I recently contributed to a great initiative launched by Alex Moyle and Louise Triance called the A-Z of Recruiting success. You can see all the contributors on Alex’s blog but my particular letter was H for Hero Content. For me Hero Content really is a recruitment marketing dream because it gives you so much more to work with than one piece of content.
Content driven recruitment marketing
We all know that original content that adds value and addresses a particular pain point of your audience is likely to get more engagement than any other. But for busy recruitment marketers or for owner managers that don’t have the luxury of an in-house recruitment marketing team, this can be difficult to achieve on a regular basis. This is where hero content really comes into its own.
What is hero content?
It’s a really meaty piece of content that can then be repurposed into lots of other things. So, for example, part of your recruitment marketing strategy may include events – or surveying your clients and candidates. The outputs from those marketing activities can be turned into reports or white papers which can be hosted on your website as downloadable files and marketed out through social and e-marketing campaigns in order for you to capture leads. Because let’s face it – the whole point of any recruitment marketing is to get more leads – this isn’t a vanity project – it’s a business development exercise! The main themes from the report or white paper could be turned into a press release which in turn will generate coverage for you to showcase through blog posts and social. The results could be turned into an infographic and the main content could be chunked up into a series of blogs or guest blogs – a series of videos could be made promoting the hero content - the opportunities are endless.
Creating hero content
One of the things I hear a lot is: “We don’t really have enough to talk about – not enough to produce a robust report.” Consequently, too many recruiters concentrate on writing about what they do – rather than what they know. Everyone knows what it is that recruiters do - they are far more interested in the knowledge that your business has. And I have news for you – you know a lot about a lot of stuff that people are really interested in:
- You know about the people agenda
- You know about pay going up or pay going down and what’s driving that
- You know about skill shortages and what’s driving those skill shortages
- You know about talent pools and pipelining
- You know about global and regional comparisons
- You know about diversity in the workplace
- You know about leadership
- You know about the future workplace
- You know about employability
And what’s more you have tons of data in your businesses which will support any of the themes above and more! So, if you are responsible for recruitment marketing in your organisation then have regular 10-minute brain dumps from the consultants in the business on some of the topics above. Ask them what the pain points of their clients and candidates are and look at how the data in your business can be sliced and diced to support the themes of the content.
The principle in action
A campaign we ran last year started out with a white paper on The Future of Work. It was hosted on the client’s website and promoted though social and e-marketing campaigns. We produced a press release and a series of thought leadership articles for the HR and business media which were also shared through social. The coverage and some of the themes from the white paper were repurposed into a series of blogs for the website with calls to action to download the white paper. The result? A 600% increase in traffic to their website with an impressive goal conversion; 20 new enquiries and a corporate content award. And really, who wouldn’t want that.
So, make sure that your recruitment marketing teams become content heroes – and watch those leads come pouring in!
For more advice on recruitment marketing take a look at our white papers and read what our clients say about us and don’t forget to check out the other contributors to the A-Z of Recruiting Success!
Author: Tracey Barrett
