The HR tech market is expected to grow beyond $10 billion in 2022. From HR tech companies offering highly specific solutions to multi-functional tools, there is a lot of competition in this space and those who want to survive will need to differentiate themselves.
Are you comfortable that you’ll be able to stand out from the crowd?
While there are several ways to get in front of your audience, few provide the long-term results that content marketing does. An inbound marketing technique, content marketing allows you to publish an article today that can still generate leads in a few months or even years.
Optimizing your content to rank and sharing it on social media will put you in front of your target audience time and time again, growing your brand’s visibility. Not to mention the trust you’ll build when you put out valuable content that offers solutions to your readers’ problems.
There are a lot of benefits to doing content marketing for HR tech, but to enjoy them all, you need to have a few crucial elements in place.
Table of Contents
Essential Elements of Successful Content Marketing for HR Tech
Deep audience knowledge
Who are you writing for? Without answering this question, your content risks reaching the wrong people, or nobody at all.
An HR director does not struggle with the same pain points as a recruiter does, and an HR Systems Administrator likely won’t have the same questions as a Supervisor will.
Which HR professionals do your HR technology offer a solution for? What size of company do they work for? What is their function? Do they juggle multiple responsibilities, or are they part of a larger human resources team? How much decision-making power do they have? What does their company’s budget look like?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can tailor your content to your target customers and promote it through the channels they’re active on.
A brand that does this well is Toggl. Toggl offers a time tracking tool, a project planner, and a hiring process automation tool. Fittingly, its blog covers categories such as “productivity”, “project planning”, and “hiring” and it features articles such as this Ultimate Guide to Time Management Strategies. Toggl knows who its audience is and creates content accordingly.
Clearly defined goals
Why do you want to create content? It’s much easier to engage team members when they know why they’re working on something than if you’re doing content marketing simply because everyone else is, or because you “feel” it’s the right thing to do.
Having clearly defined goals is also crucial for evaluating whether your content marketing efforts are paying off and which areas need to be improved on. That means you don’t just need to establish goals but also define the metrics that help you measure whether you’ve reached your goals, and track those consistently.
On top of that, your goals help shape the kind of content you’ll produce. If you’re a fairly new player on the market and want to raise brand awareness, your content will look different from that of an established competitor whose primary aim is to retain current customers.
And if you want to build backlinks, for example, you’ll want to create something that is interesting for people to refer to. EduMe plays to the popularity of statistics with its blog post listing 5 Key Employee Retention Statistics. Not only is it likely to get links from other articles on employee retention, a quick “state of affairs” like this is highly shareable on social.
Aside from backlink building, a few other possible content marketing goals are:
- To increase newsletter sign-ups.
- To generate free trial sign-ups.
- To raise brand awareness.
- To build more trust.
- To schedule product demos or discovery calls.
- To increase customer retention.
- To build backlinks.
A solid content strategy
What are you creating content about, and when? To answer the first part of that question, have a content brainstorming session to come up with topics that lie at the intersection of what your solution offers and what your audience cares about.
When brainstorming, consider the different stages of the buyer’s journey your prospects and customers may find themselves in and come up with content that matches those stages:
- Awareness: provide an answer to the problems they’re facing in the form of a guide or other type of informative article.
- Consideration: demonstrate that you can help solve the problems they’re facing by outlining the benefits of the type of solution you’re offering, or by showcasing how you compare to competitors.
- Decision: remove any barriers to buying your product, showcase the ease of onboarding, or highlight possible results through a case study.
Cross-check the ideas that come up with your business goals to make sure they’re aligned, and perform keyword research to identify which keywords to target as well as how competitive they are. This way, you can identify which topics to prioritize and which ones to keep for later.
While it’s crucial to have a high-level plan for your HR tech blog, it’s also important to remain flexible so you can seize opportunities as they arise. When the four-day workweek became a hot topic, Wildbit created this optimized evergreen article and was able to capture all that new search demand.
The article is on-brand as well as the company has been implementing a four-day workweek since 2017. It’s a great example of how you can turn your company culture and values into a content marketing tool.
A content marketing strategy for HR tech should also entail how often you’ll be publishing content. While your production speed may depend largely on your resources, it does impact how quickly you’ll see results and so depending on your goals, you may want to adjust how quickly you put out new content.
Aside from that, defining a content creation schedule ensures that you’re consistently working on your content marketing goals. Especially when you don’t have a large library of HR-related content on your website yet, regularly publishing something new is key and will keep you top of mind with your audience.
Sounds like a lot of work? It is! But you don’t need to do it all by yourself. We can help you create and execute a sustainable content strategy that keeps bringing in qualified leads. Get in touch to learn more.
Knowledgeable content creators
The next question is: who is going to write all of that great content? Unless you already have an in-house writer, there are a lot of benefits to hiring freelance writers and plenty of places online where you can find them.
Regardless of whether you decide to hire someone as part of your team, or to work with freelancers, it’s important to work with writers who are knowledgeable about the HR tech industry. While a lot can be achieved through extensive research, a writer who knows your industry will be able to weave in unique examples and relevant references, demonstrating to your audience that you know what you’re talking about.
Another benefit is that an article by someone who’s familiar with the HR world and who is a great writer will require minimal editing.
A promotional workflow
The final element of your HR content marketing strategy answers the question of where you will promote your content. Ideally, your articles are already optimized to rank well in Google, but there is more you can do:
- Share them on social media.
- Mention them in your newsletter.
- Build backlinks to them by giving interviews, guest posting, and more.
Doing these things will help you get the most out of your content but only if you promote your content through the right channels. If you’ve properly figured out who your audience is, you’ll also know where they spend their time online and this shouldn’t be a problem.
The easiest way to make sure each piece of content gets promoted is by creating a content promotion workflow as part of your content strategy.
A Note on Content Types
This article focuses on written content as your company blog specifically is the easiest to optimize for the search engines. While we think it should be a core element of your content marketing strategy, there are other types of content you can create depending on your goals, such as:
- Whitepapers.
- Video content.
- Podcast episodes.
- (Recorded) webinars.
- A library of resources.
Content Marketing for Workplace Tech: a Consistent Source of Qualified Leads
Content marketing is one of the best marketing strategies out there to attract a consistent stream of qualified leads for your HR tech company. To get amazing results, you need to:
- Have a deep understanding of your ideal customers.
- Set clear goals and define how you’ll track them.
- Create a strategy that allows you to produce great content.
- Find the right writers to create that content.
- Design a process to get your content out into the world.
If you want to attract more customers but don’t want to figure out how to create a strategy that will get you the results you’re after, we can help. Get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss our process with you.
