TRN Marketing Manager Haydn talks us through 4 of his most hotly anticipated marketing trends and how the marketing department is planning to take them on.Marketers ruin everything, I love this little statement that always pops up. But it’s true, we do, we get our grubby little paws on something and beat it into submission and squeeze every last drop of lead juice out of it.
It’s okay though, own it! A clever marketer is always look ahead not backwards and there’s some interesting new techniques and tech on our doorstep that we better adapt and write strategies for before it’s too late.
I’ve listed out 4 marketing trends that I believe are making an impact, and I’ve included our strategies to meet them in the field of battle. And if you want to pinch them then, they’re yours, keep ’em!
Live Content
Let’s just brush past the part where Facebook actually boosts the living hell out of anything Live, because they’re desperate to make it a reality. And rather look at the huge potential a solid live plan can offer a business.
Facebook isn’t the only Live platform out there, but it’s a legacy platform, with a lot of support, a strong system and the ability to run ads through retargeting. Meaning that if done right you can at the very least earn yourself a nice bucket loads of relevant leads and improve brand awareness.
What does a great Live Strategy look like?
It always starts with fantastic content, map out how you want your Live video to go down, this is like any piece of video so you need a confident actor – If you’re doing your recruitment marketing correctly you’ve already identified and built up a few key thought-leaders in your business.
Next, choose a subject that will interest your audience, that provides inherent value straight off the bat and will allow a platform for the viewers to post questions and engage.
Now you go all traditional on this Live session, give it a date, treat it like a webinar and market the hell out of it, splash it everywhere and get the buzz going. Crack out some Facebook ad spend and go to town on this, as it needs to make an impact.
A couple of weeks before you go live: build a great piece of written content which details everything that’ll be spoken about, and more! This’ll be the doorstep for a CTA that’ll pop up later and it’ll lead too.. Yep you guessed it a content upgrade of sorts, which requires a form to get it, ebook, tool, etc.
When your video goes live you want to heavily advertise the fact that the video will have a Call to Action full of the information you’re talking about and more + all the questions and answers from the session. You’ll then advertise this call to action to all those who missed it and a recording of the video, you’re now creating a piece of cornerstone content off the back of a simple live video.
Once you’ve done that then you start running some retargeting ads off the back of the people who watched the video and didn’t follow the CTA, but also people who visited the content page but didn’t download the content upgrade. Nail this and you’ll create a fantastic little lead cycle – Bit of work, but imagine if you did about 5 of these a year!
We’ve got this exact strategy mapped out and we’ll be implementing it very soon!
Messaging apps and bots
It’s coming more and more obvious that we’d prefer to talk via messaging than pick up the mobile, it’s becoming hardwired in our habits and this is even more prevalent for younger generations (Gen Y). The invention of chatbot, these basic AI programmes that mimic a person on the other end of a messaging app are taking industry’s by storm.
I won’t bang about Facebook this entire article I promise, but Facebook, being developer of one of the most popular messaging apps out there is a great place to start. And, it’s pretty simple to set one up, we’ve currently got a campaign in the works for getting one of these nifty guys on-board and this is the strategy we’re using.
Recruitee have been our inspiration for this
What could a Facebook Chatbot Strategy look like?
Start by brainstorming with your team, what could an interactive FAQ + Content Guide have in it? What questions do you think your target demographics will be asking? It could look like something above, or perhaps it’s more candidate focussed. I’m sure you have a FAQ and a few great articles you can use to kickstart this.
Build a series of FAQ and industry hot topics and answers to them (Mini blogs) which can provide a huge amount of value to the person using it. We’re looking at something like manychat to do something like this.
If you’re clever and prepared to invest some money into Facebook ads, then you’ll be able to send unique advertisements to people who have interacted with your messaging service, this gives way to some exciting opportunities to interact and advertise to warm prospects.
Voice search
As I described in my previous article, voice search is growing in certain surroundings like the home as described by this article. When over a quarter of searches are done through voice search it’s time to take notice and build an effective strategy that works in favour of unique voice-lead searches. Because if you’re not doing it, you’ll be assured your competitor is trying it out.
When a person searches with their voice it’s common for them to search something that’s long tail. For example someone may say something to their Echo like “Alexa, what are the best restaurants within 10 miles of me” rather than typing “local restaurants” – Instantly you see a huge different in the way your SEO markup is going to need to be different.
Voice search needs to begin with an understanding of how humans speak to each other, how a person would ask another a question.
Aiming to prepare your SEO for search just takes a little more forethought on your part, it means thinking deeper about how your content, pages and products will be searched by someone.
Make sure the titles for your web content are long and descriptive to what you want to achieve.
Cluster Content
Topic clusters are a interesting topic which I discovered towards the back-end of last year, as covered in more detail by Hubspot here. This SEO model begins to looks at intent and topics rather than the simple keyword.
The benefits of this are that the User Experience of your website increases with the structure that comes with topic clusters, you help Google discover related content and you boost your ranking in the search engine.
The Clusters work by breaking your blog topics into sections, for example we’ve planned topic like: ‘Talent Attraction’ and ‘Marketing for Recruitment’ these subjects will have hundreds of different keyword variations and trying to capture every keyword through different articles will result in a repetitive blog! By building off these overarching topics; which Hubspot call ‘Pillar Content’ you’re able to link smaller more specialist articles which are related to the topic.
You’ll find that if a cluster content topic performs well it’ll provide a boost to all the other articles in that Topic Cluster!
How we’re getting into the way of Topic Clusters
I’m really interested in how Topic Clusters could make a difference to the visibility of our content so we’ve implemented a new way of producing certain aspects of our blog content.
In our vision to become an industry thought leader, it’s important we create evergreen content that scratches the itch of our target audience’s pain-points. So, like I explained before we now dedicate a month to a certain subject our ‘Topic Months’ which deep dive an overarching industry issue. We can then create individual articles that deep dive the issue.
Our Marketing for Recruitment agencies month has proven popular and has so many different areas we can explore.
During the month of January, but also spilling into February this is a perfect example of our current cluster content in action. This is a subject that has so many different deep-dive article opportunities from: Strategy, Content, Social Media, ROI, Email .. The list goes on!
It’s an interesting way to look at how your content sits on your website and for me it created a little bit of a light-bulb moment, it seemed like a sensible and obvious way to structure your content. I’ll keep you updated on how this goes!
If you want to discuss how to implement any of these strategies in your own business then do not hesitate to get in touch I love talking shop!
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