The 7 Pillars To Content Marketing Success As An HR Technology Company

Content marketing as a human resources technology company can be challenging. How do you create content that resonates with HR professionals and convinces them to spend hundreds of dollars with you versus other services? What makes you unique? What value do you bring to the table? Today on Amanda Cross Co., I am going to share the seven pillars to content marketing success as an HR tech company so you can understand what you need to do.

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1) Know Your Audience

If you want to succeed online, you must know your audience. You cannot create amazing content if you are marketing to everyone. Think about the audience you are trying to attract. Create an audience persona and get crystal clear on the people who embody your ideal audience.

Think about the following:

  • How many people work for the companies you are trying to target?

  • What vibe do those companies have?

    • Ex: Fun, Energetic, Scrappy, Tech-Savvy, Innovative, Creative

  • What is the company budget for their next software investment?

  • Are there anything(s) that might hold them back from purchasing from you?

  • What do you offer that their current solution does not give them?

    • What is your UVP or unique value proposition? What makes your product so special?

If you have an audience already, you are in a great place! Connect with people who have used your products already, especially those who stopped using your products! Talk about their experience with your brand, what they liked/didn’t like, how you can improve, what they need help with, et cetera.

If you have built an email list, send out an email asking for feedback. Use that feedback to produce stellar blog posts that speak to your audience and their needs, fears, excitements, et cetera.

Resources To Help You Know Your Audience

2) Create Consistent Content

If you want your audience to know, like, and trust you, you must show up for them consistently. Inconsistency can throw off any traction you begin to build with your audience. Creating consistent content doesn’t mean you can’t take a break! You can take a ton of breaks through the power of content scheduling.

Most blog platforms give you the opportunity to schedule out content far in advance. Your platform will post for you so that you can set it and forget it.

You can also schedule out the social media promotion of your content thanks to websites like CoSchedule, Buffer, Tailwind, MeetEdgar, and more!

The most important part of creating consistent content is picking a schedule that you can manage. Posting five days a week sounds fantastic until you are burned out after the third week of regular posting.

Create a consistency that makes sense for your brand. You may want to launch your blog with a certain amount of content, then go down to once or twice per week at the most. As an HR technology company, you don’t want to get hung up in the weeds of pushing out all the content. Content marketing should be a means to connect with people and bring in new clients. Don’t become a full-time blogger in the process of growing your brand! Remember your primary goal here. That goal will take you further than pushing out 100s of posts a year.

Resources To Help You Create Consistent Content

3) Make Your Content Digestible

Next, you must make your content digestible. A while ago I wrote an article titled, “8 Tips To Help Make Your Blog Posts Easier To Read.” In this post, I talked about an article I’d recently seen on the internet that looked promising but did not keep my attention. In this piece, I shared eight tips that you can follow to make sure that your audience keeps reading your content, every time.

Making digestible content isn’t as difficult as people make it out to be! Readers don’t need much. They do want the content they read to do the following:

  • Flow: When I am reading your work, do I get caught on words and phrases easily? You want your readers to focus on the value you are giving them, not the errors in your writing.

  • Provide Actual Value: Are your providing value or fluff? If you want content marketing to help your brand reach your fullest potential, you need to be willing to share information with your audience.

  • Be Easy On The Eyes: Do I have to strain my eyes or reach for my reading glasses to read your content? You want your audience to feel comfortable when reading your work.

  • Be Scannable: Can I read your headings and a few sentences that grab my attention and still get value from your work? If so, you are doing amazing!

  • Work Across Devices: Your audience is reading everywhere they can. Sometimes they may read from their computer at work, their phone on the train, et cetera. Make sure your content is great on mobile as well as on a desktop.

The Outline Of A Phenomenal, Digestible Blog Post

  1. Start with an attention-grabbing introduction.

  2. Share a picture that grabs your readers eye.

  3. Share two of your main points.

  4. Break it up with another picture.

  5. Share two more of your main points.

  6. Break it up with another picture.

  7. Share your last main point.

  8. Wrap it up with a conclusion.

While I don’t always follow this “outline,” this is the basis of most of my content. Sometimes I need to say more, so I space things out differently. What I share here is a simple layout that grabs your reader’s attention and keeps them hooked every time.

Your introduction makes a big difference for your readers. If your introduction doesn’t grab their attention, it makes it easy to click off your website. Make sure that your introduction paragraph isn’t just an afterthought. Put effort into it!

I like to use H2/H3 headers to note any significant ideas in my articles that way they are easy to scan, and they also get picked up by Google.

I use pictures that break up the text, give the post a visual element, and sometimes they even add to the conversation if I add infographics. You should be trying your best to make a great first impression with the pictures you use on your site. You could also use graphs and charts to add visuals to your articles.

4) Have A Goal Besides Blog Post Traffic

When you think about blogging, you may feel that your goal should be blog post traffic. As a business, this isn’t true. Content marketing is not there to get traffic. It’s there to bring qualified leads into your business. If you are only increasing traffic, you are doing content marketing the wrong way.

What is your goal for creating a blog? Is your goal to:

  • Increase email list sign-ups?

  • Get more companies to sign up for free trials of your product?

  • Schedule more product demos with interested companies?

  • Become a household name in your industry?

  • Have more touchpoints with potential customers?

When you sit down and understand your content marketing goals, you can create a blog that works for your brand. If you want to create a blog that converts email subscribers like crazy, your blog will have a different layout with things like in-post opt-ins, sidebar opt-ins, and potentially even pop-ups leading back to your email list.

Once you know the goal behind investing in content marketing, you can focus on building those goals into the content marketing process.

Traffic is a great goal if you are a lifestyle blogger, but for a business, you don’t need a traffic avalanche. Instead, you need to bring in the people who will buy your product. Bringing in 500 page views is better than 50,000 if those 500 page views convert into more customers!

Defining SMART Goals For Your Business Blog

Have you ever heard of the acronym SMART as it relates to goals? When creating goals for your business blog, they need to be:

  • Specific

  • Measurable

  • Attainable/Achievable

  • Relevant

  • Time-Bound

Here are some examples of this in action:

Goal: I will create four long-form (1,500+ word) articles related to employee engagement on my business blog every month.

  • Is it specific? Yes, you are stating what you want to share on your blog each month as well as how long you want each post to be.

  • Is it measurable? Yes, you will be able to measure when you have reached this goal every month based on the amount of and length of the blog posts you create.

  • Is it attainable? Yes, you should be able to write 4, 1,500+ word blog posts OR hire it out for someone to complete.

  • Is it relevant? Yes, if your goal is to create content on your blog, this goal would be relevant.

  • Is it time-bound? Yes, you want to achieve this goal monthly.

Run through this exercise with all the goals that you set. Click here to read a post from MindTools all about setting SMART goals.

5) Find Your Company’s Blogging Voice

One of the most important pillars to content marketing success is finding your company’s blogging voice.

When you get super specific about your company’s voice, you can do things like hire out your content marketing while still sounding authentically you.

I talked about this a bit when I published an article about creating a content style guide. Your brand voice needs to be polished before you can expect to hire a freelancer who doesn’t require a ton of editing. Whether you hire an in-house employee or a freelancer to write on the company blog, you need to get clear on how your company speaks.

This process is a bit harder because you are not speaking for individuals at your company. Instead, you are speaking for the company itself. How would a company that focuses on your topic speak? Chances are, you already have some content on your website. You need to analyze the presence you have so far on your website or social media pages. What does your audience respond well to? How can you double down on that and make it a part of your company voice?

Remember, you are not creating a brand akin to Gary Vaynerchuk. You could potentially go for an edgy approach like Wendy’s chooses to on social media, but you have to be prepared for that to be considered your company’s voice, not just your voice. You don’t want to mix in your voice when you are speaking for an entire company, especially if the company doesn't revolve around you.

7 Things You Can Do To Find Your Blogging Voice

  • Ask your customers for clarity. What do they think your company sounds like?

  • Lean into the voice that your customers seem to respond to the most.

  • Think about your company values and mission statement. What would someone with those values sound like?

  • Record company meetings and day-to-day interactions every blue moon. See what your employees naturally sound like when they interact with each other and your customers.

  • Dig into the content that you have already shared on your website and social media. What stands out about how you talk online?

  • Think about the audience you are trying to reach. What is their age, education level, background, et cetera?

  • What adjectives would you use to describe your brand? Check out this list of brand adjectives from Elise Epp Designs to get you started with 1-3 adjectives that describe your company.

6) Repurpose Great Content

Are you letting go of your content too quickly? It’s so easy to get sucked into a never-ending cycle of creating all the content and then allowing it to get sucked into the void, never to be used again.

Don’t let this happen to you! You can continue to reap the benefits of fantastic content week after week, month after month, year after year, and so on. Great content should never die, it should just get repurposed.

Keep reading because I am going to cover ten awesome ways to repurpose your blog content. For now, you must know that this is necessary.

Content marketing is about 20% content creation and 80% content promotion or marketing. So many people mess up when creating content because they spend so much time hunched over a computer writing that they don’t have time to enjoy any content they write.

You know what happens to content that doesn’t get promoted? It’s wasted content. You are wasting your time with content creation if you don’t follow it up with content promotion.

If you don’t see results from your content marketing efforts, most of the time this is due to lack of content promotion. You need to bring new people to your blog. A great way to do this is through the marketing side of content marketing as well as repurposing.

10 Ways To Repurpose Great Content

  • Create an infographic.

  • Record a podcast episode.

  • Record a video discussing the topic of a high-performing piece.

  • Package together a few great blog posts into an eBook that builds your list.

  • Do a live stream covering the same topic as your blog post.

  • Create a SlideShare featuring your content’s best points.

  • Republish your content on sites like LinkedIn and Medium.

  • Create social media updates based on the highlights and best quotes of your content.

  • Send out an email newsletter based on one of your pieces that is doing well recently.

  • Write a guest post based on one of your best-performing pieces.

Want to learn more about repurposing great content? Check out my recent post featuring 27 ways to repurpose content.

7) Use Your Resources As A Tech Company

Last, but not least, let’s talk about using your resources a technology company. You are uniquely positioned with data and analytics to back up your claims. If you say that your product helps your customers with employee retention, look at the numbers you have to back that information up.

Many companies have to rely on external data to back up their claims. If you collect data correctly, you have a never-ending supply of rich data that you can talk about on your blog.

Do you want to use the data you are given the right way? Produce case studies, inject data into your articles, create graphs/charts around your data, et cetera. These are all great ways to use your internal data effectively.

If you are not collecting data on the backend, you should start now. You don’t want to give away anyone’s personal information, but collecting and sharing aggregate data is a great way to build trustworthiness in your brand.

Work with your brand success stories to create more in-depth case studies or video testimonials. Seeing actual company names along with faces talking about how your product helped them succeed will help build your authority.

Don’t overlook the power of a good chart or percentages to help tell your story online. Your content will be much more successful if you can give more information about how your product helps others.

Resources To Help You Use Your Own Data For Content

Conclusion

I hope this blog post was interesting and eye opening as you create content to connect with your own readers. Creating content is one of my favorite things to do. If you need more assistance, consider hiring me to as a writer. I can produce all kinds of HR-related content that will help you connect with HR professionals and be seen as a leader in your industry. Let’s work together in 2020!

Blogging, Human ResourcesAmanda CrossComment