Refreshing Your Staffing Content Marketing Strategy
In previous articles, we have talked about different approaches to content marketing, but I wanted to take a slightly different direction today. From company to company, we have seen a staleness in their content marketing. Today, let’s discuss how to keep your content marketing fresh and delivering results. Your content marketing strategy is directly tied to your key messaging and differentiation and there are many reasons to keep your content up-to-date. Without going further, let me simply ask the question, when was the last time you updated your content on your website, social media and direct marketing efforts? If your answer is greater than a year, please keep reading.
Why content marketing is important
There are a couple of key reasons why your content marketing strategy is important. The first is that the search engines are looking at how often you are updating your content in order to determine your ranking. Periodic updates allow for your content to remain fresh with the search engines. But, equally important is the fact that your messaging and differentiation is constantly evolving. The last time many firms looked at their website content and updated it, they were still general staffing companies; however, many of you have adopted practice areas or areas of emphasis beyond standard generalizations in order to elevate your brand and your success with clients. You may have taken a look at your content at that time, but in many cases, even that has not been fully updated. Content marketing encourages you to constantly evolve your message and ensure that your audience is receiving your desired content. The last thing you want is to do a great deal of work in developing practice areas or improving the ways in which you work with candidates and consultants, and not have it be fully addressed in the content that your audiences see. So, for your first piece of homework, let’s review your content and make the adaptations needed, keeping in mind that the search engine spiders and your audience depend on this content marketing to understand and evaluate you.
How often you should refresh your content
Like mentioned before, if it has been longer than a year since you last updated your content, then you absolutely need to take a hard look at it. The search engines are constantly looking at your site to determine if updates have been made. I certainly don’t recommend updating daily, but once a month or once every two-month updates on the pages throughout your site enhances your search engine optimization as well as offers the ability to update your messaging to what fits the times. Anything older than a year easily hurts your search engine results, and frankly, it’s is not giving consultants or clients anything new to learn about your company. Additionally, this method of relatively frequent updates gives you the opportunity to adapt your social media efforts and ensure that you’re delivering content that is important to all of your audiences.
Just think, for a moment we have talked strictly about clients and consultants; however, internal hiring of salespeople and recruiters is one of the greatest challenges we are hearing from our clients. It’s highly important to freshen and adapt your messaging for that audience. Internal hiring benefits greatly from a robust sharing of information about the company through your social media. Consultants want to regularly see what is happening within your company and with the recruiters they work with. While clients visit your site less, they also want you to get to the point quickly with who and what you are along with how you can help them. Frequent updating is the key to delivering on all of these objectives.
How to ensure your social media is carrying your message vs creating new messaging
Your social media efforts typically include everything from blog posts to what we call “repurposed articles” (articles in mainstream news that you reshare) as well as memes, podcasts and general shares of interest. If you have focused your business on certain areas in order to capture a greater audience, be sure to look at the topics of your blog as well as the types of articles you are resharing and so on. Since your social media efforts are typically daily, there is a great opportunity to focus and adapt your messaging; however, many companies tend to simply share and not look at the effect on their overall content marketing strategy. If you have focused on specific areas because you believe your audience is wanting to work with you in those areas, then what’s better than sharing content that is focused on those same areas?
Don’t let yourself get frustrated. The updating of content requires review and thought, but it is not an overall heavy lifting project. If you want to discuss evolving your content marketing strategy, please reach out.
About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations.