According to the team at BlueSky PR Press coverage is 100% more credible than an advert or a piece of content on your own website because someone else is saying something about you rather than you saying something about yourself. However…
PR is more than just the press
You still need your own content in order to demonstrate your expertise. An article in the press can’t go into the depth you can in blog posts and whitepapers.
And you need to get potential clients and candidates on to your website in the first place in order to see them, which means you need search engine optimised content, brand awareness (think press) and backlinks from credible sites and social media.
Sounds complicated? It can be as simple as using LinkedIn to start sharing your opinions to stir up some comments and controversy.
Employee advocacy
Getting your recruiters interested in producing and sharing content is a tough one. You need to show them the ROI – how does content convert to money in their pockets? Show them the number of clients and candidates that have come in on the back of your blog posts / website downloads / press coverage (and if you can’t show them the numbers you need to get tracking your ROI) and how much revenue that brought in.
Demonstrated ROI but still not getting the level of engagement you need? Have competitions for whose posts can get the highest interactions etc. We have our own internal incentive scheme for social sharing and trust me it makes a huge difference to the reach of your content!
What if your recruitment consultants are finding the writing itself difficult or are struggling to come up with content? They can pick a topic and ask their clients or consultants for their opinions, summarise the results and include quotes from them.
Authenticity of voice
Have internal marketing resources available to produce content? Fantastic! By no mean does that mean you have to sacrifice authenticity. Your marketing team just needs to understand the tone of voice of your director or consultants and combine it with the tone of the brand.
We often find recruiters particularly struggle with writing content – they tend to be better on the phone – so marketing can talk to them and have a 10 minute conversation to produce the content. It will still be the consultant’s thoughts, it can still be controversial and out there, it’s still authentic, it just isn’t written by them directly.
We ghost write content on behalf of our clients, and often on behalf of each other for our own marketing, based on a quick chat with the expert on the topic. You’d be surprised how a few minutes of conversation can convert into hundreds of words of content (film your conversation and you’ll have a great piece of video content to use snippets from alongside and for promotion J ).
Content is like selling by stealth
Everyone who reads your content is a potential lead (presuming you understand your audience and are targeting your copy correctly). Content draws people in and gets them to interact with your brand. So give your readers direction. Guide them down the path you want them to take. If they read your blog post and just leave then that’s a missed opportunity. Suggest additional content they might be interested in receiving via email, link to gated content within your site, offer useful information such as webinars and how to guides.
Remember – the ‘stickier’ your content and the longer the person spends on your site, the more of your expertise they are exposed to.
BUT…
Don’t forget that just simply collecting readers or social followers is pointless. Are they on your CRM? How do you engage with them going forward? What is your follow up strategy to turn them into a qualified lead?
Engagement with content gives you different reasons to pick up the phone and speak to a potential client, rather than trying to sell your services outright. Call to discuss their opinions on the topic they have shown an interest in or to offer additional hints and tips. It’s this sort of value added interaction that makes you stand out from your competitors as a credible industry expert.
Leverage your content
If you’ve written a blog post or you’ve got something in the press – how can you stretch that content? How can you maximise the bang for your buck?
There’s no point in having a great piece of content that withers and dies because its audience wasn’t maximised. Don’t just put your coverage up on the wall in reception, send it to your mailing list. Drop it into conversation and then offer to send over a copy. Turn it into an infographic, or video, leverage every last drop out of that piece of content by thinking of all the different ways you can reformat it – you’ll find that different people engage with the piece in different formats and on different platforms and you can use this to start to segment your content strategies.
Measuring your return
We could go on and on about ROI here at BlueSky (and being that we have multiple blog posts, ebooks and webinars on the topic, I guess we have) but in all seriousness the only real way to demonstrate the value of PR and content for recruiters is to measure it. And I don’t just mean the direct conversions. Often a candidate or client will have engaged with you multiple times before that turns into a placement and you need to know what they engaged with in order to know what content is working.
But how can you track this?
The easiest things to track will be website downloads, blog subscriptions, email clicks etc. But don’t forget to simply ask the question – the sooner you ask, the more likely they are to remember what it is they saw that made them think of you.
Want more tips on how recruiters can make money from PR and marketing? Download BlueSky PR’s ebook.
