At the speed of digital trends, do you want a PR agency that’s agile like a fox or sturdy like a buffalo?
Big PR firms have the manpower, resources, and contacts to execute campaigns quickly, but advances in technology means brands need the flexibility to pivot to suit the mood of today’s on-demand audience.
Here are a couple reasons why you should hire a boutique agency over a big firm:
Skilled Staff
More manpower doesn’t mean a higher quality of work. At some larger agencies, smaller accounts may be handed down to junior members or even interns.
At a boutique agency, there is a specialist for everything. By nature, these smaller companies follow lean organisational structures stripped of multiple management levels and stringent systems and constant revision. This makes the team more nimble, enough to weave past unnecessary approval processes that eat up your billable hours.
They’re part of the ‘hacker generation’
Smaller companies tend to have a startup mentality: Fearless, resourceful, unorthodox problem solvers.
They are known to approach barriers from the outside and sometimes, through the backdoor instead of waiting for the higher-ups to approve a solution. On top of that, staff at leaner agencies enjoy taking the unconventional routes that keeps them on track with or sometimes even ahead of the consumers.
They thrive on change
Change is the constant of boutique PR firms, and they are well-equipped to move along with key industry trends and developments. Rather than fearing new technology, smaller agencies race to be the first to use a new platform or tackle a new social media trend.
With fewer people, revisions are also easier for boutique agencies. If an internal structure is holding back results, managers at small agencies will not hesitate to remove or reform them, to power your business and theirs forward.
Skilled Staff
With the internet bubbling over with too much information, brands need more creativity, quicker.
It’s become clear that advertising is no longer just the business of selling your product or services. Instead, it is now all about making their brand a part of the customer’s everyday life. In order to be there with the customer every step of the way, brands need to be able to tailor strategy at the very last minute.
This is typically where the big players have struggled to keep up, given their internal business reglementations put in place to ensure consistent organisational structures.
What I feel is imperative for businesses today, is to steer themselves away from the traditional view of how bigger or more is better. This can be done through re-evaluating business goals and looking further into what the boutiques can bring to their table, helping business owners get the best bang for their buck.
Need more advice on choosing the right agency for your business? Contact us at [email protected]
With the increasing global smartphone ownership, social media surrounds us. It’s inescapable, and for businesses, it means we can interact with anyone at any time.
Having said that, it’s a common misconception that brands need to be on every social media channel possible to achieve mass coverage. I’ve seen businesses get excited and set up accounts across all the major social media platforms expecting a wave of new business overnight. And then… nothing!
Like a content marketing strategy, social media takes focus and dedicated long-term commitment – there is no overnight success. Let’s take a look at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest. Each social media platform is targeting a unique audience with a dedicated engagement purpose:
So, how do you go about selecting what is right for your brand? Well, to make it simple, here are some handy tips to get you thinking about how to make the most of your social media.
1 – Start with purpose
Goal tracking matters! There must be a purpose to your online presence. Write down why you are actually using social media and what it is you would like to achieve. What is the business goal of your strategy? Hint: It’s the things your CEO or investors want.
Get everything down on paper, as chances are, you’ll more likely stick to your goals!
2 – Be strategic
Most companies can’t be perfect on every platform so, instead of being average at all of them, select a couple that match your business goals and rock them! Here are a couple of things to think about:
Who is your target audience and how will you reach them?
How does your social media strategy help you reach your core business objectives?
How will you nurture your followers in order to convert them?
You need to have a clear social media strategy and work out a plan to realistically implement it. Set up a schedule for each week and stick to it – and you can always review it as you go.
3 – Allocate your resources and budget
Do you have time to work on your social media? Or do you plan to outsource this? Whether it’s yourself or someone else working on it, there needs to be significant time dedicated to social media posts and engagement every day.
The intensity of your posts depends on your goals but ensure that you have a solid structure in place in the form of a content calendar that will help you keep track of everything. Allocate a budget that you are comfortable in spending to boost or advertise your posts as this will also help you widen your reach and, is cost effective at the same time.
4 – Keep calm and be patient
Be persistent and don’t freak out if you aren’t an instant overnight success. Remember that a solid social media strategy takes time and patience. The more time you dedicate to your social media strategy, the better outcomes you will get!
Brands have a massive opportunity to utilise social media and if your business does not have some sort of social media presence, chances are you are still living in the dark ages. Step out from under that rock and embrace the social world…it’s truly powerful, and a great and cost effective way to engage with your target audience.
Be careful though, if you don’t have a dedicated in-house social media specialist, there is absolutely no benefit to having any channels linked to your business. In 2016, social media is a full time job. Keep it simple and remember that less is more! Only pick what’s right for your business!
Looking for some structure and strategy around your social media campaign? Get in touch with us at [email protected]
Can you tell your brand story in nine images? According to eMarketer, Instagram’s global mobile ad revenues are expected to reach $2.81 billion by next year. With 400 million users and growing, visual content via social media is becoming an increasingly important part of a marketing campaign.
Corporate tech giants like IBM, Intel, Salesforce and Cisco are killing it on the photo-sharing app. How? The key isn’t in exotic landscapes, squat workouts, or well-lit bacon burgers – it’s about telling your brand story in a cohesive tone that’s unique to your company.
Here are 10 steps to success on one of the world’s most influential platforms.
1. Start with your core company values.
If you don’t have a tangible product to work around, the sky is still the limit for creativity. Pluck out key points from your brand manifesto. Concepts like ‘delighting customers’, ‘teamwork’, ‘encouraging innovation’ are possible to illustrate in a creative photograph.
2. Profile staff.
If the global success of Humans of New York doesn’t have you convinced, check out some of the creative staff posts from IBM. Your employees are all part of the brand story. Include a short description or anecdote of your staff member’s role in the company. Plus, there are tons of fun ways to take a profile shot for Instagram.
Have one picture lead to the next. We don’t just mean with colour and lighting, but with the tone of each picture. Have transitions between uploads. For example, if you’re posting about a company outing, have some transitions or pre-event hype: i.e. “T-minus 45 minutes ‘til we pile into the car for the conference!”
4. Show behind the scenes.
Context is a great way to express your brand values. Showing the magic behind what you do with a sneak peak at of your office, lab, or even toilet.
5. Engage with your community.
Instagram didn’t get to 400 million users by just being a photo app. Comments, captions and trending hashtags are chances to engage directly to your audience like a friend. It’s not the place to sell. Use the space below the snap to ask questions and likewise go through other accounts of similar companies. Then tag, comment, hashtag, and of course, double tap.
6. Humble brag about your office space.
Get inspired by accounts like @apartmenttherapy and post pics from the office. Ask users for suggestions on how to improve a space or what colour to paint a wall. Ugly office? Creative #desk spaces get good hits!
7. Show your company culture.
What do your programmers do when they’re not doing sprints? Create FOMO with your staff. Show happy staff in action, whether brainstorming, in a meeting, or just chillin’ on the couch. A strong company culture strengthens a company’s brand. Likewise, your staff are your brand ambassadors, and happy staff are more likely to share their company activity on social media leading to more engagement.
Festive holidays and other relevant events are an easy way to be part of a larger dialogue and increases your chance of being noticed. Even posting a custom greeting card, Christmas tree, or candy hearts spelling out your company name connects you to your users.
9. Focus on quality.
Take an extra couple of seconds to step into the right light and do a little set planning before snapping and uploading. Amateur pics are great to ‘keep it real’, but at the end of the day, you’re competing with millions of photos online. Make each one count.
10. Own it.
Popularised by Millennials inspired to ‘work with what they got’, owning it is taking pride in what you have. Businesses today don’t need to look longingly at National Geographic or Nasty Gal with envy. Say, if you have cloud-based software that’s hard for people to understand, create fun ways to illustrate it. There are plenty of pretty accounts out there, just make yours looks like you (don’t believe me? Just take a look at Sharpie’s account. It’s only a pen, but it’s one of the coolest Instagram pages around.)
We hope this helps your company get its Instagram game off the ground. Tweet us @mutantcomms to tell us how you make your unsexy business cool, or get in touch with us at [email protected]
Over the last 12 months, content has become the cool, hip kid on the block.
Comprising of everything from blogs and e-books, through to social media posts and viral videos, marketers can’t get enough of it… and for good reason. It produces results!
But an often overlooked aspect of great content is visual graphics. These branded images, short videos, infographics and more also fall under the content banner, and should be a permanent addition to any content marketing strategy.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and people are more likely to absorb visual content. Particularly with the copious amount of information we are exposed to on a daily basis, it becomes hard to absorb everything, so the simpler and more concise the information, the better for the targeted audience.
Only 10% of people remember what they hear, 20% remember what they read and 80% of people remember what they see. (Source)
This means content teams must ensure they are creatively presenting information with more visual appeal, and coming up with campaigns that lend themselves to pictorial and graphical ideas.
Infographics are one of the more popular pieces of visual content around. They’re not only easy on the eye, but also educate the audience in a simple and effective manner. A good infographic has a consistent and sequential flow of information that is presented in easy to absorb facts. Take a look at some snippets of my favourites below:
What makes them so good? They tell a story quickly in an entertaining way, with useful facts to draw from.
Here are a few quick tips to get your visual content in tip top shape.
Less is more
The biggest flaw is trying to fit in way too much information; it very quickly stops being effective. The idea of visual content is to be clever with how the information is presented, otherwise you might just as well write an article or blog.
You want your readers to remember what you are presenting to them, and keeping it simple and to the point means they are more likely to absorb and retain the information.
Get factual
Decide on a timeline of events or a process for how you want your audience to read the information. Then, pull out only the key facts and present only this through a series of illustrations, graphics or videos.
You might have a ton of data, but only use what’s relevant and easy to comprehend.
Colours and content
Colours matter a lot when it comes to visual content. Ensure your graphics are suited to the type of information you are presenting.
Brighter red, blue and green shades are more likely to stand out and get noticed, but darker colours such as black or navy can be just as effective in representing sophistication or something concerning.
Hopefully now you have a bit more of an understanding about presenting visual content. Try and incorporate these tips into your content marketing strategy, and to help you come up with cool and creative ways to present information to educate and inspire.
If you need help with your visual content please get in touch with me at [email protected]
Getting your point across in an email isn’t as easy as you think.
No matter who your customer base is, chances are they receive dozens of emails and newsletters every day, informing them of special deals, new information or other updates to their business that might be of interest. It’s incredibly easy to get lost in the noise.
People are busy, and you have about one second to grab their attention when your newsletter pings in their inbox (check out my previous blog to help you create a newsletter people actually want to read.) That one second comes down to what you choose to put in your subject line. It’s what determines whether they click to open, or click to delete.
After all, what’s the point in sending out the greatest email there ever was, if no one opens it?
I subscribe to pretty much everything, so as you can imagine I’ve got a decent sample of both good and bad newsletters to draw inspiration from. There are a bunch I delete without taking a second look, but what about the ones that I actually do bother to open and actually read?
Here are some examples of effective emails that have landed in my inbox, which compelled me to click.
Zalora
Email Subject: How to look stunningly well dressed for any occasion Content: Fashion/clothing options for any occasion
Zalora have crafted some amazing emails and really know how to use the power of email marketing to get directly in front of their readers. They have used what is called a “trendy topic” headline and made it catchy and relevant to their subscribers.
AirAsia
Email Subject: HURRY, grab your FREE SEATS now! Only 4 days left! Content: A selection of destinations across Asia with free flights
Most people know AirAsia, and in this particular email they have really drawn on the “free” aspect to get people’s attention. Their audience are regular travellers looking out for cheaper deals (why else would they subscribe to a budget airline newsletter?) and so the use of the word “free” is an instant attention-grabber. The subject also has created a sense of urgency that encourages readers to click through – a very clever move.
The attraction to open email newsletters is heavily based on what is written in the subject and how much it appeals to a person at that particular time.
Here’s what you should be doing with your email subject line:
Summarise, and leave the reader wanting more: In a very short 40-50 characters (or less), you will need to summarise what your email/newsletter/offer is about. Keep your readers curious and encourage the clickthrough.
Make it urgent: Where possible, make the reader feel they must know the information you are presenting to them NOW. This is more likely to encourage people to take action with fear of feeling left out.
Keep the content relevant: Writing catchy subject lines doesn’t mean succumbing to clickbait. Your readers will get annoyed if your content is not relevant to what is written in the subject. You can be creative and quirky to capture attention, but ensure that your content is related.
Ask yourself why?: Why would (or should) people bother opening your email? Is what you’re saying important and worth opening to investigate further? Just because it matters to you, that doesn’t mean it appeals to others, so do your research.
If you would like to look at ways to incorporate e-newsletters into your marketing and PR strategy, get in touch with us at [email protected]
Hiring good talent is tough. The recruitment process can be long, expensive and exhaustive, especially in a competitive talent marketplace like Singapore and wider Southeast Asia.
Over the past few years, recruiters have had to become increasingly creative with how they attract and connect with the right talent. Today, we know this goes well beyond well-written job descriptions and Facebook likes – you’ve got to go deeper and think long-term about how you make effective candidate connections.
One of the best ways to do this is with content. Regular, targeted and insightful articles about your company, its core values, your people and the way you operate (for starters!) is an enormously effective means of drawing in potential talent with the right skills, personality and mindsets to match your culture.
Then, you can go deeper. Engage your audience with thought pieces from your senior management; share your opinions on newsworthy topics and relevant industry happenings; provide inspirational stories and videos about employees who have done great things within your organisation, or share your insights around any research or data your business and its various units has released.
Let’s be clear: this is not a short-term strategy. In order to actively promote your company as an attractive place to work, you need to consistently and effectively write and share stories on the platforms and networks where your ideal talent spends their time. From brand awareness to creating a desire to click “apply” for a role you are advertising, content can seriously change the way you recruit if you capture people at the right point of the sales funnel.
Why does it work? It’s simple:
Because people who agree with you and what you write about will share your content with like-minded people.
Because if they don’t agree with your culture or values presented in your content, you weed them out early on.
Because if you are regularly producing interesting content for potential employees to read, you’ll likely see an increase in the quality of candidates you interview.
If you’re brand new to the content marketing game, don’t worry. It’s not something that can (or should) be rushed, and it requires a decent amount of planning and strategic oversight to get it right. In fact, producing poor quality content hastily could actually do more damage in the long run.
If you’re an HR professional or business leader looking to get started with content, consider the following:
Do you have somewhere to host your content?
Your content is yours. Make sure you have a good, easy to find, platform on your company website or careers page to host the dozens of articles you plan on writing. You’d be surprised how many businesses think plonking an article on their ‘news’ page amid other press releases and internal announcements is effective. If you can, make sure these articles, videos and other pieces of content really stand out to anyone who finds their way there, and is easy to navigate.
Do you have a social recruitment strategy attached to your content marketing plan?
Although you need to have a place to host your content on your own site, potential talent isn’t just hanging around on that page waiting for you to post new stories or blogs. You need to ensure what you produce is being shared on platforms they frequent. Content needs to be promoted and boosted in targeted areas to boost exposure and ensure the right people are clicking through to read what you’ve written. Anyone can spend money and advertise a post to get thousands of likes, but if you’re not increasing the chances of the right people applying for a job with you, then what’s the point?
Your current employees can be your biggest advocates
But it’s not as easy as forcing employees to share your company’s articles. There is a deeper element of employee engagement that plays a part here, and any HR professional worth their salt knows they can’t simply dictate their employee base to like and share content – they have to want to do it. And if they do want to do it, it’s quite simply one of the best ways to show that your business really is an awesome place to work.
Your content marketing efforts should strongly tie into your overall employer branding strategy and company culture. After all, how can you write about what an amazing culture your business has if it’s not exactly true?
If you’d like to discuss how content marketing can help your business attract talent, please get in touch with us at [email protected]
Elon Musk is the world’s raddest man. Sure, he’s an engineer, investor, genius, innovator, and has an actual car startup. But did you know he’s also really good at email?
Musk’s success comes (in part) from his effective interpersonal skills. He’s a stuttery public speaker, but he can pitch. He’s nothing special in interviews, but is often quoted. Being an effective communicator doesn’t mean being a great talker — that’s why politicians seldom create big changes they promise.
Communicating a vision and being a leader takes tact, it’s about having great interpersonal skills: Listening, having manners, social skills, and really understanding who you’re speaking to.
Here’s three ways you can communicate like Elon:
Cut the acronyms in emails:
In an interview with Henry Blodget, CEO and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, Musk joked: “I do a lot of email – very good at email. That’s my core competency.”
His secret? Avoiding acronyms. The man hates them. I found this excerpt from his book on this Quora thread, “Why is Elon Musk so good at email?”
Singapore’s multi-cultural business environment both breeds and suffers from too many acronyms. When staff in a big company are from different parts of a region, they might not want to spell out the whole word, but how many times have you looked up from your desk and hollered, “Hey does anyone know what AFB is!?” Sure you’re saving on word economy, but acronyms are not good for productivity.
Like Musk says in his email: “No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don’t want to sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees.”
So, the next time you’re sending an email out to staff, be clear! It saves everyone time and gets them on the same page.
He cuts the jargon
Musk isn’t an eloquent speaker, but the worst thing than a shaky voice is one that’s full of buzzwords. In this perfect pitch for Tesla he breaks down his problem and solution in a way the audience can understand, not just in a way he understands. The man got people on their feet, over batteries.
https://youtu.be/yKORsrlN-2k
Musk finds a common problem and tells us about a simple solution. It’s classic storytelling. See the full article on how to pitch like him here.
He uses real content to advertise:
Wait but Why is a personal, yet investigative tech blog followed by thousands of people. But at the end of the day, it’s a blog with stick figures on it. Musk called up the writer Tim Urban and asked him to interview him for SpaceX and Tesla. Um what? Check out his post published two days ago on the Huffington Post.
After Urban finished gathering his brains from off the floor, the blogger agreed and met up with Musk to write the multi-part blog series.
Musk is so good at cutting the crap, he doesn’t advertise Tesla. According to Urban, he refuses to advertise for his electric car startup, because “he detests vague spin-doctor phrases like ‘studies say’ and ‘scientists disagree’, and he refuses to advertise for Tesla, something most startup car companies wouldn’t think twice about – because he sees advertising as manipulative and dishonest”.
Bonus lesson:
You don’t have to be a great orator or rocket scientist to communicate your vision. All it takes is thinking about making things clear and simple for your audience. If Elon can make electric cars and space travel easy to understand, you should be able to, too.
The last lesson on how to be more like Musk is a bonus one: Always say what you mean. We’ll leave you with this quote from the part one of the interview with Musk:
“He’s been saying the same things in interviews for a decade, often using the same exact phrasing many years apart. He says what he really means, no matter the situation – one employee close to Musk told me that after a press conference or a business negotiation, once in private he’d ask Musk what his real angle was and what he really thinks. Musk’s response would always be boring: ‘I think exactly what I said’.”
Do you need to better communicate your messaging through effective content? Get in touch with us at [email protected]
Image Credit: Elon Musk, Tesla Factory, Fremont (CA, USA) by Maurizio Pesce. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons
Emotions make content viral, not the content itself. Anger, awe, happiness, enlightenment and sadness create the urge to share with others. When content is written with the intention to “give you the feels”, facts can become secondary.
In comparison, journalism in its traditional form is designed to inform, yet the lines between the two fields of communication blur in the convoluted slush pile of tweets and soundbites packed nuts to butts on the internet. It’s our job as content marketers to stay on the latter half of the thinning media tightrope.
Fake information spreads like wildfire – take @Jonnysun’s twitter “scandal” last week.
Jonathan Sun, the biggest internet celebrity you’ve never heard of – also an MIT researcher – posted a fake fact about actors Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, online. To do this, he created a fake Google search image about the origins of their children’s names, Willow and Jaden Smith. The made up fact was nothing ‘amazing’ in itself, but what happened next was an eye-opener.
Nineteen thousand retweets and 25,000 favourites later, tweeters were bragging “they already knew ages ago” about this so-called fact, while others were enraged this ‘old’ news was making headlines.
When the jig was up, the experiment had the Twitterverse facepalming, while Sun was praised for confirming what we always suspected: the majority of people online do not fact check before sharing.
As content marketers, we market through shares – of thoughts, insights, knowledge and information. So if there’s something off about our information, there’s something off about our brand.
People are already skeptical, since it’s getting increasingly difficult to differentiate between paid content and well-researched original facts and quotes.
Here are some tips from a former journalist on how to do proper due diligence:
Be hands on. If you’re talking about a product, instead of looking up a review of what someone else thought of it, download it or get your hands on it to form your own opinion.
Pick up the phone. While it’s easier to copy and paste a quote from an article, a sure fire way not to misquote someone is to just ask them.
Check statistics: When you see a stat in a post, look for the original research document that the article cited from. Most of the time they’ll have the actual link.
Um, Google. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve caught a slip up, typo, or hoax just by Googling it.
Read the news. Instead of just retweeting existing news, take the facts from a real news story and spin your own angle on it. This way you can’t possibly be wrong, since it’s your own opinion crafted from hard facts.
In a time when we’re always trying to hop on to what’s trending for engagement, it’s important to step back and say, “Really?” If authors don’t take the extra few minutes or an hour to check facts, readers will start to view content marketing as the new clickbait.
Knowing something intimate and relatable about a Hollywood couple made everyone go “awww” – and it sold. But while tugging at heartstrings racks up numbers and engagement, it’s authenticity that retains and converts.
Mutant’s content experts are all former journalists. If you’d like to chat with us about your content marketing needs, please get in touch with us at [email protected]
Before you pen your next blog post, stop what you’re doing and read these writing tips for more clickable and shareable content.
It’s fairly easy to argue that the headline is more important than the article. It’s not always true, of course, but when most people only read about 50% of your content, drawing them in with a strong, attention-grabbing headline is a must.
It’s easy to leave the headline as an afterthought, but it’s what gets you noticed. Amid millions of articles, tips, advice and blog posts out there, you need to stand out and get in front of your audience in an interesting, unique and confronting way.
But the art of the headline is a difficult one to master, and it often takes even experienced writers years to understand how to construct one effectively. To help you in your quest for excellent content, we’ve got a few headline tips to get you started.
1. Keep the headline to 6 words
Your audience is lazy. They like to have loads of content available to them, but they can’t be bothered actually reading all of it. It’s reason the inverted pyramid exists in news writing, and why a former editor told me to “write as though you are targeting a bunch of fidgeting 12-year-olds, rather than educated adults”.
You want to draw people in as fast as possible, and a succinct headline is the best way to do that. Keeping it to six words isn’t a hard and fast rule (sometimes longer headlines can work in your favour, depending on the content and platform you are writing for) but it’s a decent guideline to make sure you don’t waffle on.
2. Tap into your audience’s insecurities
Don’t feel bad about this – the news media has been doing it for decades. For some reason, the human race responds better to negativity. I’m not sure whether it’s because we like being miserable or because we have a morbid fascination with things that are bad and wrong (or both.) All I know is that it works.
For example, these are taken from a mix of the BBC and CNN’s homepages this morning:
Hiring? Avoid the friend zone Google doesn’t care about your alma mater China’s growth set to be slowest since ‘09 The worst place on earth
Negative headlines work best (i.e. get more clicks) when they inform and alert. Think about how you can use words like “no”, “stop”, “can’t” and “without” in your headlines or sub-headlines for added impact.
3. Track keywords
Let’s all take a moment to praise the development of analytics!
With the ability to track and follow the traffic your articles are generating, it’s very easy nowadays to pinpoint (over time) the types of articles and headlines that work well for you, and the ones that don’t.
At a previous job, we worked out pretty quickly that our audience liked to read about money; headlines with the keywords “money”, “salary”, “cash” and “pay” got significantly more clickthroughs.
It highly depends on your audience. If you’re writing for parents and mothers, words like “baby” and “childcare” might be some of your top keywords, while for a restaurant words like “menu” or “food” could be gold.
4. Make sure the headline matches the article
It’s easy to get caught up in writing the most attention-grabbing headline, only to end up with something that is actually misleading and over-inflated.
If you’ve managed to pull someone in to click on your article, don’t send them running and rolling their eyes when they realise they’ve been duped by clickbait. I personally dislike it when an article claims to have 7 unbelievable ways to [insert promise here] – especially when the tips are actually quite believable. Useful? Yes. Unbelievable? No.
The same applies for “amazing”and “incredible”. Unless it really is amazing, try to be a bit more creative.
5. Use numbers
99 things to do in New Zealand works so much better than Ninety-nine things to do in New Zealand.
Using a number is easier on the eye, and it stands out from the rest of the sentence. As we’ve already established, people are lazy – they want to read the most interesting articles in the most efficient way possible. Numbers and lists will do this for them.
6. Use a trigger word
How to create a viral blog post What you need to know to write the perfect blog When to give up on writing boring blogs Why you should seriously consider content marketing Where to go for the best content marketing tips
The trigger words are a must for viral content. People read blogs not only to look for information, but to find answers to questions they didn’t even know they needed answers to.
Using the ‘how, what, when where, why’ method indicates immediately to a reader that they are likely to learn something by clicking on your post.
7. To question or not to question?
Struggling to get ahead at work? Looking for your dream home? Are you missing this vital ingredient in your PR strategy?
The question headline can be incredibly effective when targeted at the right audience you know are looking for answers. It can sometimes sound a bit advertorial, but the power of the question should not be undermined.
8. Create a formula that works for you
I once read a formula for the perfect headline which went something like:
Number/trigger word + interesting adjective + keyword = PERFECT HEADLINE
So, say you want to write about how to peel an orange (because, why wouldn’t you?) start by thinking about the formula. Instead of “How to peel an orange” you might end up with:
12 effortless ways to peel an orange
or
How to peel an orange in less than 30 seconds
or (in question form)
Is your orange peeling technique out of date?
It can often add an extra impact to include an assurance or guarantee in your headline. It could be to do with time (hence the “in less than 30 seconds” in this example) or something more substantial like, “How to peel an orange like a professional chef”.
Go forth and be viral! But if you need some help crafting, planning and putting a strategy around your content to drive business leads, feel free to get in touch with Rebecca at [email protected]
A lot of recruiters are quick to be dismissive of blogs. Too often, blogs are viewed as a sort of corporate ‘Dear Diary’, or a place to simply post press releases or in-house news.
But while that may have been what blogging started out as, the power of the written word has moved well beyond this.
By not realising the potential of a strategic content plan, you are doing yourself, your business and potential talent a huge disservice. Why? Let me put it this way:
As a recruiter, you’ve probably tried everything. You’ve posted job ads, and tweaked the wording to get it justright. You’ve updated your LinkedIn profile – both personal and corporate – and invested a lot of time and money into social media strategies to reach talent on Twitter, Facebook and everything else in between. You’ve probably explored recruiting software, re-designed your website and landing pages, put a lot of work into SEO, as well as hired and fired a few recruiters and talent acquisition specialists, all in the pursuit of finding the right people for your business and/or your clients.
It’s a hard game, and the terms aren’t fair. A squeezed labour market makes your job even more difficult, and maybe you feel like you’re running out of options. How do you get the attention of the people you’re trying to reach in a sophisticated way?
This is where blogging can add value. I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet, but it’s an incredibly important aspect of connecting employers with talent. As an inbound marketing tool, blogging is about earning your customers – and their loyalty – by gaining their trust.
So, how do you get started in helping your business blog its way to success?
With blogging you have to start at the beginning. What are your ultimate goals? What would be the best outcome from your recruitment strategy? If you start blogging without an idea of why you’re blogging, you’ll just end up going off-message and off-brand, and miss the opportunities altogether.
What talent do you want to attract?
As part of this initial goal-posting, you need to consider what kind of talent you’re trying to attract. If you recruit in-house across multiple departments, do you know what each business unit leader is looking for in an ideal candidate? For agencies, do you understand each of your client’s specific talent needs?
Now think from that perfect candidate’s point of view. What are they looking for in a job? What does their dream job look like? What might their career goals be and why would they want to work for you?
Aligning these thoughts should give you dozens of bullet points, which is a fantastic place to start.
Create a content calendar
See all those bullet points you just wrote down? Here’s where they come in handy. Create a calendar of editorial content by expanding on those points.
For example, if you’ve written down that you are looking for Singaporean engineers with international experience, that’s not one blog post idea – it’s 20. You could share insights on the hiring situation for engineers, highlight skills successful engineers develop, discuss how Singapore engineers can use LinkedIn to build their professional network, or how they can use LinkedIn to find a job. The list continues.
The beauty of blogging is that it allows you to cover the same topic and target the same people from multiple different angles, and appeal to the niche interests of your target audience, without getting repetitive.
The calendar aspect helps you decide what the headline will be, when to run it and who will write it.
Get social with it
Simply posting a blog to your company website isn’t enough. While you may have a small audience who go there directly, chances are you’re going to reach talent via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which amplifies your content to a much larger network.
It’s best to fit this into a strong social media strategy, which will include much more than just re-posting blogs, and it’s an important part of helping to convert blog readers into customers/talent. Be wary of the need for different voices on different platforms – the way you reach people on Twitter is incredibly different to how you reach people on LinkedIn.
Know how to measure success (and use a call to action!)
There’s a reason why we at Mutant encourage at least a six-month engagement for any content campaign – because it takes time to build a voice and a following. Content is not a quick fix, nor should it be. It is a planned, ongoing strategy for genuine engagement with a target audience.
But by measuring its effect over time, you’ll start to see some real results. Using analytics platforms, you can view who is reading your content, where they clicked on it, where they clicked afterwards, where they are based, and much, much more. By including a call to action (i.e. an “Apply Now” button at the bottom of a relevant blog post) you will encourage lead generations and turn sometimes readers into customers.
Blogging is a much more powerful tool than many give it credit for. Over time, providing potential and passive talent with quality content will not only put you at the front of their minds and show them you understand their needs and interests, but it will help educate them, too.
Get in touch with us at [email protected] if you’re interested in creating compelling, meaningful and targeted content for your business.
Every year, billions of people around the world cozy up in front of their TVs to watch rich people receive a gold award shaped like a man for their achievements in acting like other people. At its core, that’s what the Academy Awards is. So, what makes it so compelling?
The famous people are part of it, as is the glitz and glamour that has surrounded the night for nearly 90 years. But my personal view is that the night gathers so much attention because of the story being told. From the red carpet and the behind-the-scenes shots, to the speeches and the post-awards interviews, the media (with the help of social media) loves crafting stories around what is essentially a gathering of otherwise boring, rich people.
From a marketing point of view, there are dozens of lessons to be learned – but more specifically, there are a few strong points to be made about how we use, create and share content.
So without further ado, those lessons are… (drum roll please)…
The right message spreads a long way
True content marketers understand the importance of unique content, but sometimes it’s less about an exclusive message and more about it being timed just right.
This year, the two speeches with the most buzz were by Patricia Arquette and Graham Moore, who called for wage equality and raised awareness about depression respectively, garnering hollers from the crowd (mainly Meryl Streep, let’s be honest.)
Why were the speeches so good? Because they were authentic. You can tell Arquette truly cares about the issue of wage equality, while Moore drew on his own experience with depression and nearly taking his own life to get his message across about being true to yourself.
People everywhere can see right through the “I wish for world peace!” message, but will stand up and take note when your content and its message is genuine and heartfelt.
Content isn’t just about words, it’s visual
What gets the most attention at the Oscars? Is it the movies? The speeches? The musical performances? Nope. Rightly or wrongly, it’s the pre-show red carpet, where people ogle and judge celebrities in their designer garb, snapping photos and posting images to social media and blogs all over the world.
Incorporating visual elements into your content marketing strategy is crucial. Humans are visual beings, so think about where you can include pictures and infographics into your articles and overall strategy.
When content is unexpected, it works even better
Constantly pumping out content (correction: good content) is necessary to gain traction in any campaign, but sometimes it’s good to shock people. Lady Gaga used to shock the masses by wearing dresses made of meat, but at the Oscars she shocked by, well, just singing.
After dropping off the radar for months, Gaga appeared as if from nowhere to sing an incredible tribute to The Sound of Music and its star, Julie Andrews, and floored everyone. Her performance was a far cry from the Gaga we know, and she got a standing ovation for her stellar efforts.
The lesson here? Surprise people! Create content your audience won’t expect – you have a platform to create anything you want, so go Gaga with it.
Storytelling matters
Okay, so I know I’m supposed to be talking about this year’s Oscars, but the 2012 awards presented such a fantastic example of storytelling that it can’t be ignored. It was the year The Artist, a completely silent movie, took home Best Picture. It was the first time in 83 years that a silent motion picture scooped the big award. It was (and still is) a big deal and an incredible example of the importance of storytelling.
The movie stood out not just because of the acting, but because of the love story. With content, we are lucky we can use words to tell a story – but it’s all about how you craft the narrative, report, press release, blog or information you’re trying to use to engage your audience. Tell a story people can identify with!
Know what your audience wants
The hashtag that is still trending since the Oscars is #AskHerMore – a call to action for red carpet correspondents to ask female celebrities more compelling questions than “who are you wearing?” The trend was started by the Representation Project and is supported by Smart Girls (an organisation headed by Amy Poehler), and it gained massive traction on Twitter in the lead up to the show to ask about the work, not the dresses.
When your audience is asking for something, it’s your job to give them the information they need. Know what they want and cater to it in a creative way.
(P.s. E!’s ‘Mani Cam’ – a camera that focuses on what the stars’ manicured nails look like – was axed for this year’s awards after the #AskHerMore campaign highlighted its absurdity.)
In the end, good content always wins
JULIANNE MOORE FINALLY WON AN OSCAR. Yep, after four previous Academy Award disappointments, Moore finally took home a golden statue for her portrayal of a linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice.
Although Moore has won countless Golden Globes and other awards in her late-blooming career, she’s held out for the Oscar and finally got it (YAY!) proving that sometimes an entire body of works speaks louder than a one-hit wonder.
With content, your results aren’t going to show overnight – and that’s okay. What’s important is that the entire campaign and strategy is strong, consistent and carefully managed to ensure you get what you need out of it.
Get in touch with us at [email protected] if you’re interested in creating compelling, meaningful and targeted content for your business.
Firstly, if your organisation is relatively new to the social media recruitment game, a warm welcome.
Secondly, what took you so long?
Chances are you’ve been involved in some sort of social recruiting for a while now. As recruiters, business leaders or burgeoning start-ups, you will have been “making connections” all over the place with people whom you deem to be ideal talent for your company. But the problem isn’t about connecting, it’s about connecting with the right people, in the right places and at the right times.
As part of a well-rounded recruitment strategy AND a strong marketing strategy (yes, sometimes the two go hand-in-hand), social media can offer a wealth of tools to help your business find the talent it so desperately needs.
If you’re not sure whether your efforts are on track, read on and ask yourself whether you’re really optimising the true benefits of all things social.
First, decide on your social approach
Social media is a beast, and it can’t be controlled with ad hoc posts, links, images and status updates. If it were as simple as “I think we’ll launch a company LinkedIn page today”, a lot more businesses out there would be successful with their social media game.
The ones who do it well are those who have a plan. They have taken the time to answer questions like, who are we targeting? What’s our ultimate objective? How will we respond to people who engage with us? What will our key messaging be? If you don’t have a business-led purpose behind your social media strategy, you’re not going to get the most out of your efforts or find the talent you’re ultimately hoping to reach.
Where do your future employees hang out?
A social media strategy is about quality, not quantity. Well, it can be about quantity on a carefully selected number of social platforms, but it shouldn’t be about opening an account on every single social space and ramming how wonderful your company is down people’s throats. Do you want to spam people? Because that’s how you spam people.
To avoid diluted messaging and jumping into social sites just because they’re new or popular, you need to understand where you can reach your potential candidates online. Companies searching for executive talent, for example, are going to have a much higher success rate focusing on LinkedIn, while firms looking to fill dozens of service jobs on short notice will have more luck on Twitter and Facebook.
It’s about who you are, not what you do
Your employer brand is everything. Your employee value proposition – what you offer talent (other than money) in exchange for their hard work – is what sells you to candidates. But this doesn’t necessarily need to be spelled out for them. Instead, it should be part of an organic, genuine and carefully-planned strategy which utilises social media to showcase your people.
Don’t tell people on your company Facebook page how awesome you are – show them. Use videos, articles, employee Q&A and more (by the way, this is where content marketing comes in very handy) to exhibit your business as a great place to work.
Use calls to action, fresh content and interesting visuals
If you’re on Twitter, you know how fast it moves. If you’re on Facebook, you know that you stop scrolling once you come to a post you’ve already seen. Social recruiting needs to stay fresh, with interesting and new content to keep people engaged.
Original, value-added material produces better results than anything else. If you have data to share, why not create an infographic? Is that article you want to link to only interesting to you, or does it resonate with targeted talent you’re trying to reach? Why post a boring old job ad when you could write articles about the benefits of working at your company, which ultimately leads them to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ you. This interaction is so much more valuable.
Is your CEO social?
If you work at a big global company, chances are you have a well-known leader who has somewhat of a large online presence. But if your CEO isn’t well-known…well, why not?
Positioning businesses heads as thought leaders is an ongoing strategy as part of a wider content campaign, but it’s one of the best ways to directly engage with talent you want to attract. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be your CEO, and they don’t need to post heavily.
Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of people, is the man who hires and fires at the tech giant (which makes him the ultimate connection for every Google wannabe). He’s an influencer, but he doesn’t post heavily on LinkedIn – in fact, he’s only done 5 posts to date – but he has more than 130,000 followers and his most-read post has been seen more than 2 million times. Why? It’s partly because what he says matters to people and adds value, but also he’s created wonderful dialogue around recruitment, HR and working at Google. He is interesting and genuine, and he shares data, company “secrets” and strong, well-thought out opinions and advice.
Immediate and direct engagement is everything. Think about how you can use your country heads, managing directors and CEOs to help you reach the people you need.
Above all, be authentic
It’s a talent’s marketplace, and when it comes to choosing a job and career path, they have the power. In Asia, low unemployment means a tight labour market, which means if you give potential candidates any reason to believe you’re not as genuine as your competitor, they’ll pick up on it right away and take a job elsewhere.
Even worse? They do take a job with you, only to leave six months later because it wasn’t what they were promised. In whatever social interactions you have with talent via social media, don’t overpromise. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not and, for goodness sake, don’t lie.
An authentic and ‘real’ employer brand voice can speak louder than all the chatter on all the social media platforms put together. A genuine message is where your talent efforts should begin and end.
