The Importance of Building Trust With Your Audience

January 15, 2019

Trust is the glue that binds us together. It’s the foundation on which human interaction is built. Without trust, we would be stuck relying on ourselves for survival–I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be able to survive on my own. For most people, everyday interactions, like texting a friend, or buying something at the store, are modern-day miracles.

“Brands are all about trust. That trust is built in drops and lost in buckets”

– Kevin Plank, Under Amour CEO

There is a great essay called I, Pencil, and I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t already. It’s a testament to the sheer depth and breadth of our modern global economy. It essentially states that there isn’t one person on earth who knows how to make a pencil, yet most of us can walk down the street and buy a pack of them for a couple of bucks.

It’s trust that facilitates these transactions between otherwise complete strangers. It’s trust that helps us make decisions on who to surround ourselves with every day. But trust can’t be bought, it must be earned over a lifetime.

It’s interesting to think about trust in 2018—during the ’90s, when the internet first came out, skeptics thought it would be too difficult for consumers to trust businesses on the internet with their information and credit cards. But it didn’t take long for a man named Pierre Omidyar to come along and flip the script on the naysayers.

Pierre created a website called AuctionWeb, a site “dedicated to bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace.” AuctionWeb started off as a side project for Pierre, but by 1997 there were over 2 million auctions and counting on the platform. Pierre soon had the brilliant insight to institute a rating system for buyers and sellers to rate each other, which was a signal of how trustworthy one was on the platform.

Today, AuctionWeb, now called eBay, is one of the largest marketplaces in the world with over 175 million buyers and 1 billion products listed. By implementing a rating system, eBay became the trusted third party that allowed buyers and sellers from all around the world to seamlessly transact for goods and services. The rating system is still the gold standard of trust today and can be found on popular apps like Airbnb, Uber, Yelp, Amazon, just to name a few.

Trust is the Foundation Upon Which Progress is Built

As trust becomes ever more important in the digital age, businesses must spend more and more time investing in building trust in their brand and their business. Recruiters can take a page from the eBay story, and build trust into their business strategy.

While getting referrals, recommendations, and testimonials is a great way to convince your leads to work with you, it’s even more important to build trust throughout the entirety of the buyer’s journey. In the second part of this blog, I’ll list a few ways that recruiters can build trust with their audiences and become the gold standard of service for their market.

If you’re working to build trust with your clients and candidates, Parqa is here to help strengthen your digital brand as a trusted recruiter.

Parqa Marketing is a digital marketing agency that works to transform your digital marketing efforts.

Content is King: How To Build Your Credibility With Content Marketing

December 7, 2018

As a recruiter, your tenacious, go-getter mindset serves you well. It’s the valuable trait that fuels you when you’re putting in the work to identify the best talent, and when you’re building positive and lasting relationships with clients. When you’re creating and implementing your firm’s content marketing strategies to grow your business, it’s important to tap into that same committed work ethic.

With content marketing, it’s imperative that you remain committed to generating content, patient in evaluating results, and aware of the various, and sometimes unquantifiable, ways that content is affecting your business.

Remaining Patient When Setting Goals in Content Marketing

In most of your business strategies, your goals are created using a simple equation. By doing X, we hope to yield Y. In recruiting, you might purchase an additional LinkedIn recruiting seat for your firm, with the goal that it will increase revenue by a certain number. The time-tested equation makes for an easy ROI analysis upon the completion of your initiative.

In content marketing, that’s not a great way to set goals. Why? Because your content has a broad impact on your company. A single piece of content has the ability to improve your search rankings, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, educate prospects, engage with your audience, create brand awareness, and improve your brand’s reputation. There are simply too many variables to insert into a linear success equation when it comes to evaluating content.

A common pitfall that companies fall into is they get discouraged with their content efforts when they don’t collect quick wins from it. They then drop the ball on content creation, for a while, out of frustration.

I made this mistake when I first started creating content for my recruiting firm. I was so focused on how much traffic our website was generating, and how many leads we were converting, that I was losing sight of the long game. You, of course, should set goals for the various content metrics out there—whether that be rankings, traffic, or conversions. But don’t forget to be patient. If a piece of content doesn’t generate a lead this month, or even over the next few months, that doesn’t mean it won’t eventually. There are so many ways that content can help your brand, that you must avoid rigid evaluations of whether or not it’s working.

Instead, your primary goal should be to create good content regularly. You never know when a piece of content is going to serve as the conversion point for a lead. The life cycle of a piece of content can go for years, which is important to keep in mind when evaluating the metrics of your content.

Staying Committed to Producing Content Across All of Your Channels

In recruiting, your reputation is everything. Candidates measure your reputation when weighing whether to trust you with guiding them toward the next opportunity in their career, and your clients weigh your reputation when deciding whether they can trust you to find them the perfect candidate.

If your firm isn’t producing a steady amount of content, your reputation is in jeopardy. Before a lead picks up the phone and calls your firm or sends you an email, they will read three-to-five pieces of content. As they come across the content they read, they will be evaluating your brand.

Ask yourself this, what does our content say about us? If you only post a blog every couple of months, leads will take notice and question your commitment. If your social posting is inconsistent and unfocused, leads will notice. If you don’t have any long-form content that tackles the important questions and topics of your target audience, your leads will notice. Gaps in the consistency or quality of your content will stain how leads are appraising your firm.

By staying committed and patient, you’ll be able to supply leads with a steady diet of educational content that will both inform them about the solutions to their pain points and to the value of your firm.

Parqa Marketing is a digital marketing agency that works to transform your digital marketing efforts.

9 Stats That Prove the Importance of Website Design

November 20, 2018

It’s almost 2019 – hopefully you realized that your website, content, and overall design has a profound impact on the perceived credibility and quality of your business.

But just how much does your website’s design, layout, and content really impact your visitors’ experience and their likelihood of purchasing your product/ service?

THE ANSWER: a lot more than you might expect

Why the Design of Your Website is So Important?

Below are 9 stats that prove the importance of having a website that’s easily maneuverable, well designed and laid out, has quality content, etc.

“38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive”
– (Source: Adobe)

It takes 0.05 seconds for visitors/users to form an opinion about your website and determine whether they’re going to stay or leave. So your website’s content and layout has to entice your visitors enough to want to stay on the site and read/ learn more about your products and services.

“88% of online visitors/ consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.”
– (Source: The Gomez report, Why Web Performance Matters)

This means that your website has to not only create a great first impression by being easy to read, easy to navigate and appealing aesthetically, it also has to entice visitors to stay on your site by almost immediately answering their questions.

“Judgements on a company’s credibility are 75% based on the company’s website design.”
– (Source: Web Credibility Research from Stanford)

It’s almost 2019, and your website serves as a window into your company, thus it needs to exude trust and credibility. Otherwise you run the high risk of handing your potential customers over to your competitors with better designed websites.

Most often this trust is emphasized on the ‘about us’ page of the company’s website… See Parqa’s ‘About Us’ page

“Users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at a website’s written content”
– (Source: Eye-tracking study by Missouri University of S&T)

This is not a lot of time to soak in all the written content on your websites homepage.

The key to this is to utilize a concept called “progressive disclosure,” where people aren’t bombarded with content they don’t need right away, but they are still easily able to find it and other information by digging deeper into the website. (i.e. in the main navigation menu)[/vc_column_text]

“70% of small business websites lack a Call to Action (CTA) on their homepage and across their website.”
– (Source: GO-Gulf web development)

A great CTA button can direct users, get them to take a desired action, improve conversion rates, and ultimately help your website achieve its defined objectives.

How are visitors/ potential customers supposed to know what actions you want them to take if you don’t give them CTAs that help them better find what their looking for, or how to find more information?

…. They don’t and they can’t.

“A study found that, first impressions are 94% design-related.”
– (Source: The Effect of Aesthetics on Web Credibility, Farah Alsudani & Matthew Casey)

“That same study found that 46% of consumers base their decisions on the credibility of a website from its visual appeal & aesthetics.”
– (Source: The Real Business of Web Design, John Waters)

User Experience also plays a role in the effectiveness of your website: Learn More ➢

“47% of website visitors check out a company’s products/services page before looking at any other sections of the site.”
– (Source: KoMarketing)

“44% of website visitors will leave a company’s website if there’s no contact information or phone number.”
– (Source: KoMarketing)

I can’t tell you how many times clients come to me asking to look at their website and give them feedback, and they have no dedicated contact form page, no phone number and/or email address prominently displayed and easily visible/ clickable on their website. And they wonder why people don’t contact them through their website or why their website doesn’t generate leads.

The more time, energy, and money you put into your website, and better understanding the types of visitors that are coming to your site, the harder your website will work for you to generate leads/ purchases.

So, What Does All this Mean?

Your website is a magnet for judgement—and this judgement isn’t limited to the website itself—it carries over into the way users perceive the company as a whole.

All of these stats build on one another, any snag a user/ visitor hits on your website – whether it’s related to design, loading time, content or navigation—can be detrimental to your chances of turning that visitor into a lead/ customer.

“A bad website can greatly tarnish a company’s credibility—but a quality website can help a company extend its sphere of influence and create leads.” – Sweor

The difference between obtaining a lead and losing a lead may be as simple as making small adjustments that change the way users perceive your website the first time they interact with it.

“88% of online visitors/ consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.”

Source(s):
https://www.sweor.com/firstimpressions
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/compelling-stats-website-design-optimization-list
https://econsultancy.com/site-speed-case-studies-tips-and-tools-for-improving-your-conversion-rate/

The Truth About B2B Web Design and Why You Should Invest in It

https://web.archive.org/web/20130209052518/http:/scholarsmine.mst.edu:80/thesis/Eyes_dont_lie_unde_09007dcc80993a1e.html
https://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/ewic_hci09_paper66.pdf
http://www.komarketingassociates.com/files/b2b-web-usability-report-2015.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?id=8Ij4DAAAQBAJ

Why Recruiters Should Target Candidates with Their Content Marketing

November 5, 2018

The last time the national unemployment rate was this low, Planet of the Apes was raking in the cash at the box office. No, not the stunning, CGI-dependent reboots or the laughable Mark Wahlberg fail. I’m talking about the original Charlton Heston classic, with its delightfully cartoonish hair and makeup and brilliant political allegory.

Low unemployment has created many opportunities for recruiting firms. Hiring is never easy for companies, but in this job market it’s nearly impossible without the industry knowledge and network that savvy recruiters possess. To take advantage of the low unemployment before it inevitably shifts back to normalcy, recruiters should absolutely be creating smart and informative content that is targeting business owners. At the end of the day, without clients to provide staffing solutions for, there’s no way to make money.

However, far too often I see recruiting firms neglecting the opportunity to create compelling content for candidates. And that’s a big mistake—, especially in today’s labor market.

Many Candidates are Unaware of Their Value

Being in the recruiting world, or even recruiting-adjacent such as myself, it’s easy to forget that other people are unaware of the current labor market. As recruiters, you eat, sleep, and breathe labor, so the trends and happenings of the industry are always top of mind. Business owners aren’t quite as in the know as you are, but with hiring being a vital element to their business success, they also maintain a strong understanding of the labor market. You’d be hard-pressed to be speaking with a prospective client and blow their minds by telling them about the low unemployment rate. Anyone that has had to hire in the past year is well aware of the challenges.

Candidates, on the other hand, not so much.

They’re busy working and growing their careers. Unless they work in the HR sector or are passionate about labor trends, they won’t know that they currently are more valuable than they have ever been in their careers. When talking with professionals across a vast number of industries, I’m always shocked when I discover they have no idea how low the unemployment rate is or how competitive hiring has become.

This ignorance of the labor market presents tremendous opportunities for recruiting firms to be pumping out informative content to inform these talented candidates. Especially firms that place permanent hires, as you’ll be drawing largely from a passive candidate base. By furnishing educational content that details how rare the current market is, and how advantageous it is for job seekers, you can build trust with candidates and begin to warm them up to the idea of changing jobs.

Candidates are Easier to Reach Organically Than Clients

As a recruiting firm owner, you naturally want to dedicate their content marketing resources to attract clients. More clients lead to more business—I get that. But in terms of attracting organic eyeballs to your content, and your website, going after candidates is a far easier task.

For one, there’s simply more of them. It doesn’t take an economics expert to notice that there are more worker bees than business-owner bees out there. Let’s say your firm specializes in engineering recruitment. If you’re writing a blog targeting engineering firm owners, there’s a finite number of them within the reach of your market. Depending on where you’re located, there may be anywhere from 10-100 firms, so you’re hoping that an owner at one of those firms reads your blog. How many engineers live within the reach of your market? 1,000? 5,000? 10,000?

Secondly, candidates spend more time online seeking information. Millennials have overtaken baby boomers as the largest generation in the American workforce. Of the many stereotypes out there about my much-maligned generation, one that is undoubtedly true is we depend on, and regularly rely on, the internet for our information. From finding the best Vietnamese restaurant to scoring tips on finding a new job, the internet is the first place we seek out information.

The combination of more eyeballs and an increased likelihood that candidates will seek out your thought leadership online creates a tremendous recipe for increased traffic to your website, which can help you get clients. With a sound and optimized website, the organic traffic to your candidate-targeted blogs will directly improve your organic rankings for other pages on your site. The better your organic rankings, the more likely you are to gain an organic client lead.

Content Marketing Tailored to Recruiters

You might be thinking, “This all makes sense. I need to write more Candidate-driven content. But…writing is hard and I’m way too busy growing my firm to sit down and write content.”

I’ve got some good news for you: Parqa Marketing can help. We’re a digital marketing agency that exclusively works with recruiting firms. Intrigued? Schedule a call with our team and learn more about how we can transform your digital marketing efforts.

Need help getting blogging? Let’s talk!

Content Marketing: Your 3-Step Recipe for Lead Generation

October 22, 2018

There’s no way around it. Everywhere you look there are either marketers trying to sell you lead generation strategies or entrepreneurs trying to create them. So why all the fuss? Isn’t there a clear path that leads to more customers and clients? After five years of growing my company, Versique, from the ground to a thriving $17 million leader in executive search & consulting, I believe there is.

So, let me ask you, what is the one thing that every successful lead generation strategy has in common?

A robust content marketing strategy.

That’s because 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with you. You literally can’t have one without the other; no matter how good your ads are, how high your marketing budget, or how many cold calls you’re making each month – if you’re not distributing the right content in a valuable, relevant, and consistent way, you simply won’t drive the potential customer or client to action.

So, whether you want to call it lead generation or content marketing, we’re talking about the same thing.

Let’s dive in and look at the three requirements of a strategic content marketing strategy and how to successfully execute them in your business.

1. Creating and Distributing Valuable Content

The digital space is getting noisier and more crowded each day. With the average consumer seeing over 4,000 ads between the time they wake up in the morning until the time they go to bed – it’s increasingly important to add value with each piece of content you produce.

Yet with all our responsibilities, to-do lists, and business pressures it can be tough to strategically plan to create valuable content, let alone to distribute it effectively. Use the following list as a guide to remind you of ways you can execute on this without taking too much time planning strategy. In our final point, we’ll cover the optimal frequency of each.

Blogs
Social Media Posts
Infographics
Vlogs
Podcasts
Website Landing Pages
Press Releases
Email Campaigns

2. Creating and Distributing Relevant Content

Creating relevant content goes beyond value to adding more in-depth and specialized information in a systematic way. Here’s the best way to understand the difference:

Valuable content is worth the reader’s time.
Relevant content helps the reader accomplish or learn something they need to know.

These pieces of content take more time and strategic thought to produce but are more targeted and useful for your market. Use the following list as a guide to remind you of ways you can execute writing relevant content without taking too much time planning strategy. In our next point, we’ll cover the optimal frequency of each.

eBooks
White Papers
Webinars
Case Studies
Newsletters
TV & Radio Spots

3. Consistently Producing Content

Consistency is the key to success in both life and business. Without taking a consistent approach to content marketing your lead generation will be feast or famine – great during the months you’re producing and terrible during the months you’re not.

Use the following list to help you plan out your strategy:

What to Post Daily –

Social Media Posts: Social media posts are a great way to humanize your personal or business brand, stay in touch with your customers, and stay relevant to your target market. Depending on the platform, your posting schedule could include one to several posts each day.

What to Post Weekly –

Blogs: A weekly blog is helpful to not only get both valuable and relevant content to your target market, but also for SEO and ranking purposes as well.

Vlogs: Videos are exploding reach on every digital platform out there today. By publishing a weekly Vlog or professionally done video, you increase reach, engagement and further humanize your brand while setting yourself apart as a thought leader in your niche.

Podcasts: Podcasts are another trending avenue to show yourself as a thought leader and expand your reach within your target market.

Email Campaigns: Depending on the campaign, you may have daily, weekly, and monthly emails going out to your list.

What to Post Monthly –

Infographics: Producing a helpful infographic each month and distributing it to your networks is a powerful way to stay relevant and current.

Website Landing Pages: By creating a new lead magnet and subsequently a new landing page each month you’re able to exponentially increase your email list while simultaneously reminding your target market that you are innovative and current within your niche.

Case Studies: Publishing new case studies and customer testimonials should be considered a staple in your marketing strategy. Potential customers want to see that what you’re doing works and from others, why they should work with you.

Newsletters: Although print newsletters lack relevancy, a stunning and dynamic digital newsletter is a great way to stay in contact with your target each month.

TV & Radio Spots: It really can’t be helped. We are programmed to look up to people featured on Radio and TV as experts and specialists in their field. Maintaining a regular media appearance still provides brand value.

What to Post Quarterly –

Press Releases: Press releases around current or trending events within your company or niche is a great way to gain credibility as well as add valuable content to your marketing strategy.

eBooks: The popularity of eBooks continues to rise. By releasing a new eBook each quarter you can stay ahead of your competition and current with your market.

White Papers: Academic publishing can help you be a leader within your field, and there’s no better way to do that than a quarterly white paper.

Webinars: Unfortunately, webinars are too often used as strictly a sales tool – with the only purpose to get people to buy NOW. However, that is not the best use of this type of content. Adding as much value as possible for 30+ minutes will allow your listeners to lower their guard and be more receptive to hearing a pitch either at the end or with follow up email campaigns.

In the end, the result of a strategic content marketing campaign done well, is a pipeline full of profitable customer action, aka Lead Generation.
If you need help growing your recruiting firm and want to know how I grew mine to $17 million in revenue and 120 employees in five years, we should talk.
To learn more about how content marketing and when to use gated content to grow your business, check out our recent webinar recording.

How Recruiting Firms Can Write Meaningful Thought Leadership Blogs

October 17, 2018

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.

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!

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.

5 Simple Ways To Repurpose Your Best Marketing Content

September 25, 2018

Back in the mid-1990s, we were on the cusp of the “.COM” bubble, the turn of the millennium, and blogging began. Blogging was seen as a way to get your thoughts on paper (well, on screen actually) and maybe someone else in the world would stumble upon it and check it out. At the time, there weren’t social media channels to share it out on, and it wasn’t used to highlight your expertise in an industry.

Fast-forward twenty-plus years and the world has shifted dramatically. Today, blogging isn’t just a space to put your thoughts out in the world – it’s a foundational piece to your content marketing strategy. But what if people aren’t finding your blogs? What if there isn’t traction with the content you’re putting out into the world? There could be a number of reasons these pain points are hitting you and today I want to focus on repurposing that content you already have into other media formats.

Webinars

Most blogs on the internet are around 500-700 words, while most webinars are around 30-40 minutes. If you read an average length blog out loud, it won’t take more than 5 minutes. Directly transferring from a blog to a webinar will clearly result in a lack of content, and your audience will be disappointed in the length of your webinar.

But webinars are a great way to tell stories about how you got to this point of sharing your knowledge. Webinars – different from podcasts – have the ability to show content, such as a PowerPoint or webpage to expand the topics you’re speaking about. In a recent webinar done by our CEO Tony Sorenson, Tony was able to tell his story on how he got to where he’s at, deliver information on the topic, and connect with the audience on the importance of the topic in our market. If Tony were to type up that entire webinar, it would be incredibly long, and most likely not something a few hundred people would want to read word for word.

Long Form Content

Long form content can come in a few different ways like ebooks, salary guides or whitepapers. Transferring a blog directly into long form content may not necessarily work (similar to the webinar) as it wouldn’t be enough content. The reason people download long form content is to receive ‘the ultimate guide’ or ‘the easy guide’ to solve a problem they are seeing in their industry or life.

Video blogs

This is one of my favorite ways to transform a blog for a different audience. When blogs are posted to social media, someone needs to click on the blog, be routed back to the website, then read through all the way to the end in order to see your call to action. Video blogs, on the other hand, are a brilliant way to take a blog and transform it into a video that’s usually around 30 seconds long. People can watch video blogs over lunch, on the bus heading home, or just relaxing on the couch. They are quick and don’t require having the sound on (such as a webinar) since the tips are right on the screen. The best types of blogs to convert over to video are blogs such as ‘5 tips’ or ’10 strategies to’ since they have numbered out suggestions. Each slide in the video can be your 5 tips, then it’s wrapped up with a Call-To-Action to direct the audience to engage. The other great part about video blogs, is you don’t need a designer’s eye to make it look great. There are tons of tools out there to help you get started – and they’re very simple to use!

Podcasts

While similar to webinars, Podcasts are built solely for your audience to listen to and not watch or read anything simultaneously. Podcasts are great for people on the move – personally, I listen to them out on walks, during my lunch break, or in my car on my commute home. They’re also a great way to bring on guests to interview who are thought leaders in the industry. Podcasts can also have commercials or sponsors to encourage people to take action outside of just listening. Build a following and a cadence to allow insight into your company, your objectives and your opinions on industry new and trending topics.

Infographics

Infographics are similar to video blogs in that they are excellent tools for your social media strategies. These work great for blogs that are laid out in the step by step, or workflow of suggestions. Arrows, timelines, funnels or other shapes that guide from idea to idea help an infographic flow. This is also another format where a blog can be slimmed down to a handful of main points to quickly and effectively make a point. They’re also great in presentations, handouts or to reference for quick facts within a blog. The one downside to converting to infographics is they can take a lot of time, and potentially need a designer to put them together – but once completed, they are effective on social, and quickly get your information in front of prospective clients.

While getting content out in front of the world is great, having a strategy to get the right content at the right time in the right format is crucial. If someone is busy walking their dog, they most likely aren’t reading a whitepaper – but they could easily be listening to a podcast! Taking the time to figure out who your audience is, where they’re consuming content, and at what pace. Utilize the analytics and tracking to study what your audience does and capitalize on it!

Webinar On-Demand: Is Your Website Your Best Salesperson? How-To Bring Content into your Marketing Strategy➢

Repurposing Content: What to Do and What Not to Do

September 13, 2018

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘content is king’ enough times to meet hearing it with a slight eye roll, but, as is the case with some clichés, the overuse of the phrase is warranted. Content is the essential fuel that drives digital marketing as any SEO-driven marketing campaign requires content. However, once you’ve been aboard the content train for a while, it becomes more difficult, and time-consuming, to generate fresh content.

As a recruiter, there are few more valuable resources to your business than time. The more time available, the more calls you can make, interviews you can conduct, and searches you can fill. How can you continue to generate the all-important content your digital marketing strategies require without committing too much of your time writing it?

Let me introduce you to the concept of repurposing content.

What is Repurposed Content?

Repurposed content is a creative way to recycle previously written material for reuse. By repackaging content that you have written, you’re able to get further use out of content you’ve already spent resources creating. Repurposing content lets you get more mileage out of existing content by placing it in front of new audiences—all while saving your time.

Repurposing content only works with evergreen content that continues to provide value to readers after its original publish date. For example, that fun blog you wrote that tied into the 2016 Super Bowl is not a repurposing candidate. Conversely, a blog that discussed the impact artificial intelligence could have on the recruiting industry is an excellent repurposing candidate.

So, repurposing content is merely reposting an old blog as a new blog, or taking an old LinkedIn post and reposting it again? No, no, no!

Content should be repurposed on a new channel.

A portion of a blog can be repurposed into a salary guide, a graphic from an internal PowerPoint can be repurposed into a social media post, and a part of a case study could find a new home as an infographic. It is essential that you do not try and merely repost old content and frame it as new.

Much like Santa Claus, Google knows when you’ve been naughty or nice. If you try and pull a fast one and repost an old blog, they will identify it and, instead of a receiving a lump of coal in your holiday stocking, they will penalize your site’s ability to rank in searches.

What Channels Serve as the Best for Repurposed Content?

The best channel for your repurposed content will depend on the piece of content you’re repurposing. I find that the easiest application of repurposing content is taking blog content and reshaping it into gated content or social media posts. If you really want to be on-trend, take any piece of evergreen web content you’ve made and repurpose it as a podcast.

What Types of Evergreen Content Should You Repurpose?

Anything that is still relevant to your target audience is ripe for repurposing. There’s a misconception that only content that has been successful (yielded high traffic, engagement, or conversions) should be repurposed, which is not true. Sometimes the content that doesn’t garner the engagement you were hoping for is the best content to repurpose.

Digital marketing is not a precise science, as we all know. There are times where you craft an awesome Tweet or a blog, only to have it fall flat in terms of engagement. In some of those instances, you merely had lousy timing. Or, you posted to the wrong channel. Repurposing content allows you the opportunity to appraise your marketing materials in a new way. It gives your content a mulligan of sorts. If you notice drastically different engagement when a piece of social content is repurposed into a blog, it will inform how you select channels in the future.

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What to Do and What Not to Do

The life of a recruiter is super busy. So busy in fact, that you might not want to set aside a full ten minutes to re-read this blog and recall how to repurpose content effectively. Hey, no offense taken! Let me make it nice and easy for you to commit to memory. Here are the primary things to remember when repurposing content.

Do these things:

Only use evergreen content
Publish repurposed content on a different channel
Tweak and optimize your content to fit its new channel

Don’t do these things:

Don’t repost your old content onto the same channel.
Don’t repost someone else’s content onto your site.

Content Marketing from Parqa Marketing

It’s hard to repurpose content if you don’t have any content to repurpose. If you struggle to punch out content, we can help!

Why Recruiting Firms Should Hire a Digital Marketing Agency that Specializes in the Recruiting Industry

August 23, 2018

If you had to decide between hiring a digital marketing agency that knows the recruiting industry, or a digital marketing agency that does not specialize but happens to be local, who would you choose?

Let me ask you this: does your recruiting firm specialize? By market? By niche? Probably. If you’ve led a recruiting firm for much time at all, you know that your chances for winning a search are much improved if you specialize in your client’s specific need. Why?

You know the types of candidates they need. Also, you know the trends in their market or industry niche. You are a thought leader in their space — an expert. You have more insight into what their company needs and can deliver better candidates than someone who is a generic recruiter (I’m betting).

I once had someone tell me years ago that “a recruiter is a recruiter is a recruiter” – implying that a recruiter who has developed a good skill set can recruit for any position. While this may be true technically, it’s not the most important consideration when it comes to being selected by the company searching for talent. In that company’s mind, if they’re hiring a CFO and they have the option to choose between a generalist recruiter or a finance & accounting executive search recruiter in their market with 20 years of experience, whom do you think they’re going to select? Right. The expert.

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Why Is It Important to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency Who Knows the Recruiting Industry?

I’ve talked to hundreds of recruiting firm leaders across the country, and I’m losing track of how many tell me they hired a digital marketing agency in the past that didn’t know the difference between candidates vs. clients. The marketing agency they hired drove website traffic and even leads, but there was a disconnect between why a recruiting agency might want to attract clients, not candidates (or vice versa if you are in a candidate-driven market like IT Consulting). They thought it was all the same. Traffic. And we both know that could not be further from the truth. Those are very different audiences.

At Parqa, we were created within a $17M executive search and consulting firm. Our whole team has experience managing marketing campaigns for recruiting companies. I’ve personally had the opportunity to manage marketing in-house at recruiting firms for the past 7 of my 10 years, specializing in marketing/branding/PR/communications. Our CEO Tony Sorensen is a 20-year recruiting industry leader who has successfully grown two recruiting companies from the ground up, $20M and $17M (and growing). From creating respected recruiting firms from ground zero to rebranding already existing recruiting firms and starting over, we’ve seen it all. Also, we’re a little nerdy about it.

Why? Well, we’ve struggled through the challenges of setting up a PPC campaign on Google, only to have candidate leads fill out our contact forms rather than client leads. That was years ago. We’ve now determined best practices to ensure the highest level of accuracy with attracting qualified leads. As a little history, Tony was dabbling with SEO and PPC back in 2007, which is ancient for digital marketing, and even more unheard of for a recruiting firm.

Industry-Specific Best Practices Matter

The recruiting industry as a whole is not at the forefront of marketing innovation, but most recruiting firms realize that it’s a changing world, and if you’re not building your credibility online, you’re missing opportunities. Moreover, if you happen to be the top 5% of the market that’s doing more than merely the marketing basics, you’re a diamond in the rough—and I’d love the opportunity to see your online presence and meet whoever is owning that because that’s no small feat!

Whether you’re right at the beginning of growing your brand through content marketing, or you’re in conversations about marketing automation, having a team in your back pocket that knows the recruiting industry as well as you do, will propel you into the next phase of your company. In fact, it will streamline the process and keep you on the cutting edge of the recruiting industry.

How does that help you? Credibility. Without it, you may not get a callback. Without it, you may not be found at all. With it, you open up the door of possibilities of attracting more relevant clients (or candidates based on your business goals). Now that is worth your time to explore!

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5 Tips to Inspire Your Team and Yourself, to Blog

August 22, 2018

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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