This is the second of my “intro to content marketing” blog posts. If you missed part 1, check it out our advice on why staffing firms need to be content marketers
How to Create a Content Marketing Campaign
Okay, so you’re convinced that you want to use education as a tool to create awareness, open doors with prospects, develop new reasons for employers to purchase staffing services, and systematically target your ideal clients.
But how do you get started?
At Haley Marketing, we’ve been doing content marketing for more than 16 years. Here’s how we suggest you start.
- Determine your goals. Sure you want to grow, but by how much? And by what date?
- Define your ideal client. Paint a bulls eye on the target for the types of companies you want to sell to and the specific decision makers in those firms that you want to reach.
- Define educational goals. What do you want to teach people about? And what are your clients, prospects and candidates interested in learning? Make a specific list of topics.
- Outline your content curriculum. Think about education like a college course, and break down your topics into small, manageable bites.
- Determine the channels for getting your content to your ideal prospects. Most likely, you will use a combination of direct mail (yes, it still works), email, blogging and social content sharing. Depending on your geographic location and the type of staffing you do, you may also include drop offs, seminars, webinars, and writing for local newspapers or industry associations.
- Define a step-by-step process for your direct marketing activities. Diagram each touch point with a prospect in your marketing action plan. Be sure to define the places where you want follow-up calls made–content marketing is ACTIVE. This is not inbound marketing, you don’t wait for people to come to you, you pick up the phone a multiple steps in the process.
- Create a spreadsheet for tracking activities and results. Content marketing should be systematic.
- Divide your target marketing list into small, manageable batches. Small enough that you can guarantee 100% follow-up. Content marketing should be highly integrated with your sales efforts.
- Put your plan into action. Track results weekly.
- Plan to be persistent. Just like staffing is not a one call close, content marketing is not a one-touch campaign. It takes repeated content over an extended period of time to capture the attention and interest of your audience.
Content Marketing is About Long-term Relationship Building
Through regular relationship nurturing communication (remember, you are educating, not selling), you will positioning yourself as an expert. You will elevate your firm from being seen as a commodity, “me too” staffing firm to an industry expert that has the knowledge and experience to provide consultative solutions to tough business problems.
About Haley Marketing
As you might guess, content marketing is our thing. Since 1996, we’ve been educating employers how to use staffing more intelligently–and helping staffing firms to implement the marketing tactics outlined in this blog post.
If you want more ideas for marketing your staffing firm, check out the IdeaLab, our FREE playground for sales and marketing ideas and inspiration. You find more than 70 articles, hundreds of blog posts, four ebooks on marketing, and 7 hours of on demand video training.
And if you want to discuss how to put content marketing to work for your firm, give us a call at 1.888.696.2900.