How to build a content marketing strategy for recruiters

Recruitment is such a competitive and crowded industry that it can be a real challenge for newer recruiters and agencies to stand out, build a reputation and raise brand awareness with potential clients and prospective candidates.

Content marketing can be a great way to communicate your market expertise and deliver truly useful content to your target audiences that will benefit your reputation and brand profile online.

Our quick guide aims to give you some top tips for developing a recruitment content marketing strategy that delivers results.

Know your audience and their journeys

Understanding your various audience segments, their challenges, pain points and the intricacies of their journey towards becoming a client/applying for a job, is essential so that you can provide the content that they are looking for, at the right time and in the right form.

Developing personas can be useful to ensure you keep your content strategy on track – every piece of content will need to be focused on meeting a specific need or want in one of your personas at a certain point on their journey, and have a clear objective for what you want that content to achieve.

Identify the types of content and channels that work best for your audience

We’re all different and like to access and digest content in different ways. Some people love digging into a long-read blog post, others want something short, snappy and visual. Some people like to scroll on their favourite social media platform until they see content that hooks them in, others want it emailed to them once a month. Understanding which camps your audience fall into is important, as it’ll help to shape your recruitment content marketing strategy.

Set your content marketing objectives

Setting objectives for your content marketing strategy is a step that should never be ignored. These objectives need to be aligned to your wider business goals, whether that’s driving more organic traffic to your site, delivering completed client enquiry forms, growing your email database or widening your pool of known quality candidates.

Each individual piece of content will play a role in contributing towards these objectives, having its own KPIs (more on this later) that feed into the wider strategy.

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Audit your existing content

It’s an essential step to understand what content you already have on your website and how it is performing (in relation to your objectives) so that you can take these learnings into your new content strategy, and see if there is any existing content that can be utilised and updated or repurposed as part of that. Reusing content that already exists, at least in part, can be a great way to save time and money when it comes to content creation, as long as it aligns with your new goals and serves the right purpose for your audience.

Content ideation and calendar creation

Now it’s time to come up with ideas for your content that meet specific needs in your audience and create a calendar so that each piece can be created, published and amplified effectively. Essentially, your strategy is laid out in a content calendar, with information such as:

The title of each piece
SEO information, such as the keywords being targeted, the meta description to be used, H1s, H2s etc, suggested internal links to and from the new page
Who is responsible for creating the content?
What the deadline for the first draft is
Who is checking the content?
When is the target publish date?
What other channels will be used to amplify it e.g. social media, email newsletter, paid media, digital PR etc?
What the objectives are for this specific piece e.g. send users to a contact form, email signups, direct to another piece of content that is further down the funnel etc. You can specify the call-to-action (CTA) here.
Any notes on what the piece could contain and examples of similar content already out there that this content should be better than. Suggestions for visuals etc.

Set your content KPIs

Every piece of content should have its own metrics so that you can tell how it is performing once it’s out there in the world. These will vary, depending on the type of content it is and what the primary objective for the piece is. For example:

Blogs – number of views (segmented by channel), average time on page, engagements, conversions/goals, organic rankings for target keywords.
Video – full and partial views, click-throughs, shares
Podcasts – number of downloads/listens, reviews, listener retention rate
Social posts – reach, engagements, shares, increase in followers.

Create your content

With all of the planning and preparation already done, actually creating the content is often the most straightforward step in the process. Whether it’s written content, visuals, video, audio, or a combination of any or all of these, making sure that what you produce is better than anything else already out there is important if you want to stand out.

Make sure it’s visually appealing and follow content design principles to ensure straightforward usability for your website visitors.

Distribute and amplify your content

Once the content has been checked by someone else and is ready to go, your distribution plan comes into play. As well as hosting it on your website, you may also want to utilise other channels to help more people see your content and earn links to your site. This will all be detailed in your content calendar.

Measure your content results and adjust your strategy if needed

Once your content is live and your amplification has also been done, you’ll need to ensure that you measure performance via the metrics you set earlier. The amount of time it takes to assess these will vary, depending on the metric.

For example, if you’re looking at search engine rankings for keywords targeted in the content, it can take weeks or months for some pieces to start ranking in search engine results and driving significant traffic. Other metrics will need less time to properly assess.

Use the KPIs you set to decide how well a piece of content worked and this can inform your future strategy.

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When planned and implemented well, content marketing can be transformative for recruiters. Whether it’s driving new leads through the website or increasing your brand profile to attract new clients and candidates through any channel, content marketing can be very worthwhile in the recruitment sector.

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If you are looking for marketing support with content or any other channel or strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch.

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