When it comes to transparent content marketing, Matt says believes “with the right technology, it’s possible to interrogate someone’s previous touch-points with your business and its digital properties, and fill in a lot of the gaps that marketers take for granted”.
Now, you’re probably wondering who Matt is. Matt Hodkinson is CEO of Influence Agents, an inbound marketing firm specifically for B2B companies. They’re a HubSpot partner, specialising in marketing automation and sales technology. Matt knows the importance of transparency in content marketing and is happy to share some of his secrets.
Marketing in the recruitment world
“In speaking to clients and prospects in the recruitment, HR and employer brand sector, one trend emerges time and time again is that candidate-focused marketing comes more easily than client-side, and the latter sometimes just never happens. It’s never been easier to “attach” your recruitment/HR brand to a particular sector, via content, but it takes an element of specialism and niching, which is a natural turn-off from the start. The braver companies are making strides, and the reality is that they’re no better set up than any other company, to steal a march in this area.
By taking a niched approach across a number of different verticals you’ll have much more success than a generic piece of content. When I talk about content I mean e-book, white papers, reports and videos. The winners in recruitment marketing will be the ones that take a niched approach.”
Check out Matt’s 5 steps to transparency in content marketing:
1. Start with people
This should come easily to recruiters. Get access to the right marketing talent, in a core set of roles, to support a digital content-led approach: copywriters, developers, designers, marketers as the base team. Also spend time defining your buyer personas (most businesses have 3-5) and get under their skin through research and conversation. Don’t forget your own profile as a company – core values, culture, story/journey, goals – all go to inform your positioning.
2. Use the right technology
Access the right tools to support your inbound marketing like your CMS, CRM, email marketing, email marketing automation solutions as well as analytics tools. But realise that it’s a game of 90% people and process and 10% of technology.
3. Consider the customer journey
Define it. Understand the stages that every prospect must go through in order to engage with your company. Don’t be afraid to create a “velvet rope” mentality and turn the tables. I think too many companies in this sector relinquish all power to the client, and it devalues you as a service provider, and makes yours a commoditised offering. If you’re truly experts at what you do, act like it! Have people feeling like they need to work a little, in order to get on your books – not the other way around.
4. Make meaningful content
Don’t create it for the sake of creating content, but do make sure you’re able to produce relevant and powerful, targeted content when required. Every single piece of business you’ve ever done, I’ll wager, can be attributed to something you wrote or said.
5. Measure
Analytics has moved on from the numbers game. Use the right technology to inform you of behaviours and actions taken by your prospects. You can even get alerted when they perform certain actions on your website, or if they achieve a lead score. Predictive lead analysis is more common now, too – big data is changing the way we convert new business.
Related: How L’Oreal uses Transparency to Drive Employer Branding
