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Why Your Content And Social Media Marketing Isn’t Working
Social media and content, big buzz, isn’t there around it? And everyone says, “Oh, you should be doing it,” but then you’ll find some people that say, “Well, I’ve invested in content, and nothing’s worked.” That’s probably because you’re not doing it right.
Let me talk you through some very key fundamentals that lots of people get wrong. Because you’re listening to this podcast, you have an opportunity now to get them right.
1. Not Giving Your Audience What They Want/Need
Number one, very important, write about what your audience needs. Your audience is coming to your recruitment website for advice, suggestions, and hopefully to look at the jobs that you have on your board as well.
Remember, they’re coming to you with an issue. They’re coming to you wondering about their career development. They’re coming to you wondering about how they can attract talent and how they can engage talent to come and work for their organisation. They are not necessarily there to read about you and your organisation, your lunch club and how everyone went out and had a lovely meal. They don’t really want to know about the skiing trip that you took your team on.
They really don’t want to know an awful lot about you, and it’s one of those sad facts of life. It’s not about you. It’s about them because that’s what they have got in their mind when they reach your website.
[IMPORTANT: If you don’t provide this they will likely leave and not come back.]
The other thing to remember is that they ( your clients and candidates) will go to niche-specific websites to be updated on their area of expertise; not your recruitment blog.
Let’s say you are an HR recruiter. Your candidates and clients are going to go to HR Grapevine or HRZone, or the CIPD to find out the absolute cutting edge things that are happening in HR circles.
Sorry to say,they’re not going to come to you, a recruitment website, to find about that.
However they will come to you to learn about what’s going on with regards to what jobs and roles are ‘hot’ at the moment, where could their career go.
They’re going to come to you for that type of information. They are not going to come to you for specific niche content.
We’ve been creating content and campaigns for probably the best part of 10 years , and we monitor all the traffic for all the blog post that we create for people.
We categorically tell you that content, niche-specific content performs the worst for views and shares. The best ones? Good old how to write a CV, how to write a job description, how to engage candidates, how to think about culture.
All the sorts of things that people are coming to your site with a question they have in their mind.
Fact: They see you as an expert on career development and careers and recruitment.
Imagine their burning questions; “ I’m going to need to really spruce up my CV. I wonder if my LinkedIn profile is fit for purpose.” That’s the sort of content they’re going to be looking for.
How do I engage my employees, not niche-specific content and certainly not content about you? There’s something wrong in writing the odd thing about your organisation, but that should be way down the list of priorities.
2. Sending People To Other People Websites And Away From Yours!
The second point when it comes to content marketing and social media. I see people say, “Well, I’m tweeting three times a day. Denise, I’m tweeting, sending stuff out.”
The problem is that often, this tweeting is to somebody else’s website and not yours. Content is great, and we provide it as a value-added service to our candidates and clients. We don’t use it to promote other people’s websites.
People get engaged on social media. Then, we want to get them to your website and then when they’re on your website; then they can give you their name and email address, by downloading a free report. You can then start to email, and build a real relationship with them. That’s the whole point of it.
Sending people to what we call offsite content isn’t going to work. We were talking to somebody the other day, and admittedly, this particular person was very upfront and said, “I’m sharing a blog post, but I’ve realised it’s all offsite content.”
They had a snapshot of the post published and then a link to view this on the original website. Ethical by the way, however a lost opportunity.
You’ve done all the hard work; got somebody on your website and then sent them off somewhere else. Don’t do it. Those are two big, big errors that we see every single day.
3. Job Alerts Only
The third one is when it comes to social media, some people just send jobs only. Now, there’s nothing wrong with sending out a job alert, absolutely not. However, if that is all you are sending, you are going to chase off probably 90% of people visiting your social media channels because people the only ones who will be interested in that will be ready for a job, and as we all know with the buyer cycle, it’s roundabout 3% of people want to buy now.
If you are sending people just job alerts all the time, they’re going to think, “Oh, there’s no point in coming back to this. There’s no useful content.” That’s something else to be aware of.
4. Failing To Market Your Content
The next one is not distributing or marketing your content. It’s like; “I built it so that we’ll come”, the famous quote from, “ a Field of Dreams”,a great movie by the way, and a rubbish sentiment.
The reality is that if I open a shop in the backstreet of Kendal selling walking gear or whatever because every shop seems to sell walking gear in Kendal!
Nobody is going to find my shop unless I promote it. For us in an online world, it’s eyeballs. You have to market your content.
Quite often, we’ll say to people; I’m going to say, “Well, I’ve written this blog post and nothing has happened.”
First of all, they haven’t actually written and optimised it for the search engines with SEO, I hate to say, but it does still work. Are you using words and phrases that people might be searching on in your content?
Secondly, are you sharing it around? Are you sharing it on every single social media channel? Are you sharing it as a LinkedIn pulse post? Are you uploading it to other sites? Are you approaching people in your sector who could also share your content for you?
It’s about getting your content out there so people can see it. This is a huge one. Do you get your consultants to share it with your candidates and clients?
As an example, “Oh, by the way, we’ve got an excellent post on this you might find useful. I’ll just share you a link to it. Here’s a link or here’s a PDF.”
We have a couple of our clients do this consistently, and they make placements out of it because they are now perceived as a very different style of recruiter that actually cares, that actually wants to help you and they sending you great content.
5. Call To Action
The number of times I see people finish a blog post with no call to action. As an example, the other day, one of our team wrote a post on temping for one of our clients.
They had a contract to fill, and the article was a great presell with a call to action statement at the bottom with a telephone number, links, who to contact, get in touch now, etc.
Because as a human race, we like to be led, so you need to give people some directions on what you want them to do. It makes such a difference when you have a call to action on your blog post.
6. Email Your Database About Your Content.
Now, the other thing that a lot of people miss out on, and it’s something we do with our content packages for clients, is we will create a small email. That’s right. We call a pre sell email to the article. If you’ve got an excellent database and you’re building your database, and you have a new blog post, do you inform people through email that that blog post is there?
We write a lot of pre-sell email for our clients, and then there’s a link in there to click. Our clients send it out. People click the link inside and they go and read the article.
How good is that?
Because what happens when they’re on that blog, they might have a look at your job search. They might see what your featured roles are; all these things are what many people forget to do.
Here’s the thing, depending on the email service provider you use, you are able to tell who has opened an email and also who is clicking links.
If you have access to that data, part of your business development process, I would strongly suggest is to pick up the phone and speak to those people because
A, they’re on your list anyway.
B, they’re opening your emails,
My suggestion is that they have a need or they’re interested in what you have to say, and you will be astounded at the difference that makes when you are picking up the phone to a warm lead rather than one that is stone cold.
This is where people miss out. They don’t do that. They don’t go and check this data out; “ Ah. This guy, James Adams, he’s actually opened the last six emails of ours. Cracky, I wonder if he is now looking for a new position?”
You will probably get an incredibly warm reception if you pick up the phone and speak to this person. That’s what a lot of people don’t do. If you talk to some of the bigger organisations and particularly those very sales-focused, they’ll talk about lead scoring.
Some of the very sophisticated email marketing platforms, you can have something that has a lead scoring ability. For example is, If somebody opens an email if someone clicks a link etc.
That would trigger a call.
This is how content works, and I think a lot of people don’t appreciate how to make it work for them.
You can see how it starts to profile your brand. You can see how it makes a huge difference because you have a call to action because you’re asking people that you’re sending emails through to do something.
Your consultants then have a gateway to pick up the phone and speak to them.
You’ve got a few things to work on here….. over to you.
Important
As an ambitious recruitment organisation, THE marketing strategy to master is email marketing. It will consistently deliver both candidates and clients.
