity to executive teams who do not see them as anything more than the colouring-in department.

How do you convince a CEO to give you an opportunity as a marketer?

Be proactive and become more sales focused. Here is how I will affect sales, build the brand and bring in ROI. It can be said that recruiters are great marketers in that they are constantly networking and branding themselves. You have to be energised to work with the recruiters, get their respect and then start your plans.

How do you define sales?

Marketers have been defined as getting X amount of MQL's, this means nothing if they don't convert which caused even more friction in the handover when the MQL's don't produce sales. We should be measuring marketers and sales on revenue and when they both move towards that common goal it can remove the friction.

Account-based marketing - what is it?

Producing content specifically targeted towards a set number of companies. An ABM approach can help a recruiter have a reason to pick up the phone and follow up with the sale.

This content needs to help your desired company/ person at helping to remove any issues or problems they have in a quick and useful way.

PPC can be so specific within ABM to target one company, one person via LinkedIn adverts and that budget spend is extremely targeted and convertible. If you can target X company at X seniority level for not too much money, why wouldn't you do that?

What's your view on personal brands on LinkedIn?

It's definitely relevant within the recruitment sector. Most recruiters have their own personal brand anyway and are known in their sector for certain things. They just haven't developed it into blogs, content etc. Within a personal brand, it's about turning up, interacting and keeping active. The ultimate thing within your personal brand is to be known and seen for X thing you want to be seen for. If you are known by everyone in your specific niche section then you'll become the go-to person for that purpose.

No. 1 piece of advice for a marketer starting out?

Do a CIM qualification. Don't complain about not being taken seriously if you are not actively seeking more knowledge across all business. It will help you get some technical knowledge at a set standard.

In this episode of Beer with Darren, I spoke to Jemma Lea Bevan from Social Jems about social media marketing, lead generation and all things LinkedIn.

Social Jems is a training, content and lead generation company. If people want to increase their online presence but don't know where to start they can either be trained or have it done for them.

We've seen people buy from people, not products so building a personal brand and showing people who are you and what matters to you is key in generating sales. The way people are buying has changed, they no longer want to be a number, they want to buy from someone they trust and like. By building a personal brand you show people who you are and essentially generate those leads.

Jemma started by selling payroll to recruitment agencies but could not understand why she spent all day on the phones when LinkedIn had the message option. So her wholesales career has been utilising LinkedIn by posting and building her own personal brand. But the majority of leads Jemma generated from LinkedIn were people asking for help with their own LinkedIn profiles, something the company she was working at didn't offer. The demand was there and her skill set so she started Social Jems.

At the beginning of the pandemic, everyone panicked and cut their spending on marketing. But come May time, everyone realised with most people working from home, traditional sales methods like cold-calling won't be enough to secure new business so they had to add the social media element. Social media allows you to be visible to potential customers sooner, for warmer calls when they come.

Typically the smaller companies or companies with one-person marketing teams rely on outsourcing a lot of marketing efforts which come across extremely formal. When in actual fact people just want to see real.