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This podcast is from a recent Facebook live we delivered in our Recruitment Marketing Mastery Group and the subject is using content to convert candidate and client leads.
Enjoy!
We wanted to have a chat about content; If you want to attract more leads and then convert them, content is a way to do that.
We do get a lot of people emailing us and saying, “What content should I be writing, and when should I be doing it? When should I be posting it?” We wanted to give you a framework that will help you when it comes to content.
There are three categories of content to focus on:
- Value add and authority.
- Who you are and how you help.
- Social proof and the results that you get for people.
1. Value Add and Authority
The thing about the recruitment and staffing sector is you’ve got clients and candidates. It is essentially a B2B environment. When you are placing a candidate, it’s a high-value item. Last week we started to get the pots outside and realised that the outside table cover had ripped with all the various storms we’ve had. I went online, and I bought a cover for the table now.
I knew I wanted a green one of a certain size. I went on to Amazon and bought the cover. We’ve decided to get some new garden furniture and a barbecue. And as it’s been 10 years since they’ve been replaced, I will do a lot more research. So remember that people won’t just suddenly start working with you; they need to know who you are. They need to like you and trust you before they start engaging with you. Having content around those areas makes a huge difference. So you want to add some value for them.
I always love Frank Kern’s quote. He’s a great internet marketer. He always says, “Help people by actually helping them.” We do a lot of very tactical content. We give away lots of things that maybe other people don’t because we like to help people, by actually helping them. They get a great experience and then think this is free. You might have gone and worked with that person. It’s the same when it comes to recruitment.
Yesterday I was on a call with one of the business owners who like to write. It’s not just that time is an issue, but it’s getting the ideas first. We chatted about drawing on this individual’s expertise and knowledge in the market because they’ve been around that particular market for a long time.
At the moment, many people are looking for high-quality candidates. Some are finding it more challenging than others. Think about how you can nurture candidates and target some of those passive candidates; perhaps people sitting tight, unsure about whether to move or not, because markets might still be uncertain. The candidate journey is very much about what is it that helps someone make that decision to start looking for a new job? There are a variety of reasons that can be that trigger point.
Maybe you can create some content around how to decide when it’s time to leave or to look for that next career opportunity. It could be that promises have been made. This time of year, some markets are waiting for their bonuses to be paid; perhaps promises were made in terms of promotions that might not transpire. There are many reasons why people think, “Well, I was promised this; it has not happened, that opportunity’s not a reason.”
Or they might look at people above them and the next opportunities. Or even laterally, it will be some time because they’re not expanding anymore to go into one of those places or even apply for one. They need to start going outside. Start by thinking about the trigger points. When somebody’s decided to leave, there’s a whole journey.
They need to get their CV together. When was the last time they did that? It could be a while. Thinking about interviews, “I might have had some internal interviews, but it’s been a while since I’ve gone externally. I’ve definitely not had a video interview. That seems to be the rage right now. How am I going to handle that? What do I need to do?”.
Think about the change cycle that people go through, emotionally and mentally, and then build your content around that. I’ve recently seen lots of polls on LinkedIn about what would make you move? Because obviously, recruiters are really keen to find out why.
People will still move for money, and we have to get real about this. We all know that the cost of living is going up. However, many people are going to start looking at, “Hang on a minute here. I’ve not had a pay raise for two years, and my heating bill will likely double. I need this for the kids.”
Just think about all of those drivers and trigger points for people when it comes to content.
You might get those clients that are ready to act now. Yet the reality is that in a sales and marketing funnel, at any one time, only 3% to 7% of people are ready to make that decision. The other 93% are planning; they know their plans in terms of recruiting, but it’s about nurturing them.
It’s also about prodding people in terms of making decisions. Then taking that client by the hand and walking them through the whole recruiting process, from the point of view of who we want to add to the team? What is that role? How clear are we about the job description? We have a number of our clients who do quite an in-depth consultancy with their own clients to make sure that that is the profile of the job they need, and hence the person they need.
Then, of course, it’s helping that person think through the whole recruiting process. I was chatting to my nephew last week, who is in the first year of his first job as a young medic, and his girlfriend, who is looking for a new role. She has a science degree and isn’t 100% sure how to use her science background. She has four lines of application in at the minute. One of them is a five-step process. There’s no timescale on that process.
She’s already thinking, “What do I do if I’m still being taken through that process and interested in it, but I’m made another offer?” If they have other opportunities, and a concrete job offer comes in while she’s still going through the process, whether that’s engaging to her or not, she will accept one of those other opportunities.
There’s lots of education that you could be doing in your content around the process, getting your client to understand that they need to adjust their internal processes. They need to meet the needs of the market if they want to truly get some of the best candidates. There’s lots of advice about the rest of the journey but think about the journey you take your clients through.
2. Who Are You, and How Do You Help?
It is important to remember that the features of any product are great. However, what is it that they’re going to do for you? Think about the features of your recruiting service, communicate that out into the market, and tell people how that will help them.
There’s nothing wrong in promoting you and your service because you need to stand out and say to people, “Look, this is what we have. This is our process; it’s slightly different. This is what we can do.” We’ve worked with some very experienced recruiters where marketing is new to them. They’ve done bits, but they want to get it nailed. I would say every one of our clients are amazing recruiters. They just don’t always communicate it very well.
We have one recruiter that’s been in the market for 31 years. They really know what they’re doing. They can communicate to people the value that they offer. So think about how you are communicating that? There’s nothing wrong with writing a blog post about how you deliver your service and why it’s different. You need to tell people because often people say to us, “Well, I’ve got lots of other people I could work with. Why should I work with you too?” We explain why because some of the things we do are quite unique. You may say, “Well, all recruiters are the same.” You’re not. It’s how you deliver the process. That unique content around that is vital.
Something that is often missed or there is less focus on is what are the outcomes and the benefits of your process. I always remember in our early years in business, another marketer talking about Pareto’s law, and I’d never considered applying the principles of Pareto, which is the 80/20 rule.
They were saying that if you’re looking at features and benefits, have 80% of your benefits on your website and then talk about features for 20%. By all means, have that timeline process that you take people through. I think it’s really important that you say, and the benefit of us working with you through this process is XYZ.
Which allows you to do X, Y, and Z. There are many features of the resources that we make available in Superfast Circle. Yet, unless we say to people, “What does that mean?” It means that you can have systems and processes in place for your marketing. It means that you’ve got the content there that will allow you to automate processes. You can focus consultants on certain activities, knowing that they’ve got marketing supporting them in the background.
There are many opportunities here to review what you are saying about your service. Ask yourself, “How many benefits have I got that relate to what I’m saying our service does?” It is what people experience, of the features, and what that will mean to them and their recruitment process. To their ability to get the right candidate that will fit their culture and what that person will do when they’re in the role.
3. Social Proof and The Results That You Get For People
We’ve talked about value add and authority building, which is vital when working in a B2B business because people don’t make decisions overnight. They come to it after a while and after they’ve watched you.
The final bit is the social proof. Fundamentally, people hate making mistakes. They want to know what results they will get if they work with this recruitment company.
How will it work for you? Something that will always work for you is having reviews, testimonials, and case studies. Case studies are really important in today’s market because people are moving around and looking, and they don’t want to make mistakes. If you have a really powerful case study, that can make a difference.
It goes without saying that LinkedIn is a huge priority platform. Some companies will prioritise that in a very focused way. We would strongly encourage people to think about sharing your content across multiple channels. You want to build your LinkedIn company page. When you think about your business owners and your consultant team and add all those connections together, you are missing a huge opportunity. You need to share your value-added content down business owners and key team members’ individual profiles because your reach will be much greater.
Do share content on Twitter and Facebook. There are many benefits from a future point; you might think your audience is not on Facebook. However, within a certain demographic, your audience may well be on Facebook.
Remember, Facebook advertising is relatively inexpensive. The targeting is not as good as LinkedIn, as you can’t get detailed. Of course, because of the latest updates on Facebook, you can advertise, particularly with videos. You still do an age range in your market. That is relatively easy to do. With video, it’s quite inexpensive to get in front of your market and retarget.
If you are creating videos, and we’re seeing more and more companies doing short videos, do make sure that you have a YouTube channel where you’re adding those videos onto. You are putting SEO, titles and descriptions in those. Of course, ads on YouTube as well can be relatively inexpensive.
Of course, remember Instagram and TikTok, two very visual platforms, and more and more companies leverage those. Some companies are testing out TikTok in different ways. Of course, you need to be a bit more creative, but there are opportunities there. At the moment, the jury is still out in terms of the demonstrable ROI.
Yet, it’s a platform that is growing exponentially. I think it’s one that we can’t ignore, but we need to do some testing with it. You have a certain demographic of a market that’s more gen-Z, and it could be where some of your candidates are sitting right now.
Remember, people go to YouTube looking for solutions if they don’t know how to do something. Particularly for candidates, always use something that you only share there.
You may hear or see articles saying that email doesn’t work anymore. Email’s dead. It absolutely is not. I’m on a passionate mission to convince people that email is one of the most underutilised resources and one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing to your clients and your candidates. Yes, we want to find those candidates to fill jobs now, but remember, 93% of people are not ready to make that move right now. It’s about nurturing and building relationships, keeping your brand and your business front of mind so that when people are ready, it is you that they go to.
Think about having some key nurture campaigns in place. If there are two campaigns you should have, it is a candidate nurture and a client nurture campaign.
Email is critical – as a business owner, who doesn’t open their email every morning and check what’s in there. You know you’re going to get a sporting chance of being read. The other thing is, of course, your authority website. The job of social media is to reach out to people. You can be in front of people relatively inexpensively to pull them back to your authority website.
Make sure that you answer all those areas that we talked about before. You’ve got authority content on there; who you are, what you do, how you can help, and your social proof. It’s ensuring that you’re consistently getting people back to your website.
If you think about all your different social channels, you can build authority and share different quotes, videos, blog content, PDFs, and reports.
One of the things that we create for our clients is reports. They are still one of those popular things that people look for, and it really does help you elevate your brand and position yourself as this person. We make this unconscious connection that if somebody’s written a report, they know what they’re talking about. So that is something we would strongly encourage you to leverage when it comes to content.
Denise: There are multiple ways you can use a report, and downloading them from a website in exchange for an email address is just one of them. But you can leverage that content in probably 12 to 15 different ways.
We’ve got a diagram of how to use the templates we provide every month. The other way, of course, is email.
If you send things through email, and people see you on social media, there is an unconscious connection, “Maybe we need to have a conversation with these guys because they’re everywhere, and they seem to know what they’re doing.” There are many different campaigns you can use in email.
There’s an email campaign no matter where somebody is on the journey. I strongly encourage you to have a blog or insights page because, for every piece of content you put on that page, it’s another page on your website.
I don’t know about you, but I would sooner someone will be able to find 500 or 600 pages of my website on Google. When you do that, Google positions you as an authority because you’re creating content. On your website, you can have so many different pieces of content that demonstrate your authority.
Also, from an SEO perspective – people will find you. If you’re talking about interview skills for engineers, then people are Googling that. Let’s say you’re a local recruiter around Cumbria – we see a lot of engineering companies around here. You start typing that in, and you happen to be a recruitment company in Cumbria.
The first website it will send you is somebody in the local area.
Something that you may well resonate with that we hear multiple times every week as I’m chatting to different directors and owners is, “We have an amazing service, we have a great company name within the client base that we’ve got. I want to stop being the best-kept secret.” I still hear that phrase, time and time again. If you want to stop being the best-kept secret, then as you start implementing some of the things we’ve talked about today, it will elevate your brand and get your brand out to a much wider audience. You can start fishing in a much bigger part of the market.
If you enjoy this podcast and are ready to take your marketing to the next level, then maybe it’s time to check out Superfast Circle. As a member of Superfast Circle, we are with you every step of the way as you start to elevate your marketing to a new level. You get weekly calls; you get an online training platform that you can access anytime, anywhere on any device. You have events that you can attend; we have a tech genius that can help you with your technology.
You also get your marketing collateral provided for you every month that you are a Circle member. If you would like to know more, then head over to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/sfc. Have a look at what’s involved and what’s included, and then book a call with one of us, and we can talk you through exactly what the next steps are. We’ll give you a demonstration of the program, and we’ll have a conversation about how this can work for you and your recruitment and staffing business.
How We Can Help
As a Superfast Circle member, you get access to multiple campaigns you can use every month.
Book your call and demonstration here if you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you too.
Thanks,
Denise
P.S. If you want to join Superfast Circle and would like to find out more, speak to us here.
