HR Tech Lead Generation: Different Ways to Increase Sales and Leads

As an HR tech, it can feel like your options are pretty limited for marketing yourselves outside of having your sales team bring in direct leads.

However, you have more options than you may think.

If done right, you have plenty of marketing tactics you can use to reach your decision-makers and get them to convert.

Some are easier than you might think.

In this article, you’ll find different lead generation strategies you can use for your HR tech.

Let’s jump right in.

How to Generate More HR Leads

Diversify Your Marketing Channels with Inbound and Outbound

To scale your leads and sales with marketing, you’ll need to diversify your channels to include both inbound and outbound.  

Source: HubSpot

These HR software marketing strategies are aimed at helping you create a marketing campaign that focuses on getting results at the lowest cost possible.

Your acquisition cost for each of these marketing strategies will vary, but they all work well for driving leads for you to capitalize on.

Use SEO to Expand Your Brand’s Reach

The first marketing strategy we have is to expand your brand’s reach through SEO.

The beautiful thing about SEO for B2B SaaS is that they can target all marketing funnel stages.

No matter where a user is in their buyer’s journey, you can create content that matches it.

Not only can it work as a lead generation channel, but it can also work to scale your brand’s presence and awareness by being present for all relevant searches around your topic or industry.

So in the case of HR software, you can create top-of-the-funnel content that captures searches at all touchpoints for your target audience, which helps them become more familiar with you and trust your brand more.

Say your HR tech is built around “employee retention,” and your target persona is an HR or middle management professional struggling to retain employees; you can create content around all aspects of that search.

The goal is to have your brand appear throughout your ICP’s buyer’s journey.

You can even rank for top-of-the-funnel searches like: “Why do my employees feel unsatisfied?” or “How common is employee turnover?”

While these top-of-the-funnel searches rarely generate results for you, it’s a great way to build brand awareness and slowly push your users through the funnel until they reach another article you wrote.

The goal of SEO is to become an authority around a niche and dominate it with content.

You want to become an authority for both your users and search engines.

Source: How the Fxck

Topical authority is considered to be a ranking factor for search engines.

You can even use SEO to target bottom-of-the-funnel searches that generate leads.

Now let’s say it’s still your employee retention software; you can create content for users ready or close to making a decision.

If you have close competitors in your market, you can create content like “competitor vs. *your company*” or “competitor alternatives.”

With “vs.” content, your users have already boiled their options down to two companies, and now you’re just guiding their hand and helping them choose your HR solution over your competitor.

Use PPC to Target Your Competitors

While PPC is considered an outbound channel, it’s great for driving potential signups against competitors.

The best way to run PPC against your competitors is to understand potential pain points your audience may have against that specific company.

Their product may be too expensive, or maybe they don’t like its features.

Whatever the reason for the pain point, you can capitalize on this by using your paid ads.

You can’t mention the competitor by name, but you can call out pain points with your ads.

Say Monday.com is too expensive for your audience, and your brand is positioned as a cheaper alternative; you can use that to drive clicks to your ads.

It’s all about understanding the user’s intent behind the search and using that to your advantage.

Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Audience

If your HR tech is in it for the long haul, you can use social media to grow awareness for your brand.

Like SEO, social media lets you capture and build your audience for free.

Instead of paying for an audience, you’re capturing and building an audience.

Compared to SEO, the only downside to social media is that you have to use it daily to see results.  

It’s not like SEO, where you can set it and forget it; you need to post quality and relevant content daily to build up your following.

It also matters how you post too.

Personal profiles tend to outperform company profiles by a lot.

You can use your brand to post thought leadership or use incentives for your employees to post as well too.

But it matters what you post too.

While companies can post thought leadership, company profiles work best when they publish entertainment mixed with education.

Thought leadership works best with a personal profile.

You also have to be consistent with your efforts too.

You can’t expect to make one post and have it go viral.

You should aim to publish at least 3-5 times a week.

This is key for building your brand and an audience who can become familiar with and interested in your offering.

Offer Value That’s Packaged in a Lead Magnet

If you want to capture leads, what better way than to package them in a lead magnet?

Creating a lead magnet creates assets that can only be accessed by entering contact information.

This can be a:

• Ebook
• Whitepaper
• Webinar
• Report

Once you have these leads captured, you can add them to your email list or organize them into segments to see where they are along the pipeline.

Users in the beginning stage of the pipeline can be added to your email list, and your sales team can activate users who are close to converting.

It also helps when you have the brand to back up these magnets.

That’s why inbound channels work well for building your brand and trust for your brand.

If you have that level of brand trust and industry authority, getting users to sign up for your gated lead magnets will be much easier.

You can even use your marketing channels to promote these lead magnets.

You can use SEO to promote lead magnets on highly trafficked pages and social media to promote and generate hype about them.

And you can even use email to pitch to your existing audience, further engaging with them.

These assets will be gated, so they can access the asset once they submit their contact information.

Using lead magnets is a great opportunity for your company to capture qualified leads you can use later to push toward converting.

You can learn how to leverage lead magnets for your HR tech in this article.

Create Customizable Landing Pages

If you want users to convert, you need to create quality landing pages that entice users to convert once they land on your page.

These work great for your existing assets, like your lead magnets, so these landing pages aim to increase the likelihood of a user converting.

These landing pages can be for product demos and signups, but the goal is to create a landing page that explains to your visitor the benefit of your solution and how they can sign up.

Your landing page should usually include the following:

• An offer
• A deal
• A CTA that speaks to them
• Social proof
• Company details

Use ABM and LinkedIn to Target Qualified Prospects

If you want to get precise with your marketing efforts, you can use account-based marketing to target your prospects on LinkedIn.

Source: DeckLinks

This will be a bottom-of-the-funnel type of tactic.

If you’ve identified that this user is close to converting, you can use your sales team to reach out on LinkedIn and guide them toward a conversion.

LinkedIn is one of the best channels because you can quickly identify your decision-makers and reach out to them directly.

LinkedIn also has one of the best cold outreach success rates.

You can use tools like LinkedIn sales navigator to help narrow your target audience and find the best opportunities to reach them – like when they’re researching HR software solutions.

Aim to Give Short and Value-Focused Demos

If your HR software offers product demos, you’ll want to use this as your final closer to convert the lead.

The user has already expressed interest in your solution and now wants to see the actual product themselves to see if it would be a good fit for them.

This lead is very close to making their final decision, so your product demo team needs to deliver on the value of your product.

Source: HubSpot

They need to understand the intent behind the user’s decision to use your product and use that to move them toward a decision.

This will be the last stage in their buyer’s journey before they make a purchase, so your product demo team has to execute this well to capture that conversion.

Use a Product-Led Approach to Highlight Customer Pain Points

If you choose SEO as a marketing channel, you’ll likely need to build out blog content.

With this, you’ll want to focus your content and SEO entirely on your target audience and their buyer’s journey.

So highlighting their pain while positioning your product as a solution.

If you’re using this product-led approach, it’s important to remember not to pitch your software as the holy grail solution to all problems.

Instead, you want to walk users through their problems and showcase how your software can help with this exact problem.

So if it’s an employee retention solution, you want to show the user exactly how your employee retention software can be used as a solution to help improve their retention rate.

From there, you’re leaving it to your audience to decide whether your solution is right for them.

They don’t care about the features of your product; they care if it can help them.

Keep Your Product Trials Short

Surprisingly enough, keeping your product trials short increases the likelihood that your customer will take the time to get to know your product.

If they only have a few days vs. a whole month, they know they have less time to check out the product, so they’re more motivated to get as much usage out of it as possible.

However, if you give them an entire month with your product, it’s easier for them to forget about it and only use a select number of features.

Run a Referral Program

If you want to generate leads with little involvement, you can run a referral program, also known as an affiliate program to generate leads.

This method involves freelancers or affiliates promoting your product and receiving a commission for every sale.

You’re commissioning a salesperson without actually having to pay for a salesperson.

The beautiful thing about this is that these referral leads are typically high quality and are already interested in working with you.

These referrals usually create positive word of mouth about your product and jump straight to your solution without considering the alternatives.

While you won’t receive the total value for your product, it’s still a great way to get leads if you’re still in that initial growth stage.

There’s no work on your end; the only payment you have to consider is the commission once that lead becomes a customer.

Highlight Customer Success Stories on Your Website

Adding social proof is a great way to influence users who might be on the fence about your product.

You can add case studies and testimonials to highlight how users can benefit from your product.

Users in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey might be reviewing your website to see if your product is right for them, and these testimonials and case studies can help show the results your product can achieve and that your product can achieve similar results for them.

You can also leverage social proof on other websites too.

If you search “HR software tools,” you might see a few websites ranking for terms like “best HR software solutions” or “top HR software tools,” these will be your golden opportunity to get expanded brand reach without much work.

You can contact these site owners to see if they’d be willing to feature you on their website in exchange for compensation or an extended free trial period of your product.

This will help get your product in front of qualified traffic while getting a backlink, which helps with SEO.

Create Video Content to Highlight Your Product and Brand. Even Create Product Demo Videos

YouTube is the second largest search engine outside of Google, and if you leverage it right, you can use an HR tech SEO strategy that benefits both your YouTube channel and website.

You might sometimes see YouTube videos on the search engine results page, so if you want double visibility for your brand, you can rank your YouTube video along with your website URL.

If you search for “Ways to manage a team remotely,” you’ll notice there are YouTube results on Google’s results page, so if you create both website content and YouTube content around this search, you can capture double the visibility you have, which will likely give you a better CTR.

YouTube will also drive some clicks too.

That’s not to mention that videos help with user experience, which is a Google ranking signal, so your content may even rank higher if you have a video embedded.

You’ll also want to use the same product-led approach for your video content.

If users are trying to learn how to manage their team remotely, you can use your website and YouTube content to highlight different methods to use, including using your software.

This YouTube video will act as a quick product demo for why your product is the right choice for them.

Offer Discounted Annual Plans

To entice users at the conversion point, you can use annual plans to offer a discount.

Typically monthly will be more expensive, but when you show a discount with annual, there’s more of an incentive to save money.

Especially if that user plans to use your software for an entire year.

When they sign up for your solution for a year, they’ll be more enticed to stick with your program throughout instead of canceling randomly.

Offer a Smaller Free Version of Your Product

While this step isn’t entirely necessary, you can offer a free but limited version in exchange for contact information.

This functions similarly to a lead magnet, but since this tool is free, it’s easier for users to share it and refer it to other interested users.  

People are always looking for a great free tool, so this is a great way to get your brand out there without any additional marketing.

Plus, this method gives your users a sneak peek into your product, so they can sign up for it if they want access.

However, you’ll want to offer a limited version of your software instead of giving access to the entire product.

The point of this free tool is to help your audience with a small task while showing how much more potential your tool has.

A good example would be Grammarly, a popular grammar-checking SaaS that offers a free trial for its software.

They’ll check your writing for free, but they’ll only fit around 50% of your writing, with the rest of the corrections hidden behind their paid product.

They also offer free trials in addition to this, so this helps users lock in with their decision once they decide that this tool is right for them.

This will look different for an HR SaaS, but if there’s a small version of your product you can use, then I highly recommend it.

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