Grow Your PEO Company: 10 Proven Tactics to Help You

Stand Out, Generate Leads, and Grow Your Business

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Do your prospects know how your PEO company is di�erent from the 900+ PEOs operating in the US? Do your prospects even know what PEO stands for?

PEO companies face the dual-marketing challenge of a hyper-competitive industry plus relatively low levels of general knowledge about what a PEO does. The top 15 PEO companies control 75% of the total gross market, and they are not going anywhere soon. That means you are competing with around 890 PEOs for the remaining 25% of the market.

Luckily for you, there are a series of tactics and strategies that can distinguish your PEO from the competition while attracting new prospects.

In the following pages, we will dig into each of these tactics and what you need to do to stand out, generate leads and grow your business.

The top 15 PEO companies control 75% of the total gross market.

1. Become the Sensei through Educational Content

2. Meet the Needs of Your Buyer's Journey

3. Create Touchpoints Across Channels

4. Find and Reduce Unnecessary "Friction Points"

5. Create Top-of-Mind Awareness (TOMA)

6. Use Your Customer's Language

7. Niche Down to Find Your Market

8. Raise Evangelists; Get Referrals

9. Land and Expand

10. Get "Inspired" By Your Competition

10 Proven Tactics to Grow Your PEO:

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1. Become the Sensei through Educational Content Business owners and executives are largely at the mercy of the PEO they hire. If the PEO is full of incompetent workers, the blowback could endanger employee retention, the decision-making executive’s job, and even the company’s financial future. At the same time, you need to answer questions and uncertainties before your prospects will feel comfortable signing up with your PEO.

If your company provides everything a prospect needs to educate themselves on choosing a PEO, then your company becomes the prospect’s "expert source." When asked about an issue, the prospect will go to your website, not Wikipedia or Quora, to get an answer.

Besides raising top-of-mind awareness (see #5), this gives you a significant edge over the competition. If your content demonstrates expertise, empathy, and problem-solving abilities, then your prospects will start to trust you before you even know they exist. If your prospect is tasked with finding a PEO, why would they compare random options when their "sensei" provides all those services?

When your website is the basis for a prospect's understanding of PEOs, then your PEO is the one that prospect will innately trust. If your pricing and value is competitive with other PEO options in the market, it will be a no-brainer for your prospect to choose your company over the competition.

• Case studies

• Video case studies

• Explainer materials that answer simple questions like, "What is a PEO?" and "What are the Benefits?

• Infographics

• Blog posts for every stage of the buyer's journey

• Educational eBooks

• Interactive content such as checklists or calculators

• Sales email templates

THE KIND OF CONTENT EVERY PEO NEEDS INCLUDES:

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2. Meet the Needs of Your Buyer's JourneyA prospect who is just learning about PEOs may not be in a position to decide that their company needs a PEO. Immediately asking this prospect to schedule an appointment will fail because the prospect is not yet ready to purchase.

Similarly, when a prospect is ready to sign up with a PEO, it would be a waste to o�er the prospect more introductory material rather than scheduling an appointment.

Di�erent types of content attract prospects at various stages of the buyer's journey. Your job is to map your content onto your buyer's journey to fill in the gaps. If you only create introductory material, then your prospects will go elsewhere when they are ready to commit. If you only create conversion-oriented material, then buyers who are early in their journey will have no reason to visit your website.

Mapping your content to your buyer's journey ensures that you have the material to move a prospect from the beginning to the end of their journey.

Consideration Stage

AwarenessStage

DecisionStage

THE BUYER’S JOURNEY

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3. Create Touchpoints Across ChannelsA touchpoint refers to any interaction between your business and a prospect. These interactions encapsulate everything from seeing advertisements to reading a blog, getting an email, reading a review, connecting on social media, meeting in person, or just seeing a billboard.

It takes an average of 6 touchpoints (minimum) to generate a conversion.

A study by Oracle found that it takes an average of six touchpoints (minimum) to generate a conversion. 50% of sales required more than four touchpoints. Visiting your website from a Google search is one touchpoint. Watching a video in a Facebook ad could be another. Where are the rest?

You do not control how prospects interact with your touchpoints. The only thing you control is the location and nature of those touchpoints.

That is why it is essential to have multiple touchpoints across channels. If your only touchpoints are your website, sales emails, and Google ads, then you might miss opportunities to connect with prospects who are coming across your competition on other channels.

Touchpoints, such as blog posts, should also be mapped to the buyer's journey. Never expect your buyer to jump to an unfamiliar channel for the sheer pleasure of continuing the journey.

Instead, you must ensure that your prospect's physical and digital environment contains enough touchpoints to allow them to move through this process.

50% of salesrequired more thanfour touchpoints.

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4. Find and Reduce Unnecessary "Friction Points"Friction in marketing occurs when some obstacle appears between the prospect and an action the prospect wishes to take. Gated premium content may ask for an email in exchange for useful information. The user's goal is to get that information as quickly and as easily as possible. In order to accomplish this, the user must surpass the obstacle of "filling out the email lead form."

Eliminating all friction would be the wrong move since gaining email addresses is the goal behind creating the gated lead magnet. Having fewer items to fill out reduces friction. Asking the user to enter their name, email, phone number, address, and favorite color results in more friction than just asking for their name and email. More users will complete the low-friction lead magnet o�er compared to the high-friction o�er.

Some friction is necessary because your company has goals that do not 100% align with the motivations of the user. The user's goal is to get information. The company's goal is to get the user’s email address. Unnecessary friction does nothing except lower your conversion rates.

Make processes as easy as possible for your users. If you want users to call a phone number listed on your website, you can reduce friction by making the phone number "clickable." Otherwise, the user has to re-enter the numbers on their phone, which creates an unnecessary obstacle.

If your call-to-action (CTA) button is not easily visible, then it will take more time and e�ort for users to find the button. If the button is easily visible, less friction exists for a user who wants to push the button.

Reducing friction is the foundation of good conversion rate optimization (CRO) as well as good user experience design (U/X).

Some friction is necessary because your company has goals that do not 100% align with

the motivations of the user.

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5. Create Top-of-Mind Awareness (TOMA)If Nike and Taco Bell are such well-known brands, why do they keep running brand-awareness advertisements? It's because they know the secret to consumer spending habits. Consider a decision such as buying a car. Buyers choose from an endless array of brands. So, how do they choose?

A 2018 Nielson Study found that 90% of purchasing intent was driven by prospects recalling a brand without any external stimulus. That is, they had "unaided brand awareness." Customers with unaided brand awareness have ten times the purchase intent as those who are reminded of a brand through an external stimulus (aided brand awareness).

Unaided brand awareness occurs because a brand has reached top-of-mind awareness (TOMA). That is why even the largest corporations will spend money on achieving and holding top of mind awareness.

It’s unlikely that your PEO has funds required to have your brand placed in a movie or on a stadium. However, creating TOMA means meeting your prospects where they spend time. This could be as simple as chamber of commerce networking events, business conferences, or trade shows. But you’re not limited to physical places or events to create TOMA. TOMA can be created via digital experiences as well. Do you know where your prospects spend their time online? Do they visit LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? Having this insight will allow you to properly position and promote your brand online. This can be done through regularly posting relevant stories, buying ads, or a combination of both.

One way to create TOMA is to attach your brand to something familiar. For instance, Miller beer has cemented its brand in the minds of many Milwaukee baseball fans by adding their name to the stadium (Miller Park).

Product placement in films is a multi-billion dollar business in large part because seeing a brand helps its unaided brand awareness. Even if viewers don't actively notice a product placement, the association between the film and product will stick in their minds.

90% of purchasing intent was driven by prospects recalling a brand without any external stimulus.

6. Use Your Customer's LanguageIn lesser-known industries, like the PEO industry, it is especially important to not confuse prospects with industry jargon. "Professional Employer Organization" itself borders on being jargon due to the fact that most people outside of the industry aren't familiar with this term, or what exactly it means. Brand new prospects are looking for "how to spend less time doing HR paperwork" and not "how to hire a PEO to reduce administrative burden."

Unless your prospects have previously heard about PEOs, prospects may only know that they have a certain set of problems that could be solved via outsourcing or freelancers.

The advice "don't use jargon" is equally useful across industries, but the advice becomes essential in industries where the terminology is largely unknown or misunderstood.

7. Niche Down to Find Your MarketA common but understandable mistake is to try and corner the entire market for PEOs. However, you risk trying to be "everything to everyone," which detracts from how your PEO is di�erent.

Instead, look to the specialties your organization already possesses. It can help to write a list of what capabilities you have to di�erentiate yourself.

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These answers may or may not provide hints as to which subset of the market you can corner.

When you "niche down" to focus on prospects similar to those you are especially successful with, you instantly raise the chances of converting leads. That lowers the cost of gaining a lead as well as the cost of ultimately acquiring a new customer.

Segmenting prospects like this can also help raise relevance scores and similar advertising indices that represent quality. Search engines and social media properties reward these kinds of advertisements by lowering the costs of advertising even more.

Some questions to ask are:

• Do you have experience working with a subset of clients in a particular industry or niche?

• Do you o�er (or could you o�er) services which are unique even if they only apply to a subset of your market?

• Have you noticed your PEO attracts a particular kind of client?

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8. Raise Evangelists; Get ReferralsWord-of-mouth impressions result in 5x more sales than depending solely on paid social promotions. No wonder 64% of marketing executives believe it is the most e�ective form of marketing.

Your existing client base represents a key resource in word-of-mouth marketing. If you have niched down appropriately (see #7), then your clients are likely in similar industries or at least know individuals in similar industries. When CEOs are bragging to each other at trade shows about their progress, eyebrows will certainly raise if one of your clients rattles o� the savings in time and money that you provided.

The sloppy way to do this is to o�er mediocre service with a discount if an existing client brings you more business. While o�ering incentives is fine, your service should be so superior that your clients cannot help but rant to everyone in earshot about how great your company is.

Word-of-mouth marketing is trusted because people put their reputation on the line when they promote a product or service. Another way to increase referrals is to ensure you are actually asking for them. This can be done with strategic communication and the use of automation. Create sales plays that your team can follow to engage clients and ask for referrals. A sales play is a prescribed sequence of events and tasks that your team executes over several days or weeks to achieve a desired result. Sales plays may include email templates, call guides, voice mail scripts, and custom content with specific calls-to-action. Leveraging CRM and marketing automation tools can instill discipline into the process and ensure that the steps in your referral generation program are skipped and you achieve the results you’re looking for.

If your services aren't great enough for your client to put his or her reputation on the line, then discounts will never be enough to bring high-quality word-of-mouth recommendations. This is why regular customer engagement surveys and NPS scores are an important tactic to measuring your reputation with your existing clients.

You don't just want clients to be satisfied; you want them to become full-fledged evangelists for PEOs (specifically, for your PEO).

64% of marketing executives believe word-of-mouth impressions are the most e�ective form of marketing.

9. Land and ExpandThis strategy, while usually used by Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, is very applicable to the PEO industry.

As trust builds, the client will start to become more comfortable trusting your PEO. That is why it is so important to ask both "what services can we sell the prospect now" as well as "what services could we sell the prospect if we had a long-term, trusting relationship?"

10. Get "Inspired" By Your CompetitionThere is no need to reinvent the wheel. As previously mentioned, 15 giants currently corner 75% of the PEO market. These giants are perfect for studying what works and what doesn't work. It will also help you realize where you have gaps in your buyer's journey and how to fill them.

Companies willing to invest in the right software and tools can go a step further and reverse-engineer where competitors are getting tra�c from, which articles trend the best on social media, and what content rises to the top of Google searches.

There is no point in stealing ideas from your competition. Beyond being unethical, copying your competition is a waste of time. At best, you will match their performance. The goal is to be "inspired" to create assets that will surpass whatever your competition currently provides. Your content must provide unique value that cannot be found on any competitor website.

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The "Land and Expand" strategy is to start your client relationship with a relatively small service or product. In the case of PEOs, it could be as simple as o�ering guidance or streamlining a particular HR process.

With these 10 tactics, your PEO can di�erentiate itself from the competition, target prospects at low costs, get a consistent string of referrals, gain top of mind awareness, become a trusted expert, map your touchpoints and content to your buyer's journey, and optimize your website to reduce friction and increase conversions.

These skills take time and e�ort to master, but they are the key drivers of growth for businesses fighting over the remaining prospects.

To learn more about what proven tactics we use at LeadG2 to help PEO and HR Outsourcing

companies get real results, contact us to set up a complimentary consultation.

C O N TA C T U S

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