Success Story – HR Service Partner

Content is King, distribution is Queen!

With the help of Smart Profile’s services, one of the world’s largest HR service partners continuously improves its outreach to the right contacts in the right companies.

Human Resources services have evolved significantly in the last years. HR professionals use more and more cloud-based software and expertise to leverage the full potential of employees. Talent, excasso, payroll and compliance are critical concepts in this evolution. Eugene Commandeur is responsible for Digital Performance EMEA, a key player in the HR services industry. “We think about HR in terms of Human Capital Management: making the added value of people tangible. HR thus becomes a business partner in its own right inside the organisation. From hire to retire.”

The Commercial Enablement Manager adds: “The HR professional is the primary target, but other decision makers, like the CIO (Cloud), the CFO (budget), the CTO and the CEO are increasingly important in the decision-making process. To do business with these target audiences, you must reach out first and demonstrate your value as a discussion partner, a party that can help solve the customer’s problems. In this respect, good content is just as essential as the correct contact data. Smart Profile ensures we can always e-mail the right persons with the right information.”

‘Always be Helping’

“In the first phase, the discovery, the digital strategy is essentially digital teaching. We describe in our content a potential problem for the customer. We want to help HR professionals get better at their job every day. With that objective, we offer a lot of targeted information downloadable from our website. As such, the website is the hub. That is where the action happens, and we will need to do the first conversion: from an unknown visitor to a known individual. To drive customers to that specific download, we use very targeted e-mails. And with more than 12,000 downloads a year, we are very successful in that.”

Connecting to Marketing Automation

“We decided to bet on a digital content strategy. All traffic should lead to our website because we can track what happens and who does what. After taking the digital plunge, we migrated to a new website, a new branding and a live connection to the Eloqua Marketing Automation system. Visitors are now instantly recognised when they visit the site, and depending on what they have already done and downloaded, and they are offered tailor-made content. Due to the nurturing efforts, they are advancing through the funnel up to the first contact/touch points.”

“To run this process as efficiently as possible, with the maximum impact of the available budget, it is essential that contacts who enter your site and who go through the process of getting acquainted have the highest possible level of quality. After all, you want to get to know the people who visit your site, and the basis for that is a good e-mail address. When you have the correct contact data, including the relationships individuals have inside an organisation, and the consent to use these data, you can start designing profiles and relationships.”

“It all starts with content. No content is no download. Content is king, but distribution is queen.”

‘Content is king, but reaching the right contacts is just as important. Without solid content you can’t do anything, but if your content doesn’t reach the right target audience, even the best content is worthless.’

New contacts

“In working with Smart Profile for our e-mail programs, we have been able to shift our focus to the larger organisations where we weren’t present before”, the Commercial Enablement Manager says. “The content is now better tailored to those audiences, and we see in our numbers that the average order size has increased. We had to have excellent data and a good system to drive that shift to reach those new contacts. Smart Profile helps us with that. They have the database, totally GDPR compliant, with the right contacts and the ability to reach out to them. Including the additional information and data about, e.g. the hierarchical relationships within organisations and the composition of the Decision-Making Unit (DMU).”

The Digital Performance EMEA lead says: “That is where the power of Smart Profile lies: they help us to get the right content to the right people in an early stage, without the need for us to run an extensive telemarketing apparatus to keep all that data complete and up to date.”

Visibility of the addressable market

“We have online access to the Smart Profile database and can send e-mails straight from the portal. Both Marketing and Sales have access to the data. A good collaboration between Sales and Marketing to me is essential for the success of a program like ours. Thanks to Smart Profile we are also less dependent on the input from Sales. The Sales teams cannot always keep contact information up to date. Smart Profile is a significant help for us to do e-mail shots with very targeted marketing and messaging. We have great visibility on our addressable market now—the right individual with the right message. As we start from a highly qualitative file, we can be sure that everybody who reacts is a part of the potential market. That saves a lot of work and frustration in Sales. Next, we can work with the information on that customer in our systems.”

“The collaboration with Smart Profile enables us to reach out faster and more effectively and makes our commercial efforts extremely efficient and effective.”