We know what you’re thinking, you’ve already read our recruitment marketing automation Q&A session with the ever awesome Zinzan over at DMJ Recruitment, right? But the thing is, we work with a lot of recruiters, and every single one of them uses Kulea in a different way. So when the opportunity came along to interview the equally awesome Gemma Sleight, from FMC Talent, who were we to refuse?
Gemma – Kulea loves ya!
Q1. Could you please tell us a little bit about your background and the sector you work in. eg. Job description, where you work, company description, your experience of marketing automation, your personal objectives etc?
I am a Marketing Manager working at FMC Global Talent. I have worked here for almost 7 years after joining as Marketing Assistant straight out of University. FMC Global Talent is a technical recruitment agency with a long history spanning 30 years, with our experience rooted firmly in Headhunting, our aim is to work for the client, proactively, to deliver the best talent and solve recruitment issues as quickly as possible.
The markets we work across (Smart Industry, Medical Technology, Industrial Automation & Automotive) continue to undergo masses of development which are largely down to technological changes, so it is key that as a recruitment partner we are also operating with the best technology and delivering a seamless service.
I have only been delivering true marketing automation for the past year. My goal as Marketing Manager has always been that the Marketing team deliver a return on investment from everything we do … and I saw Marketing Automation as a way to deliver more at a lower cost with a commercial output. From reading, learning, taking part if courses, seminars, webinars, teaching myself… I have learned what good looks like when it comes to Marketing Automation.
Q2. What is it about MA that makes it so compelling? Did you have any specific challenges that you were looking to overcome?
I think anything that saves you time and money is compelling… and add to that the idea of giving customers a more personalised service without being spammy! It’s a no-brainer.
I think the most challenging thing for us has been to ensure we have the right content and are able to target it effectively. We have spent a lot of time over the last 2 years just working on capturing insight and staying at the forefront of news and developments in the markets we work in… as there is no point in investing in marketing automation if you haven’t got anything decent to say when people engage with you.
Q3. What objectives/KPI’s did you set yourself before embarking on your marketing automation adventure?
I think firstly it was looking at what ‘good’ is to us. How many marketing leads a month are considered good, what insight is the most compelling to our audience, what sort of open rates do we want to hit and how much would we like to be in touch with our audience.
In implementing the marketing automation… our main objective was to avoid confusing ourselves by keeping things as simple as possible before we got too deep!
Q4. Let’s be honest, most recruitment companies aren’t yet taking advantage of marketing automation. What do you think it is that’s holding them back?
I think a lot of recruitment agencies are still very much sales led, now I am not saying this needs to change completely, but I think a joint sales and marketing approach is required to protect us from future developments.
This can be difficult to embed culturally though! Where we’ve seen it working is when we’ve been able to demonstrate the return on investment in marketing and how this directly works with the sales and recruitment teams.
Q5. From your own experiences, have you found these to be realistic reservations?
Yes, they are realistic reservations in the recruitment industry, especially for organisations that were around in the days when the only tech used was a phone and the only CRM that existed was the phone book!
I think recruitment will always be a people business, people talking to people, selling people to people… and I don’t think that should ever change. No amount of marketing emails or ads will ever take away from a good recruiter’s ability to sell a job to a candidate face to face or over the phone.
However, we have to face that as our audience get younger, they expect a different kind of service and they expect more from us than ever before.
As businesses we are constantly looking for a way to lower the costs but up the outputs… so if there are recruitment agencies out there that have this as their goal but have not looked at marketing automation… they’re missing a trick!
Q6. How quickly were you able to get up to speed with marketing automation, and how did you find the first few months?
Fairly quickly. I had used many similar systems before and as Kulea is very simplistic to use it really didn’t take long to get up to speed. With the support of the Kulea team I was able to get support on the areas that I did struggle with.
We were able to see a return almost immediately.
Q7. What features do you feel are generating the best returns for you and the business?
The forms feature and emails. When we get the content right and the audience right, these are the features that bring it all to a reality for us.
We are starting to see a return on using Journeys, but we have work still to be done.
Q8. How are these helping you improve the business KPI’s you’re measured on?
We’re able to effectively measure marketing leads and how many we’re putting through our funnel. We are also generating more leads than ever before!
Q9. Where do you personally see the greatest benefits of marketing automation?
Being able to consistently keep in touch in the RIGHT way!
Q10. What are your next steps in your marketing automation journey?
Improve our journeys!
Q11. Have you any words of advice for recruitment companies and marketers in general that are considering marketing automation?
- Make sure you have buy-in from the sales and recruitment leaders in the business before you get too far in your marketing automation adventure, without this, it won’t be worth the investment.
- Think about your content first… there is no point investing in marketing automation if you don’t have anything good to say to your audience.
- Start simple and map out what you see as being your marketing automation journeys.
- Have a plan!
