10 Ways to Increase Revenue Without a Marketing Dept

If you’re a recruitment startup operating in a business-to-business market, your sales challenges are different from those of companies that sell simple services or products to a wide range of shoppers. 

Your money should go to finding high-value clients and perfecting your candidate selection process.

But how to reel in new business and increase revenue without a marketing department? Here are a few ideas.

Automate recruitment marketing

With the pressure to attract and hire the right talent faster, you need a strategy for successful talent acquisition. Unfortunately, with most companies, it’s part of the marketing budget and is rarely considered a separate competency. 

But recruitment marketing can also increase your customer base. 

In the olden days, businesses used to place job listings in the weekend edition of local newspaper’s classified ads, hoping to see a stack of resumes on Tuesday.

Today, labor markets are divided and segmented. Job boards are specialized and even with the huge popularity of social media, no individual platform can reach all demographics of the labor pools. 

To get the attention of such a diverse audience, recruitment reps need all the technology and resources to spread your message to as many people as possible. 

This often leaves little room for marketing expenses. But how to reach out to companies that have open job positions?

Recruiters use emails, social media, text messages, videos, and print ads. 

And these are all effective ways of sharing information with other people, but there's no realistic or affordable way to apply them all without technology or automation.

Or is it?

Our Recruitment Proposal pretty much has it all – a beautifully designed cover, pre-written service section, and a case study example – all with editable text, images, colors, and layouts.

From there, your client can see what your recruitment fees include, and even digitally sign and pay from within the proposal. 

The whole process can be over within minutes. 

Using our recruitment proposal template, our recruitment customers managed to win over $38,000,000 of business in 2021 – effectively extending their reach and revenue without a marketing department.

Focus on customer retention

it costs 5 to 6 times more to attract new customers than to try and retain the existing subscribers. 

And to try and retain means to do something. There are two things you can do – switch barriers or try relationship marketing. 

• Switching barriers: You are creating a sense of familiarity with your business and discouraging customers from going to your competitors. The idea is to offer a personalized experience – of the product, service, ordering, delivery, etc OR to make your product an integral part of your client’s operations so it becomes more difficult for them to switch brands. 

• Relationship marketing: Using these tactics, you increase the degree of loyalty customers have towards your business. To this end, you can create an Account Management plan for major accounts, reward clients for years of patronage, or give them special attention on key dates such as birthdays or milestones with the help of customer loyalty software.

Find ways to cross-sell

It must’ve happened to you a million times: 

Case #1 You go into a fashion store to buy a pair of jeans, and the shop staff says “We have polos that would look great with raw denim.” 

Case #2 You happen to go to a bank in person. When you complete the transaction, the teller may ask “Have you heard about our best insurance offer?”

In both cases you probably said something like “Thank you, I’m not interested.”

Both the shop assistant and the teller are trying to cross-sell their products or services. Yet they fail because they don’t genuinely understand your needs. 

The teller knows nothing about your situation and is simply trying to push insurance packages. The shop assistant doesn’t know why you’re buying jeans in the first place. Why? Because they haven’t asked. 

In a B2B sales context, you win at cross-selling when you are selective in how you promote your other product and services to existing customers. Your customers want you to understand their needs, so you can recommend the best option for them. 

So the first step is to gain an understanding of their situation, problems, and goals. Then you offer suggestions on how they can improve their outcome by using your other products or services. This cross-selling strategy must become an integral part of your process.

Re-structure your pages

If you’re not investing extra cash to bring more people to your website, you need to make the most of the people currently visiting. In other words, if you don’t want to splurge on marketing, you need to improve your conversion rates. The average conversion rate across industries is 2-3%, but some of the best websites have conversion rates up to 11%.

So how can you increase conversion rates? You can try BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model, which aims to increase the visitor’s motivation to complete a task while making the process as smooth as possible.

If you do this effectively and include effective triggers, you can influence the behavior you want in your users. 

Keep in mind that this is not a magic potion. Increasing overall conversion is a process that requires many adjustments throughout the buyer’s journey. 

On a higher level, you can start mapping out your customer’s journey and evaluating the channels you use and their conversion rates. This will allow you to find gaps in where and how you interact with customers – empowering their Ability.  

On an operational level, you should implement some of the best landing page design practices – influencing Motivation. 

Identify high-value customers

There’s no nice way to put this but, some clients are worth more than others. It’s your job to assess which clients bring you more revenue. And it’s not always just about money. Identify the characteristics that make a client valuable to you. Look into the sales records, previous client data, and other sources to determine your ideal client profile. 

When you define the high-value customer segment, you can direct your efforts to retain them.

Think about:

• The type of solution or service they are buying from you.
• The nature of their “issue”.
• The type of their business – industry or size.
• Their knowledge of your product or service.
• The profitability of selling and maintaining the client

Focus on your “A” category prospects, but don’t forget the lower value prospect either. Today’s “C” category prospects may evolve into “A” category clients tomorrow. This is why you need to have a nurturing process in place for them that doesn’t distract you from working closely with “A” category prospects. 

Target your high-value prospect with personalized benefit messages and suitable sales and marketing activities that are suitable for them.

Adopt smart email automation

Email marketing is such a popular channel for generating sales because the aggregate ROI from it is between 37-42 times on average. In other words, for every $1 you invest in email marketing, you can hope for $42 in profits. 

For 81% of SMBs, email marketing is a primary customer acquisition channel. 

Email automation, for example, is a great way to acquire and retain customers. This includes “welcome emails” that are sent automatically when someone becomes a user. The average open rate for these is as high as 86%, says GetResponse. Such emails are also a great engagement driver, as their click-through rates are roughly 25%. 

Email marketing might look scary and complicated if you’ve never done it. Trust me, it’s not as hard as it seems – even the entry-level has become much easier with the release of the best email analytics tools such as MailChimp. This tool allows you to manage a mailing list of up to 2000 contacts completely for free. Generate an email automation sequence and set sales on autopilot. 

Understanding the buyer’s journey and user activation go hand-in-hand with email automation as they will tell you which emails you need to create in which sequence. For example, before buying your product, the customer must see value in it. So in this email sequence, our goal is to show the product at work. 

In a customer-retention role, emails are a great channel for offers, deals, and updates – the things that keep loyal customers in your brand universe.

Improve digital content and online access

The internet has been around for quite a while, but it’s often underutilized. Yet the internet doesn’t go home, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get caught up on phone calls, never gets sick, and never goes out for lunch. 

With the correct design and appropriate digital tools, you can significantly improve customer service, attract more clients, and increase client retention. 

A study by Gartner Inc. found that 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will take place in digital channels by 2025.

The preference to access information and service online grows stronger as more Millennials move into decision-making positions.

Your website is a vast resource for generating qualified leads. It’s the ultimate sales rep that you can use to explain your process and reassure prospects of your ability to solve their problems.

By offering a structured contact process, you can help prospects qualify themselves so you minimize spending time on low-value inquiries. 

However, always respond promptly to any inquiries generated via your website or social media activities. Prospects and existing clients will judge the quality and reliability of your company by how you respond to their requests. 

Businesses that respond most quickly to online inquiries have a much higher closure rate from those inquiries than those who delay their initial responses.

Capitalize on YouTube Shorts

Video content has exploded in recent years, and YouTube is the 2nd most visited website and social platform in the world. 

So how does your business fit in there?

Video sharing platforms are perfect for boosting sales and you don’t have to spend tons on marketing or ads. 

One of the best YouTube features you can use to gain exposure is YouTube Shorts. Similar to Instagram Reels and Tik Tok, YouTube Shorts easily get millions of views and they get shared like crazy. 

In this way, you can repurpose content from different social media channels to fit your content. In other words, you don’t have to invest more money to always produce something new for each channel.

Then you can go a step further and create video content together with blog content as well. YouTube is also the world’s second-biggest search engine, so you can expect millions of people to search for information as they do on Google.

Together with your blog content, your YouTube Shorts content can create a positive customer feedback loop, where each channel helps the other grow. For example, for each blog post, you can create an embedded video that presents the same content but in video format. 

Your SEO blog content can get a higher odds of ranking this way because it contains a featured video. In the same way, your YouTube channel can grow both organically, but also with the help of people who discover it through your blog. To better analyze and optimize your YouTube performance, you can use a YouTube report template for comprehensive insights and improvement.

Write a PR story that gets media exposure

Having unique and relevant content is essential for your public relations. There are many ways to get exposure without having a marketing department. Here are the three ways to do it that do even for startups:

• Newsjacking: This strategy is very effective for piggybacking national news stories. The idea is that you find popular stories relevant to your business and add an angle to them with some valuable insights. 

For example, a story about a fast-food restaurant giant replacing styrofoam packaging with recyclable cardboard is perfect for a company that operates a recycling facility. The company can then follow up with a unique spin, such as research or survey. For example, by highlighting how many people actively recycle at work and home, etc. 

The beauty of this strategy is that businesses of all sizes and industries can benefit from it. Newsjacking is an easy way to establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche.

• Help A Reporter Out: HARO is a platform that allows reporters to get in touch with business leaders for valuable insights, precisely when they need them the most. When you register as a source, the tool sends out daily queries from reporters who are looking for credible sources to contribute with original thoughts and content. 

Since journalists are already looking for sources, your pitches have a much better approval rate than cold pitches. So instead of spending time reaching out to journalists, their queries motivate you to produce high-quality material. In return, you get a PR boost. 

• Exclusivity: Just as you want your company to stand out among the industry buzz, journalists want to offer unique insights into relevant, trending subjects. A survey shows that 75% of journalists are more likely to cover an exclusive story than repurpose an old one. 

In other words, you need to offer an exclusive. An exclusive story increases your odds with the journalists because the story is more attractive for them to cover.

Generate leads through guest appearances

About 81% of consumers trust products recommended by the people they know. When you appear as a guest on other platforms, it can increase your traffic in the short term. It also creates a long-lasting branding effect, as you get to build trust with more of your prospects. 

What is more, by featuring in relevant media outlets, where you offer helpful content, you establish yourself as an authority in your industry. And build trust among your target audience.  

A great thing about this strategy is that it’s very broad and it allows you to think creatively. It works well for B2B and B2C and you can get guest appearances in these four ways:

• Using your existing network. Even if you’re just starting, chances are you know someone who can help you in your first media exposure. 

• Using your location, experience, background, and origin story. Start with media publishers and content producers who live in the same place and share the same experiences or background. 

• Build on previous results. If you have no previous record of being featured, you can start with small media to gain some experience until you’re ready for bigger outlets. 

• Create unique content. The best shot is with unique content that features data and statistics relevant to your audience and is worth talking about.

Wrapping up

In a world dominated by marketing campaigns and strategies, it’s hard to stay on the surface without a dedicated marketing department. However, if you trust your product and workflows, there is a way to grow by letting your expertise speak for you. 

The other part of the equation is technology. By automating your process, you can create more proposals and personalize every one of them for the best chance to land a job.

We can help you a lot in this department. Sign-up for a free 14-day trial and join the thousands of businesses we helped increase their revenue.