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Let Your Expertise Shine - Parqa Marketing

Brand Credibility Part 6 of 6: Show or Tell – Let Your Expertise Shine!

One thing staffing and recruiting agencies know better than anybody is the difference between simply working and actually getting the job done.

When it comes to your brand, you could be working hard and doing everything right by:

  • Starting from the ground up, creating a brand guide complete with all the elements of a cohesive brand that defines your agency
  • Taking the time to define what you do and who you serve
  • Log hours creating and broadcasting consistent messaging that resonates with your audience
  • Build credibility by living into your company values every day

So how could it be, after all this time and hard work, this strategy still might not move the needle? 

We’re wrapping up our 6-part series on brand credibility with one of the most crucial elements to building credibility: demonstrating your expertise.

Read on to learn about how demonstrating your expertise could be the most important ingredient to your brand strategy, the final step in building credibility and creating a winning and successful brand.

Expertise Puts the “-ability” in “Brand Credibility”

Can your staffing and recruiting agency solve persistent and complex employment problems for your partners? Of course you can! But how?

Simply telling your audience that you can create employment solutions and help their businesses grow is a good start. But stopping there accomplishes very little. It might be good news that you can create employment solutions, but unfortunately, your audience is less likely to choose your agency simply because you say you’re up to the challenge.

Your audience is looking for more than lip service. They’re looking for themselves in your content. Ideally, they’re looking for a story or a challenge similar to their own, like finding and hiring job seekers in a candidate-driven market. They’re looking for the solution you (and only you) can provide and how it not only solved the problem but was the beginning of a years-long, mutually beneficial partnership

When you demonstrate your agency’s expertise, you demonstrate a clear ability to get the job done. Only those agencies who can clearly demonstrate proven results will attract the most clients and job seekers. 

Why Demonstrating Expertise Can Be a Tricky Business

Expertise is like salt. Too little or too much can spoil a recipe.

In the same way, demonstrating your expertise can be a tricky business. Modesty in marketing is always good. On the other hand, leaning too heavily into your expertise, and you risk blurring the line between genuine enthusiasm for your work, and bragging.

The balance in developing and delivering just the right mix of expertise often comes down to subjective unknowables, like:

  • Intuition to know what content works the best
  • An ability to read an audience
  • Tactfulness in how or where you tell those stories
  • A moral compass to guide how much or how little to highlight your successes

Once you can create the right strategy, showing your work – from your process, successes, and even your mistakes – can build a potent back catalogue of expertise that is supported by the emotional weight of genuine storytelling.

Broadcasting Expertise With Your Digital Marketing Strategy

At Parqa, helping staffing and recruiting agencies demonstrate their industry experience is one of our favorite things to do. Nothing moves the needle like telling your story through authentic, relevant stories on platforms like your website, social media, email campaigns, and many more. 

When it comes to your online marketing goals, we believe there’s an opportunity to leverage every digital platform available to broadcast your industry expertise. Here are some of the key  tools and strategies we use to highlight your industry expertise in your marketing mix: 

1. SEO

Primarily a tool to increase your agency’s brand awareness and direct more traffic to your site – a key SEO strategy can make your agency rank higher in search results. The search engines which deem those higher-ranking sites to be the most authoritative sources in their industry or subject matter will make them more visible to consumers who will then associate your company with industry expertise.

2. Social Media

Not just for pictures of the office dogs. Using your social media platforms to create engaging and useful content, interact with your target audience and answer their questions is a great way to promote your staffing and recruiting agency and a powerful tool in demonstrating your expertise.

3. Blogging and Guest Blogging

What better way to demonstrate your staffing and recruiting know-how than to share or interpret industry information, trends, and interesting articles? Actively blogging and contributing blogs to other sites not only keeps visitors coming back to your site, but is also a great way to position yourself as a modern and savvy staffing and recruiting business.

4. Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews and testimonials are the physical evidence of your industry expertise. Publishing your feedback from clients and employees to your website is a key strategy to adding their powerful endorsement directly to your site. But you shouldn’t stop there. Responding to positive and even negative reviews on Google or Glass Door is not only mature and thoughtful but demonstrates your commitment to following through on your commitment to excellence. 

5. Customer Service

Providing excellent customer service is often not the foremost strategy in promoting industry expertise. But nowhere is word-of-mouth and strong relationships more powerful than in staffing and recruiting. When you go above and beyond to create a customer experience that is second to none, you’re laying the groundwork for associating your strong brand with positive, uplifting experiences.

6. Case Studies

What better way to demonstrate your expertise than by telling a true story about a real client, with a real challenge, and a real strategy that accomplished real results? These should be editorially written with plenty of data to support the outcome. It’s even better when you can get an authentic testimonial from your client at that specific organization to speak sincerely about the great experience they had with your firm. 

It’s okay if creating a digital marketing plan that leverages all of these powerful tools sounds like a tall order. That’s where a digital marketing agency can help.

Entrusting your content strategy to a marketing agency – especially one that specializes in serving staffing agencies and recruiting firms – might be the best business goal you can set.

Everything Your Staffing/Recruiting Agency Needs to Know About Brand Credibility

Branding, maintaining your brand credibility, and demonstrating your industry expertise is an ongoing process. It’s one that takes attention to detail, savvy and consistent commitment.

For everything you need to know about brand credibility and the importance of your agency’s most powerful tool, check out our previous five episodes here:

  1. The Set-Up: Brand Messaging for Staffing and Recruiting Agencies
  2. The Follow-Through: Living Into Your Company Values
  3. Brand Your Way Out of the Summer Slowdown
  4. How Messaging Can Resonate or Repel Clients and Candidates
  5. The Core Components of a Brand Foundation

At Parqa, we’re big believers in the power of branding. We want your staffing and recruiting agency to be empowered to create and sustain a powerful brand.

We’d love to help you create content and a strategy that will:

  • Project the trust and reassurance that is so critical to your industry
  • Establish your agency as the leading expert
  • Help you to rise above your competitors
  • Create and nurture leads
  • Ultimately, grow your business

For everything you need to create industry expertise and brand credibility for your staffing and recruiting firm, contact us today!

typing on keyboard

How to Determine if Your Blog Writing is Working

In order to stay relevant in your industry, you need to be blogging. And not just blogging for the sake of blogging – but having a true content strategy. A content strategy starts with determining a buyer persona, developing pain points, and writing keyword-based blogs around these pain points. So, if you’ve gone through each of these steps, and you still aren’t sure what the point of blogging is – now what?   

When we want to determine what the traffic is doing on our blogs, we examine a few metrics. These include how many views are getting received on the blog, on what page the reader is entering into the site, and what readers searched on Google to land on your blog.  


Related Post: Buyer Persona: What it is & Why You Need One ➢


Number of Views 

When someone views your blog, this is recorded as a “Session” within Google Analytics. By tracking how many sessions have occurred on your blog, you can begin to develop a baseline for what’s an average number of visitors reaching your content.   

Let’s say the first three blogs you write and publish to your site have about 30 views per blog over a one-month period. You then estimate your next blog would do about the same. This is an optimum time for you to start advertising and pushing out your blog. This can be done in a variety of ways. You can begin an email marketing campaign, utilize LinkedIn InMail, or even post a link of your blog to your network on LinkedIn. If your average sessions in a one-month period increases, you’ll know you’re marketing tactics are working. The more eyeballs you can have on your blog, the better!   

Landing Pages  

Landing pages are defined as the page in which someone enters your website. The most common landing page on most websites will be the homepage. Think about it – you Google something, and hundreds of websites come up. There’s a good chance, especially if you know nothing about this topic, you’ll choose from the top five options. So, each time you click to go to that page, Google Analytics will count that as one session occurring on the site and attribute it to one session with that being the landing page. It’s important to watch these sessions because you want to understand how and why people are coming to your site.  

There are many ways to watch how people are coming to your site – but what are the most important metrics to pay attention to in your analytics? Personally, I pay attention to Social & Organic traffic to the landing pages.  

If you share a blog on your LinkedIn on page, someone clicks on the link and heads to your site to read it, that’s important. Paying attention to that metric shows how well, or not well, your social channels are working in your favor.   

Organic traffic to landing pages, on the other hand, shows people finding your blog through Google or other search engines. This means someone has typed something into the search bar in order to find an answer to a question or problem. If your blog is the one coming up in the search results (without paying for it), that’s great! This means a blog has been optimized to reflect keywords people are searching for and ranks for those keywords. This is exactly what you want to see when using blogging metrics.   


Related Post: How to Target Your Buyer Persona ➢


Keywords  

Lastly, pay attention to your keyword rankings. SEM Rush or Moz are both great resources to help understand what your keywords on your site are doing. For example, I had a client who was looking to improve their rankings around the Engineering Recruiting space. By consistently blogging a few times each month, for three months, they were able to increase their ranking on Google from 78th to 8th (which is on the first page!) for Engineering Talent.   

Content is king in the world of SEO and ranking above your competitors. To make sure your blogging is working to benefit you in the way you’re hoping for, pay attention to these metrics!   

Need help with your content strategy and blogging metrics to outrank your competitors? Contact the Parqa team today!   

Contact us today to learn how our Digital Marketing services can help grow your business.

desk with keyboard and notebook

How to Generate Quality Blog Topics as a Recruiter

Now more than ever, blogging is the key to successful content marketing. Neglecting to post blogs can hurt your brand and your business’s chance of being seen. As a recruiter, consistently generating fresh blog content brings potential clients and candidates to your site. The main challenge is while you’re busy making placements, it’s hard to find time to brainstorm intriguing topic ideas, let alone write quality blogs. After reading this blog, you will have the skills and tools you need to master the process of generating excellent blog topics, even on a tight schedule.


Related Post: Why Recruiters Should Target Candidates With Their Content Marketing ➢


Identify Your Target Audience

Start by nailing down your target audience – Who will be reading your blog? Knowing your buyer personas is extremely helpful for this step. Think about who they are and what they’re interested in. Potential clients and candidates will find your blog one day, and it’s important to make sure they’ll find engaging and useful content.

Industry Trends – What are People Buzzin’ About?

Are you aware of the latest trends in your industry? Do you keep up with the latest news? What is your network buzzin’ about?

Staying on top of the answers to these questions will help you tap into fresh topic ideas for your next blog. For example, a big trend in the recruiting industry right now is the positive impact artificial intelligence is having on the recruiting industry. Writing about methods and predictions related to AI would be a great topic for a potential blog in the future.

There are several resources you can use to determine the latest industry trends such as online articles, magazines, social media, podcasts, television, etc.

These first two steps are essential for a strong start and continued success in writing engaging blogs.


Related Post: 5 Tips to Inspire Your Team and Yourself to Blog ➢


Topic Generation Tool

There’s going to come a time when your brain stops working, and you cannot think of any great topics to write about. Luckily, using a topic generator tool allows you to quickly and efficiently come up with topic ideas. Once you have finalized your target audience and researched industry trends, insert specific keywords into the topic generator tool you’re using.

Topic generators can help boost your SEO ranking, which plays a large role in growing your brand awareness and your business. Without a stream of fresh content, your SEO ranking will sink along with your social media presence.

Not all topic generator tools are built the same, but all have the same end goal of providing you with a variety of ideas. Below is a list of tools I recommend using to generate quality blog topics.

Don’t be Afraid to Reach Out for Help

If after all that, you’re still truly stumped, don’t hesitate to ask your fellow co-workers, family, and friends for suggestions. Asking others for ideas is especially helpful, as you never know what their unique views can bring to the table. Word of mouth travels fast, and someone may have heard about a topic in the industry that could spark an idea for your next awesome blog.

While writing blogs can be a challenging process, coming up with good topics can save a lot of headaches. If you’re having a difficult time growing your brand and are interested in expanding your blog content, partner with us today.

To learn more about how content marketing can grow your business, check out our recent webinar recording.

Content Marketing Webinar

desk with old laptop and ipod images

How to Create the Right Blog Image

When you’re scrolling through social media, what catches your eye the most? For me personally, it’s the images. Striking, exciting, adventurous photos catch my eye – no matter what the topic is. In fact, a post that includes an image has a 650% higher engagement rate than a post that’s made up of only text. So clearly, it’s crucial to include images – but how?


Related Post: What Is Your Websites UX? & Why It’s Important ➢


Make it Appealing

Stock photos can be boring – we’ve all seen the two coworkers shaking hands, a group of people chatting & pointing at a computer, or fake doctors wearing stethoscopes around their necks with their arms crossed. They’ve been used hundreds of times and won’t necessarily catch the attention of a social media scroller. Instead of using basic stock images from anywhere on the internet, I recommend using websites such as Unsplash or Pixabay. On these sites, you can find stunning, high-quality images for free – and if you want to give a shout-out to the photographer, their information is included! But these images can be used free of charge with no worries of penalties or copyright infringement.

Adding Accents

Programs such as Canva or Lunapic have excellent programs that can help you edit photos. From filters to shapes & lines, these programs help create an eye-grabbing image for websites & social media. The best part – you definitely don’t need to be a designer to use them! These programs are free to use and have a very simple user experience.

When adding accents though, don’t overdo it. A few simple lines or shapes, and 1-2 fonts are all you need to make an image pop. Also, be sure to use high contrast to your benefit. Overlaying a darker filter over an image opens the door to use light text – and vice versa.


Related Post: How Can Digital Marketing Get Me More Clients ➢


Brand Consistency

Once you start determining the style of images that match your brand & feel correctly, stick with it! By no means do they need to be boring templates every time you create one. But there should be some sort of brand consistency. Accent colors should correlate with your logo, prominence of your logo should be consistent & overall feel of the photos should match. When a person sees your images week after week, your brand should resonate with them.

Sizing is Key

I’ve seen so many images on the internet where the words are falling off the pages, and the image is cut in an odd spot, or there’s extra white space. I find there’s nothing more off-putting to the naked eye than an image that isn’t correctly sized.  Be sure to research what size is needed before publishing – and then check yet again once live! For example, Facebook has a different size requirement than Instagram, and yet another size is used for every website on WordPress. Just be sure to double check your work so you aren’t kicking yourself after it’s been live for 3 days.

As you can see, adding an eye-catching image to your blog can make an impactful difference to the engagement of your blog posts.

Are you having issues coming up with images to match your brand? Talk to the Parqa team today to help make your content with imagery speak directly to your audience!


woman typing on laptop

How Recruiting Firms Can Write Meaningful Thought Leadership Blogs

Most recruiting firms know it’s essential to create thought leadership content. It builds credibility, and it’s excellent for getting found online (hello SEO)! Have you been blogging for a while and it doesn’t seem to be working? Or maybe you don’t currently blog, but when you start, you want to make sure you’re doing it the right way?

Well, you’re in luck! We have an easy way to make sure you’re bogging effectively. Five steps. Read on.


Related Post: Why Recruiting Firms Should Hire a Digital Marketing Agency that Specializes in the Recruiting Industry ➢


Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

Simply stated, decide who you want to talk to. Better yet, who do you want to attract and engage? Do you want to attract more candidates? Or (most often) clients?

Let’s say you want to attract more clients.

Step 2: Narrow Down to a Specific “Buyer Persona”

Who do you want to get in front of? Is it HR Leaders in the healthcare industry who hire roles X, Y, Z? What size of company do they typically work for? What headaches do they have to deal with at work? What trends are they interested in staying on top of related to their job? What makes them tick?

Let’s say your buyer persona is HR Manager Mary. She is 42 years old and has been in her role for nearly 20 years. She works for a smaller organization that is rapidly growing, but she is the only person in HR, and she has to manage all of the hiring herself. Her most significant pain point is that, while she is capable of hiring talent for her company, she just doesn’t have time. She wishes she could keep up on trends in her space (e.g., healthcare) and wants to provide the best talent to her growing organization. And she’s a family person who values time management so she can spend time with her husband and children in the evenings after work without having to be glued to her laptop.

Step 3: Find Keywords Relevant to Your Buyer Persona’s Pain Points and Industry

This may be the most challenging step – but you’re just a few minutes away from getting started. Create a list of topics and phrases that matter most to your buyer persona – try to integrate their specific industry (the industry you specialize in, ideally). For example, you may use keywords such as “healthcare industry hiring trends” or “healthcare recruiters Minneapolis” or “recruiting time management.”

It’s helpful to work with a digital marketing agency who specializes in SEO for recruiting firms to define keywords of focus that you know your potential client will be interested in, and also confirm that there is search volume for those keywords (e.g., do people search for a specific keyword phrase 200 times/month or 20,000 times/month).

Step 4: Create a Blog Content Calendar

This sounds complicated, but it’s as simple as deciding what topics you’re going to write about, and when. When life gets busy between managing searches, working with your team, and trying to keep everything running smoothly, writing a thought leadership blog is usually the last thing on your mind. By having a content calendar with deadlines and pre-determined titles, keywords, and a buyer persona, you can sit down and write. (Yes, we can help with that.)

I know it’s easier said than done, but with benefits ranging from building credibility and presence online to driving Google search results, writing thought leadership blogs is one of the critical business focuses that will help you win searches and attract new potential clients.

Step 5: Share, Share, Share

Once you write a blog on a topic that matters to your potential client, get the word out there! Post the blog to your company’s LinkedIn page. Share it from your LinkedIn Publisher. Tell your recruiters and leaders to share it in a LinkedIn post. The more reach, the better!

If you work with a team of recruiters, and your company specializes in a specific industry niche, your co-workers also have a relevant network on LinkedIn who would like to see your thought leadership content! It builds your brand, your company’s brand, and your fellow recruiters’ brands. Win, win, win!


Related Post: How to Inject Some Much-Needed Fun into Your B2B Blog ➢


Now that you’ve got the recipe for writing relevant thought leadership blogs get started! It will take you:

  • 10 seconds to define your target audience, because you know it (clients vs. candidates)
  • 3 minutes to write down a specific buyer persona (remember HR Manager Mary)
  • 3 minutes to brainstorm keywords relevant to their pain points and how you can help
  • 3 minutes to assign due dates for yourself (do the 10th of every month to start)
  • (Once you write your blog) 5-10 minutes to share it to your LinkedIn Publisher, share to your company page, and email your recruiting team to share as a LinkedIn post

It’s not something you can do with your eyes closed, but it IS something you can get ready for if you spend less than 10 minutes preparing. Not everyone can master the art of blogging. Not everyone blogs for the right audience. And not everyone blogs with meaningful, keyword-focused content. Then again, not every recruiting firm is excellent at what they do. Not every recruiting firm picks a niche and dives in, making sure they only hire the best and provide the best service. But if you are among the best in your space, then the next step is to build your brand online and become known as a thought leader in your industry. If you’ve made it here, you’re committed to improving your company – and that makes you different. Now, go spend 10 minutes preparing!

Need help getting blogging? Let’s talk!


Webinar On-Demand: Why Recruiting Firms Should Hire a Digital Marketing Agency that Specializes in the Recruiting Industry ➢


At Parqa Marketing, we specialize in creating and executing content marketing strategies for recruiters. Learn more about our approach to content marketing and contact us today if you’d like to discover how we can transform your recruiting firm’s digital marketing efforts.  

people on their phone at work

5 Tips to Inspire Your Team and Yourself, to Blog

As a business owner of a recruiting firm, digital marketing might still be a new concept for you. Ten years ago, your marketing efforts consisted of posting ads in your local Yellow Pages and scraping the early versions of online job boards for leads to cold call. Wow.. how the landscape changed. If your firm has been slow to adapt, you might be struggling to grow your business.

There are tons of digital marketing strategies that recruiters can deploy to grow their business. One of the cheapest and easiest tactics is to install a culture of blogging with your team.


Webinar On-demand: Watch this webinar to learn how you can implement content marketing into your strategy ➢


Picture this scenario: you’re talking with a fellow owner and they tell you they partnered with a digital marketing agency. The agency is helping them with blogging, social media engagement, building a new website, and optimizing their content for SEO. Intrigued, you head back to the office and decide it’s time to dip your toes into the digital world and write a blog about something you are passionate about in your industry. Energized by the process, you get the great idea that everyone in your firm should participate in the blogging process as a way to build your firm’s brand.

What a great idea! But how are you going to get everyone on board and engaged in the blogging effort?

Here are 5 tips to inspire your team (and secretly maybe even yourself) to blog.

1. Start with the Why

Tell your employees WHY you are asking them to take on this new task. What is the purpose? Taking three hours away from the phones and client meetings to write doesn’t automatically sound appealing to recruiters working on commission. Here a couple of examples WHY it is important for your employees to blog.

  • Build their personal brand in the digital marketplace: Blogs can be seen by potential clients and candidates on the company website, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If people don’t know who your recruiters are, how are they going to call them?
  • Build their reputation as an industry expert: You know that your employees are rock stars in their fields, now you need to spread the word. If your team blogs about pain points in their respective recruiting verticals, people in that vertical will gain valuable insight into the industry and recognize the expertise of both the employee who wrote the blog and your firm’s brand in general.
  • Increase brand visibility: We all know marketing is not free and that we can never get in front of enough people in the recruiting industry. Through blogging, your employees have the opportunity to market themselves for no cost to them or the company.

2. Tie Blogging to Tangible Business Results

In our search and consulting sister company, Versique, we track both activity metrics and financial results of individual team members to help them grow their business. If you’re new to digital marketing, work with some of your peers or check out our website to get stats around the effectiveness of building an online presence.

  • One of our expert recruiters has closed 25% of their business the last 4 years from building their online presence. That is well over $300,000 in search fees.
  • One of our thought leaders recently posted a blog on LinkedIn. In the first 24 hours, they had 52 likes and the post had been viewed 3,668 times. How many networking events would you have to attend to get in front of 3,668 people?

Related Post: 5 Content Marketing Mistakes – That Give Competitors the Edge ➢


3. Create a Content Calendar

No one wants to be in the middle of a huge search and have the owner of their company fly into their office and demand a blog be written by the end of the week because they forgot to tell you a week ago. Don’t be that type of leader. Create a content calendar so your team can be properly prepared.

Creating a calendar for your team that is 4-6 weeks out allows your employees to ask questions, raise concerns, and do some research on a topic. It will also allow the employee time to balance the ebbs & flows of the recruiting business or pick a slow time to set aside a block of a few hours to sit down and write. On top of helping the employee, a content calendar will also create group accountability and collaboration for the company as a whole.

4. Involve Your Team in Topic Generation

I know for me picking the topic is sometimes the hardest part of the blogging process, but that doesn’t mean you should just hand out a list of topics to your employees because the topics are important to you. It is integral that your employees are an active participant in generating topics. A few reasons why it’s so important to include:

  • They are building their expertise in their vertical – they should know what the pain points are for their current clients.
  • If your team members are going to get excited about writing, they should pick a topic they are passionate about and own it.
  • It will help them to think critically about how they can add more value and expertise to their clients.
  • You will get a more diverse range of topics with everyone contributing.

Related Post: 5 Content Marketing Mistakes – That Give Competitors the Edge ➢


5. Lead by Example

Planning a strategy is great, but execution is the key to success. As the owner and leader of your firm, it is easy to set the strategy for your employees and move on to the next visionary idea that will change your business. When you establish the blogging strategy and calendar, make sure you lead by example by making yourself a regular contributor.

Additionally, maintain an active role in assisting your employees with their blogging efforts. Sit down with your employees and discuss topics or help them troubleshoot any hurdles they are having.

But it all starts with you. If you’re not meeting your deadlines, it’s hard to expect that your team will.

Next Steps:

Blogging is an EXCELLENT way to get you and your team started in building up the brand of your firm, and the individual brands of your employees. When ramping up your in-house blogging consider the above simple tips to keep you on track to execute.

Want to learn more about giving your B2B marketing a boost?

Learn how Parqa can transform the way you approach digital marketing.Content Marketing Webinar

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