How Content Marketing Helps Engage Candidates At Scale

“You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

   – Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin, 1744

“Content is King!”

   – Essay on Microsoft website, Bill Gates, 1996

Well… depending what source you find, some say Sumner Redstone of Viacom said it in the mid-’90s before Bill Gates, referring to his TV empire world. Digging further, you’ll also find that the phrase came from the book, Magazine Editing and Production by J.W. Click and Russell N. Baird in 1974, referring to a great photograph – not the technicals of exposure and shutter speed, but the emotion it evokes.

All that aside, the point of these quotes is that you have to have good content to pull people in, to intrigue them, to engage them, in what’s been defined as Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing. As opposed to broadcasting out a sales pitch to the masses through TV and Radio. (I over-simplify) Don’t get me wrong, if you have some budget you need multiple Comm channels to increase the opportunity for your target to see and engage with your message. Reach + frequency matters. But even if you don’t have a big budget (or any budget) like most of us small, lean, mean, efficient companies, you still need to figure out the means and the messaging.

Be a Magnet
For us in the Talent business, we’ve all seen the same old postings or emails with a stale boring list of job openings. How do you make it interesting, different, stand out? That’s the challenge to solve. Jobs are the sugar, and people love to eat it up. But is it a spoonful that gives a quick fix, or is it an amazing gourmet dessert, that makes you want to come back for more? We spent painstaking hours, days, and weeks perfecting our interactive Open Jobs Map on our website, and it takes dedicated weekly care & feeding. But we get a huge response when we promote updated job postings. Be a magnet, a beacon. And it will automatically become “shareable”.

(Note: this applies to all content, not just juicy jobs. Here’s a tip within a Tip: when posting content, answer the questions that are already being asked. That way people can hopefully better find your message and resonate with it.)

It Takes a Village
Some final tips on how to engage at scale:

  • Amass a mass audience – Network, grow, connect, collect. And figure out how to do it organically.
  • Know your audience, and how to talk to them, what their buttons are. What do they want to hear about? (more on this in a future blog post)
  • Maximize your eyeballs – If you have dollars to spend, then use it. But for most of us small companies we have to maximize all our low/no cost Comm vehicles (bonus of they’re all free)

Happy posting,

Chris Markham
FloodGate Director of Marketing Communications

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Floodgate Medical is proud to have been ranked #9 in LinkedIn’s 2017 Top 25 Most Socially Engaged Staffing Agenciesfor North America in our category.