After much experimentation content and social marketing has become the main thrust of Colleague Software’s sales and marketing strategy – essentially creating conversations around areas of interest and expertise. As our friend and consultant, Bill Boorman, often tells me people don’t want to be sold to any more, but they all would like to buy.

Content marketing – the sharing of both original and curated content – can help build essential relationships, establish trust, demonstrate knowledge and expertise and give an insight into your business culture and brand, without the need for hard sales.  However it should be noted that alone content marketing and social media efforts will fail – you must involve the rest of your business, incorporate it into an effective sales follow up strategy and ensure it is integrated into your CRM / technology tracking and pipeline.

With that in mind I thought I would share a few tools that can make sharing content easy….

1. Feedly

Feedly is perhaps the best RSS reader I have used. It allows you to plugin numerous blog feeds into one presentable magazine format. Allowing you to check your industry content quickly every day – and push it out across your networks using handy social integration.

1. Buffer

A huge time saver, Buffer allows you to push out content to multiple accounts, from various social networks at certain times that you set. This allows you to share all your content at the beginning of each day, enabling you to get on with other tasks.
 

1. MailChimp

Free, up to a point, MailChimp has beautifully designed e-newsletter templates, allows you to maintain, monitor and report on multiple email lists, and allows you to send out multiple campaigns. One of the best features, in my opinion, is the RSS campaign, which allows you to plug in your blog articles – consequently it will go out automatically when you wish it to without the need to manually create the campaign. MailChimp easily integrates with your website – providing an html code for a sign up form, so no need for a techie to get involved.
 

1. Google+ Hangouts on Air

For a free, easy way of producing webinars with guests in your industry look no further than Google+ Hangouts on Air. Simply schedule a hangout within your free Google+ account, invite the guests you wish to join you, manage and promote the automatically created hangout event page, and go live when you are ready. Your hangout automatically is broadcast through a live Youtube stream, allowing you to embed it on your website and share across your social network – this means anyone can watch it without signing up and it automatically goes onto Youtube afterwards as a permanent feature. If you want to capture sign ups you can always integrate a MailChimp sign up form on your website, alongside a promotional blog regarding your upcoming webinar. Check out our Recruiters Hangout series here.
 

1. Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is an odd one to include as it is a rather old tool that doesn’t get mentioned a lot. However from a curation content marketing point of view I have found it to be very useful. We’ve talked above about plugging your blog into a MailChimp email campaign but I didn’t mention a curation campaign. Pipes allows you to bring together numerous rss blog feeds in your industry and produce one master rss feed. You can plug this feed into a MailChimp RSS campaign which will provide you with an automatic list of the latest titles from your favourite blogs to share with your email lists.  
 

I hope you find this useful. If you would like to discuss this, or wish to know any more, don’t hesitate to email me on louis.welcomme@colleague.eu

Louis Welcomme is the marketing chap at Colleague Software. Colleague provide software to the specialist recruitment business sector. Find out more at http://www.colleague.eu

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