Competitive content: Why this marketing director is “building a newsroom inside a marketing department”

“You either have to do content well or not do it at all,” says Michael Oliver. For the Director of Marketing at MBK Search, that means steering away from basic how-to blogs and listicles and taking a journalistic approach to content that targets, nurtures and ultimately builds long-term relationships with the top-tier risk, audit, and compliance talent the UK-based global recruitment firm wants to attract.  

Traditionally, recruitment marketing takes one of two approaches: the first is SEO-driven articles like “How to improve your CV” or “What do to in an interview”—in other words, says Oliver,  “evergreen content that anyone who is looking for a job will pay attention to, which you can just churn out over and over again.”

The second approach in the recruiting space is emphasizing the employer brand—more often than not,  by sharing images of staff parties on Linkedin.  “I've always thought if you’re a company that takes itself and the work you do seriously, you want to work with a company that also takes itself seriously and you can trust to find the right people,” he says.

Oliver, who has been charged with overhauling MBK Search’s marketing strategy, decided that neither route was right for the company. “We don't want to position ourselves as a recruitment company in that sense.” Content is going to play a “massive” role in that strategy, says Oliver, “because that’s what’s going to differentiate us from our competitors."

Creating content that competes on the world stage

How will MBK Search’s content strategy set the company apart from the pack? “I want our content to be at the level of what you would read in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times,” he says. “We need to play the game that the big banks play. We need to play the game that the likes of the McKenzie Group plays. We need to play the game that these white glove, top-of-the-line, thought-leading businesses take in order to position ourselves at the same level.”

Oliver—an ex-journalist himself—has partnered with a content agency that’s made up of ex-journalists. “That really appealed to me, because I knew that the kind of content they would produce would be of a high standard. I also knew that if I was to talk to them in  ‘journalese’,  we'd be able to get the kind of content that we want,” he says. “In a way, what I'm doing is building out a newsroom within the marketing department.”

“What we’re going to do is produce research and content that makes people think about the industry they work in and actually provides that value that everyone talks about—content that does more than say, ‘Hey, we're really good at finding people jobs’.”

Measuring the impact of content

While the impact of content is notoriously hard to measure, Oliver has put KPIs in place to help measure the share of voice going forward. “I’m setting goals and targets for how often I want the company's name to appear in trade publications, national publications, as well as thinking about things like,  how do we get, how can we get our CEO on  Bloomberg TV or CNBC,” he says. “ Just by virtue of having an association with content distributors who are of a significant level helps our brand grow and mature by lending it that legitimacy.”

That’s important in an industry “where people are being hounded by recruiters all the time,” he says. “We have to think about what we can do to make ourselves stand out in this industry, and show that we are a company of experts who know what they're talking about and want to be taken seriously. That all comes down to our messaging and positioning, and content plays a huge role in that.”

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