Our website is vital for consultants’ marketing for many reasons – it demonstrates how we work, what face2faceHR is all about, our approach to HR, clarifies what clients we work with and gives useful information about our products and services. It also gives a certain amount of credibility and established presence which is especially useful for consultants who are just starting out, and generates leads and visitors through regular topical articles.
One of the specific areas we help our consultants through our website is the technical ‘back-end’ bit, and I think it’s fair to say they are all pleased this is something they don’t need to think about!
Our business development channel for our partners identifies the key ways potential clients ‘arrive’, and while a large proportion of these are through recommendations and referrals (with our marketing training designed to ensure this happens), there are clients who arrive via the website, either because they’ve performed an internet search for HR support in their particular town or area, or a general search not limited to area.
We obviously want to maximise how many of these reach our consultants, so we do two things. We ensure our ‘main’ website is search-engine optimised so that any potential clients searching for small business HR support have the site appearing in the search. When they contact us centrally we then ‘farm’ the leads out to the appropriate nearest consultant. Because we do this, it means we do get leads coming in from ‘out of area’, and although obviously the ideal client is round the corner, every little helps and as consultants are able to do much of their work remotely, having extra clients coming in through the main website who are not technically within their local area is always a welcome addition to their income.
More importantly, we also perform search engine optimisation on the consultants’ individual pages. We like to achieve a balance of being a wider brand but also having very local, personal presence, so the optimisation is done so that anyone searching for HR support in one of our consultant’s areas will have that consultant’s individual page coming up. That way they immediately get the face of their local consultant and have a more personal connection than if they just landed on the home page.
In addition to search engine optimisation, we also produce reports for our consultants showing the number of visits to their individual page and where those clicks have come from, so they can identify how well their other marketing activities such as social media are working, and tweak these accordingly.
All of this ‘back-end’ activity means the consultants’ marketing is fully supported and maximised, and they can relax and concentrate on those marketing activities which are personal to them, and on working with their clients, which is of course the reason they are in business.
If you’re interested in talking to us about becoming a partner with face2faceHR with bags of support, do get in touch.