Challenge

• As a leading provider of innovative HR and payroll solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses, Paycor has a distinct target audience that is very present and active on LinkedIn. With a specific understanding of who they want to reach, the marketing team sought to drive new demand and convert clients with greater efficiency.
• As Alex Schutte, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing for Paycor, lays out the challenge: “How do we generate demand to an audience that is relevant for us but may not either know the brand, or may not necessarily know that they have a particular pain point that Paycor can solve?”

Solution

• “Our prospects are on LinkedIn. They’re qualified, and in the buying cycle a lot of times,” says Lauren Dennison, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist at Paycor.
• Paycor refined a sophisticated strategy that involves narrowing its targeting scope around job function (higher-level HR and finance professionals) and company size (50 to 750 employees), delivering content that is meaningful and useful to these individuals. Teaming up with agency partner Metric Theory helped bring team depth and efficiencies to LinkedIn efforts.
• Highly aligned content pieces such as compliance-focused assets, and guidance on improving an HR organization or building the ideal HR team, serves to attract interested members, who then turn into leads via Lead Gen Forms.

Results

• Paycor places a major emphasis on down-funnel metrics like lowering cost per lead and improving close rates. Across these measures, the company is crushing benchmarks while driving huge lead volume.
• “LinkedIn helps us grow by delivering consistent high-quality leads into our funnel,” explains Dennison. “Almost 6,000 this year.” While CPLs naturally vary from business to business and campaign to campaign, the Paycor team felt that their rates — running as low as $47 — are well worth the price to reach quality, well-targeted decision makers.

Nearly 6,000 leads added to database in one year (75% net new).

85% year-over-year growth for Paycor on LinkedIn.

Leveraging Lead Gen Forms

• “Lead Gen Forms have become our bread and butter, so we’ve really started optimizing around those,” Dennison says. “It’s so easy for a prospect to go in and actually get our content, because it directly fills in all the info and gets it over to them.”
• Paycor has developed a repeatable process where sales development reps reach out to prospects who fill out the forms and set up first-time appointments with field reps. Integrating LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms with Marketo made it easy to trigger flows like fulfillment emails, lead scoring, and MQLs for smoothly synced sales and nurture follow-up. This has led to a steady and efficient stream of new business and pipeline.

Vigilant oversight

• One key to Paycor’s success is an attentive approach from the marketing team. Dennison notes that they monitor close rate and return on ad spend weekly — if not multiple times per week — to ensure they’re maintaining a high level of quality and satisfactory ROI, making adjustments when warranted.

Zeroing in on what matters

• The Paycor team values LinkedIn highly because it moves the needle for their most important objectives. Dennison advises others on the platform to look past top-of-funnel metrics and rally around the outcomes that matter most to your growth.
• “My biggest piece of advice to advertisers is to make sure you’re optimizing to the objectives and key results that matter most to your business,” she offers. “CPLs and Cost Per Conversion are important metrics but are you also converting to sales appointments and deals? Real success comes when you can optimize your campaigns based on down-funnel metrics, too.”

About Paycor

More than 30,000 medium-sized and small businesses trust Paycor to help them manage their most valuable asset—their people. Paycor is known for delivering modern, intuitive recruiting, HR and payroll solutions, but what makes us legendary is our singular focus on helping business leaders, entrepreneurs and HR professionals make a real difference in their organizations. Paycor’s personalized support and user-friendly, scalable technology streamlines every aspect of people management, giving our clients the peace of mind to focus on what they know best, their business and their mission. Paycor is recommended by today’s most innovative brokers, bankers, and CPAs.

Website - https://www.paycor.com