In today’s blog post we’re going to talk about how to take your content deeper. If we as businesses truly want to differentiate ourselves from our competitors, we need to get smart and strategical about our marketing efforts.
We’ll be tackling the idea of building smart content to bolster your inbound marketing strategy and will provide you with all the steps to help you get thinking about how to implement this immediately.
As I am sure you are acutely aware, inbound marketing is an ideal methodology for building a list of fantastic leads who are interested in your business and service. From this you’re able to nurture and lead them down a rosy path to warm them up, engage with and eventually close. A conversation off the back of an inbound strategy will always be an awful-lot better than a cold-call.
When it comes to a basic inbound strategy, it’s vital to create regular and consistent content that is aimed towards your ‘Buyer Personas’ – but, typically when we go down this route, we tend to come up with numerous article ideas covering everything and anything possible to help our readers.
In recruitment, there are of course a whole range of different topics to create content about from alternative sourcing tactics to candidate & interview tips and industry insights. These kind of topics can be great, but typically the content sits on a surface level – which is good to build noise and a profile, but not real engagement. Quite simply, with everyone doing it at a surface level, we need to get a bit more tactical.
What we want to do is get deeper, take the conversation further. We can do this by following these simple steps:
Commit to healing a critical pain point. Create content about our journey to cure the pain point. Client Case Studies to back up your commitment to curing the pain point Whitepaper enforce your commitment, intention and purpose.
Commit to healing a critical pain point
This whole strategy revolves around the fact that you should be focusing your attention on solving one key pain-point that is a burning problem for your clients.
For every recruiter this may be something different but there will always be some pain your company is capable of solving for your clients.
What if you were the Recruitment Company that is committed to raising employers’ satisfaction with candidates presented to them to something really punchy like 90%? That’s an ambitious claim and something you can shout about and built your content strategy on.
Data taken from REC #JobsOutlook 2017
This approach to creating content talks directly to the clients you want to attract. With recruitment being such a busy sector, with many direct competitors in your space, you certainly need a hook to show that you’re different.
If you keep to the safety of creating surface level content that tackles subjects that could not even be a pain point to your desired client you’re going to get lost in a sea of similarity.
Take some time to think about the biggest pain points in your market / niche for your clients. It’d be wise to get the input of everyone in your office, as some of your consultants may identify different trends that they’re seeing.
Why should I bother with deep diving?
In the REC Jobs Outlook for May 2017 we see that Agency Expertise in terms of regions and sectors was the 2nd highest criteria used by employers to select an agency, just under quality of service.
Data taken from REC #JobsOutlook 2017
If you are committing to solving your target demographic customer pain points, even demonstrating your deep knowledge of what those pain points actually are in the first place, you will quickly establish yourself as an agency that has strong expertise and a go-to partner.
Create content about our journey to cure the pain point.
Here comes the part where you start creating blog posts / videos / reports that focus directly on the pain point you’ve committed to remedying. Start creating guides, insights and commentaries on all the potential connotations and critical impacts of the issue, taking the conversation deeper.
If you find a deeply rooted problem that is common to many of your target demographic, there will be a whole host of interesting topics and approaches you can take to build engaging content around. Your client will want to keep coming back to your website to consume your cutting-edge insights to cure their problem and what to do next.
Remember with any content strategy you want to maintain consistency with the regularity of putting out your content – this builds security, trust and expectations with your client.
Because you’ve committed to a journey of taking a customer through solving their issue you need to create content that provides regular updates on this mission, truly making it a journey of discovery and learning for the reader. This is a classic example of storytelling for businesses.
Client Case Studies to back up your commitment to curing the pain point
When your journey is well on its way and you have a great selection of insightful content under your belt, you’re going to start to make a name for yourself in your industry as “experts”. Clients will see you’re speaking their language and that you’re aware of their problems.
The next step will be to take this conversation even deeper. The goal is to enforce your capability to solve the problem, and substantiate the impact your methodologies have. This is where getting detailed case studies really comes into play. Get every client you’ve helped solve their similar pains to outline what you did and the resulting impact it had – the best thing about this is that they’ll be centred around the problem you’re trying to solve – which in turn takes the conversation deeper.
When you start this process you’ll see a snowball effect; you’re creating great content that attracts the clients affected by this burning problem, then when they investigate your website further they’ll see you’ve fixed this problem multiple times with different companies; enforcing your expertise in the subject. You’re starting to look like a very attractive partner for their business.
Whitepaper to enforce your commitment, intention and purpose.
This is the next natural step of a good Inbound content strategy. Whitepapers / ebooks / reports, whatever you want to call them. Those pieces of gated content that gets contact details in exchange for valuable information.
When you’ve built a great portfolio of client case studies, informative articles and you’ve now got a great story to tell about how you’re fixing problems, you can start to collate all you’re the ideas and information into a downloadable summarised report.
More often than not when a client is investigating a service, they’ll take the time to download a report to enforce their buying decision. If you’re offering a great ebook that shows you are a thought-leader who’s embarked on this journey to solve one of their most pressing pain points, you’ll establish yourself a very attractive option on their decision list.
And the process works both ways because you’ll ask for their contact details in return, so you’re able to reach out to these potential clients, talk about how you’ve helped solve these problems before with like organisations and share your wisdom into helping remedy their problem. In essence, it becomes a honest exchange of their contact details (and permission to contact them therefore) for some free, value that helps them.
Nurture and continue the journey
If you feel like the client isn’t quite ready to engage with or buy from you, then don’t neglect the ability to nurture them further until they become ready to close. Keeping adding more and more value, sharing insights and guidance, solving more and more of their pains.
Ultimately, don’t let them forget you’re the one committed to solving their problems and keep giving them calls to action to keep the journey’s momentum going.
When a client immerses themselves in all your content and feels the depth and seriousness of your efforts to solve the problem, you find you’ve got a very deep campaign of great content!
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