Do blogs still work?
Almost every business feels under some kind of pressure to ‘have a blog’.
Often the 'why' is quickly forgotten. That's just how it is. If you run a company, you write a blog.
Ask recruitment agency owners what their experiences have been with blogging, however, and the responses are mixed.
Plenty suffer from lack of consistency and become a graveyard of good intentions… “Last updated June 2016”.
Still more, however, question the results
that all this effort generates.
How many people actually read the blog, in any case? And what’s the benefit to the business if they do?
There are certainly times when keeping a business blog can feel like a lonely duty - writing patiently each week or month for a tiny audience who are most likely already engaged with your agency.
Done right, however, blogs can still produce brilliant returns for recruitment agencies, acting as magnets for new candidates and clients and leading to hundreds of thousands of pounds in fee income.
Not seeing those kinds of results?
Here are the most likely reasons why your recruitment blog isn’t working:
1. You're not promoting it properly
Often business blogs get started with some unrealistic expectations. “If you build it, they will come…”.
Blogs are a great way to drive traffic to your website, boost your SEO rankings etc. With that said, your blog does need a push. People need to know that you’ve written something - simple.
Especially new people.
Promoting your blog for free usually involves email newsletters and posting links to social media channels.
Organic (free) promotion faces the natural limitations that it only gets delivered (for the most part) to people already within your network
– people on your email recipient list, or people connected to your agency on social media.
For our clients at Clockwork Content, we combine organic sharing with a dose of paid promotion using LinkedIn’s powerful targeting features.
Thanks to LinkedIn’s incredibly detailed data on its users, it’s possible to promote your blogs to very specific audiences, meaning that it will pop up in the newsfeed
of only a specific type of LinkedIn user - exactly the same way a recruiter searches candidates, only in reverse.
EXAMPLE:
If you focus on
IT recruitment in London, you might write a blog post on "London’s Top Developer Conferences in 2019", and promote this only to LinkedIn users with a “full stack developer” job title (or variation) located in London.
Hey presto – any and all clicks through to your blog are from hyper-relevant candidates, (who can then browse your jobs, register with your agency etc.).
LinkedIn targeting can get even more specific, attracting reads from professionals segmented by:
- Location
- Company name
- Company size
- Job title
- Industry
- Years of experience
- Degree field
And much more.
For many of our clients, we use LinkedIn’s marketing features as a way of generating leads from specific groups of candidates or hiring managers
– first creating content that will spark the interest of these users, then aligning it with a promotion campaign that zeros in on their profiles.
2. You don’t capture leads
One of the biggest issues with blogging is converting traffic into tangible business prospects.
Lots of things can cause this:
- It takes all the time you have just to write the blog, there’s nothing left to analyse website traffic and see if anyone’s reading it (and what they do after)
- Your site has few (or ineffective) conversion points - even if you get plenty of readers on your blog, most of them vanish without leaving a trace…
To remedy this, our preferred approach is to mix regular blog entries with ‘gated’ content – meaning guides, reports, longer articles etc. which require visitors to add their name and email address
before accessing the content.
This can be a brilliant way of generating leads both on the candidate side and the client side.
EXAMPLE:
Supposing you’re looking for more relationships at the HR level with IT SMEs
– you might publish “Top Ten Employee Perks New for 2019”
– promoted to HR Managers working at IT companies with between 50-1,000 employees on LinkedIn, with a lead capture form.
Like magic, your inbox will fill up with the contact information of carefully-targeted prospects (who are all now familiar with your agency).
3. You don't stick at it
Updating a blog is hard work.
Despite the best-planned calendars, unexpected crises and opportunities will always throw writing schedules off course, and the ‘weekly blog’ soon becomes the ‘when I can remember blog’.
Trying to delegate to team members is tricky, also.
Do you really want your top-billing producers distracted by the need to take hours away from their desks (or management roles) to work as part-time marketing managers?
For internal marketing teams, it can also be tough. Often in small agencies marketing managers wear a lot of hats, and among the 101 plates they have to keep spinning, finding the time to write truly expert-level recruitment content is a challenge.
This pass-the-parcel situation usually leads to inconsistent blog output, which in turn creates patchy ROI, and eventually blogs are either semi or totally abandoned.
But blogs work best when they are consistent and frequent.
Marketing – especially content marketing – is a cumulative process. For our customers, we typically produce 1-2 blog posts per month.
Prospects need multiple opportunities to encounter your brand, and blasting out individual blog
updates at random times and expecting a flood of new business in return is not
realistic.
Instead, working steadily to produce engaging, high-quality content with steady regularity
ensures that your brand (and the expertise showcased via your blog posts) is continually being drip-fed into targeted areas of LinkedIn.
This is, of course, why many agencies partner with reliable outsourcing partners to deliver content – but whether you’re staying in-house or working with an agency, consistency is crucial for ROI.
How did you
get here?
You're probably here because you're involved in the ownership, management or marketing of a recruitment business in the UK.
You're reading because we've created content that addresses an important issue for your company.
That's the power of content marketing using LinkedIn Audience Matching.
Want perfect target clients and candidates to find your agency just how you found us?
Let's talk!
4. You're competing with dedicated news sources
Getting the content itself right for your blog is another challenge, and a common error in recruitment blogging is to try and duplicate established industry news sources.
Agencies are so keen to show their clients and candidates that they really do know their markets that they write exclusively about industry trends and developments, often losing the recruitment angle.
For most businesses, this is not the optimal approach.
As much as customers may love you for being the guys that truly know their stuff, they’ll almost always have better sources for basic industry news.
Instead, it’s key to remember that
your value comes from your position as recruitment experts within your market.
You know things nobody else does about salaries, interview processes, hiring trends etc.
Of course, it’s important to be up to date on news - but it’s still more important to show what that news means for candidates and job seekers in your sector.
Forgetting the recruitment angle in your recruitment blog positions you in competition with bigger, better-resourced news agencies and deletes your critical value-add!
Putting it all together...
Do blogs still work?
100%.
We've seen our clients contacted by brand new customers who found them via their LinkedIn content, liked what they read and reached out to start a partnership.
Some of those relationships have turned into £50k+ annual accounts.
Still more clients have seen high-value candidates submit CVs, or reach out direct to recruiters after reading a sponsored blog post that really resonated with them and spoke to their situation - a £20k or £30k placement on the strength of a 750-word post.
So yes, blogs still work!
Thoughtful, insightful, high-value blogs
which are
published with regularity and
promoted with accuracy can deliver some of the most impressive marketing ROI in the recruitment sector.
But successful blogging requires an
effective strategy and consistent execution.
With the right team and the right plan, content marketing can revolutionise the way your agency thinks about advertising.
Ready to shine online?
Think about it... how did we find you?
We used LinkedIn Audience Matching to bring you to this blog post.
We know (Big Brother would be proud...) that you're involved in the ownership, management or marketing of a recruitment business in the UK.
Just who we wanted to talk to!
We can do the same thing for your agency - bring perfect target prospects to your website, job boards or email-protected content, consistently, month after month.
LinkedIn is the most powerful B2B platform ever built, and if you're looking to grow your client or candidate base there is quite simply no more cost-effective way to do it then through high-quality content marketing.
We create, publish and promote the content while your busy team focuses on pitching to clients and closing deals.
Interested in learning more?
We'd love to chat.
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Delivered like clockwork
Promoted to your audience
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