Creating a successful recruitment marketing blog is not as easy as opening a new template, writing an article, and clicking publish. It takes time, effort, and careful consideration of your messaging and narrative to attract top talent to your organization. With the following six tips, you'll be on your way to creating a recruitment marketing blog that engages your target audience.
But how do you accomplish this? What principles or best practices should you know when starting a recruitment marketing blog? With these questions in mind, let's examine six seemingly simple (yet extremely powerful) tips for starting a recruitment marketing blog that will guide you on this journey and provide guidance in your recruitment blogging's early days.
Why Does it Matter?
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82% of marketers say blogging is an effective way to generate candidates. This means that by starting a recruitment marketing blog, you can reach a wider audience and generate more leads for your business.
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Blog posts are 6x more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. Starting a recruitment marketing blog, you can increase your social media reach and engagement.
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The average blog post gets 3.5x more organic traffic than a website without a blog. A recruitment marketing blog can increase website traffic and improve search engine ranking.
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Blog posts can help you to increase brand awareness. By sharing your company's story and values on your blog, you can build brand awareness and create a positive impression of your company in the minds of potential customers and clients.
Define your blogging goal.
To define your recruitment marketing goal, examine your motivation to start down the blogging path in the first place. Are you looking to enhance your employer branding or drive more consistent engagement with the passive jobseeker? Are you aiming to improve your recruitment process and fill current positions more dynamically than merely publicizing links to online application portals? Or, are you hoping to establish your company as a thought leader in your industry by leveraging in-depth pieces based on extensive research, experts within your organization, and gathered content from various sources outside your organization?
Each of these impetuses for launching a recruitment market blog is valid and worth pursuing, but identifying one as the prime motivator will not only help provide an overriding direction for the content you subsequently populate your blog with (as well as accurately judge how successful your blog becomes), but it will help address each of the following points of practice we discuss.
Identify your audience.
In any writing or content creation endeavor, you must answer two basic yet critical questions: What is your purpose, and who is your audience? We addressed the point of purpose above, so now you need to identify your audience for your recruitment marketing blog in general and individual blog posts. A passive job seeker needs to be engaged differently from an active one. The candidate with 15 years of experience and in the middle of their career journey has different needs than the new college or grad school graduate.
Identifying who your content is for and what you want your audience to take away from your blog post is the heart and soul of basic marketing strategies and thus holds for recruitment marketing and your blog. To demonstrate that you and your company understand what the job seeker values and desires in a workplace, you need to speak to them in a way they can connect.
How-to tip: Identify your audience by understanding their needs and pain points.
What are your target job seekers looking for in a new job? What are their biggest challenges and frustrations? Once you understand their needs and pain points, you can tailor your blog content to address them.
Example: If you are recruiting software engineers, you might write a blog post about the top 10 skills that software engineers need in today's job market. Or, you might write a blog post about overcoming the challenges of finding a job as a software engineer.
Find your voice
OK, I will come out and say it right at the top: finding the right voice and tone for your blog will likely come as you continue to create, publish, review, and refine your recruitment marketing content. But if you notice our first two tips, you'll find that discovering your voice and tone will likely chart its course and present itself to you rather than you having to go hunting for it.
That said, you can make some very considered and metered moves to help find and establish the voice and tone of your blog.
How-to tip: Consider your industry and target audience when choosing a voice and tone for your blog.
Examples:
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If you are in the healthcare industry, you may want to choose a more professional and serious voice and tone for your blog. Your readers are likely professionals looking for information about your products or services.
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On the other hand, if you are in the tech industry, you may want to choose a more casual and friendly voice and tone for your blog. Your readers will likely be millennials looking for information about your company's culture and benefits.
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Think outside of the text.
Remember: a blog doesn't mean a 500-word article about your company culture or an informative piece about how X or Y passive job seekers with given credentials can be a good fit for your organization. While those certainly are worthy pieces to consider, it's essential to vary the content on your blog, and this means making an effort to incorporate video, audio, photos, dynamic photo presentations (slideshow), graphs, infographics, or other visual representations of data – especially given that much of your blog traffic will likely be from mobile devices where these kinds of content pieces are more readily received.
But within the realm of text, don't forget about the power of team member testimonials, profiles, or other narrative-driven blog entries that put your employees front and center and gives them a voice to help spread the gospel of your culture, brand, and overall candidate experience.
How-to tip: Incorporate visual content into your blog posts.
Visual content, such as images, infographics, and videos, can help to make your blog posts more engaging and visually appealing. This can help to improve your blog's click-through rate and readership.
Example: Create an infographic that highlights your company's culture or values. Infographics are a great way to share complex information in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format. You can use an infographic to highlight your company's culture, values, or employee benefits.
Curate content
By now, you've noticed how much of this blog entry is devoted to strategic frameworks or solutions to the problem of managing a recruitment blog effectively – we're not advocating just jumping in headfirst and seeing what happens. The same is true of how you roll out or curate content. This is where the concept of a monthly editorial or content calendar helps better strategize the kind of content you're publishing, when and how you're working to amplify your content, whether it's through automating email updates, unlocking social media posts, or other means of driving traffic to your blog.
When conceiving your blog, don't just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks – create a plan for your content and see that plan to fruition.
How-to tip: Create a monthly editorial or content calendar.
This will help plan and schedule content in advance and ensure you publish high-quality content regularly.
Analyze performance
As an expert blogger, you understand that data can reveal the true narrative and guide your decision-making process. That's why regularly analyzing the reporting and analytics of your recruitment blog - including page views, shares, link clicks, bounce rates, and other integrated dashboard metrics - is crucial to better understanding what resonates with your audience and drives traffic and engagement to your blog entries.
Don't be afraid to pivot away from ideas, concepts, or themes that don't resonate with your audience or yield the desired results. Similarly, keep an eye out for unexpected successes or opportunities from your data, even if they don't align with your initial vision. These can lead to increased engagement and interest in your career opportunities. Remember, as an expert blogger, data can be your guiding light, so use it wisely.
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