It’s no secret that to compete in today’s digital landscape, your business needs a blog. But while many companies begrudgingly do it, few understand the real value of consistently producing content for your brand—and just how many different angles you can take with that content. Blog content can serve many different purposes, all with the final result of helping you grow your business. From increasing brand visibility in the marketplace and establishing yourself as a thought leader to generating leads organically, your blog is one of the best assets you have to market who you are and what you do. What’s more, publishing regular blog content can help boost your company’s recruiting efforts. An article from Undercover Recruiter outlines five ways to use your blog to bolster your recruitment strategy.

Here’s our quick take on how to use blogging as a recruitment tool for your company.

1. Openly Highlight Your Culture

Blogging is a chance for your company to showcase your brand, promote your company, and highlight your culture. It can provide an inside look at your business and what makes your culture unique.

2. Discuss Job Openings In Depth

Posting to a job board is a must, but another option is to share job openings through your blog. Doing this allows you to go in-depth on the job description itself, listing the requirements of the position and also touching upon the benefits your company offers or your unique work culture. Discussing job openings through your blog allows you to give someone a more complete picture of the role itself as well as what makes your company desirable.

3. Utilize Your Employees’ Knowledge and Opinions

Blogging provides your employees with a voice; it’s a chance for them to share what they know within their specific area of expertise. It also provides them with an opportunity to give a firsthand account of what it’s like to work for your company.

4. Use Social Media to Share Your Content

Not only do you need to share your blogs on your brand’s social media profiles, but you should also encourage employees to share. Having your employees interact with your brand on social media not only increases your total reach but also puts your brand in front of hundreds to thousands of eyes that could be interested in your services.

5. Build Thought Leadership

Blogging is a great way to consistently publish quality content that can help you gain your target audience’s trust. Building this trust is key to being considered a thought leader within your industry. Ensuring your company publishes high-quality content in a consistent fashion will not only help improve search engine optimization but will also help you build your overall credibility.

How Can Parqa Help?

Digital marketing continues to evolve at a constant pace, so it helps to have a team on your side to navigate the latest changes and help you get solid results based on your unique objectives.
Parqa is a Digital Marketing Agency that specializes in SEO, SEM, Marketing Automation, Social Media and content creation. We help grow your brand and drive leads through inbound marketing. See our work.

One of our key tasks as marketers is to be creative and find ways to generate interest and demand in our products and services. Creativity has been essential to marketing success long before the internet or digital marketing came about.

Creative has always been a key factor in standing out in marketing both online and traditionally, but as online-targeting becomes increasingly sophisticated, consumers now expect the online world to be cutting-edge. Relying on a fixed formula is risky and, as technology becomes more advanced, your approach to digital marketing will need to be smarter, more creative and better informed if you want to have a chance of standing out.

Many digital marketers have abandoned innovation in favor of “playing it safe” but, for those who hope to build highly effective digital marketing plans in the future, creativity will play a leading role in their development and execution. Here’s why creativity has always been important, and how it will become increasingly critical as a tool for achieving success in digital marketing in the future.

Why Creative Is So Important

Today’s users move fluidly between devices and channels and expect a seamless, engaging and fun experience. At any given moment, every user is rapidly taking in several pieces of information that they have to assess when deciding whether or not to award their attention to anything. Creativity already plays a vital role in breaking through, making an impact, resonating and inspiring the customer to give you their attention. However, it will play an even bigger role in the future when it comes to generating real engagement that leads to conversion.

The fact is that we oftentimes get caught up in the work and analysis we do to ensure the right product is promoted to the right segment, but sometimes we forget that there’s a person at the other end of our promotion.  Microsoft recently did a study that measures the “dwell” of different digital marketing campaigns. According to a Regroup article, “dwell” refers to the amount of time people spend with a given piece of creative for a product or service and, “the higher the ‘dwell’, the higher the engagement and the more likelihood of purchase.”  The fact is that more creative, engaging online ads lead to higher “dwell” and, thus, more successful brand campaigns in terms of searches, traffic to the brand site and engagement at the brand site.

Targeting Consumers Creatively

As consumers encounter increasingly better-targeted messaging at higher volumes, it will become critical to strike a balance between technology-driven targeting and creativity to stand out. Marketing Land columnist Peter Minnium wrote in a recent article that marketers tend to “get so caught up in the potential of technology and data to optimize the delivery of an ad to the right person at the right time in the most efficient manner possible, that they often lose sight of a fundamental truth: the ad creative has to be good, or it’s all for naught.” His observation is spot-on.

Creativity will be critical when it comes to both how we target future audiences and what we display to them. According to ComScore, data show that half of a campaign’s impact on sales is due to the creative strength. By activating customer data and leveraging deep data insight like psychographic information, you can cut through the noise to provide real value to customers in the form of a highly personalized ad that is both relevant and useful.

Creating a More Compelling User Experience

Marketers are accustomed to targeting consumers by demographics, dividing them up using broad variable such as age, gender, geographical location or ethnicity. Although these metrics are important and deliver results, marketers can’t afford to rely on demographic data alone in the future, as they will miss a huge opportunity to increase audience engagement and risk delivering generic messages that appear irrelevant.

As targeting becomes more sophisticated, consumers expect the messages they receive to be increasingly tailored and personalized. From the marketer’s perspective, achieving success requires getting creative with targeting and understand the customer’s personality, motives and action-drivers at a deeper level. Targeting can go well beyond where your audience lives and what they do to become even more granular and specific. With social media, people share their common values and interests to create digital communities of interests that advertisers can leverage to creatively build advanced, personalized targeting the drives action.

Inform Your Marketing Strategy with Data-Driven Creative

With insights provided through analytics and data management platforms, you have the ability to more effectively reach different audiences by segmenting them into groups and tailoring custom creatives to increase the impact for each specific group, according to the Make Thunder blog.

Here are a few types of data that you can use to creatively segment your audiences and customize each ad’s messaging, according to Make Thunder:

Behavioral Data: Targeting based on a user’s previous web browsing behavior across the web. Placing a cookie on a user’s web browser allows you to collect various behaviors such as websites visit, pages viewed, clicks, downloads and videos watched. You can then group behaviors together into segments and target them with tailored messages.

Contextual Data: This related to the content viewed by the user. On-page content and keywords displayed on a page are captured. You can “use contextual data to target a consumer’s present web behavior and align ad messaging with the content they’re viewing.”

Psychographic Data: Psychographics provide insight on the “why”– what’s driving the purchase decisions of your customers. This includes personalities, beliefs, values, interests and lifestyles. Psychographics get into the “psychological aspects of consumer behavior, while helping to paint a more detailed picture of who your target audiences are and what motivates them.”

Geographic Data: Geographic data simply provides information on “where” your customers are. When you need to target specific regions, or tailor promotions for a local market, geographic data is key.

By combining numerous types of data, you can build unique audience segments based on data driven creative tactics such as retargeting and cross-channel.  The goal is to create one-to-one messages to consumers from when they first interact with your brand up until they are ready to make a purchase decision. Doing this requires data-driven creative, continuous monitoring and optimization of ads overtime to maximize ROI.

 With a creative and informed approach, digital markers can deliver more relevant experiences that offer more purpose and foster long-term brand awareness, loyalty and advocacy. If you’re interested in learning more about psychographics and how you can leverage them in your ad targeting, check out our last blog: Psychographic Marketing: Hypertargeting Your Customer’s Passions to learn more.

Nick Noble, Director of SEO and Inbound Marketing, recently participated in a panel discussion at the Business Marketing Association’s “How to Happy Hour” event. Nick was one of four search experts on the panel discussing SEO and SEM Strategies for businesses.

Below, Nick shares insights on 10 of the most common SEO and SEM questions for building your business strategy:

1. In your experience, what separates SEO from SEM?

SEO (search engine optimization) is a part of SEM (search engine marketing). SEO is the optimization of your website in the effort to rank well organically within search results. SEM includes SEO but also includes the paid advertising strategies that appear in search results (text ads and PLA – product listing ads). The efforts of SEO focuses on organic traffic, while SEM includes all traffic from search engines.

2. What are the key benefits of implementing SEO and SEM strategies, and how can it be used to complement an overall marketing plan?

There are many benefits of implementing SEO and SEM strategies and they can not only complement, but lead an overall marketing plan. If you have a product or service that is highly searched on the internet, then search engine marketing has potential to lead your marketing efforts.  In these instances, instead of trying to create the demand for your product or services, you are targeting individuals who already know they want/need your product or service and are currently looking for it.

3. When starting fresh with SEM/PPC for a company, what process do you take to build out the account structure?

Often, but not always, I start by identifying what I call the “money pages.” These are the pages that are going to send the paid traffic from our ads. They are usually product or service pages that align with the business goals.  I use a single money page for individual ad groups and typically create campaigns based on the sites structure or marketing objectives (budget also plays a big role in campaign structure).

4. What are a few ongoing optimizations that could be executed within the PPC account to ensure optimal performance?

Negative keywords… Typically we are looking to reduce our CPA (cost-per-acquisition). At a consistent level of spend, two of the most effective ways to decrease your AdWords CPA are: Decrease Cost-per-Click (CPC) and Increase Conversion Rates. Read this blog post I wrote for more information on this: Two Ways to Decrease Cost Per Acquisition in AdWords.

5. Is there a difference in targeting mobile vs. desktop? How can we use that in our optimizations?

Yes. Ad text, ad extensions, landing page experience, etc. vary between mobile and desktop. Also, it important to understand the user’s intentions and experience on the different devices.

6. My company is doing a complete website redesign. What are a few things we can implement to ensure our new site is optimized for search?

Use 301 redirects! If your site URL structure is going to change on your new site then make sure you redirect your old URLs to your new URLs. These should be mapped out on a page to page basis.  There’s lots more I could talk about here, so if you want to know more feel free to ask! @lookingfornoble or nnoble@parqa.com

7. How do you analyze performance of your SEO and SEM efforts? What do you look for?

Depends the business objects and who you are talking to about it. Typically CEOs want to hear about revenue, leads, CPA, ROAS, etc. not traffic levels. It also can be a headache if you get them focused on things like individual keyword rankings or CTR. I should probably write a blog post on this.

8. Many times, a realistic test budget for a new account is almost always north of what a company wants to spend. How do you approach that conversation with clients or higher ups in the company? How do you determine a test budget, and what would the duration of that test be?

Do your research and use the data you have to come up with projects. This will help you validate the test budget. Here’s an example:

9. What are some free tools available for anyone looking to rank higher in Search?

Google –has multiple tools.  Google analytics, AdWords keyword and display planner, Google Search Console, Google Trends, Google Page Speed Insights, Google Structured Data Testing Tool, and Google itself.  A few others that can be very beneficial: SEObook, Moz/ Moz Bar, SEMrush, Raventools, Screaming Frog, etc. have limited versions or free trails. Answerthepublic.com, Keywordtool.io, ubersuggest.io are free keyword research tools.

10. What is your top tip for anyone entering the world of Search?

Always be learning – the world of search is constantly changing and evolving, therefore, as search engine marketers, we must too. Whether it’s staying up to date on the latest trends, following industry thought leaders, or learning from a past project, it is key to never stop learning. Also, be willing to test new theories and ideas and learn from their outcomes. Oftentimes, it takes creative thinking and going outside of the box to really move the needle.

As marketers, most of us are familiar with demographics and how they can play into strategically targeting qualified prospects and customers. Demographic information, such as gender, age, income and marital status, help to explain who your buyers are, but they don’t exactly explain “why” they buy. This is where psychographics come in.

Unlike demographic information, psychographic information includes more about the “why”, including the buyer’s habits, hobbies, spending habits, interests and values. Today, the most effective way to reach your target audience is by gaining a deep understanding of both their demographics and psychographics.

Combining these two related but separate sets of data can help you build a highly detailed buyer persona that encompasses who your prospects are, but more importantly, how they feel about things.

Psychographics and Digital Marketing

Source: jeremysaid.com

Imagine that you are trying to get people to switch from a popular protein powder to your own innovative and all-natural protein supplement. You may start by running campaigns to target specific groups of athletes or fitness conscious people, but there’s likely a deeper subset of people that are particularly ready to make the switch: the people who hate their current protein powder or value natural and organic food. This gets into the psychology and psychographics of your prospects.

Psychographic targeting means figuring out ways to actually reach the people who are unhappy with their current protein powder and are more motivated to try something new. According to eConsultancy, the best way to do this is to have people self-identify which psychographic categories they fit into by responding to your content signals.

For example, you could create a blog, eBook or white paper about the benefits of organic protein supplements, or about how some traditional supplements are filled with potentially harmful additives.

The people that respond to these initiatives are telling you that they are part of the narrow psychographic you are targeting and separate from the average satisfied protein powder consumer.

Understanding these deep sentiments about your consumers is at the heart of why psychographic targeting is so effective when integrated with marketing.

Getting Psychographics is Now Easier than Ever

Because psychographics are so specific, it used to be a lot harder to get the data compared to demographic data, which has been available in different forms for decades. Even if you had psychographic data, opportunities for making it actionable were hard to come by.

However, the internet has changed the game when it comes to accessing psychographic insight, making psychographic difference more prominent and making it easier to leverage the data to improve marketing efforts.

Consumers have different reasons for their purchases and a lot can be missed when you assess demographics alone. Consumers with different incomes and lifestyles make somewhat different purchase decisions and psychographics allow us to get to the heart of why that is.

When you understand psychographic differences, your online marketing tools make your insight actionable in a way that was nearly impossible before data giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter existed, according to Harvard Business Review. Through our interactions with these websites, they essentially become mass data collection machines.

Using Psychographics to Market Smarter Online

Source: Curatti

When you understand the key differences in what your customers care about, you can execute smarter and more tailored digital marketing, especially when it comes to keyword targeting. You can target messages to the unique sentiments of different groups of consumers.

For example, you can target Facebook ads to people who have liked specific pages or identified particular interests, or you can research which hashtags different psychographic groups are using on twitter to tailor your messages accordingly.

The internet has given rise to a new sort of interconnectedness that makes it easier to find like-minded peers to share our interests and attitudes with. The web is a borderless worldwide community of tribes that help to “consolidate psychographic differences” by self-identifying their interests and passions.

In the past, people tended to identify with one another based on demographic community or geographic region, but now they have the ability to identify with others that share mutual interests.

Psychographics give you “a roadmap for navigating different types of divisions and sensitivities” when it comes to your customers. With the latest online tools, you can quickly gather the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of consumers by using social media analytics to identify the latest trends in interests and attitudes.

From there, you can dig even deeper by conducting a sentiment analysis to further uncover attitudes. Along with analyzing sentiments, you can also monitor organic social media conversations that allow you to “spot emerging issues or psychographic clusters,” according to the HBR. With all this data, you can get far more granular with your targeting and marketing efforts.

An Example of Successful Psychographic Advertising

Source: spectator.co.uk

Perhaps the best example of how psychographics can be used to target specific groups to motivate action is the recent US presidential election, which was won by Donald Trump with the help of a British data science company called Cambridge Analytica. While many think that Trump was simply a great campaigner and influencer, his tactics ran much deeper than that in reality.

Cambridge Analytica carefully created psychological profiles of the electorate by grouping people with similar traits and designing political advertising to match (psychographics in a nutshell). They had on file more than a million personality tests completed by Americans–online, by phone, and in-person. Responses to these tests were graded on what psychologists call the “big five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion and neuroticism.

They then expanded those findings from those that took the tests to the entire American electorate of 230 million by leveraging the 4,000 – 5,000 data points they have on every single adult in the US. This included everything from basic demographic information like age and gender but extends to more psychographic information like which magazines people buy, the television shows they watch, the cars they drive and more. All of this data is for sale.

Through their research, Cambridge Analytica was able to predict that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (traditionally blue states), would go to Trump on election night. This type of big data work wouldn’t have been possible five years ago, but now we can look at audiences with more granularity than ever before and learn precisely which messages individuals need to receive to be influenced. You may be wondering where all this data comes from.

When you opt-in on social media to share data, what’s really happening is that you’re agreeing to have your personal data used for marketing and targeting purposes. While some don’t mind having their data collected, others see it as harmful or intrusive. How do you feel about your data being collected for marketing purposes? Let us know in the comments below.