Much has been written about the similarities between the marketing funnel that nurtures prospects from awareness to advocacy for your products and consumer brand, and the candidate funnel that nurtures prospective employees from awareness to employment. But when I attended the Influence HR conference in Las Vegas this week, I was reminded about some of the other similarities between marketing and HR.
- Learning Management and Marketing Automation. In the marketing world, marketing automation is all about identifying and segmenting prospects, examining their activity to help determine their needs, and prescribing a path of nurture that will educate them to the point of being able to make a decision about purchasing your products or services. It’s about using technology to mass-customize the available information that you can share with them, and hopefully timing it at the exact moment when that prospect is ready to take the next step. Our learning systems should help us do the same for employees. By segmenting employees and determining what learning they need — based on their job requirements, career plans, and organizational need — and delivering it just-in-time is the blueprint for future success.
- Learning Content Management and Content Marketing. Content marketing is all the rage today — focused on offering buyers information and thought leadership as opposed to just product information. It’s also based on the idea of taking one large piece of content and parsing it out into “just-in-time” information and smaller bites the people can consume as needed. Learning content management helps organizations do the same thing with their learning: taking traditional online or ILT programs and repurposing pieces and parts of the content to deliver in multiple formats and digestible chunks for specific learner segments.
- Sourcing and Personas. As marketers try to figure out the strategy for their content marketing and marketing automation nurture processes, they often do work to identify their buyer personas. Who are their most profitable buyers? Under what conditions do people buy? What influences these buyers? Where do they look for information? This work is incredibly important when it comes to sourcing and hiring great talent too. Organizations need to know who their successful candidates would be, where they look for information, who influences them. And like marketers, recruiters must tailor their sourcing to find these candidates where they live and deliver messages in ways that are meaningful to them.
- It’s all about them. One of the key themes that came out of all the presentations at Influence HR was that as marketers, it has to be all about them – your customers. When it comes to hiring, retaining and developing great talent, it’s all about them as well – your employees and candidates. Your organization has clear business goals, but it can’t get there without getting both clients and employees on board with your vision, and helping them see what’s in it for them. It’s all about how you solve problems for customers and clients, how you align individual goals and skills with organizational need for employees and candidates
–Mollie Lombardi, VP and Principal Analyst,
Workforce Management Practice, Brandon Hall Group
@mollielombardi
