The more time we spend sitting in front of our screens these days, the more we are bombarded by information which is why having an effective content marketing plan in place that catches your audience's attention is more important than ever.
In this article, I aim to give an overview of what a recruitment content marketing plan should include and how to start – by answering five simple questions:
A recruitment marketing strategy should start by assessing where you are as a company, who your current audience is, and how your expertise can help your stakeholders – and attract more. Whether you are trying to give your recruitment business a boost by sharing your content with clients or by convincing your ideal candidates that with you they would be in safe hands, you need to be able to portray it accurately to others.
This has become increasingly important over the past year, as we observe constant changes within the recruitment market and our own audiences. We are now operating in a predominantly candidate-led, highly-competitive market – which means your staffing company needs to stand out as the firm of choice even more than before.
The best way to stand out is by providing truly valuable content - to do so, it is essential that you identify not only your area(s) of expertise, but also who your candidate persona is. This will ensure that you are not only delivering top-notch content, but also not wasting time on false leads, and reaching the top talent who want to work with a recruitment firm they can trust. By narrowing your target audience and individuating the right listeners, you will also ultimately choose more wisely the right means to reach them through.
It’s a no-brainer – the centre of content marketing is, of course, the content. If what you are trying to promote is not useful or insightful to your audience, all the other expedients you are putting into place won’t help you.
Before you sit to write about a particular topic, have a look at the resources you already have available and how they performed. Putting together a table of the content you have already published, the types of content, the website traffic it triggered and the engagement with your audience/perspective audience is always a good way to be able to tell whether what you have in mind will take you where you want to be.
Now the fun begins. How are you going to present your content? Will it be a LinkedIn article, an Instagram guide, or a blog post on your website? Hint: it’s all three!
The key word we often use for content is recycle. It takes time and effort to sit down and showcase your knowledge – so why should you only share it with a selected few? Accompany the black and white of the page with a nice visual and your article will be ready for Instagram. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes, find out what gaps in their knowledge you can fill, write out a triggering question and spark a conversation on LinkedIn or Twitter, tying in the piece you have been working on. If you can video yourself to promote your piece, perhaps highlighting the key takeaways, even better – the algorithm will favour you. Before you even begin to engage with your followers, find ways that work for you, your audience and your platforms to drive engagement.
A well-shaped content marketing strategy involves you and your team moving strategically. Having selected your resources and picked your channels, you’ll need to allocate enough time for the team to bring the plan into fruition. Once you have dates and deadlines in your calendar, it will be easier to keep an eye on who needs to do what when, who to chase, and when to look at the metrics and – perhaps – adjust the direction of the campaign.
Setting precise and measurable goals is the ultimate way to test which aspects of your campaign were successful, but also to learn from your mistakes. What is often considered the most ‘boring’ aspect of working on a marketing campaign is also the most useful tool to make sure you are doing your job efficiently.
While some measurements can be misleading, despite boosting your professional ego (I am talking about you, social media followers count!), seeing an increase in traffic and engagement, newsletter subscribes, or simply hitting the sales target for the month is a more accurate way to understand whether you have reached your goal – so set precise numbers and visualise them before you get to work.
It is also important to have a look outside your business and decide when to best start sharing the content you have created. Is there a particular time of the year/month/week that you could tie to your piece? Multiple resources are available online for recruitment marketeers to make an informed decision on their campaign’s timings – and you should be making the most of these already.
Planning is no fun and games – but it is key to the success of your campaign. What we have learned from the pandemic is that all this planning could go out of the window in a snap – so flexibility is key, and it will still be into the future.
Author: Elisabetta Caria