ecruit - the background
A young entrepreneur, Ben de Grouchy, came to Huble Digital for assistance with planning and building his new business venture: ecruit. Ben was running a recruitment and search consultancy and knew that his business venture would be supported by a new online presence that would build his new brand from scratch.
ecruit was conceived as a low-cost fixed fee recruitment provider that specialised in sales recruitment. The Huble Digital used a Growth-Driven Design (GDD) process to rapidly brand and launch the ecruit.co.uk website into the enormously crowded UK recruitment marketplace, based around a HubSpot CMS developed website, HubSpot Marketing Automation, and Sales Enablement. Due to ecruit’s rapid success in the sales vertical, Ben quickly started to expand the business into the IT, marketing and office & secretarial industries, based around his GDD development plans.
What was the challenge?
Despite having no technical background, Ben knew that for ecruit to succeed, it needed a website and an applicant tracking system integrated into it. A website, along with the integration of the applicant tracking system, would allow his brand-new, fast-growing business to generate interest, leads and grow.
Also, ecruit’s website needed to be search engine optimised, as well as include high-quality content, lead capture functionalities, and user-orientated features (including a job board integration) to drive lead generation, improve the user experience (UX), and facilitate lead data capture.
Needing support developing a search engine optimised, lead-generating and prospect-orientated website, ecruit approached The Huble Digital team and requested assistance with website build, development and optimisation. Ecruit wanted a specialist growth marketing consultancy that would be able to build a lead generating website as quickly as possible, as well as increase ecruit’s visibility online.
Why engage with Huble Digital?
Huble Digital was engaged with ecruit from the outset - and advised them on how best to build the website and develop it in order to support the business. To quickly build ecruit’s website, Huble Digital worked with them to define a GDD website build strategy that allowed them to start with a minimum viable product (MVP) website (the most strategically effective website to launch within the shortest possible period of time) and build out the website on an ongoing basis.
In addition to this, Huble Digital had to quickly build (from scratch) a clean, clear and smart-looking website that was fully search engine optimised (SEO) and could rapidly draw in visitors, with SEO playing a key part in building brand presence and brand awareness.
Website Development with Growth-Driven Design
Appreciating the fact that ecruit was a fast-growing business, the Huble Digital team worked to devise a timeline plan that would deliver a new, lead-generating ecruit website within three months using GDD and acted as an extension of ecruit’s marketing team. The Huble Digital team also deployed a full-service Inbound Marketing plan, starting with the design of the ecruit logo and brand identity – both of which would be replicated across the website.
Following this, the Huble team conducted keyword research and then built a search engine optimised sitemap that reflected the structure of the website and its navigation. The sitemap was designed in such a way that allowed prospects arriving on the website to immediately find the solution they were looking for. Each page on the sitemap was optimised for a specific keyword term relevant to the industry sectors ecruit operated in, ensuring those pages targeted the right audiences.
Please see below the website's 'go live' sitemap. We have removed all inclusion of specific keyword and website URLs which would usually be included within each box.
With the sitemap created and optimised, the Huble Digital team then adapted ecruit’s chosen website templates and went ahead with the website creation. In this process, keyword optimised website copy was drafted and inserted into the website.
Huble Digital also agreed to build an additional ten pages per quarter, further expanding ecruit’s website and allowing them to target additional industries and facilitate the addition of new service offerings. These pages were added as and when they were needed and Huble Digital advised on how to achieve best results through the new pages.
Content creation and lead nurturing
To help drive traffic to the website and nurture leads, the Huble Digital team implemented a content strategy, starting with a clear definition of the key buyer personas and then creating top, middle and bottom-of-the-funnel content to match with their pain points.
Huble Digital recommended ecruit build a simple, easy-to-understand two-minute explainer video. As ecruit’s service offering was a relatively new concept, it was important for the prospect arriving on the website that they could quickly understand ecruit’s proposition. Huble Digital helped ecruit to find the right supplier capable of creating such video and advised on simplicity and understanding of the video.
After the creation of the explainer video, Huble Digital started with top-of-the-funnel content focusing on the pain points for employers to help generate awareness and interest in ecruit and promoted the content on social channels to maximise reach.
Middle-of-the-funnel content assets were created as well. Huble Digital created new eBooks to drive lead generation, targeting employer pain points and positioning ecruit’s service offering as the solution. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, demos were included allowing interested parties to see ecruit’s service in action.
With a full content and lead nurture strategy in place, along with lead capture on the website, Huble Digital was able to put ecruit in a position where it could drive lead generation activity through content and attract interested parties.
To help bolster ecruit’s presence online, Huble Digital built ecruit’s social media following and activity through the regular promotion of its own content and sharing of other relevant content. As such, ecruit’s presence online has grown and is quickly becoming a thought leader in the space.
Finally, because ecruit was a brand-new start-up, to generate additional traffic, improve its online profile and maximise lead generation, further outreach was supported through Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC).
What happened?
Increase in website traffic and improved ranking on SERPs
The addition of high-quality content to the website and the optimisation of web pages for specific keyword terms has helped to increase website traffic, improve ranking on SERPs and drive interested parties to the website.
Business growth as a result of the activity
The success of the programme has meant that the ecruit website has expanded rapidly to include a series of additional vertical markets, rather than just ecruit sales - for which the programme was originally conceived.
Ben de Grouchy states:
"The Huble Digital have been absolutely key to our growth, and creating a presence for us online. We've gone from zero in April, and are now at a point now where we're generating a large amount of website traffic via a number of different routes - this traffic is also converting into qualified leads on a monthly basis.
Since June 2017, we've had six large customers come purely through the HubSpot and content marketing route. One of these customers has bought from us three times, and another twice. Our content and Inbound Marketing system is helping us find leads who are turning into repeat customers."
A steady stream of leads coming through HubSpot
With a content and lead nurture strategy in place, allowing ecruit to attract, convert and close customers, ecruit is now generating a steady stream of leads through Inbound Marketing and HubSpot. Furthermore, with the value of content apparent, ecruit has now brought some of that content creation in-house and enlisted a permanent member to manage HubSpot activity.
As a result of the Huble Digital team’s support and the success of the programme, ecruit is now in a strong position where it is utilising Inbound Marketing effectively. The website is able to attract, convert and close visitors, and content routinely drives traffic to the website, helping the business’ lead generation, customer acquisition, and client engagement.
