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This post and podcast are revisited from an earlier piece I wrote, and I want to bring this back to your attention as we enter that busy end of the year period as we end one year strong and prepare and plan for the next.
Candidates and, in many cases, now clients are in short supply. So, what do you need to do to communicate your value to the clients and candidates you NOW want to work with?
Content assets are the way.
Today I have 7 fundament pieces to share with you, and in this handy checklist, I share several more. Click here to download a copy now.
What is a Content Asset?
Over time, it compares to owning an investment property where the value grows over time. We create it once, and over time this develops into something that gives us increased revenue, increased profile, increased presence in the market.
If you have several content assets that have been created over time, they will attract candidates. They’ll demonstrate your expertise and showcase the brand and what it’s like to work with you.
You can create assets once and leave them to work time and time again. For example, we have a blog post that brings in thousands of views every year. It’s got a life of its own. It was optimised for the search engines, and it continually brings traffic to our website. Of course, once people have read that, they start reading something else on the website or subscribe to our podcast.
I bet the first time some of you found us was because of this particular post about lead generation strategies. It’s called 10 Lead Generation Strategies for Recruiters. It’s been bringing awareness to our brand for absolutely years.
Types of Content Assets
I’ve narrowed it down to seven that consistently work for our clients. Let’s start with number one, which is the good old blog post.
1. Blog Posts
I’ve already shared an example of how a blog post continues to bring in traffic year after year after year.
Create blog posts that align with important topics for both candidates and clients where you answer the questions that are going on in your clients’ and candidates’ minds. You promote yourself and your brand, and you’re demonstrating your expertise.
It’s very easy to find out what those questions are if you just talk to them. Think about the candidate and client journey, and you have got more than enough topics to write about there.
2. Reports For Your Market
Last week we did a deep dive into the anatomy of an ideal report or guide for your market. These are pivotal as you move forward.
Hubspot shares a lot of PDFs and guides, and in a recent survey about what they should be creating, their clients indicated that they wanted PDFs and reports.
You can make your reports gated, which is where people give you their name and email address, or if they are a connection on LinkedIn, of course, you can send them a link because you are already connected to them, but it helps you bring in new people into your area of expertise, into your recruitment sphere, into your sector that you could potentially work with.
3. Longform Social Media Posts
These posts engage your market and share a little piece of advice, a tip, an idea or a strategy. We have talked so many times about the bias cycle. You can read a couple of posts we’ve written on the subject here and here.
They tend to work well if you have a nice image with them; maybe a picture of you or a picture of your working environment or your local town. They do tend to get more views and responses. Of course, when that happens, LinkedIn and Facebook push them out more into the LinkedIn sphere, so more people will potentially read them or look at them.
You can use them again and again and again. In fact, I saw a post of mine on social media that I know I wrote two years ago. At the time, I think it was talking about a particular marketing strategy that you could use and giving people some tips and advice on it.
That post is going out and still gets viewed each time it’s shared. So, it’s still working and getting eyeballs onto the Superfast brand time and time again. What if you wrote several posts like that or outsourced that writing?
They are an asset for you and your brand. Social media is often the first place that people will come across you. If you’re reaching out to a candidate about a great opportunity that you have, first thing they’re going to do is research you on social media or check you out on your website.
4. Video
Love it or hate it, video is the way. You’ll notice we do a fair bit of video, and we do some other things as well. Video gets engagement. In a recent poll on LinkedIn, people were asked what they preferred to look at and read. People talked about visual content as something that they enjoyed reading, and they got value from.
Two years ago we put out a video on procrastination. We probably got something like 400 views on it. Procrastination is something we all experience no matter how good or how ninja-ish we think we are. It was a bit of content that helped people with some ideas and strategies around what they could do to get out of the funk that they were in when it came to procrastination.
Video content also promotes you and your brand. Recruitment is a relationship-to-relationship business. I always encourage our clients to get their MDs on video because being the figurehead of a brand, being out there makes massive difference because also, it impacts clients.
5. Podcasting
I did a really long and detailed post about podcasting, which obviously was leading up to this post, which you can read here.
I record this podcast in batches two or three weeks before it’s launched. They’re very easy to do. I just note down some things that I want to share, talk about it, and then it goes into a process. Having a podcast, you mean you are then on the biggest search engines in the world – Google, iTunes and of course, you can upload it to YouTube as well.
I won’t go into it too much, but please go and check out that post. Podcasting elevates your brand, particularly if you are a recruiter working in the professional services sector. It can make a massive difference because you tend to find that business owners or the business leaders tend to listen to podcasts. They’re as obsessed with the business as we are.
6. Training Classes
I know there are a little bit more to do, but many of you listening to this podcast will have been on one of our webinars or master classes and will have listened to content. Some of you may have even downloaded our latest video series.
If you want to look at our different frameworks that we use with clients, and we go into a lot more detail about things then, go to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/clf. Pop your name and email address in, and then you can get access to all the videos. We’re not taking them down anytime soon, so you’ve got them there, and that you can go and look at. That content asset is already bringing in
clients for us.
It will continue to do that because we share some classic strategies that people often forget. We shared a framework that we’ve developed over the last 15 years.
Something that we share with you now might spark interest in someone that will probably get in contact after they’ve listened to this podcast and say, “You know you talked about all this content assets, and we understand that you create a lot of these in your Superfast circle membership. What do we need to do to join?”
7. Download Pages
The final content asset is so easy to do, and it works like gangbusters: you collate everything that you have in one page on your website, a download, or resources page. We have multiple things you can download on our downloads page.
Some require name and email address, some don’t but it’s a magnet for people that go to that page, and it’s an asset for us because we’ve already created all the other content pieces. We just go and put them all on there.
If you want to know more about Superfast Circle, where we actually create a number of these elements for you and we give you scripts to create the others, get in contact with one of us, just go to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call. That’s our web address/call, book yourself into one of our diaries and we can have a chat with you.
How We Can Help
We have many clients who are on for their best quarter because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we provide.
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.
