Do you want to stay ahead of your competitors online? If your answer is yes, you need to be producing regular content for your website, blog and social media channels. Here are 5 easy steps that you can take to get started with this mammoth task:

1. Repurpose Past Work

The king of B2B content marketing strategies. Your business does produce content. Just not always for the purposes of online marketing. You need to think laterally here, come up with great ideas to repurpose existing media into new content for the web. Maybe you had some great graphics designed for a newspaper ad? Maybe you just gave a killer powerpoint presentation to a client? Or maybe you just submitted an article to an industry journal? Whatever you did, get it up online as quickly as possible. Use slideshare, social media or your …

Jobs.ac.uk one of the leading international job boards recently undertook a survey into recruitment trends and the key findings are very much centred around advertising and marketing.

The survey identified candidate attraction and the lack of skilled/ quality candidates as the biggest challenge facing recruiters. This is nothing new and will always be a problem; as the best candidates are rarely actively looking for new opportunities, so how to find them?

Currently there is a lot of hype around LinkedIn, and don’t get me wrong used correctly, it is fantastic, but never forget good old fashioned media research. Thorough media research allows you to target candidates effectively, by identifying key trade publications and websites that your target audience is likely to read, without necessarily searching for a job.

The 2013 survey also identified Job Boards as the most effective recruitment tool, recognising sector …

When trying to fill a new position, HR and recruitment professionals are likely to fall into one of two categories, either:

1) Attract too many unsuitable candidates

or

2) Struggle with a poor response rate and very few applications

To avoid this predicament it is essential to get your job advertisement right in the first place; saving lots of time and money.

Media Research:

You could design the most eye-catching, informative job advert ever, but if it isn’t displayed in the right medium for your target audience, they will never see it.

What media you use depends on the type of candidate you want to attract. For specialist technical roles, trade publications often work well, whereas a local paper tends to be more effective for low-skilled local roles, LinkedIn is effective to attract senior candidates that are not necessarily job seeking and the internet and social media …

At a recent meeting a business associate of mine asked me why I thought he wasn’t getting many repeat visitors to his website and those that visited were not staying very long. After a few questions it became clear that he’d only spent a few hundred pounds on the website and it had been done by someone in Eastern Europe. The site looked okay and functioned faultlessly, the problem lay with the content.

The analogy I often use is that a website is like a garage you have built for your car, a fairly simple structure, walls, door, roof, perhaps a window, unfortunately no-one is really interested in your garage it is what you keep inside that they really want to see. Finding a reliable builder to knock together a garage for you is quite easy, you can even buy them …

It is generally recognised these days that websites need to feature video, to help SEO, visitor engagement and increasingly for ease of use on tablets and smart phones.

Based on my experience what is less well understood is the different roles video can play and the how this affects the levels of engagement.

I would say there are four distinct levels:

Level 1
This is who we are

In its simplest form this is the corporate video, generally a mixture of people, products, services all mixed up with a few logos and building tours. A great start, but just that, a start. Useful if people do not know much about your organisation, could sit on your home page, will only be watched the once.

Level 2
This is what we do

Now we are getting a bit more interesting, you might have one video per product/service category or …