Content. Is. King.
No, not that kind of king!
They say “Content is King”, but is it really? Sure, content is many things that kings are – powerful, persuasive and magnetic. But when you get down to it, could content actually be more like gold?
This thought was posed to the attendees on Day 1 of #TBSummit by presenter, David Ige (ee-gay), former Employer Brand Manager of Alaska Airlines. It is a concept that was shared with him at a previous employer brand conference that really resonated with him, and shaped his point of view.
Why gold?
Well, while content is certainly powerful, it’s also an enduring commodity. Like gold, good, engaging content is a great investment in growing value over time. And when it’s really good, others want to steal it!
With U.S. companies spending about $5.2 billion annually on creating content, it’s no surprise that a strong content strategy is a key element of building a powerful talent brand. However, it’s estimated that nearly 70% of content falls into a black hole and never reaches its end user as a result of poor strategy and lack of thoughtful activation.
“Nearly 70% of content falls into a black hole and never reaches its end user as a result of poor strategy and lack of thoughtful activation.”
That’s where content activation plays a key role.
Content activation is the process of planning, creating and distributing content to motivate people to take a specific action at the right time.
So, where does one begin when it comes to building a strong content activation strategy? First, you have to identify a few key things:
Who is your target audience (employee/candidate)?
What action do you want your audience to take?
What is your end goal and how do you define success?
Answering these questions is a critical starting point in laying out your strategy and helps set the groundwork for determining the next critical elements to activate your content. After you understand your target audience, the action you want them to take and what success looks like, you need to define:
What platforms will best reach my audience?
What communication style is most effective?
How much money do I have and where will I see the strongest ROI?
How will I measure my success?
To bring this concept to life, David broke the Summit attendees into virtual groups and challenged each group to build a content activation strategy for:
A high volume/high turnover role OR
A highly skilled role
My group selected a high volume/high turnover role and established a goal of improving brand awareness. For the sake of this exercise, we all entered the land of make believe and pretended budgets and resources were endless (it sure felt good to pretend)!
Here is how we approached answering the key questions above to plot our content strategy:
Target audience (candidate): Retail Sales Associate for a teen lifestyle brand age 16-25 who cares about social issues and philanthropic/community efforts, passionate about expressing themselves through style and spends 3-4 hours on their phones daily.
What action are we seeking from the candidate? Like/follow/engage with our brand to drive awareness with them and people like them in their network.
How do we define success? Increase followers and engagement on our social channels, and drive conversions to our company career site.
After we identified our target and goals, the team came up with various suggestions on best platforms and key messaging to reach out audience and achieve our goal.
Best Platforms/Methods to Activate Content:
Instagram
Twitter
Facebook
Tik Tok
Career Site
Employee advocacy
Key Messages:
Inclusive culture/sense of community
Community involvement/philanthropic efforts
Growth & development opportunities
Flexible hours
Merchandise discounts
Once we determined our key platforms and messages, the group began brainstorming ideas to finalize our content approach. Again, budgets and resources abound! Here are a few ideas the team came up with that we could build into our strategy:
Leverage Instagram, Tik-Tok and Twitter to share a behind the scenes look at company culture through photo assets/videos/storytelling
Spotlight associates on the company career site and Instagram to tell their personal story around growth & development
Arm existing associates with content they can share through their personal feeds
Create a campaign/company hashtag for existing employees to share content that you can reshare (think #LifeAtAwesomeCompanyName)
Revamp job descriptions to incorporate language around discounts/incentives and provide links to career site for the audience to consume more information about company culture
Encourage employee adoption of content sharing through gamification or incentives
There are quite a few ideas here, which is a direct result of the diverse mix of talent branders who attended the virtual Summit. We could have spent all day coming up with new, innovative ideas, but in reality, it’s most effective to focus on a few key action items to ensure you’re maximizing your time and reach.
Following our breakout, we reconvened back into our larger group to share our ideas and hear from other attendees, and a few key themes emerged:
Your own employees are your MOST critical part of your content activation strategy. Honestly, this can’t be stressed enough! Whether your strategy is improving brand awareness, driving applicant traffic or generating leads –your associates are your most valuable and trusted resource to activate. Your priority should always be equipping your employees with engaging and relevant content and empowering them to share their own experiences. This is a surefire way to drive effective content that your audience trusts.
Know the purpose and audience of your content. Remember that black hole we talked about earlier? Not understanding the “why” or the “who” behind your content is the quickest way for it to wind up in the abyss. Answering a few quintessential questions before moving full steam ahead will ensure your strategy gets the most bang for its buck.
Don’t be afraid to take risks. Every good idea was once a risk someone took. There are a lot of platforms or content delivery methods out there- some are tried and true, and some are new (looking at you, Tik Tok!). Keep learning about your audience and when a new tool falls in your lap, give it a try! You might surprise yourself.
And remember, a thoughtful content activation strategy will always be worth its weight in gold!
About TBA Member Hailey Cash
Hailey Cash is the Employer Brand & Recruitment Marketing Lead for AEO, Inc., where she is responsible for building and maintaining the employer brand and developing integrated recruitment marketing strategies for all AEO, Inc. brands. She is also serves on TBA’s Events Committee and is an active member of our Atlanta Chapter.