Content marketing has, perhaps unsurprisingly, become one of the most widely used digital marketing tactics, trusted to boost brand awareness, website traffic, and conversion rates alike. It can also be an amazingly useful and cost-effective way to attract the top talent in your industry by showcasing your company values, goals, and employer brand.
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Here are six ways content marketing can help you attract your desired workforce:
1. Content Marketing Lets You Promote Company Values
In his book Lost and Founder, Rand Fishkin makes an incredible point on core values: “People who share core values and believe those values to be the most important part of their contribution to the world have the greatest potential to accomplish remarkable things together.”
In other words, if you want to attract employees who want to work for you and with you to make your brand the best it can be, you need to find people who share your core values.
Team members who are in it for the long haul and are invested in the work they do perform much better than those who are there just for the paycheck.
Content marketing is the best way to showcase your core values without sounding too promotional or salesy. It allows you to define and showcase your brand voice in the most natural way: through your entire online presence.
If you ensure that every piece of content you publish is aligned with the core values you stand behind, potential candidates won’t question your integrity and honesty—it will be spelled out for them everywhere they search for you.
2. Content Marketing Introduces Your Team
Sticking to the subject of teamwork, let’s agree that teams that mesh well and learn to speak the same shorthand work the best together. Getting there takes a lot of time and mutual effort, and when adding a new person into the mix, matching a skill set alone will simply not cut it.
From the third employee you hire onward, more than just core competencies need to be examined and explored to ensure the new hire fits in with the company culture you are trying to establish.
Luckily, you don’t have to make someone spend a day shadowing his or her potential team to see how the person would mix.
Content marketing lets you introduce your employees to the world, whether as authors of posts, through social media, in your website’s news section, on a dedicated page, or through other means.
That way, those interested in joining your ranks will already know what kind of vibe to expect and if they would, in fact, be a good fit, saving you recruiting and screening time.
3. Content Marketing Lets You Reach Talent Where They Like to Hang Out
Often, the best candidates for a job will not even know the job is available because they don’t spend a lot of time looking at job ads. The best way to reach these kinds of candidates is through the channels they know, trust, and regularly visit: blogs, news outlets, social media groups, and so on.
By leveraging content marketing, you can pop up unobtrusively in front of the types of candidates you are looking to attract without having to resort only to job boards. When they come across the ad in a more casual manner, they might be more likely to send in their résumé.
This also means you can show up on the radar of someone not looking for a new job but who might be drawn in by your voice and message and turn out to be the perfect fit. That makes content marketing a great passive recruiting channel.
4. Content Marketing Can Make You Stand Out
The main purpose of content marketing is to make you stand out in a crowded market and let your potential customers and clients know what they can expect from you as a brand. Similarly, it can be very difficult for a candidate to gauge what kind of workplace you enforce based on a job ad, which will make the person search for you online.
A well-executed content marketing campaign can let interested parties know what you are like to work with, what you represent, and what kinds of projects they can expect to be involved with, which is certainly more than any job ad can share in a limited word count.
This can tip the scales your way and enable you to attract the kinds of people you want to work with instead of risking their joining the ranks of your competition.
5. Content Marketing Makes for a Less Formal Contact
Everyone gets nervous when replying to job ads and talking to HR. This is only natural.
However, if you use content marketing as a channel that encourages interested potential candidates to reach out and send in a résumé, they can be much more relaxed, true to themselves, and open about the entire process. The lack of extra pressure will make them more communicative and enable them to showcase their best qualities in a natural way, making your recruiting task that much easier.
Also, candidates are much more likely to trust a brand’s voice and message that are spread through its marketing channels as opposed to a single job ad.
6. Content Marketing Done Right Is Your Best Calling Card
When executed properly, a well-crafted and well-rounded content marketing campaign is the best for representing your brand; it showcases your unique tone of voice and the point of view from which you view the world and communicates with readers and viewers truthfully, honestly, and with integrity.
When exposed to your best version, potential candidates will be much more likely to engage with your HR department and get the ball rolling.
On the other hand, if executed poorly, content marketing will not only fail to drive the return on investment you were hoping for but also have a detrimental effect on your hiring process, so bear that in mind when embarking on a campaign.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing is much more than a marketing tool; it is an extension of your brand and a straightforward and potentially successful way to attract the right talent. If you ensure that the voice and message you want to represent echo through your marketing avenues, the right talent won’t take long to notice you and get in touch.
Josip Mlinaric is an e-mail marketing and outreach specialist at Point Visible, a marketing agency providing custom outreach and a link-building service. He likes to say he has a simple and calm mind-set when it comes to his approach toward life in general and likes to relax with experimenting in the kitchen or just chill listening to music.