Focusing on Content Marketing in HR Tech with Andy Prystanzki
The world is full of content marketers. But, in today’s rather crowded atmosphere, content marketers probably need more due than they're usually given. HR tech is a space that rarely sees much of the limelight, but it is definitely a crucial aspect of every organization. content marketing.
Lattice is one such tool/product that empowers HR professionals and caters to xx customers world over. Andy Prystanzki, Content Marketing Lead at Lattice, talks to Anirudh Singla, Founder**, Pepper Content about the world of content marketing in HR Tech, the importance of outsourcing, and much more.
Here are some excerpts:
1. How did you get into content marketing?
I was in HR for several years, before I joined Namely - an HR tech company - in 2015. That’s when I got a start in content marketing, and I haven’t looked back since. Lattice happened at the end of 2019 - literally on the cusp of the pandemic - where I joined as the Content Marketing Lead. We're a people success platform that includes performance management, engagement surveying, career development, and compensation management.
2. How has the focus on content and its goals changed since you joined Lattice?
When I joined Lattice, they had just hired Annette Cardwell as Head of Content. She brings with her years of journalistic experience and adds journalistic quality to our content. Before she joined, our content was very stereotypical - where we had surface level blog posts created purely for the sake of ranking.
Together, we were able to transform the content from that early stage into something that we think people actually want to read. Our philosophy was to first build trust with our primary stakeholder. A lot of companies get it wrong here. If you have a really great product from the start, yes, maybe that can help you build readership. But if you work on building trust through quality reports and articles that can stand well on their own without a logo or branding, it makes whatever comes next so much easier. And if that next step is a sale, great. If it isn't, then, you know, maybe we'll get there.
Now that we’ve built long-lasting trust, we are slowly weaving in the product a little more. That's also because the product has evolved. So we're able to pull in insights from our own engagement benchmarks and integrate a little more subject matter authority. We're not necessarily just relying on external or internal experts. We're actually able to reference our own data, which has been an exciting shift to be a part of.
3. According to you, what are a content marketer's key KRAs and goals?
It differs with the company. From our perspective, it's sort of been all about demand generation, brand marketing and thought leadership.
A marketer that I worked with briefly at Carta, Emily Kramer, had this great analogy of demand generation essentially owning the engine. But without the fuel, it's just a bucket of bolts. Content is your reputation, and if you invest in it - it reaps results. If you're doing a great job it's hard to point to one KPI or two one, cross-team stakeholder, because really so much bigger than that.
4. What's your perspective on quality versus quantity? How do you scale high-volume quality content?
I like both honestly, especially if you can get them together. But I'll say this: focusing on quantity without prioritizing quality is almost a surefire recipe for failure. Most of your readers don’t have a full understanding of the scale to which you've been publishing. They may see something on social, or something on search because its ranking. But they're probably not living and breathing in your content library day to day awaiting with bated breath to read every single piece that you publish. So if they come across one piece that isn't of quality, it doesn't matter if everything else that you've published is, that's going to be the example that makes the impression.
If you want to achieve quality, there's no way you can do it alone. In theory, we could hire our own full-time team of publishers, but it probably isn't scalable and it would be a hard case to make budget- wise. What we've been able to do is connect with some outstanding writers that aren't just familiar with content marketing or SEO, but actually have a solid journalistic and magazine publishing background.
So we're able to maintain that super high bar of quality but still scale our content. We also have a freelance editor who we can lean on and trust to maintain that bar of quality.
5. So, what's the secret sauce behind the success you guys have seen at Lattice in terms of content marketing?
I think the secret sauce is definitely our focus on quality. But it is also the fact that we took a a step back and thought about our industry in a big picture. A lot of people assume that only HR professionals read content from an HR tech company. Yes, that’s our primary reader and focus. But at the end of the day, as a storyteller, you're not just telling stories about human resources, you're telling stories about work, about employees, about managers, maybe somebody moving into management, all the sort of emotions and uncertainty that they go through.
As soon as you make that connection, like I think we have, the range, the richness of the stories that you can tell far exceed what you thought. A lot of that is also dependent on the industry that you're in. Every marketer needs to really understand is it's not just an industry or a persona. You're telling stories that will resonate with everyone who comes across your content.
6. If you were to get access to the ultimate content stack, what would you want it to have?
That's a great question! There's a lot of different tools that we use in content marketing. It would be great if I could get something that - this is gonna be a laundry list - would include our content calendar, give our freelancers access, or could include options of researching and generating SEO. I could also look at and analyze our traffic numbers, include keyword tools, integrate Google Docs and Google Analytics. It would be fantastic! This could be a hub where all that could live.
