I’m Kat Cavano, a content marketer at Stories Inc., a company that creates recruitment marketing content. The meta-ness of it all is not lost on me… but inception aside, I fully understand the challenge of creating compelling content for your company – whether it be for employer branding, traditional brand awareness, or both (in my case).

If there’s one thing I’ve learned working at startups or bootstrapped companies, it’s how to work smarter when resources are stretched. And in the case of content creation, there are two ‘shortcuts’: use stories (the most compelling and accessible type of content) and repurpose them (distribute in multiple mediums across different outlets).

If you do these two things, you’ll get a ton of mileage out of your content, without sacrificing quality. For example, One Technologies created a complete photo library, 27 videos, six blog posts, and a story-based job description infographic to share with candidates that came from one day collecting employee stories.  

We take our own advice

Recently, we spent a day in our office gathering stories from our team about company culture, values, and more to update our website, sales collateral, and social channels. So far we’ve used photos from the day on social and created short videos to promote an eBook, create culture videos, and are working on video introductions to our team members...with a lot more to come.

We also repurposed a story I told:

I joined the Stories Inc. team at the end of January 2018 and my first day on the job was traveling with Lauryn Sargent, one of Stories Inc.’s founders, to attend SRSC in San Francisco.

First, my story shares an insight into what our team is like here at Stories Inc. It was an unusual first few days, but it spoke to our flexible and welcoming company culture and commitment to learning and development. Combined with stories from the rest of the team about other travel experiences, we created a compilation video that tells a lot about our company culture and will be used on our website, job descriptions, in our client newsletters, on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and in email marketing campaigns to passive candidates. This markets our employee experience, which candidates and our clients care about.

Second, my story gives insights into my experience at SRSC as a first time attendee, new to our industry. This markets the conference (and our involvement in it) while at the same time provides some marketing lift for Stories Inc. as a thought leader in the industry. We could share it with SRSC and EBrandCon, who could in turn share it with those considering attending either conference, because the experience of a first time attendee is a great insight for their audience.

Take a look for yourself:

So, how can you apply this to your own content strategy?

Once you’ve gathered stories for your content, here are a few things to think about:

1. Determine the message you want to convey
   Do you have a particular value or company benefit you want to highlight with this story? Consider the different ways the story can be interpreted or utilized to speak towards your company culture or otherwise and break down each direction you can go with the story.
   
   
2.  Decide where the content can be distributed
   The format for where the content will live is a crucial part of how you’ll repurpose it. Understanding the best way to communicate on your chosen platform will allow you to better repurpose the content to speak to the intended audience.

For example, Dell wanted to promote the access to leadership members of their career development programs experience. They created this video for their YouTube channel featuring stories from several team members that illustrate that point.  Then, they took one story from the longer video and created a 15 second video for Instagram that grabs attention and communicates the same message. One story, in two different iterations, on two different platforms.

Creating an endless amount of content when time and manpower are limited can feel like a near impossible task. But using story-based content to create the strong foundation of your content can very quickly open endless content possibilities for both recruitment marketing and even consumer marketing. So, where will you take your stories?

Kat is currently working to build the Stories Inc. marketing strategy from the ground up through a comprehensive content and SEO strategy with the goal of creating brand awareness and driving inbound traffic and leads. Follow her on Twitter @katharinaeleni