Content that works for your audience [podcast #18]

How to produce content your audience wants The modern employer brand blog

Do you know what content works for your audience?

Or maybe you wonder what content might work for your audience?

I love creating new content, but I also struggle with it sometimes. If you want your blog posts, videos or social media posts to really work for your business the pressure becomes real. It’s so much easier to blog or do videos when you have the inspiration. The pressure comes from keeping up with a content production schedule and creating content your audience actually wants to read, see, listen to or look at.

Professional content creation is about servicing your audience

Creating and sharing company content is a great way to get the company name out there. But, what I’ve learned is that a business should not produce just about any content that comes to mind.

For content marketing to work for branding a company as a business and as an employer, the key is to focus. Have that one thing that everyone will be able to associate your business with, whether as an employer or as a business. And in modern employer branding, these go very much together.

When I for example teach blogging to our customers, I pinpoint the difference between business blogging and writing a personal journal or diary. Both are equally important forms of content creation, but they serve different purposes.

Creating content for an audience requires to create content your audience will be interested in consuming. But that’s not all. We also need to make the content easy to scan through and easy to read regardless whether your audience consumes your content from a big screen or a smart device.

How to make sure your material is relevant to your audience

There are many ways to figure this out. If you asked me, this is what I would suggest:

(1) Select one cornerstone theme to be associated with your business.

What is the one key theme or topic your business should be associated with? I know you probably wonder why “business” why not the “workplace”? I recommend business, because it’s what your business does for your customers that attracts your talents as well.

For example, my business is associated with modern employer branding. This is a central theme connecting all content production we do in Finnish and in English, including our own employer branding.

Your business needs an audience who find your key topic relevant. Our customers need a strong employer brand that supports their business growth and scaling. My business needs future employees who are super interested in employer branding. So this makes it a mutual topic for both our customers and our future employees.

For the sake of creating an employer brand that will be remembered, all your content creation should link to that one key topic. When you keep producing content from this basket, your business will attract more and more audience who find your key topic relevant.

(2) Check out your analytics regularly to learn what works

Your website analytics give you a whole lot of information about what works and what doesn’t. That’s why I love keeping taps on our analytics!

We use Google Analytics. It’s free. We also use Google Tag Manager to learn more about what works and what doesn’t, where people find our content and how they find our website. This all helps us to further tailor and sharpen our content production and marketing activities.

Let’s take our topic of modern employer branding. Quite a lot of topics can be tied with it. We don’t expect it all to be relevant or interesting to our audiences. In the interest of keeping our audience interested to come back to us, we use our website data as well as social media data to monitor what exactly drives traffic and builds engagement. Then we give more what the audience wants.

Sometimes I try to introduce new topics under modern employer branding, for example in our podcasts. And we can immediately see if I go off the radar. That’s when I make sure I won’t repeat that specific topic week after week. That would only drive our audience away and you guys might never come back! So we introduce new topics – under the modern employer brand theme – in small dosages.

(3) Use Google to find a right angle for your content

I use Google a lot for figuring out the specific angle I want to take or I suggest one of my team members to take with our content.

Imagine yourself googling for inspiration and answers to some questions you have on your mind. Let’s say Google gives you 10 results answering your question. And all the results (web pages) have exactly the same or nearly the same title. Which one will you choose?

If you are like me, you’ll quickly scan through:

  • what is the most recent answer (to make sure the information is up to date)
  • what is in a format you have time for
  • what is in a format you prefer (video over blog etc)
  • who posted it (the authority of the source)

That’s how you make your decision about which search result to click open. That’s how we all do. So you want to make sure your audience chooses the content your company posted.

I can now see that there are already 10 similar or same sounding content for the this question. The audience is unlikely to go through them all. So unless you are really clever at writing headlines or with SEO to make sure your content will end up the number one search result, choose another angle.

In the most simplistic form I suggest: If everyone else is answering the question “What is [something]?”, why not position your content as an answer to the follow-up question, such as: “How to..”.

(4) Expand your angle further to respond to these 4 types of content people search for

There seem to be four basic rules when it comes to what kind of content people google for. This is not my idea, this is what I keep hearing from so many content marketing experts and they have been saying these for a few years now.

The four types of content most people search for and engage with are:

  1. Informational content – as in what is this?
  2. Educational content – as in I want to learn more about this
  3. Inspirational content – as in this calls for me to action, create my own, try this out..
  4. Entertaining content – as in easy-to-scan in order to give my brain a little break

Taking an advantage of all the four types of content people search for and consume, you are able to expand the content variety your business produces to “feed” your audience content needs.

How to produce content your audience wants The modern employer brand podcast

The complimentary podcast-episode

In this episode 18 of the Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, I talk about what I’ve learned from others and through my own content marketing activities over the years what makes content interesting for your audiences. At the end of this episode, I will also share 10 ideas how to produce interesting content.

Episode-length: 49:33 min

Listen to this episode on Soundcloud >>

Listen to this episode on Spotify >>

In this episode:

  • The four types of content people search and consume.
  • How to know what content is relevant to your own audience?
  • Why is it important to stop producing content on what the company needs and start producing content what matters to your audiences?
  • 10 tips how to create content your audience is likely to enjoy

Talent segmentation is an important way to learn more about what might be relevant to your specific employer brand audience. Go past the most obvious, as in general career talk as well as general profession-related content. There is so much competition around the most common themes these days that it’s extremely hard to get attention.

Download this free PDF guide on talent segmentation >>

Become aware of ad-blocking as a new trend >>

Sujan Patel about trending content >>

About Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast

Building a Modern Employer Brand-podcast is a weekly podcast bringing you a modern breath of air into HR marketing and employer branding. 

This podcast is dedicated to all modern growth companies and modern employer branding practitioners who want to really influence their talent audiences and add measurable value to growing and scaling modern businesses with HR marketing and employer branding.

The Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast is sponsored by Employee Experience Agency Emine and scripted & hosted by Susanna Rantanen.

Find this podcast currently on Soundcloud and Spotify.

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