How Covid taught me my most valuable marketing lesson

Supporting sales teams during incredibly challenging conditions throughout Covid taught me the most important marketing lesson of my career. Stop wasting your time with top of the funnel lead generation.


For years, I've been putting most of my time, energy, and budget into classic top of funnel campaigns to deliver new candidate and client leads. These leads would then get passed to the sales teams to be qualified, nurtured down the sales funnel and hopefully placed.


Then COVID happened.


In a matter of days my marketing function's priority shifted from lead generation to helping the sales teams stay closer to existing customers and educate them about navigating the effects of Covid. This was a unique opportunity for marketing to get deep insights into customer pain points and their challenges.


The most effective marketing I have ever been involved with was created during this time because we tailored it for a tiny audience that we knew a great deal about. The content's purpose was to educate and the value we provided was huge.


We then skilled up the sales team to use this content to start conversations with similar customer personas. The consultants quickly became hybrid sales/digital marketers who used specific content to educate a specific audience.


This flipped my established model on its head. The sales team had new collateral and skills to win customers and build a pipeline powered by content and their personal brand (which also enhanced their more traditional sales outreach tactics). In the meantime, marketing continued to plug into growing client and candidate talent pools to create valuable content, grow communities and nurture these potential customers.


To paint a picture of how effective this approach to marketing is, I want to use a case study. At the start of 2021, I surveyed a talent pool of engineering professionals for one of our US recruitment businesses about their remote working options. I asked questions about how they felt about the industry, their remote working situation, how likely they were to move roles, and why. We then produced a report detailing our findings and shared it with that community plus our community of hiring managers in the same vertical.


Marketing delivered £130,000 of revenue that came as a direct result of that one piece of content in the 6 months after it was launched. We only used existing talent pools on our database to create the content and only marketed to our talent pools. This is the power of turning your existing customers into fans, and your fans into ambassadors of your recruitment brand.


Ben Greenstreet of Birkby Bridge is standing with his arms crossed in front of a city skyline.

The people that make it happen: Ben Greenstreet

By Robert Quirk • August 19, 2024
I work across the marketing mix to develop campaigns that hit specific goals for Birkby’s clients. I’ve used a variety of channels and tactics to achieve results. I have managed PR programs, that strategically position our clients as best-in-class within niche verticals, winning coverage in the likes of Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and Business Insider. Email automation is at the heart of my role. I build workflows designed to run seamlessly in the background, delivering high-value content to target customers and key talent pools. I’ve delivered training on LinkedIn content production alongside interview-based programs for business leaders seeking to build their personal brand and executive presence. Whether it’s engaging candidate communities, targeting new business or running campaigns for internal hiring programs, I’ve worked with a multitude of staffing and search businesses to drive outcomes through marketing. Schedule a call and see what Birkby Bridge can do for you.
A person wearing adidas shoes is walking through the grass.

3 steps to grow a great brand

By Robert Quirk • August 16, 2024
There are so many good reasons to communicate with site visitors. Tell them about sales and new products or update them with tips and information.
A person is touching a mirror with their hand.

How many touchpoints do you need to make a sale?

By Robert Quirk • August 16, 2024
It's a question that seems to be popping up on my Linkedin feed recently, so I wanted to do a quick post exploring the idea of touchpoints and how many are needed for a sale. The first post I noticed was from Constant Contact who confidently claimed 21 touchpoints are needed for a sale (up from 17 in 2019). I also remember Linkedin in the past has suggested 8 touchpoints are needed, which is supported by TrueList, who agree 8 is the magic number but with the caveat, "... every prospect is different, so this number can vary" 🤣 No 💩. Touchpoints are a two-way street. They empower marketing and sales to educate and win customers (outbound), but touchpoints also allow customers to educate themselves and make informed buying decisions on their own (inbound). So this makes them an essential part of the customer journey and you should be regularly reporting on the touchpoints you can measure and improve them. But what if I say we can't see or report on some of the most powerful touchpoints. This is where dark social comes into the mix. If you're doing your marketing and branding well, then your content is getting consumed on dark social. Links and documents get sent via private message apps across peer groups, podcasts get listened to, videos and posts get viewed, and then there is word of mouth. These are all significant marketing touchpoints that you will struggle to report on accurately or even know exist. Dark social and the fact that every potential customer is different means that measuring the average number of touchpoints to make a sale is a duff metric, in my opinion. People will buy from you when they are ready, not when you have reluctantly ground them down with 17 "touchpoints".  The important thing is to focus on the touchpoints you can control and measure/improve them, so they are as effective as possible (your website, landing pages, Linkedin profile, adverts, etc.). Then also acknowledge that if you create valuable content and distribute it on relevant channels, you won't get the complete picture of how your audience engages with it. And that's cool. Sometimes you don't have to measure everything. In fact, when it comes to building a brand being too KPI-driven will distract you from the bigger long-term goals.