While he focused on finding opportunities that would fit his skills and interests, I was noting some potholes developing in our user journey.

Obviously, we’d expected that the availability of jobs would drop because of the pandemic—even for software engineers. But I was interested by the approach that companies had taken to this on their websites.

Those companies who were still recruiting had mostly taken the time to explain on their web pages how the pandemic would affect the recruitment process—video interviews instead of group assessment centres, for instance. Often, they talked about how the pandemic might mean remote working. This is helpful to the candidate and shows a realistic and practical approach.

Some companies chose to put a banner at the top of relevant pages, inviting the visitor to find out more about the company’s response to the pandemic. Some companies added content to each page as a lead-in paragraph.

However, some of the companies that would normally recruit graduates, but had put in place a recruitment freeze were less helpful.

Dead-ending the candidate journey

Some of the companies who were no longer recruiting simply didn’t show any relevant jobs on the job search page. ‘Apply Now’ links from the usual pages about the graduate programme to the job search pages worked, but there were no jobs available.

• Suggestion: put a message at the top of the graduate pages to indicate that there is a recruitment freeze due to the pandemic. Bonus points for an indication of when recruitment might restart.

Some replaced the ‘Apply Now’ button with a button saying ‘Express Interest’. This enables the company to continue to build their talent pool and potentially identify outstanding candidates for future recruitment. It also lets the potential applicant know that there is no job open at the moment.

• Suggestion: invite your potential candidates to express interest—don’t let them fall into a black hole

A few companies had deliberately broken the links to the relevant pages, so that when we clicked a link to find out more about a specific graduate programme, it went nowhere. This wasn’t a 404: someone had edited the link and stripped out the destination, so that it simply reloaded the same page.

• Suggestion: create a single page that says ‘sorry, we have had to stop recruitment for the duration of the pandemic – please check back later’ and link there. This would involve only minimal extra work but, importantly, doesn’t create a hole in the website, or a dead-end in the user journey.

Another set of companies had decided it would be better to leave the relevant page in place, but to remove the content—so that we saw a header and a blank page. This leaves all the pages and links in place but is not at all helpful to the candidate.

• Suggestion: provide an explanation instead of a blank page – or redirect to a single page as above.

Patching up and making do in a recruitment freeze

This pandemic is difficult for everyone, and you are probably shorthanded.

But be helpful to the job hunter, especially if your recruitment pause is unusual. Tell them that you are not recruiting up front—don’t hide it.

If nothing else, being helpful and honest will support your employer brand.

• Bonus suggestion: put the dress code for video interviews in the FAQ, especially for developers. Most technical interviews conducted by software engineers are, in our experience, conducted in casual clothes – typically t shirts and jeans. But what if the technical interview is for a bank? Do things change if it’s all online, and not in-person? Letting the applicant know what is expected in your company is helpful to them, and reduces the number of emails to you asking about the dress code—win:win.

 Is the COVID-19 freeze leaving potholes in your recruitment website?

Social media and video are a match made in heaven. As the almost ubiquitous uptake of smart phones and increased cable and mobile internet speeds allow us to view video at home and on the move, social media has become the dominant medium on which digital video is discovered, viewed and shared. As a marketer, getting on this bandwagon can bring rich rewards, but getting it right isn’t easy. There is after all, a lot of content out there you’re going to be competing with.

Some Social Media Video Rules of Thumb

When implemented correctly, a well-planned video content strategy is a powerful tool in driving brand awareness, brand loyalty and ultimately new customers and clients to your business. Although a large part of every video strategy will focus on what kind of content you are going to create, a crucial element is ensuring that your message is being received by the right people at the right time and for this it is imperative to have a smart distribution and activation strategy and content that is properly optimised for the audience it is intended for.

Before we look at some specific examples, here are some general rules of thumb when it comes to creating video for social media.

Drop the sales pitch and provide value

Connecting with your audience means knowing who they are and the types of content they will be most receptive to. Everything you publish should provide something of value for that audience. People don’t like being sold things on their social media feeds, so if you’re not informing, entertaining or inspiring then your videos aren’t going to travel far.

Create a content calendar

A content calendar will help you plan your content distribution across various social platforms throughout the year. Understanding what you want your content to do is imperative. A content calendar is a visual aid that will help you think about strategic distribution, whilst considering precisely how every content decision you make will play with your historical or future video output. It is also a powerful logistical aid, so you know when resources will be needed for video productions and when to start planning for your next big campaign.

Create unique content for each social platform

Time and resources are always going to be limited, but striving to present a single idea in different ways that best suit each platform will serve you well in the long term. Not only will this boost engagement with your followers on each social platform, but this personalised and tailored approach really does drive brand loyalty and is the most effective way to ensure your social feeds look and feel consistently fresh.

Get your timing and frequency right

If you’re posting videos to social media when your audience isn’t engaged, your hard work will go unnoticed. Facebook users might be most engaged at 8pm in the evening but that doesn’t mean your LinkedIn connections will be. The best way to determine your ideal posting times will depend on a comprehensive evaluation of your analytics data and a touch of experimentation. By initially varying posting times and analysing data gathered during this process, a sweet spot will be revealed. Look for an ideal balance of both clicks and engagement, which will ensure your content is delivered to the widest and most engaged slices of your audience.

I now want to look more closely at each social media platform in turn, to get an understanding of the nature of your potential audience and what kind of content will naturally appeal. Whilst many don’t define it as strictly a social media platform, we’ll start with YouTube as it is simply too important to ignore.

Optimising Video for YouTube

As YouTube operates very much like a search engine, content optimisation is an essential step for every video you upload and will be more than worth the time investment. Choosing traffic generating keywords, considered titles, captivating thumbnails and attention given to the creation of contextualising keyword rich descriptions are all important aspects of video SEO. However, even before you reach this stage, researching the types of content that are more likely to go viral within your industry or niche is crucial. This can be done by buzz monitoring and researching what kind of content plays well to your existing and subscriber and customer base.

Creating a YouTube channel is essential if you are to build a YouTube following and this acts much in the same way your website or Facebook page would, with all your content displayed in once place. Although it can be tempting to order previously uploaded content by popularity, you should instead place the most focus on the pieces of content that most closely align with your current messaging. Once you have attracted your audience, it is likely that they will search your channel for similar content. Don’t make it difficult for them to find what they’re looking for.

Optimising Video for Twitter

Although Twitter has increased its tweet limit from 140 to 280 characters, brevity is still the key to successful Twitter content. Ensuring you use Twitter to not only effectively communicate your expertise to your audience but demonstrate a willingness to engage with that audience is the key to success on this fast moving platform. Sharing and commenting on other’s content and posts should be considered just as important to your strategy as sharing your own unique content.

The most successful tweets often include embedded content, and whether that is an image, a gif, or an engaging video will depend on the specific message you want to convey. Remember that Twitter audiences are looking for bite-sized pieces of news, tips, and links to articles covering key trending topics.

Things move quickly on Twitter, and hashtags are an important tool for both categorising content and ensuring you are reaching your intended audience. The demographics of Twitter are quite broad, which means effective targeting and thorough testing is imperative to ensure your posts don’t get lost in a large and often noisy pond.

Optimising Video for Facebook

Often considered better for B2C than B2B, Facebook has not only got the potential to reach a large audience but through paid advertising will allow you to target very specific demographics. Facebook is a very personal medium that connects friends and family more than it does businesses, celebrities and institutions. As such, it is the ideal platform on which to place personalised content featuring your team and inspirations. With Facebook users looking to engage in a community atmosphere, using conversational language will encourage engagement and ensure your posts never look too overtly promotional.

Facebook is actively favouring video content in its user’s feeds, so creating content that works well with Facebook video can pay dividends. When you consider that creating native Facebook video fares even better than linked to content (e.g. YouTube hosted video), then the potential for creating customised videos for Facebook is clear.

Facebook video plays on mute by default and is often viewed on mobile by people in public spaces, so adding subtitles so people can still get your message is important. Facebook’s paid advertising and PPC is incredibly customisable and very targeted, so investing in this may be worth your while. Running A/B testing is also recommended to ensure your video is hitting the mark.

Optimising Video for Instagram

Instagram’s demographics are notably younger than the majority of social media platforms. In a similar way to Twitter, mastering the use of hashtags is hugely important. However, developing a strong and immediately recognisable visual image for your brand will be the key to engagement and growth.

Accurately identifying the most aesthetically pleasing portion of your content is vital and if any given piece of content doesn’t contain any visually exquisite imagery, it would be a good idea to create something. This process also provides you with the opportunity to create an image or video for Instagram’s unique dimensions which can ultimately provide an enhanced user experience and boost key metrics.

Optimising Video for LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an astoundingly effective social media platform for three very specific things – business to business (B2B), sales, and hiring/reference checking. For B2B content, sharing information specifically about your business and your industry will perform well. LinkedIn also has the added benefit of allowing you to post content in several different places, with B2B content having the potential to perform equally as well on your company page, in relevant groups, and on your personal profile page.

When creating content specifically for individuals, focusing on how you can add value to their lives in a professional capacity is key. As a platform LinkedIn combines the influence of its well-connected users with powerful social and search capabilities. Your video content should be focused on instigating professional conversations and using the responses you receive to create future informative and valuable content.

Thanks Evelyn!

Evelyn Timson is the Managing Director of UK video production agency, Aspect Film & Video. She has years of experience working with some of the world’s most recognisable brands like UNICEF, Nationwide, North Face, TaylorMade adidas, Slimming World and Farrow & Ball. You can connect with Aspect on Facebook or Twitter or see a selection of their award winning work on their YouTube Channel.

 How to Optimise Video Content for Social Media Platforms

4 Ways to Improve Your Employees’ Communications with Customers

In corporate communications or marketing departments, employees are trained to communicate professionally. However, most company employees won’t have this same training. To boost your company’s communications, image and relationships with outside customers, clients, vendors and suppliers use the following tips.

Make Branding Accessible

Create a branding guide or “brand bible” to send out to company employees. This guide should show employees examples of how to present information to those outside the company (and inside as well). Will they be showing PowerPoint presentations to potential clients? Show them what a main screen should look like with logo placement, appropriate fonts, etc. Also include several examples of what internal slides could look like. Having a template to follow eliminates mistakes and consistently presents your company brand to the outside world. Create templates for email shout-outs, email signatures, presentations, company branded products (like pens, t-shirts, etc.) and more and give plenty of examples of how these pieces should look.

In addition to the branding guide, place the example templates referenced above in a shared space easily accessible to company employees. Whether that be a drop box location or company internal drive, make sure employees know where to find these files so they can easily create their communications pieces using the right branding.

Hold a Communications Crash Course

Eliminate communication faux-pas by hosting an internal communications crash course. This course should be short (think lunch-hour brown bag seminar) but give helpful, easy to implement advice to employees. To help the principles stick, give the employees a takeaway. This can be a worksheet with helpful links to websites that review grammar, examples of “the good, the bad and the ugly” as far as emails go, etc. Make the course fun and engaging to inspire employees to reread or review their communications and see what they can do to make them better.

Set the Right Example

Is there an internal company newsletter? Or email blasts going out to all employees? Make sure these pieces adhere to the company branding and practice good communications skills. Making sure all communications employees receive from the company executives, human resources and communications departments helps establish the status quo and will give employees another example to look to when crafting their communications to those outside the company.

Provide Correction when Appropriate

Maybe you’ve had a client or customer complain about inappropriate or informal communications. Or perhaps you were copied on an email that wasn’t professional. Either way, when a glaring mistake occurs, take the opportunity to provide feedback on how to improve. While these situations can be tricky to handle, it’s better to set the right tone for your company’s communications.

Speak with the employee and consider involving the employee’s manager (if escalation is necessary). Provide some one on one instruction to ensure the mistake doesn’t happen again.

Following these guidelines can set your company on the right track to having consistent, professional communication with those you do business with—something that can help establish your brand and image.

Rachel works for Built For Teams; intuitive HR software which helps businesses to succeed by encouraging employee growth.

 Communicating Your Brand to Your Customers

• an intelligent and patient collie/lab cross, who can’t resist carrot cake icing (yes, she ate my birthday cake)
• and a ditsy, hyperactive and very needy springer/lab cross, who struggles with anything new or strange.

Our springer cross has a metaphorical emotional sink into which the stresses of her day (people at the door, other dogs across a field, quadbikes passing in the lane, cows looking at her over the fence, the vacuum cleaner, etc) pour like water from a tap.

Luckily, that sink has a (metaphorical) drain which can reduce the level of stress in the sink based on a variety of stress-relieving activities. The problem is that she starts the day with a sink that is already half-full, and a drain that is partially blocked, because she has some physical problems which can cause her pain.

My task is to ensure that her emotional sink drains more quickly than the additional stress pours in. If the level of stress overflows the sink, we are in trouble: stress flooding all over the place, and she doesn’t know how to handle it.

Why is emotional energy relevant to corporate comms?

Think about your website visitor: they arrive with a certain level in their sink—perhaps they’ve had a stressful day at work; perhaps there’s a task that they don’t really want to do; perhaps they’ve struggled to find the right URL for your site in their country; perhaps their mobile is almost out of charge.

In their mind are certain tasks that they have to complete on your site. Maybe they’re looking for a contact number for recruiting, an image for a piece they’re writing, some detail about your finances or for your views on a particular industry hot topic.

What barriers does your site put in their way? Every additional hurdle will increase the level of stress in the sink (and diminish their emotional energy). Consider:

• Problematic navigation (where on earth have they put it?)
• Form filling (why do you need my birthdate and address?)
• No contact number, only a generic contact form (how will I know it will get to the right person? Or even that the form worked at all?)
• The need to register to download an image (more form filling!)
• Inappropriate filters on news items or job listings so it is difficult to find the best match
• Information hidden in PDFs rather than on the page so the task becomes much bigger (why do I have to download everything to look for what I want?)
• Search that doesn’t work effectively (I don’t need all these irrelevant results)
• Design that doesn’t work with the technology she’s using (why is it so slow? Why must I scroll right to see everything? Why won’t the menu work?)

If the sink overflows, you may well lose that visitor. You may not be able to see the stress overflow—because they’re at their desk, not barking and lunging by your side—but it will have an effect on how they think of your company.

And on how she will react next time she comes across your corporate brand.

***

For more on this, read this interesting piece on increasing funnel conversion. Darius is talking about making the sale, rather than about corporate comms, but the point is still relevant.

 Emotional Energy and the Corporate Website

When the subject of local SEO crops up, we tend to think about local businesses, such as dental practices, restaurants and HVAC companies. However, global firms also benefit from local SEO, and in a big way. Here at Straight North, we’ve seen this prove out time and time again. Let’s review why local SEO is such a powerful tool.

Easier Wins on Local Keywords

Dominating organic rankings high volume, highly converting national keywords is a tall and expensive order even for very large enterprises with very large budgets. In contrast, a global company has more than enough resources to dominate local keywords with high local-market volume and conversion potential.

Win in Strategically Important Markets

If a company focuses all of its attention on national keywords, it runs the risk of being moderately visible everywhere, even in markets of little consequence. A better option could be to achieve maximum visibility in the key markets and maintain a more modest organic profile elsewhere. So, if for instance, 75 percent of a firm’s U.S. revenue comes from Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta, strong local SEO campaigns in each of those three markets will lift conversions where the greatest number of potential conversions exists.

Expand Strategically — Geographically

Following this line of thinking a bit further, suppose after a period of time this same firm comes to indeed dominate for keywords in those three local markets. At some point, further SEO efforts in those markets will produce diminishing returns, because there are only so many possible conversions in any given market for any given keyword. At this point, the firm is in a position to shift local SEO focus to the next most important geographic market(s), systematically building its organic visibility, rather than canvassing the whole country hoping conversions drift in from somewhere. This approach is also quite useful when a global firm wants to break into a new market or rapidly build its revenue in an underperforming one.

Expand Strategically — Keywords

Along similar lines, if this firm nears its maximum return for target keywords in those three markets, it can expand its keyword target rather than (or in addition to) shifting focus to another local market. Clear-headed keyword research is critical, though. Keyword expansion is an excellent way to generate high-quality conversions as long as there is sufficient volume in those keywords to make the effort worthwhile. In some local markets and/or in certain verticals, this will not be the case.

Local SEO Is Good for the Brand

One of the biggest marketing challenges for a global company is the fact it is global.

People like to buy local, to buy from people they know. Millennials in particular are influenced far more by user reviews and recommendations than by a company’s marketing materials. And what are two key components of a local SEO campaign? Generating positive user reviews and creating web content with a strong and genuine local flavor. A brand that expresses strong interest in a local market and engages local customers through reviews (and other interactions) can overcome the image of being a cold, distant megacorporation. The result is more organic traffic and conversions.

Local SEO Improves Other Marketing Campaigns

Beyond bringing discipline and focus to national (and international) SEO efforts, local SEO enables SEO tactical execution to complement other marketing initiatives, such as new product launches in test markets, with far more impact than what can be achieved otherwise. When on-site and off-site SEO content is added or updated to reflect the firm’s marketing objectives in each individual market, this SEO-driven content becomes more than mere words to impress Google crawlers, it becomes highly effective marketing content that builds revenue.

Thanks Brad!

Brad Shorr is Director of Content Strategy at Straight North, a professional SEO firm in Chicago. With more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience, Brad has been featured in leading online publications such as Entrepreneur, American Marketing Association and Moz.

 The Surprising Importance of Local SEO for Global Companies