LinkedIn recently recognized our client, Versique, as one of the top 20 most socially engaged, North American staffing firms with 50-499 employees. The ranking takes into account social reach, employee engagement, employment brand, and content marketing power. By using thousands of data points, LinkedIn ranks companies from all over the world, categorized by location and company size. Versique was chosen from more than 60,000 companies nationwide.

Versique was founded in 2013 with the vision of investing in talented people, providing the best tools available, and building a company rich in leads. Today Versique has more than 120 recruiters and consultants, including 18 recruiters with more than 10 years of staffing experience each. From the beginning, Versique’s primary goal has been to create experiences worthy of a referral, which wouldn’t be possible without a full commitment to inbound marketing and the benefits it provides. With 15,000 followers on LinkedIn and over 16,000 new website visitors monthly, over half of Versique’s revenue is driven by inbound leads.

Parqa began as Versique’s own internal digital marketing agency and, after three years, was rebranded to a standalone company. Now, following Versique’s success and the success of dozens of clients, Parqa helps other businesses transform their businesses just as we transformed ours.

If you’re looking to gain more followers, engagement, and leads; here are a few tips for how to build your follower base and develop a more socially engaged company or recruiter brand.

1. Publish Original Content
   Ask thought leaders within your organization to commit to writing two blogs a month. Having leaders write their own blogs provides genuine insight a ghost writer may not have, while also establishing credibility. Authenticity leads to followers.

2. Write Relevant Content
   Determine what kind of blogs your current follower base would want to read. For example, a recruiting firm owner wouldn’t write about what to bring to a job interview, but rather about the best ways to retain top talent.

3. Be Consistent
   Develop a content calendar that helps you keep track of the information being published and when it will go out to your audience. Not only will this hold you accountable, but also help you develop a content strategy.

4. Share Relevant and Engaging Content
   Again, simply share information your target audience wants to see. Social networks are made for interaction. Posting your own content will only get you so far. Share relevant content from other sources, interact with people online, and remember it’s a two way street. If you interact with others, they’re more likely to interact with you and help build your brand’s reach.

5. Educate Your Employees
   Explain the power of social media to your employees and train them on how to use it to build their own personal brands. Recruiters receive over 10 times the profile visits on LinkedIn than those in other professions. Make those extra profile views count. Additionally, have your recruiters post their open jobs and share them on social media. You’d be surprised how much interaction those job postings drive and the effect they can have on the bottom line.

For more tips on how to increase your company’s social engagement, visit LinkedIn’s website. If you’d like to learn more about how online marketing can transform your business, contact Parqa today!

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on an executive round table of high level HR professionals from Fortune 500 companies who are based or have offices in the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area.  The conversation surrounded the online marketing space and how it relates to the function of HR and recruiting.

As the conversation began, we talked about how jobs could be viewed as products or services that we sell to potential candidates.  In having this view, we are working towards enticing even more qualified candidates through company brand reinforcement, employee intelligence, employee/corporate interaction with a potential client, and much more.  The following chart demonstrates how Marketing as a function serves the same type of benefit and services and when marketing for new highly qualified candidates.  I’ll talk about some of these more in depth.

Online Corporate Brand Reputation/Reinforcement

The view of a brand online can play a significant role in how the company is viewed in general.  This is very important when a consideration of a product or service is being made. The same could be said for a highly qualified candidate who is in the decision-making process for reaching out to an organization regarding one of their positions that is currently available. How the brand is viewed online through social media conversations and overall recognition can be pivotal in the decision process. This is particularly important when the candidate is highly qualified and has offers from multiple different corporations. Lisa Arnold, our Director of Recruiting, has fascinating insight on what this looks like for recruiters as online marketing becomes more and more important in finding top-tier talent.

What are people saying about you? How does it affect whether or not a candidate wants to work with you? Or if a potential client wants to do business with you?  If you have a bad online reputation and people are speaking negatively about the brand online, you have a serious problem.  A positive reputation online can go a very, very long way and the more people talking about you, the better.  This includes the employees who have something to say from the inside, while others can speak about the company/organization from an outside view.

Employee Intelligence

Smart people want to work with smart people and smart companies, period.

If a highly qualified candidate becomes an employee and is not motivated or learning from peers on the job, they may become bored, disinterested and frustrated that they took the job.  This is precisely why it is important for corporations to demonstrate the intelligence and quality of the company.  It comes as no secret why some high tech companies such as Google and Facebook can employ some of the most intelligent employees on the planet.

These companies, and companies who create an “aura” or “cool factor” around them are utilizing and pushing out content that demonstrates the culture, intelligence, creativity and thought leadership of the corporation.  This creates buy-in from potential candidates and customers who view the corporation in a higher regard.

Employee/Corporate Online Interaction

Engaging online with customers and potential candidates further helps to elevate the allure of the company. Engagement and interaction through social media channels, whether they are from in-house recruiters, the company pages themselves, or for service-specific channels where there are faces of the organization, will reinforce messages. Organizations can be and are concerned about empowering employees online using social media to be a voice for the brand.  Empowering employees in social media can be a powerful tool. It can create additional buy in from the employee and make them feel a part of something much larger. This in turn positively reflects on the content they may be pushing out on social networks. A restricted policy can make employees feel trapped or a part of a stuffy organization. There is no doubt that information will be pushed out through social media, whether that be on work time or on the employee’s personal time. The empowered employees feel a little more morally responsible to push out positive content while restricted employees tend to push out some of the more negatively toned content about the organization.

End Goal

At the end of the day, when you view jobs as products or services, aspects of marketing begin to play an extremely important role in recruiting. Not in just the recruiting aspect, but also in the marketing of the company or organization as a whole including the brand visibility, brand reputation, social media engagements with employees, corporate interaction, employee intelligence, and much more.

The lines are becoming pretty blurred between Marketing and HR. Or is it that the need for marketing in HR is becoming more prevalent? What do you think?

It’s been long known that traditional advertising affects online behaviors and website traffic.  It seems as though this idea or understanding still falls by the wayside when traditional ads and campaigns are being created.

There are many articles demonstrating how online ads affect offline sales, such as this one from RKG, another with Google’s weigh in, and it appears Coca-Cola is still trying to figure it out.  This is also very important to online marketing efforts and the correlation between the two.  It’s clear that the blending of both online and offline, to be truly integrated, is extremely important.   We’ll discuss the impacts offline has on online, and how to track the effectiveness.

Branding

Traditional advertising plays a large role in branding. How this branding is demonstrated or carried over online can be assessed through Website Analytics, Trends (such as Google Trends), and Webmaster Tools (thanks Google and Bing).  There are my other ways to track this, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll talk about these three readily available tools.

Website Analytics

Branded keyword searches and spikes in impressions/clicks can help to identify the effectiveness of an offline campaign.  If there are large spikes of branded keyword searches to the website just as and after an ad comes out, this can be an indication of the effectiveness of the ad.  Direct traffic to the website can also be an indicator for effectiveness.

Tracking these measurables through your web analytics, such as in the demonstration below, indicates when and how these efforts are working.  Setting up annotations in the analytics helps to identify and historically track what has taken place and what impact it has had on your brand.  Assuming you have already set up cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition (CPA), or some other form of ROI tracking, you can then get a better idea of the return from your traditional ads.  Getting users to convert to a lead involves other tactics such as conversion optimization, which is discussed in the context of talent acquisition here.

The chart above is an example of when an offline ad goes out on a Friday (in this case from the MSP Business Journal) and gets a spike in traffic the following Monday as business owners get back into the swing of things at work. This jump in traffic is also tracked to the key conversion points defined by the business for ROI.

Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools both help online marketers and webmasters better understand how their website is performing in each search engine, and also helps them to identify if the search engines are having issues with their website.

Both of these tools demonstrate the volume of impressions and clicks the website is receiving on any given day or week.  These impressions, when viewed in coordination with a traditional ad campaign, can help to identify how the website is performing in terms of visibility during an offline advertising campaign.

Here is an example of an offline ad going live and the impact it had on impressions of the website in Google at the launch of the ad.  This helps to demonstrate that the offline ad is generating visibility online, as the volume of impressions spikes once the ad goes out.

If the website is not set up or is not in a position to capture the impressions and clicks that are being generated from an offline advertising campaign, then you may have missed the boat.  Making sure this is in position is done through search engine optimization, potentially pay per click, and other online avenues. 

Search Interest and Trends

Google Trends provides a valuable look into search interest. This means, how much are people reallysearching for a particular keyword. In this instance, we’ll look at a brand.

In using Google Trends, we can research the volume of search interest for any given branded term over time.  When traditional ad campaigns go out, looking at the search interest is another key aspect as it shows the overall interest in the brand, not just if the website is showing up for these given branded search impressions.

Here is the web search interest for “Coke”:

In fact, it can even be drilled down to the search interest in a given location or larger city.  Therefore, if there is a large offline ad campaign going in a major market city, the branded search interest can be gauged in those locations to help to understand the offline ad impact online. Branded keywords can also be viewed in coordination with keyword modifiers such as “coke rewards,” which helps to also drill down on an offline campaign initiative. This same assessment can be done through Webmaster Tools and web analytics. The difference between Webmaster Tools and Trends is that through trends, we are looking at the search interest holistically rather than basing it on the website’s impressions on Google for the given branded keyword.

Results

Pulling all of this together will help you determine whether or not your ad was effective (a.k.a., something that should be run again, or something that should be put on the shelf and never touched again). Looking at insights of how an offline campaign is performing is one thing, but helping to quantify it by looking at the effects it’s having online is truly another, and will help you to get a clearer picture of your offline ad campaign effectiveness.

The dilemma. You have a hiring manager who wants to find the right candidate, and a highly qualified job seeker wants to find the right job. How do they meet?

Online Marketing

The solution. Online marketing can help these two find each other, and go through a process of interviews to determine if they are the right fit. Each has a need they want filled, and online marketing can prove to be their solution.

Online marketing, specifically inbound marketing – which is the process of a company generating content, whether it be through blog posts, videos, social media, email marketing, SEO, etc. – attracts a specific audience, and helps the company to gain credibility. By generating relevant content, the hiring manager/company can find themselves in the right place at the right time online, when and where the job seeker is looking.

Online marketing is a tool that can be used for almost any business, to bring in new business, generate brand awareness, and create new connections.  Understanding what your goals of online marketing are, prior to building a strategy, is critical to the success of any online marketing initiative. Components and goals can easily be added in conjunction or based on an opportunity after the fact, but understanding the root goal at inception is the most important part of any campaign. To discover your root goal, ask yourself, what is the main thing I am trying to accomplish?

Online Marketing Outlets

The number of online marketing tools that exist today is vast, and growing at an astounding pace. There are so many marketing channels, that it can be a challenge just to figure out which are the right ones to use! These channels are not just a growing group of online marketing tactics, but more and more there are becoming vertical-specific channels. They can be very lucrative for online marketing for your specific vertical.

Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn are some of the old standbys for social media, and from there, you get into other vertical tactics. For recruiters and hiring managers, these may be CareerBuilder, Indeed, Monster, and LinkedIn Recruiter.

Online marketing and user interaction on the web has grown to a point where there are so many moving parts and touch points, that it is a challenge to identify where to jump in.  Not just jump in, but where it makes sense, how to go about it, and if it fits the corporate objectives.

Content and Job Postings 

Content generation and content curation is the all the rage right now in online marketing.  Blogging and social sharing of information is a trend that has been around for quite some time, but it’s been generating more and more attention in the last year, and it doesn’t appear to be something that will slow down any time soon as the consumer appetite for new, interesting, and thought provoking information continues to pique the interest of online users.

Using the right tactics at the right time will create visibility, awareness, and promotion that can help you fulfill your business goals. In creating online content, making it memorable and making it stand out, is an important element. If you’re a recruiting firm, for example, whether creatively writing a job posting in a way that’s not often done, or blogging about content that displays you as a thought leader, your company will benefit by standing out.

With those two examples, you’ll accomplish some pretty cool outcomes:
If you: Create job postings that are sexy…
You’ll get: More candidates applying for your job!

If you: Blog about content that proves you to be a thought leader within your industry…
You’ll get: Hiring managers who are more comfortable, knowing they are in good hands!

The Right People at the Right Time

Ultimately, what it all comes down to is setting solid goals and working with the right tools to accomplish your business needs. In the example of an executive search firm, this means that you’ll attract great jobs, and the right candidates. Sounds like a win-win to me!