Life sciences company Proclinical had grown from two employees to over 100 in ten years and filled thousands of highly-skilled vacancies at companies around the world. However, its marketing activities had not kept up with the pace, according to Peter Hogg, global marketing manager with the company.
“We had a fragmented set of point solutions that weren’t working well together. For example, we used Dotmailer to send job notification emails to people in our database, but tailoring emails for different segments was a laborious process. We were using Google Analytics on our website, but it wasn’t giving us enough information on who our users were. We couldn’t tell on an individual basis if they came to us through organic search or PPC advertising, which made proving the ROI of our activities difficult.”
The Proclinical sales team were using traditional methods, such as cold calling and networking, to attract the high-value candidates they needed to fill positions.
“We did not get a lot of inbound candidates coming to our website, and the ones we did lacked the skills and experience for our clients’ needs. The employers we deal with want people with specialised expertise – we work in a niche, highly skilled segment. We needed to find a way to get more qualified candidates onto our website.”
Proclinical began its search for an integrated marketing solution that would allow it to target, segment and nurture candidates, as well as employers more effectively. When a keynote speaker at a marketing seminar recommended the HubSpot Marketing Platform, Peter was intrigued.
“We did our research and found that HubSpot had everything we needed, from email marketing to analytics to SEO, all in the one place. Each element worked together, which would allow us to build a progressive profile of our visitors and move them down the funnel quickly and easily. Then, with Sales Hub, our recruitment consultants could save time and have more informed conversations with their prospects.”
The decision, says Peter, was an easy one. Proclinical signed up to become a HubSpot customer, using both Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, in 2013.
Getting Personal With the HubSpot Growth StackPeter got started with the Marketing Hub by creating personas for Proclinical’s different types of visitors.
“We set up two different candidate personas – the first is a person looking for a permanent position, and the second is someone who wants a contract job. On the client side, we have a line manager persona and a HR manager persona, because actually, their roles are very different.”
These personas became the hooks that would drive Proclinical’s content and marketing strategy. Peter set up Blogs to cater to their different interests and used the Social Media tools in Marketing Hub to promote his posts across social media.
“The ability to post to multiple social media accounts at the same time has been beneficial for us. Our recruitment consultants are connected to hundreds of people each on platforms like LinkedIn. By setting up automatic posts to their profiles, rather than just to our followers, we are reaching a massive network of people. We’ve had much success with that – one of the blog posts we shared brought 40,000 visitors to our site in just one month.”
Proclinical set up Landing Pages with Smart Content that adapts to the visitor’s location and stage in the funnel, and it uses Smart CTAs and Smart Forms across its entire website. Contacts are then entered into various Smart Lists, based on their behaviour and characteristics.
“We use the lists to schedule automated Email campaigns, which are much more targeted and personalised than they were before. For example, we’ll address a prospect in Singapore slightly differently to the way we address a UK prospect, and we’ll send them both emails that correspond to their time zones. These little tweaks would take hours to do manually, but with the HubSpot software, we can do it with a couple of clicks.”
Proclinical uses an applicant tracking system, Bullhorn, to store data about potential candidates. It has integrated this with the HubSpot software so that information can be shared between the two systems. This means that the Proclinical now has a full view of every piece of information that it has collected on each prospect, all in the one place.
Big Changes Bring Big Results