The following transcript was taken from InSights, a staffing and recruiting podcast from Haley Marketing Group dedicated to providing quick-hitting takeaways on Social Recruiting, Content Marketing and Employer Branding. To listen to the episode, click play on the player above or visit the episode page [InSights] Social Media Can’t Fix Your Candidate Experience
Brad Bialy: Back in January on episode one of InSights, [InSights] Preparing for 2019, Matt and I explained how to create a content plan for 2019. Well, with June upon us, it’s time to reflect back on your overall goals. Matt, for our newer listeners, why don’t you break down why we need to set goals with our content marketing?
Matt Lozar: If we don’t have goals, it’s very difficult to evaluate success. At the start of any plan, it doesn’t just think about … it could be a financial savings plan, it could be a weight loss plan, it could be wanting to run up 5k. We need goals to help us determine success at the end. In content marketing, that comes back to is our goal just to drive website traffic? Is it a goal to drive applications or sales leads? It could be just a goal to publish a piece of content every week, similar to what we’ve done with this podcast. One of our goals in January was to publish two podcasts a month.
Brad Bialy: Yeah. I think it always has to come back to those business goals. What are you trying to achieve as a staffing and recruiting firm? Is it more applications or more job orders?
Brad Bialy: Once you’ve identified those goals, then you do exactly as Matt said, you break it down into bite-sized benchmarks, bite-sized goals; monthly content, weekly content, daily content. What are you trying to do to work towards those major, bigger organizational goals?
Brad Bialy: Now as we look at June as a halfway point through 2019, Matt and I wanted to bring it back to Episode One where we talked about how to create a content plan for 2019 and how to evaluate if what you’ve done the past six months has had an impact on your business?
Brad Bialy: So Matt, if we think about evaluating whether or not we were successful in our, let’s say six months of content here, for our listeners that started with us in January, where should they get started? Where should they start looking?
Matt Lozar: That’s a good question. You can, if your goal is just to publish, then just go back to your blog and see if you’ve actually published and hit those marks if it was monthly or weekly or biweekly. We could look at, if you’re good at looking with data, you could look at some Google Analytics, I think, to look at page views, or if you can look at applications, or maybe talk to the sales team on the sales side, the recruiters on the recruiter side, because it’s also a challenge in that somebody may apply for a job and they didn’t come directly from a blog post. It’s just your applications and your sales are increasing. So working with that team internally to see how quality is, both on sales or the candidate side.
Matt Lozar: So kind of circling back is let’s find some hard data to see if your page views are increasing if your applications are going up, if your sales inquiries are coming or increasing. To see that hard data to see are we hitting that goal of how often we want to publish, but then is it leading to actual conversion pages of those applications and the contact us form?
Brad Bialy: And you have to be honest with the data. Go back to the numbers, but be honest with yourself. If you set a goal in January of publishing one article every other week, and now we’re looking at halfway through June, be honest with yourself. Did you hit those benchmarks? Did you hit that goal, and if not, where was there a challenge? What was difficult for you in hitting that goal and how can you create efficiency? Is it creating a content plan? Maybe that’s a little bit more stripped down. Maybe it’s not every other week, maybe it’s once a month. Or is it having a better plan? How can you create a better plan so that you’re set up for success at the beginning of the month? But we have to go back to those goals.
Brad Bialy: Like we were talking about, organizationally, more applications or more job orders and actually having the conversation with your team, “Hey, we’ve gone through a content strategy for the past six months. What are you seeing? What are you feeling?” Are you instinctively feeling like we have more candidates coming through and does the data support that?
Matt Lozar: We can also look at, going back to the team, asking them if any pieces of content have resonated with their prospects or current clients. If somebody has seen that content. And also look at the data to see if there’s certain content that has earned more page views, earned more a longer time on page. Which is one of the metrics to look at to see if someone … if you have a blog that has 500 clicks and average time on page of five seconds, people are going to your page and not seeing what they want. If you have 100 clicks and people are spending two minutes on the page, that content is resonating a little more.
Matt Lozar: We also want to look at that content plan we started in January. We’ve mentioned this throughout the podcast, is does it need to shift or pivot a little bit for that second half of the year? You may have that plan for July to December already done, but if you wrote a really good piece of content in February or March, try to repurpose it. Try to write something similar and continue to really push that content that’s working well with your audience.
Brad Bialy: I couldn’t agree more. We have to look at the data, have to see what was successful. And Matt, I think you made a great point. Talk to the team and get their feeling on where they’ve seen success from content. Are prospects saying things about articles that they’ve maybe read? Are you hearing from candidates that as you send out resources they’re … It’s improving their interview or it’s improving their process, their flow?
Brad Bialy: Think about the impact that you’ve had more than just the numbers, but actually the impact that you’ve had on one candidate or one prospect and then use that to your advantage as you plan the next six months of content. How can you upscale the articles that you’ve already made? And when I say upscale, it’s taking one piece of content and turning it into another piece of content, whether that’s an ebook or just another, another article maybe. But how can you use the information that you’ve gathered from January to June to make more strategic decisions from July to December?
Matt Lozar: And please remember that the content is for your target audience. It’s not for you, it’s not for a business owner, it’s for the people you’re trying to get to engage with your content to work them down that funnel, to nurture that relationship, to get them to the point of reaching out to contact you.
