A warm welcome back to tonicthinking. We hope you found last week’s blog on how to find your online audience useful.
So far in this graduate blog series we’ve looked at:
- Why listening before speaking means you make more friends on social media
- How to discover untapped communities that provide a great opportunity for you to join the conversation and build reputation
This week it’s all about the laws of attraction and how you can supplement your marketing efforts by aggregating, authoring and helping in a bid to manage reputation and build a talent community around your brand by pulling people to you.
Content marketing is nothing new. However, its meteoric rise to become an essential part of any self-respecting employer’s talent acquisition strategy is down to a number of very valid reasons.
Why, you ask? Here are 10 reasons:
- Audiences are increasingly wary of ‘sales pitches’
- Push marketing is dead
- It’s informative, interesting and helpful
- It’s easily consumable on mobile devices
- It can communicate values and culture and act as a self selection tool
- It’s easily sharable and creates social proof
- It increases visibility
- It promotes your brand
- It positions your brand as the expert authority
- It improves SEO organic rankings
But! Content marketing has become a problem for content marketers.
If you’re already creating or perhaps thinking about creating content, then it’s highly likely that your close competition is too. In fact, most businesses are creating content and this in turn creates a problem because, guess what? There’s too much content; we’re being flooded.
You could argue that content marketers have ruined content marketing.
So what does this mean for students?
Negativity and cynicism. Because they’re being bombarded with messages to buy this and that, join so and so or work with X and Y, they’ll once again begin to raise their barriers.
Shame really because the whole point of creating and curating content is to get people to lower their marketing defence shield and allow you to get and hold their attention to deliver a message. If they’re bombarded with sub-standard content all the time, or content that’s “Me-me-me!” what will they think when they come across your content?
Enter Context Marketing!
So what is it? Simply put, it’s delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
Context enables your message to be unique, personalised, efficient, and ultimately more successful. If you’re going to take the time to create good content (which you most definitely should), then you may as well make that content work as hard for you as possible.
Think about your own behaviour for a moment. When you log into Facebook are you in the same state of mind as you are when logging into LinkedIn? Would the same identical content just shared on all the same channels be as effective as something that’s been created to communicate with someone on a 1:1 basis based on where they are, who they are, what they’re doing and how they prefer to consume information?
Of course, the answer should be obvious. However it does mean a little more work as you’ll need to consider that you’ll have to create various versions of content on the same topic. But the results will be worth it.
Here’s 6 tips to remember when it comes to creating content that works:
- Be strategic – one-off content doesn’t make a strategy
- Be passionate – if you don’t care about it, who will?
- Be helpful – create content that will make others lives easier
- Put yourself in the graduates shoes – everything starts with their needs, challenges and behaviour
- Be authoritative – you understand your industry better than anyone, so make sure that knowledge aligns with those looking to forge a career path in it
- Be tough on yourself – you’ll know if your content is lazy
To create content in context you’ll need to be a dab-hand at audience segmentation. And that’s something that we’ll be sharing advice on next week, so follow our blog using the follow button (top right) to receive an email when our content lands.
See you then!
In the meantime, if you want to get in touch to discuss how you can manage reputation and bring the right talent to you, drop us a line on 020 7183 2556 or email tam.salih@tonic-agency.com to set up a coffee.