In this discussion, Matt Vaadi and a co‑speaker explain how the payroll and HR industry experienced a "Super Bowl" of content during the COVID‑19 era by rapidly producing guidance on emergency legislation such as the FFCRA, ERTC, PPP, and shifting state laws. They describe how timely webinars, email drips, and other funnel‑driven assets captured clients from competitors, emphasizing that the key to success was adapting marketing plans on the fly rather than following a static yearly calendar. The speakers detail their workflow: monitoring alerts and news sources, quickly distilling complex legal updates into simple, audience‑friendly language for small‑business owners, and delivering that content through webinars and concise communications. By consistently providing valuable, easy‑to‑understand information, they built trust, grew their audience, and turned content consumers into loyal clients.
Chapters
Like this past year, if you're in the payroll and HR industry, it has been like our Super Bowl of content, right? Like if you were not creating content around FFCRA, ERTC, PPP, you know, state law changes, etc., it like somebody is and your clients are getting it from somebody. So if it's not you and they get into somebody else's funnel and they're getting that content and, you know, it starts with the webinar, then the email drip, then all the stuff we're doing where we're certainly taking our fair share of clients from our competition, uh, that's how, right? They're getting into our funnel because we're providing super valuable content that they can access in an easy fashion. But so, so that also trees into the one point I want to make is that as much as I wish that planning was always like we could plan the next year out in advance and I would know that Q1 we're going to talk about performance management, Q2 we're going to talk about hiring, and Q3 we're going to talk about compliance, like you have to be ready to adapt. Like we have had to If there's no lesson to be learned from COVID it's that you better be ready to adapt or die along the way. And not meant from illness, obviously. Hopefully that doesn't come across in poor taste. But the, you know, as a business, this has been a critical point where you've got to adjust plans according to what's going on in the market around you, and your marketing is no different.
With— and yes, absolutely. So there's been so many times over the last year where a new, you know, law or something has come out the night before and the next morning we are on there for 3 hours trying to figure out everything that's going on and then we're putting out content for it. It's going out the next day. So that is a— and I know I can't believe I failed to mention that, but that was a big part of what it took is, you know, being in front of everything. In some ways to do this are Google Alerts, keeping up with following news sources, having emails come through that are relevant to your industry. So keeping things coming to us as soon as they came through, we needed to put those out. We needed to put them out for our audience. So if it's coming from a news source or it's coming from an outside source, we put it in the language that our audience needed to hear. So we cleared it up. We took the points that were necessary for small businesses and we put them together. We took out everything that didn't apply because it can be overwhelming. I think most business owners could easily say over the last year with HR and payroll that it's been an overwhelming amount of information coming through. We broke that information down and that took time. I wish there was like an easy button for it and we could just, you know, hit a button and there it is. You know, this is what you need to put out, but we had to read through everything. We had to look at different sources and then put it in a way that our audience could easily go through and be like, okay, I needed to know this, I'm good to go, and take out all the non-necessary items. So I think that was another big part of it. You know, if you're just copying and pasting from a news outlet and sending it out to your, to your clients, to your potential clients, and they don't understand what you're talking about, they're going to stop reading it. But if they, if you put it in a way that they can understand it, they're going to start following you. And once they start knowing that you're putting in their language, they're going to look at your emails, they're going to look at your social posts, they're going to attend your webinars. Over anyone else's.
