How Monster launched an award-winning site – then adapted and expanded as audience needs changed.
If there’s one thing everyone learned during the pandemic, it’s this: Don’t expect anything to last. As the team behind Monster's award-winning content site learned, you need to be ready to adjust as you go.
By Ann Gynn
Just one month after the pandemic hit hard, Monster Worldwide's new microsite went live. Called Work in the Time of Coronavirus, the new site served both job seekers and employers struggling to adjust to quickly changing circumstances.
“We went into lockdown in mid-March (2020), and we had launched this in a month,” says Monster’s Carl Germann, senior marketing manager, brand communications. “We couldn’t believe we did it. We were like, 'Wow, this is kind of astounding.'"
Julia Gaynor, senior marketing strategist, B2B, agrees: “It was so rewarding – being able to create so much content that we knew was definitely helping
both our customers (companies posting jobs) and our candidates. It felt very meaningful.”
The judges at the Content Marketing Awards 2021 thought so too. It was the winner for the best content marketing launch and led to Content Marketer of the Year finalist honors for Carl and Julia.
It wasn’t just the expedited timing to create, execute, and publish the site that led to the recognition. The content partners tackled a number of challenges and made some new discoveries.
Work in The Time of Coronavirus effectively addressed both business (employer) and consumer (job seeker) audiences. And the content teams continued to expand and shift the content focus as they learned more about what those audiences needed.
It brought together the Monster teams in new ways, too. Here's a deeper look at all they accomplished.
“At first glance, we thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be really popular with job seekers.' And it turned out to be a little bit more popular with employers. We were happy with that because we were serving our clients in a way that we weren’t six months prior,” Carl says.
Julia agrees Monster’s new content was even more helpful to employers, particularly in the health care industry. Monster opted to offer free job postings to all health care companies and eventually opened it to all companies seeking essential workers for a time.
The screenshot of the site shows the relevant topics it covers – from what people need to know about unemployment benefits and legal rights to health care jobs that don’t require experience.
The content included a mix of existing and newly commissioned content with a special ingredient – proprietary Monster data.
The site’s Data & Insights section offered a weekly snapshot of the hiring landscape. It featured results from polls of Monster members as well as proprietary job-market data, including top searched keywords, top posted jobs, and cities with hiring surges.
Monster scraped data from job-seeking candidates and job openings posted by companies. (The company used only generalized candidate data, such as the number of resumes being uploaded, top occupational categories, and so on.)
Using that research, the content team created the Monster Job Index. The example on this page shows top keyword searches – administrative assistant, work from home, and part-time – and how each had been trending.
As the world got used to the “new normal,” Monster tackled topics like work-from-home burnout and how to pay remote workers. They also followed their audience’s growing interests by creating content on building a diverse workforce.
To draw people to the microsite, Monster sent emails to 5 million job seekers and 500,000 employers in its database.
The team reached out to the media, specifically touting the content in the Monster Jobs Index. They created organic social campaigns for individual articles. And they ran targeted promotions for webinars based on the site’s content.
As the economic impact of the pandemic dragged on, they shifted to a paid social campaign promoting individual articles on related trending topics.
The plan worked.
Work in the Time of Coronavirus averaged 2,500 monthly B2C visits. More importantly, it earned a 52% click-through rate as visitors were motivated to consume additional content on the site. The B2B home page had a 40% CTR, with most clicking to see the proprietary Monster Jobs Index.
Individual article promotion also succeeded. COVID-related posts were 51% more efficient than standard content in driving traffic to Monster's site. COVID-related content accounted for 81% of job views, 84% of new accounts, and 83% of application starts.
The impact continued into the fourth quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021. With a 50-50 content mix of standard career advice and COVID-related articles, the COVID content accounted for 71% of site visits.
As for media coverage, the Monster Jobs Index earned 55% of the company’s media coverage in 2020, and its thought leadership led to a 175% increase in the inclusion of a Monster spokesperson in media coverage.
The original goal for Work in the Time of the Coronavirus was to build brand awareness and extend Monster thought leadership across three sectors – candidates, employers, and media.
But Carl and Julia didn’t stop with one successful content site. The success they found in pitching the weekly Monster Job Index to top-tier and trade media led them to launch a new site in 2021: Monster Intelligence, which is devoted to all things data.
But that’s not where the Monster story ends. It’s really just the beginning of a new era – an integrated content approach across the organization.
About two years ago, the small content team at Monster underwent some changes. Carl led more of the company’s PR brand communications efforts, while Julia drove Monster’s B2B content marketing team.
But the pandemic’s onset led them to work together on a cohesive content strategy to respond to that incredible moment. “We could never stop doing it that way. It’s like second nature for us now,” Carl says.
Using Sprout Social’s Bambu tool, they share content with employees who then can share it easily externally.
“We’ve had great success in leveraging that for our sales team,” Carl says. “They needed to keep in contact with their clients. They needed to stay relevant. We kept giving them content and data
points (through Bambu) that they could put on their own LinkedIn (or Twitter),” he says.
Today, the marketers deliver new content two to three times a week so that the sales team and others can continue sharing relevant content digitally.
That’s not all. The internal comms team sends out an email blast every Tuesday from the marketing department talking about the latest pieces of content, public relations hits, and so on.
“It’s all become such an integrated aspect of the way we work here,” Carl notes.
All this work hasn’t gone unnoticed by the C-suite either. As Carl explains: “It’s becoming much more apparent to the executive leadership that this is just part of how we do it.” CCO
Ann Gynn edits the CMI blog. Ann regularly combines words and strategy for B2B, B2C, and nonprofits, continuing to live up to her high school nickname, Editor Ann. Former college adjunct faculty, Ann also helps train professionals in content so they can do it themselves. Follow Ann on Twitter @anngynn or connect on LinkedIn