As of 2015, Randstad was still relying heavily on outbound marketing tactics. Its website had huge volumes of traffic, but low search engine rankings; it offered visitors compelling content to download, but had no effective way to capture and nurture leads. Randstad realised that inbound marketing would be crucial to its future growth. Within six months of working with HubSpot, the company increased leads from its website by 4x.
Finding the Right Software to Generate and Nurture Leads
As the global content manager for Randstad, Anthony Hodge is the company’s corporate storyteller. He joined the business in 2013, as it was preparing to create and launch the new Randstad website. He set about building up the company’s content library, deciding on and commissioning research, articles, and whitepapers. By 2015, the website had a wealth of material that its audience could download. However, its inbound marketing provision was letting it down.
“The old website had a basic lead capturing function but at the back end, it was very remedial. You would have to spend most of your time organizing the data and there was no verification process for downloads,” notes Anthony.
He knew the company needed a more effective solution and HubSpot had been on his radar since 2014. A number of Randstad’s operating companies were already using the HubSpot platform, and Anthony was impressed by what it had helped them achieve. After evaluating other solutions, including Marketo, he made his decision.
“It was very clear from the beginning that we should partner with HubSpot. Once our website was built, and we had created a full calendar of content, I was ready to take the plunge.”
Tailoring the User Experience for Each Persona
Randstad.com is the company’s global website, and it targets a very specific, high-level audience, which includes CEOs and international Fortune 500 HR directors. The first thing Anthony did with HubSpot was to create personas so that Randstad could understand its different visitors and then serve them the content they want to read when they want it.
Anthony's technical consultant was instrumental in helping him do this. He said, “Our inbound consultant explained how important it is to first define our target personas – then we looked at the whole buyer's journey and created content around that. We’ve got a great website that gets lots of traffic, but we also needed to understand our personas to harness the power of that traffic.”
The next step was to use the HubSpot software to offer visitors content that was personalized to them and to their stage in the marketing funnel, through the use of landing pages, forms and smart CTAs. In addition, Anthony also used the workflows app to organize those leads and nurture them with targeted campaigns. Randstad now has a list of personas that are verified and continuously improved, and it is building relationships with clients in ways that were not possible before.
“If we have the CEO of a Fortune 500 company visit the website, we can offer them relevant content, piece by piece, until they are at a point when they are ready to have a conversation with someone in our organisation.”
A Long-Term Partnership With HubSpot
The results that Randstad has seen since it began working with HubSpot have been impressive. “We have dramatically increased visitors to the site - growing by 56% each year, but more importantly, leads from Randstad.com increased 4x,” says Anthony.
Randstad also integrated with Salesforce CRM, which allows its sales team to contact warm leads in a more organized way. “They know what content leads have downloaded and the topics that interest them,” explains Anthony.
In the longer term, with the help of the Marketing Hub, the plan is to turn Randstad.com into the firm’s “global switchboard”. “When a visitor lands on the website and downloads some of our content, we want to point them to the right Randstad site and then seamlessly continue the journey of nurturing from there,” said Anthony.
Anthony is a firm proponent of the HubSpot platform – once you take the time to tailor it to your requirements, it does the work of ten people, he says. In the future, he hopes that all 38 of Randstad’s operating companies will implement it for themselves.
“Many of our operating companies currently use the HubSpot software, but I’d like to see it rolled out on a global level at Randstad, so all of our marketers can succeed with inbound marketing.”
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