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Category: Content Marketing

Creating a Compelling Content Marketing Strategy

Posted on by Haydn Morgans

Why should you care about content marketing? We’re facing an economic crisis, and during these periods, marketing is one of the first departments that companies cut funding for. If you’re able to show a clear ROI for your work and demonstrate an efficient strategy, you’re more likely to be one of the lucky people who survive the recession. 

Strategy

One of the most important things is having a content marketing strategy. This is a granular breakdown of your marketing plan, covering all of the content that you produce. There may be other mini strategies like an SEO, PPC or social media strategy that run alongside it, but your content strategy should outline what you have the capacity to produce and where it should take you. Content is a powerful tool, and provides an omni-channel approach to marketing. Understanding where you’re going with your content eliminates wasted time on ad-hoc content. 

Roadmap

The first part of a strong content marketing strategy is a clear roadmap for the coming year. Once you know where you want to end up, you can work backwards to inform the content that you create. If your goal is to post six things over the month, your roadmap will show you how to go and get that content at once. 

Consistency is key to a helpful roadmap. Use your research to build it out on a regular basis, informed by your audience’s feedback, analytics and engagement. Mapping out your audience’s pain points is seriously important. You can use your content to find out what those pain points are, what’s keeping them up at night, what they like about working with you and what they think should be better. That research gives you a clear direction in the content that you make, putting purpose behind your content. 

Keystone Content

The key to an efficient content strategy is creating one or two forms of cornerstone content to get all your content from. We recommend starting a podcast. It’s a great form of content because it is a high format approach. You’ve got crisp audio and video, and you can bring in outside guests or position your founder as the host. You can repurpose or ‘stretch’ your episode to produce 10-20 pieces of valuable content that you can share over the following month. The process of extracting content isn’t time consuming either. Using one piece of high-quality keystone content that has audiovisuals allows you to regularly create useful content with a regular cadence, taking a minimal amount of time. 

Processes & Templates 

Implementing processes and templates will transform the way you work. The saying goes, ‘if you do something more than twice, there needs to be a process for it’. Understanding your role and putting processes and templates in place stops you creating the same assets every time you put a piece of content together. That’s just an example of how templates can streamline your creation process. It’s useful to audit yourself on a regular basis to see whether time is being lost. You can expedite things with automation or a strong process. Having everything already mapped out in a process allows you to handover that work really easily. 

Purpose-Driven Content 

This is how we get seriously smart with our content. This means having content that is backed by real data and an understanding of your audience. Understanding your audience’s challenges, pain points and growth plans allows you to create content that speaks to your audience’s needs. Start by researching your touch points. If you make some assumptions, try to get data that supports them from your audience by asking questions during each stage of the process. If your content speaks to the issues facing your audience, it will resonate with them and create a much higher conversion rate. 

Content Pillars 

Your content pillars should be the core topics that you can regularly talk about. Figuring out what those are allows you to create content that speaks to your audience and conveys your expertise. Each pillar should cover a niche topic that you can turn into content. Supporting each of your pillars with an SEO strategy will also help you rank well and become a leading voice on the topic. 

It comes down to the question, ‘what do you want to be known for?’ Are you the specialists in culture, talent, attraction, etc? When clients are going through the buying process, you will be top of mind, because you are known as that individual? If you’re able to drive that awareness and have it backed by data, you’ll gain a seat on the table and further your position. Marketing through smart content will change everything. 

To learn more about smart marketing, tune into the second Bonus Level of the Skill Point Podcast here. 

How to build a recruitment community

Posted on by Haydn Morgans

Building a community is like the holy grail of marketing.

If you attract an engaged group of potential buyers in a closed-off communication circuit, they become highly susceptible to purchasing from you.  

It sounds simple enough. But like any great thing, achieving it requires consistency and hard work. You can’t expect to see results overnight. You need a strategy. And the first step of that strategy is to:  

Grow an audience  

Because when you’ve got a network of engaged individuals, leveraging them into a community becomes a much easier proposition. And thankfully, there’s a long list of different ways to build an audience. For example:  

  • Start a podcast  
  • Start a blog 
  • Start a newsletter  
  • Publish an online course 
  • Create a regular video series or YouTube channel 

There’s an option for everyone. It all comes down to defining the audience you want to attract, identifying where they hang out, creating content they’ll want to consume, and engaging with them consistently. The goal is to become a point of reference; someone your audience expects and is eager to hear from.  

It requires time and effort, but it’s worth it. An engaged audience can reap results if you leverage it right. Here are a few tips worthy of attention, that will help you build your audience.  

Choose your avenue wisely 

Once you’re defined your ideal audience, work to understand where it hangs out. There’s no point becoming the number one question-answerer on Quora if that’s not where your audience is. Choosing the right platform can make or break your efforts to build a community. So be observant, be inquisitive, and choose wisely.  

Have a strong mission  

How are you making a difference in the market? There’s no point in building an audience of numbers. You want to attract a community of individuals who could, at some point, buy from you. The “more” isn’t necessarily the “merrier” in this context; you want to attract the right kind of people.  

Having a strong value proposition helps you both differentiate yourself from your competitors and ensure you attract individuals who want to support to your mission; people who will help you make it a reality. Consider how you’re adding value; why should people join your community?  

Do more than sell  

You built this audience with the intention of selling to them. So, great, go ahead, sell away. But it’s super important that you don’t spend the bulk of your time on the community just selling to them. It’s one of the surest ways to lose their interest.  

Instead, try engaging in meaningful conversations. Answer their questions, share a funny story, offer advice, and pay attention to what your audience is saying too; what are their concerns? What do they want? What’s annoying them? Discussions amongst them can inform your business decisions; help you come up with new ideas and guide your future content.  

Remember it’s a long game. Strengthen your community’s commitment to you and your brand first through genuine engagement, and only then do you go in for the sale. 

Get to really know your audience 

Don’t execute on your plan without considering your options. Pick up the phone and get to know your audience. Ask them questions that will help you better understand what your audience needs and wants. See where you and your product or service fit into the picture; how can you capture some of their demand? 

Reward loyalty  

Keep an eye on the most engaged members of your community and gradually work to turn them into advocates of you and your brand. You can send them merchandise, for example, something they can in turn showcase and indirectly promote your brand.  

Think how your decisions influence you now, and in the future. Build a community growth roadmap that will carry you into the future, along with your audience, and reward those loyal enough to come with you.  

Building and maintaining a community isn’t easy. It requires strategic planning and consistent execution. You need to be prepared to dedicate time every day towards building and nurturing relationships with your audience, listening, engaging, answering, sharing. It takes hard work and dedication. But get it right, and your efforts are sure to be worth it. 

Marketing success through clarity. Knowing your clients.

Posted on by Haydn Morgans

How well do you know your clients? I’m not talking about interests in golf or karaoke. I’m talking about really knowing your ideal client.

This isn’t just a customer persona you put together with assumptions and a bit of data, this comes from a dedicated research campaign where you spend time on the phone with existing and potential clients and dig deep into some more meaningful questions.

Questions like:

  • What part of your business keeps you up at night?
  • What do you want to be famous for?
  • What are some of your biggest barriers?
  • What part of our service do you appreciate the most?
  • What would a competitor have to do to realistically poach you as a client?

and try & finish each question with ‘why is that important

Because this is the whole objective of this exercise. Find out what’s important to them.

Because once you’ve got that knowledge, well it all just becomes a lot easier, you are going to be able to lean on these findings to make critical decisions about a whole lot of things in your business.

Considerations such as:

  • Does your messaging really speak to your audience?
  • How should I adjust my pricing and service offering?
  • Is too much effort going into a redundant service?
  • Does your branding effectively match your target clients?
  • What content are you creating? Should you change direction and format?
  • Should you be charging more or less?

Just taking the time to have a frank and honest conversations with real people down the phone helps you take off the blinders and face some harsh realities or learn new things about what the client really wants.

This is something we’ve been recently trialing with a new service offering we want to offer, a marketing package for smaller agencies.

The challenge we faced was there’s a ton of avenues to take in marketing for a business, from email to personal branding. But it was Important to us to discuss with those owners and ideal customers to find out what the perfect solution would look for them.

This helped us figure out where to trim the fat on the service and understand what they feel they would reasonably pay for the service (more than we though, go figure).

And, as a by-product it’s been a fantastic solutions for some good business development, we’ve started conversations that I know we would have not had with a hard sell.

Listen at the end of the day this stuff isn’t rocket science, I’m sure it all makes perfect sense. But it’s more about carving a little bit of time out in your diary to book in some calls and conduct some research, something I know we don’t do enough of.

5 Ways to Stretch your Content

Posted on by Haydn Morgans

It’s mad if you really think about it. Sometimes you can spend hours on a piece of content and then just relegate it to a blog or a video.

Good marketing stretches content, re-uses and rehashes your information to squeeze every drop of juice out of it.

1. Break it down into social posts.

The social algorithms favour posts without links. Why not take snippets from your content and repurpose into clips or posts.

2. Create a video from it.

If you’ve made a particularly good piece of written content then get in front of your phone camera and re-do it as video (Upload onto stories, TikTok, LinkedIn or YouTube?)

3. Create an infographic

Have you used data, or found some clever insights. Why not hire a graphic designer to create an infographic. Allow other companies to embed it as content on their website and get a good backlink.

4. Make it into a slide deck or carousel

Make it into an easy to slide mini-presentation perfect for uploading to LinkedIn!

5. Turn it into audio content, guest a podcast or start your own?

Get a guest spot on a relevant podcast and share what you’ve learnt? Or if you’re thinking of starting your own podcast, discuss the topic on that!