PDF Content Instead of HTML? Just Say No.

July 2, 2019

Beginning in the 90’s the PDF file type began its rise. When it was created, its purpose was to create a paperless office. A document that could be sent via email, read on any machine and printed locally if needed. While it fulfills that purpose well, it has been overused on various websites.

Despite its roots and advantages, it’s time to move away from the PDF where digital content is concerned. PDF files have many limitations, both to users and to content creators. The time has come to fully embrace HTML for your digital content, and free yourself from the limits of PDF.

A Nightmare for Users

The first limit of PDFs is usability. Although it was meant to be universally readable that is not the case. For many users who don’t have a dedicated PDF reader installed, they won’t be able to open your content. In addition, PDF’s aren’t optimized for mobile users, which further complicates things for the many users browsing via their phones.

For users with disabilities, PDFs are restrictive. They are not ADA compliant which in addition to reducing the usability of your website, makes a PDF hard to access for visually impaired users.

Because of the file format, PDFs are also hard to share. Many sharing options only work on other file types such as .docs and .jpg which means users cannot spread your content organically via PDF. In addition, many business firewalls don’t allow PDF downloads, further blocking your content from its audience. Even if you only consider your users, PDF is not a great option for content format.

A Headache for You

On the content creation and marketing side, PDFs have even more challenges. First, PDFs aren’t crawlable by search engines. Your hard work on your content won’t be able to affect your SEO rankings and means you cannot track the performance of your content.

If you take advantage of email marketing, PDFs are usually not used as attachments in those emails, due to download restrictions and security. During the development process, PDFs are also a headache to design from the start. When they are finished, making updates is slow and requires a new file upload every time a change is made.

The Move to HTML

If the downsides of PDFs weren’t enough to convince you, let’s look at the advantages of working with HTML.

First and foremost, your content lives on your website. It is crawlable, shareable, and usable there. You get the benefits of SEO referred traffic. Other metrics can also be pulled from HTML content allowing you to measure reader behavior and nurture leads.

If you’ve built your website to play nice with mobile users, HTML content that lives on your site is automatically mobile optimized. In addition, there is no need for version control or new uploads as the content can be edited at any time.

Lastly, you can customize your content much more in HTML adding dynamic content such as videos or animated gifs. HTML content also allows you to link readers to other parts of your site via embedded CTAs.

I’m not saying that the PDF doesn’t have a purpose. What I’d like to convince you of is that PDF isn’t the right format for your digital marketing content. HTML offers the flexibility and features that you need for successful marketing efforts.

Parqa’s team of experts can help you make sure your site is optimized across the board. Schedule a call with us today to see what we can do to kick-start your digital brand.

How Recruiters Can Build Trust Through Content Marketing

March 29, 2019

As I mentioned in part one, building trust is your number one job; everything else is noise. You can be the smartest person in the world or the world’s greatest athlete, but if you don’t have trust, you don’t have anything.

It’s no different when it comes to marketing. Part of marketing’s role is to make noise and attract people’s attention. But that’s where most people’s understanding of marketing ends. This blog is about the other side of marketing, the side that builds goodwill and trust with your customers. It’s about marketing that will enable you to build long-term enduring relationships with your customers.

How To Win Friends and Influence People (with Content)

I remember the first time I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” it was such an eye-opening experience for me. I was in the middle of my undergrad degree in business and decided to work on my people skills. It wasn’t long before I found myself volunteering, teaching classes, and dedicating myself to a life of servitude.

In many ways, the best way to understand content marketing is to understand the concepts of Dale Carnegie’s book. Even though it was first published in 1936, its message is as relevant as ever. What Carnegie understood about business wasn’t a secret recipe that you can implement in 5 easy steps–he didn’t have a checklist for building lasting relationships, he simply understood that business was about relationships, and relationships were about trust.

As I said in part one of this feature, establishing trust is arguably the most important objective of any business. One of the most cost-effective and scalable ways to establish trust with your audience is to create quality content. Not only does quality content help businesses establish trust through branding, but it also helps with positioning, thought leadership, and converting leads into sales.

Content Influences People and Their Purchasing Decisions

According to a recent survey, 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. (Demand Gen Report, 2016) This means that businesses who aren’t providing the right content are losing out on half of their sales. Due to the ubiquity of the internet, buyers are more informed than ever, and the buyer’s journey has completely transformed—which means that businesses are investing more than ever in creating quality content.

Winning friends and influencing people is all about trust, and by creating content for every stage of the buyer‘s journey, businesses can establish trust, build credibility, and forge lasting partnerships with their customers. Using the methods we’ve covered in both parts of this blog, you can not only build trust with your customers but also spur them into action with your content.

Parqa provides full-ranging content marketing services that allow you to communicate your brand and expertise without adding unreasonable responsibility to your staff. If you want to discuss how you can pivot your marketing efforts to maintain and grow within your industry, reach out to Parqa today!

The Importance of Voice in Your Recruiting Efforts

February 26, 2019

Remember the last time you got a phone call from a robo-caller? It may be using the correct words and grammar, but you can tell right away that it isn’t human. When you hear the voice, it’s obvious that something is off and that clouds the message.

Every writer has a voice. Even if you don’t take the time to develop it, your writing will have a certain tone and style. Just like you can recognize a friend by the way that you talk, you can recognize similar patterns in someone’s writing.

Using the right voice is important for narration in fiction writing, but it’s just as important in business. Making sure your business’s content is relatable, relevant and easy to understand goes a long way with both clients and candidates. Take the time to recognize your business’s voice and cultivate good habits in your content to build immediate rapport with your readers.

Talk to Your Audience, Not at Them

Even if you can match the right tone, relying on unnecessary language to either sound smart or sound more official gets in the way. There is a time and place for formal language, and it may even work for your company. Make sure your content sounds like a conversation and not a textbook.

Writing the way that people talk to each other makes things easier to read and very human. You can connect with the writer quickly and even place yourself in their shoes. For recruiting firms, use the simplest language you can to get your point across.

Jargon is ok when you serve an industry where those terms are commonplace. When you explain concepts with more complex language than required, you come off as condescending and detached. The voice you use is how many people relate to your company first, so put away your thesaurus and make sure you aren’t turning them away.

Consistency Establishes Credibility

In business, your reputation is everything. You work hard to establish a name for yourself and your business so why shouldn’t your content support that brand? We all like working with reliable people, but if your content’s voice isn’t consistent, you’re building a negative reputation for yourself.

Think of it like meeting friends at a party. The person who is known for being rude and crass shows up and the rest of the group tries their best to avoid that person. The person known for telling great stories and keeping the party entertained always has an audience. Your voice establishes consistent expectations for your audience. When clients and candidates know that they can come to you for clear concise content, they will be more likely to come back and recommend your firm.

Differentiate Yourself

Like I mentioned before, whether you’ve built your voice or not, it’s there. This voice is unique to your brand. Take advantage of voice in your content to differentiate your firm. Other than making your content easier to understand, your voice gives your company a personality.

When working with candidates, make sure your voice matches the hiring personas you’ve set up. Matching the voice and tone to those personas will stand out to the candidates that you are working to attract. Similarly, your brand voice establishes you as an expert to potential clients. You must walk a line between attracting candidates and clients as well as building credibility.

Developing a consistent voice that is unique to your brand is just as important as a good logo. When you have a strong voice, your audience can immediately identify your content. They know they can trust the information provided and they can contact you to get even more information.

Learn how Parqa helps executive search firms find and build their voice to creating engaging digital content.

Rank on Google and Bank with Content Marketing

February 18, 2019

I started my first recruiting firm in 2001. In 2006, I hired a marketing agency to do SEO and PPC for us. That was before most people even knew what SEO and PPC stood for. Back then, we were very early adopters in growing our recruiting firm through digital marketing.

When we started paying for ads on Google, we were the only firm in Minnesota doing so. We were the only firm paying to play. Consequently, I was shocked by how quickly we were able to rank #1 on Google. In fact, it led to me becoming obsessed with ranking #1 for every keyword I could possibly think of.

The agency we partnered with must have hated me, as I would lay in bed with my iPad searching for related keywords. If we didn’t show up #1, I would email our agency and ask why. Today, our recruiting firm ranks #1 for over 800 keywords related to recruiting and staffing services. We are crushing our competitors in the rankings.

In the early years, I thought that the only thing that mattered was rankings. I would ask every client that would call our firm, “How did you find us?” and they’d consistently answer, “Google.” Hearing this over and over again would get me as excited as the proverbial kid in a candy store. I couldn’t believe how many calls we were getting because we ranked #1 on Google.

Fast forward to 2019. More and more firms are in the digital game using agencies to increase their online visibility, which has made the process of ranking #1 a more challenging endeavor.

The typical search, such as “executive search firms in Minneapolis,” will have 7-10 competing firms paying to show up on the first page of Google. Try it for yourself. Pretend you’re a prospective client and Google what they would. If you own a finance and accounting firm, search “Finance and Accounting Recruiters.” Do you see your company in the results? Or do you see your competitors?

Last summer, I spoke at NAPS—one of the largest staffing and recruiting conferences in the country. My presentation was titled “Is Your Website Your Best Salesperson,” and I spent most of my allotted hour sharing why the content was king.

Every year our firm will do around 300 placements, with hundreds of companies calling us after finding us on Google. In 2019, my question to ask people when they call us has changed from “How did you find us?” to “Why did you call us?” The search ranking is usually how they found us, but the content on our website that they read is why they called us. Today, 1/3 of our revenue comes from content on our website.

Where your company ranks on Google is still important, but never forget how vital the role your site’s content plays. A high search ranking brings traffic to your website, but the content on your website is what converts the traffic into revenue.

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➢

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.

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.

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

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!

How To Create Bad Content

March 21, 2018

We’ve all seen it and fallen victim to it: an enticing headline on Google or social media catches our eye so we click the link, assuming we’ll soon land on a page that delivers relevant and useful content. Instead, we’re left underwhelmed by the lack of content or the quality of it. (And let’s face it: sometimes it’s both.) We get frustrated and either bounce back to the search results or simply move on to something else. It happens every day because bad content is everywhere—but your company doesn’t have to be a part of the problem.

Below are some common ways businesses inadvertently end up creating bad content. Consider these the bad content principles to avoid at all costs!

Poor Readability

Poor readability is a hallmark of bad content. Numerous misspellings, a difficult-to-read font, and poor sentence structure all confuse and frustrate your reader, making them more likely to abandon your website at first glance. Avoid the following: light text on a light background, small font size, and run-on sentences that go on and on and…you get the picture. These content mistakes bore and annoy your reader before they even have a chance to understand what you offer.

What you should do instead…

Pick an easy-to-read font and make sure your content is well-written and clearly organized.

Confusing Infographics

If the user wasn’t already annoyed by the lack of readability, confusing infographics will certainly seal the deal. When people use confusing infographics that are poorly designed, too cluttered, or don’t support your content, your reader will become so confused they might just abandon the internet altogether.

What you should do instead…

Make infographics eye-catching but easy to understand. They’re supposed to be a tool that supports your message—don’t let it be a detractor.

Not Useful or Relevant

One of the fastest ways to agitate your reader is to have a headline that doesn’t actually apply to your content. People spend so much time crafting a catchy headline and less time writing content that supports it. But as we said above, how often have you been frustrated by those same click-bait articles? No one wants to be fooled or tricked into clicking on something they thought would be useful; you’re there to help inform or educate your reader, not just get them to come to your website.

What you should do instead…

Keep your content useful and valuable to your reader and create a clever but truthful headline that pertains to the content itself.

Related Post: 4 Ways to Make Your Content Strategy Authentic ➢

Stuff Keywords

I’m sure you have heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by now, right? Well, SEO involves adding specific keywords to your content so that Google can find your page easier. But some businesses take this one step too far and perform something called “keyword stuffing” where they add that same phrase over and over again—even where it doesn’t make sense—in an effort to come up as number one in search results. The problem with this is that Google has gotten smarter and can now easily detect when keyword stuffing is taking place. Plus, your reader certainly doesn’t want to read something that’s illogical just because it has the phrase they’re looking for in it.

What you should do instead…

Yes, use keyword phrases. But use them where they make sense. Don’t try to keyword stuff or go over the top because Google—and your readers—will see right through it.

Have a Slow Website

While Google says that site speed is a ranking factor in 2018, bad content creators somehow don’t believe them. When you visit a website that takes forever to load, what do you do? You abandon it. You go back to your search bar and look for something else. Our attention spans have gotten shorter and shorter these days, and that’s why it’s crucial that your website isn’t lagging.

What you should do instead…

Evaluate your website speed on several different browsers, and on both desktop and mobile. If your page load times are slow, contact your developer to see what can be done to improve site speed.

Quick + Dirty Content Production

You’ve likely seen websites that churn out a massive amount of quick, poorly written content because they think that more is better. Honestly, while quantity is important, it should never be more important than quality. You want to create things that others will find valuable; content that’s clickable and linkable and offers a benefit to your reader.

What you should do instead…

Assign content creation to a group of people in your company who actually enjoy writing. They’ll take more time with it and can even help you come up with a content strategy so you have a scheduled way of producing important, well-written content.

Related Post: How to Make Content that Sticks ➢

Bottom Line

Go back through your site’s content. Does it contain any of the characteristics of bad content mentioned above? If so, you’re likely losing out on potential clients as they become deterred by your bad content. Your website should offer value to your potential clients, not confuse or underwhelm them. If you want to re-examine your content strategy to better represent your brand and grow your business, contact the Parqa Digital Marketing team here.

Content

PDF Content Instead of HTML? Just Say No.

A Nightmare for Users

A Headache for You

The Move to HTML

How Recruiters Can Build Trust Through Content Marketing

How To Win Friends and Influence People (with Content)

Content Influences People and Their Purchasing Decisions

The Importance of Voice in Your Recruiting Efforts

Talk to Your Audience, Not at Them

Consistency Establishes Credibility

Differentiate Yourself

Rank on Google and Bank with Content Marketing

5 Simple Ways To Repurpose Your Best Marketing Content

Webinars

Long Form Content

Video blogs

Podcasts

Infographics

Repurposing Content: What to Do and What Not to Do

What is Repurposed Content?

Content should be repurposed on a new channel.

What Channels Serve as the Best for Repurposed Content?

What Types of Evergreen Content Should You Repurpose?

What to Do and What Not to Do

Do these things:

Don’t do these things:

Content Marketing from Parqa Marketing

How To Create Bad Content

Poor Readability

What you should do instead…

Confusing Infographics

What you should do instead…

Not Useful or Relevant

What you should do instead…

Stuff Keywords

What you should do instead…

Have a Slow Website

What you should do instead…

Quick + Dirty Content Production

What you should do instead…

Bottom Line

Related Posts

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