This is Part one of our guide to content marketing for recruiters and HR folk. What is content marketing, why you should care, and how to build a content marketing strategy that sets you up for success (including 6 top tips to help you decide what to write about). If you’re looking for the best, free online recruitment system, click here to start using Recruiteze!
What is Content Marketing?
You’d have to be going some not to have heard of content marketing, but just in case, here’s a quick definition from the Content Marketing Institute:
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Succinct.
Why Content Marketing?
We’ve written about this before – recruitment and HR is about marketing as much as it’s about sales, and content is an integral part of marketing today.
Not so long ago, outbound marketing ruled the playground but that’s changed completely.
Outbound is all me, me, me – that shouty guy who turns every conversation into a personal anecdote. Marketers collectively realized that people like outbound marketing about as much as they like “that guy”, so they stopped placing such emphasis on it.
Inbound, a term as good as owned by HubSpot, is about giving. It rests on the idea that you can attract people in by offering them something they want – interesting, valuable content.
For recruiters and HR professionals, outbound means spamming potential candidates or clients with an onslaught of cold emails and untargeted LinkedIn messages.
Inbound means sharing relevant information, advice and insight that your network will want to consume. It means building a community, based on adding-value. It means building a reputation as a thought-leader. It means, above all, engaging with your candidates earlier in the lifecycle – long before they’re ever looking for a job.
6 Magnificent Benefits of Content Marketing
A list within a guide, whatever will they think of next…
Inexpensive
Marketing has a habit of getting expensive, quickly. Not so with content marketing. It’s one of the least expensive forms of marketing there is, and it’s
13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI. More results, less marketing spend – it’s an obvious choice.
Easy
Most types of marketing require specialist skills, tools, experience – that isn’t necessarily the case with content marketing. With a bit of practice, anyone can get good at it, whether a junior recruiter or a senior HR professional.
Increases Visibility
The more content you share, the more visible you are to your target audience, whether clients or candidates. You know what they say – out of sight out of mind. Content marketing means you need never be out of sight.
Increases Credibility
The more serious older sister of visibility, credibility is a critical part of building your employer or recruiter brand. Content marketing allows you to cultivate a reputation as a thought-leader within your industry, so candidates/clients will be more likely to work with you.
Builds Trust
Credibility and trust come hand in hand. Creating valuable and useful content means giving rather than taking, adding value rather than acting out of self-interest. This build trusts, and trust is the platform for a thriving relationship.
Targets Passive Candidates
Content marketing allows you to capture candidates or clients earlier in the conversion funnel, which increases your chances of conversion.
Previously, a candidate might only come across a recruiter if they’re actively looking for a job, typing a search term such as “tech recruiter in San Fran” into Google. If you’re creating content, you can target candidates earlier, while they’re still passive – maybe a term like “hate my boss”, for example.
Get on your candidates/client’s radar earlier and you have more chance of them choosing you when they do come to the decision making stage.
Convinced? Here’s the first step.
Building a Content Strategy
Before you can effectively start ‘doing’ content marketing, you need a content strategy. If you skip this step, you’ll struggle to keep your efforts on track, and you’ll be less able to generate tangible ROI.
These are the decisions you’ll need to make.
– Curation vs. Creation –
This is a pretty critical stage: what are you actually going to post? Your content marketing strategy shouldn’t just rely on content from you. Rallyverse explain why:
1) Because you don’t want to talk about yourself all day.
(It’s boring and self-absorbed).
2) Because you may not have enough owned content.
(It can be tough to create).
The first of those is less relevant – if you’re doing content marketing properly it really shouldn’t be focussed on you. Think tips and tricks, interviews, guides, lists, how-to’s, walk-through videos – anything that adds value to your audience.
As Kevan Lee from Buffer notes, “Self-promotion can be a good thing if your content is outstandingly useful and always adds value”.
The second is a limitation most companies will experience – creating content takes time. It takes internal resources. It takes someone to write it, and the money to pay them, and all of those things.
There are brands out there who only share their own content – Buffer is one – but they’ll openly admit that it takes deep pockets. Instead, it’s probably more relevant to share a mix of your own content (content creation) and content from others (content curation).