Today, I want to talk about content. I’ll be sharing with you some ideas and strategies around content marketing.
What is Content Marketing? There are a billion people on the internet telling you content marketing is A, B, C. There’s a lot of good information and there’s a lot of poor information, ironically with people sharing content.
The Recruitment Space
We want to be focusing your content on two key areas. Your content should have an outcome. There’s always “reverse engineer” the steps. What are you looking to achieve? What is the purpose of the content? Is it to be front of mind or is it to actually be part of a funnel. That means you take your prospect through a set of steps and they submit the CV or they have a business inquiry. Can you find an X.Y.Z type of candidate for them? What’s the purpose of the content?
The very first thing is to identify what is the outcome of the content? What are we looking to actually achieve from that piece of content? Secondly, what’s the content itself consisting of? For now, let’s keep it nice and simple. So the content can be any type of content. The description could be a podcast, could be a video, could be text, audio, etc. Let’s focus on the written piece for now.
Content in Your Recruitment Space Should Break Down Into Two Keys Areas
One is what we call authority content (That’s the term we used inside our group).
The second is expert content. Two types of content:
- Authority content positions you as an authority in your niche. Let’s say that I work in business intelligence. My goal is to get business intelligence, data warehouse, project managers, program managers, business owners, to choose me to hire for them. It could be that I want to get positioning with data warehouse developers based in Norway. That’s what it might be.
So how do I do that? What I want to do is demonstrate knowledge inside the authority piece, which is, in this case, the actual topic of data warehouse, or the topic of business intelligence. I need to demonstrate knowledge to become an authority. I want to create content that demonstrates: I understand the channels and the pinpoints in this marketplace. I understand the challenges of business intelligence in business intelligence. The challenge that is facing program managers or the challenges facing data warehouse developers based in Norway.
Authority content demonstrates, “I get you. I get your challenge. I get what’s going on in your world.”
- The second type of content is what we call expert content. Expert content is where we focus on, “Hey, we’re leaders in the marketplace. We can find you the right business developer. We have X amount of clients, we’re looking for a Norwegian business intelligence data warehouse developers. We are the right company to take you forward. We are the right company to represent you.” That’s expert content.
Focusing More On The Authority Piece
Now generally you want to be focusing more on the authority piece. Especially if you are new in the marketplace. With some of our strategies, for example, one of the Maven webinar strategies we use, is all about giving outstanding world-class content. You don’t actually create any of the content, a world class speaker does.
When you create the content, identify “Is it authority content or is it expert content?” That’s the second step.
Now, a lot of people would say “Build it and they will come, “Place it on your blog and you’re going to get all sorts of wonderful things happening”, “Post a blog and you’re going to get hundreds and thousands of companies saying, ‘Can you find me A, B, C?’” No. Read that time and time again.
Build a blog and you’re out there and you will get lost in business. Now, this does happen to the 1 in 10,000 or 100,000 people but typically they’re actually doing strategies on the back end that link the blog up to another website that brings incoming traffic. So you must have your content strategies part of an integrated strategy. That’s the third step.
“That sounds like a complex area” – it’s not really. You want to be using an automated strategy to post your content where your prospects are. Let’s say your focus is working with change management specialist, the average age is 60-70, and they’re based in the city of London. Now, are you going to spend time posting on Facebook? Probably not. Are you going to spend time posting into groups on LinkedIn? Possibly but nowadays with LinkedIn’s Swam, which is sorted wide auto-moderation, your post can get banned even though group loves the post. So you need to be strategic on how you post, where you post. You want to use an automated tool to do this.
Let’s recap, number one you want to identify what’s the actual outcome for this piece of content. Is it part of a funnel? What do we want the prospect to actually do?
Secondly, what type of content is it going to be? Is it authority content? Is it expert content?
Thirdly, are we going to think about this strategically? Build it once then let it run forever in the background, or as good as an automated strategy, part of an integrated automated strategy.
What’s The Actual Outcome?
So with your content think about the three steps we’ve discussed. Think about the actual strategies you are looking to achieve.
Now when it’s done correctly, you will get clients from the process. When it’s done correctly, you will get candidates from the process. It’s very much focusing on the problem, the real problem, for our prospect, for our avatar. Identify if it’s part of a funnel. Identify what type of content it’s going to be. Then make it a part of an integrated strategy.
Think about LinkedIn, if you post an article in your LinkedIn status update. The stick rate on LinkedIn a few years ago was 8 minutes. That means 8 minutes a day people were on LinkedIn. If you look at the strategy of posting an article on LinkedIn, you’ve got to catch that person, pretty much while they’re hot, for them to see your content. That’s why you need to distribute your content and use automated tools to distribute the content to make this really work. That’s why you do get the clients and you do get the candidates.
You’ve got a strategy that’s leveraged, works while you sleep, my favorite phrase, and brings in leads.
You want to think about your business as working while you sleep. The content piece, once you’ve got it set up, it can be set up to run for months, even years! If you’ve got evergreen content, which means you’ve got problems that will be consistently front of mind for your prospects, the content can be used again and again.
Break down your content to three distinct levels: funnel, type of content, automation. Ace it.
