marketing team in a team meeting Digital Marketing

The Future of Digital Marketing is Now

October 31, 2019

About the Webinar

It’s no surprise that technology is rapidly changing the landscape of staffing and recruiting. It’s changing the way that your team interacts with clients and the way they source candidates, but one of the biggest changes is in digital marketing.

New advances are introducing firms like yours to new methods of connecting with potential clients and candidates as well as a host of new tools to run your digital marketing program. Are you reaching clients where they spend their time online? Can they find you when they need a position filled?

The team at Parqa are experts in building and running comprehensive digital marketing programs designed specifically for your niche and your firm’s unique needs. This webinar, hosted by Parqa President Jared Hummel, is a detailed overview of the rapidly changing landscape of digital marketing for staffing and recruiting firms.

Who Should Watch This Webinar?

Staffing and recruiting firms who are new to digital marketing
Teams who could benefit from an active approach to digital lead generation
Staffing and recruiting leaders who want the most out of their marketing budget
Sales leaders who want digital marketing to bolster their lead generation arsenal

Presenter:

Jared Hummel

PRESIDENT, PARQA

Jared is an experienced professional with a history of building start-up organizations into winners. As the President of Parqa, he brings his financial expertise and passion to enhance growth and find solutions to complex operating and execution challenges, both internally and externally. He enjoys decision making and leadership in his daily responsibilities. Jared has had the opportunity to work in complex manufacturing and service-driven environments, and through complex financial transactions that have allowed him to build a very broad skill set in the operations and financial management of closely-held high growth companies.

The Power of Online Visibility in Attracting New Business

July 25, 2019

Parqa’s founder, Tony Sorensen speaks about the importance of improving your rankings in Google’s results pages with content marketing. Your company needs to build both online visibility and brand credibility to land clients. This webinar is a must-watch for any staffing and recruiting firm owners regardless of your experience in digital marketing.

The webinar covers:

The importance of your firm’s online visibility in search engine results pages
How the content on your website builds credibility with potential clients
How to leverage your visibility and credibility to grow your business

We look at the shift from ranking high on Google being the most important digital marketing toward the need for website content to convince clients that your firm is the best partner for them. While your firm’s search engine ranking is still important for online visibility, potential clients won’t pick up the phone unless you build your brand credibility.

The good news? It’s never too late to start building a digital marketing strategy around content marketing. This webinar has tips for building online visibility on search engines, building brand credibility with website content, and leveraging the two to motivate clients to partner with your firm.

While the live webinar featured a Q&A session, registered attendees could follow-up further and get any unanswered questions addressed through a complimentary consultation on digital marketing.

business people discussing to each other

5 Ways to Foster Creativity as a Digital Marketing Agency

June 25, 2019

As a digital marketing agency, there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to get those creative juices flowing. Whether it be social media, content, SEO, PPC, or marketing automation, creativity is a necessary ingredient for attracting and retaining clients within the recruiting industry.

There are endless ways to promote creativity within your organization, but I’m going to touch base on five of the most beneficial methods for successful growth.

Get Curious

It’s common to lose your sense of motivation to explore new experiences the older you get. That’s why I recommend igniting that inner child to help get that creativity flowing. Venture your mind and pay attention to all your surroundings.

Channel your inner-curious George to help spark some creativity will help you and your organization thrive.

Create a Fun and Positive Work Environment

With an upbeat, positive environment within your organization, the creative brainstorming process should be smooth and painless. Incorporating fun into your same-old work routine will allow you to be more relaxed and comfortable. Studies show, having a positive mood can allow your brain to think more creatively while in the workplace.

One thing I find helpful is switching up my surroundings in the office every once and a while. Sitting at your desk can be boring, so getting up and moving into a different room within your organization can be useful in fueling creative thought.

Remember, creating a fun and positive work environment will enhance the culture you’ve created at your company.

Challenge Yourself and Others

Don’t be afraid to be honest and give constructive criticism when necessary. Push yourself and other team members to look outside the box and view things from a different perspective. Your best work may stem from your team member challenging you.

Allow Time for Freedom

Constant supervision of employees, without giving them space to get creative, prohibits them from producing their best work. Avoid micro-managing your team; let them have the freedom to make their own choices without being critiqued.

Taking a step back and taking advantage of the freedom you have in the office will give your brain a much-needed break from all the busy work, hopefully inspiring you to develop creative ideas.

Reward When Necessary

A great way to get employees inspired is through motivation and incentives. Set reasonable goals for everyone to meet by a certain date with rewards that can be both tangible or intangible such as money or appreciation. This will get everyone motivated to reach their goals, ultimately benefiting both the organization and them.

Fostering creativity at work can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. These five ways will lead to a breakthrough in creativity and leave you and your team stress-free.

Struggling to develop creative content for your business? Contact us today to give your digital marketing efforts a boost.

The Proven Process: Digital Marketing Made Simple – Part 1

June 4, 2019

At Parqa, we use a simple, three-step “proven process” to help guide our customers to the results they hired us to help them achieve. As a digital marketing company, we hear from potential clients all the time, “I just want more leads for my team.” Like many things in life it’s simple in theory but not quite so straight forward in practice. There’s no silver bullet in business or in life. Success is defined by a process of doing a lot of little things correctly over a long period of time to get consistently positive results.

The process we adhere to is this simple equation: brand credibility + online visibility + lead generation.

Why can’t you just skip to lead generation you ask? Because the process doesn’t work like that in digital marketing or anywhere in your professional life.

Before you can just get leads to call, you must have a credible brand (that is why it’s first in our equation). In the digital world, you may only have a few seconds to impress someone that came to learn more about you. If you don’t have credibility up and down your digital platforms, you are simply losing out on any investment you’re making in attracting potential leads to those platforms.

Brand Credibility

In digital marketing, brand identity is the attire you put on every morning before a client meeting. It may not directly correspond to a lead coming in the door, but it gives you and your company long-term credibility. It’s usually visual to the client and is that first impression that you can’t take back. In terms of digital marketing, this is usually the overall appearance and effectiveness of your website and social media accounts.

These items must mirror the image you present when you are on-site with a client or candidate. You wouldn’t invite the CEO of a $100 million company to your house for a first meeting and be in sweat pants when you answer the door, but you would invite them to your new freshly designed office space and greet them with a suit and tie.

More and more clients and candidates are getting the voicemail or LinkedIn message from you or your company and going straight to the internet to learn about you before they ever consider calling you back.

Does your website look professional, easy to navigate and have insightful information? Does your LinkedInprofile have a profile picture, branded images, and your career highlights clearly defined?

Are you posting regularly on social media so people know what the culture is like at your office, what your core values are, what the hot jobs you have are, and insightful information on the industry as a whole?

These are questions that can be further evaluated in my next blog.

Stay tuned for parts two and three that cover the remaining two steps of Parqa’s three-step “proven process” equation: online visibility and lead generation.

Looking to increase your digital marketing efforts? Contact us today.

Visual Content Can Boost Your Lead Generation Conversions – But How?

May 1, 2019

Have you heard the phrase; “A picture is worth a thousand words?” Well, that’s no joke in the digital marketing world. With 65% of the population consisting of visual learners, visual content plays a significant role in reaching and closing leads.

The future of lead generation is visual content, and marketers need to realize the importance of integrating visuals into their content marketing strategy.

Read further to learn more about the three components to help boost your lead generation conversions using visual content.

Attract Potential Prospects to Your Business

Visual content can help potential clients find your business. An effective way to accomplish this is to utilize your social media. Whether you use LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even Snap Chat, inserting visual pieces of content will drive more people to your site. 80% of marketers implement visual assets into their social media marketing strategy.

Infographics are another great way to both grab your audience’s attention and inform them about your company. These visuals spark curiosity and increase the desire to read your content. Remember to keep things as simple as possible, because people shouldn’t have to think too hard when reading your infographic.

Charts, GIFS, Images… or anything relevant to your business can help expose your brand to potential prospects.

Generate Long-Term Leads

To generate solid leads, you must be continuously educating and explaining specific information catered to your target audience. You want to become a thought leader in your industry. Doing so, will build more trust between you and your leads, ultimately converting them into customers.

To accomplish this, use visual content like eBooks, webinars, blog images, white papers, social visuals, and videos. The best way to get people to convert is through content, specifically visual content. To attract leads and get them to convert, incorporate incentives into your visuals.

Close the Deal

Visuals used to close a sales deal should be informative and help solve a problem. You want to establish yourself as a thought leader who is consistently adding value to your customers. To continue to nurture your customers, from a visual perspective, you must inform them of next steps. To do this, consider using videos or images to provide value and solutions.

Marketers need to acknowledge the fact that humans are visual creatures whose brains are designed to process visuals, not text. Targeting the right people, with the proper visual content can generate more conversions for your business.

I Need to “Do” Digital Marketing – But What Does That Mean?

April 3, 2019

There are three core categories for digital marketing: brand credibility, online visibility, and lead generation. The first step in digital marketing is to determine the objective, then which type of digital marketing services will result in that objective being met.

Brand Credibility

“I’ve been in business for 15+ years. How is my brand not credible?”

Your brand is credible to those in your immediate circle. Walk into a networking event or look in your address book, there are people who know your name when they hear it.

The question isn’t how is your brand not credible, rather it’s, “Is it credible to people that don’t know you?”

People who look for the types of services that you offer or are randomly referred to your company by someone else start by opening a browser window prior to making a phone call. They will start with Google search to find your website.

What does your site say about you? Does it address their pain points immediately?

Ensuring that your website looks clean, updated, easy-to-navigate, and encompasses the right content to show all the amazing working you’ve done in the last year is imperative. These are the minimum pieces needed to justify this potential client to the next step in their research: LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a platform that recruiters live on day and night. Recruiters are constantly scouring the site to find the right candidate by reviewing their credentials. When was the last time you looked at your personal as well as your company’s LinkedIn profile? Do they each tell the proper story about your brand and highlight your successes?

Your profile should have an up-to-date headshot, cover photo, overview of specialty areas, and testimonials from former candidates placed, clients, and associates. Each of these pieces will build your online brand and credibility.

Online Visibility

Once credible online, it’s time to work on your brand’s visibility.

Start with your website and social profiles by utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Implementing SEO tactics on your site, when done correctly, will help your brand be discovered when people begin their research on Google or other search engines.

A large part of all digital marketing efforts revolves around content marketing. Once your site is set up for success with SEO, you need to ensure you have the right content created, and available, on your site to show up on the search engine results page (SERP).

It’s important to continue creating original content and publishing it to your site on a consistent basis. This helps keep Google seeing new content on your site–which helps your overall rankings–as well as assists with additional outbound sales engagement. New content can be shared on social media and with prospective clients and candidates.

Social media accounts need to have a person behind them, it’s a digital marketing tactic that is important to ensure your brand is visible online. Social profiles are an easy way to share out content that you find important and show people the culture behind your organization.

Lead Generation

Once you’ve established credibility and can be found online, it’s time to start generating leads for your business.

Leads come in all forms, and this is no different in the digital space. Creating different types of offers such as free consultations or downloadable content (such as a salary guide) is the first step to capturing a lead via online efforts. Once these offers are created, it’s time to utilize paid advertising on Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook to drive people to the offers and speed up the lead generation.

Email marketing also assists in generating more leads for your business. The best example is to think back to the Most Placeable Candidate emails. These emails are one of the easiest ways to start conversations. Previous connections can be re-engaged with email marketing by utilizing blog posts you’ve written. Older conversations can be rekindled with content offers you’ve created.

The utilization of marketing automation is one of the largest driving factors to higher conversation rates. It allows for ongoing nurturing to those in your system. Once someone downloads one of the content offers you’ve created, your marketing automation platform kicks in and sends them emails to automatically move them down the buyer’s journey to be ready for your services once they pick up the phone and reach out.

If you’re interested in starting a digital marketing campaign, or you want to expand your existing efforts, our team can help. Get in touch and learn more about our services today.

Why Our Agency Loves Partnering with Internal Marketers

April 3, 2019

Does this situation sound familiar? The owner of your company comes to you and says he is talking to a digital marketing agency. As an internal marketer, your gut reaction is probably one of the following:

Oh no! They’re probably going to fire me!

Aren’t I doing my job well enough?

Why would they need a digital agency when they have me?

Wide-Ranging Industry Expertise

No one is an expert at everything. It’s impossible. If you’re the sole marketer or have a limited marketing team there is no way you’re an expert in design, paid advertising, writing content, and email marketing. There is too much to know, especially when the market is always evolving. By partnering with an agency, you can maximize your team’s time and play to your strengths.

First, you can offload tasks that aren’t in your wheelhouse so you can focus on your strengths. You get job satisfaction in focusing on your core competencies, and your superiors see you excelling and getting real results.

Also, as a generalist, you probably want to learn more about each area of marketing over time so that you can continue to develop your career. Use the partnership to continue to learn how to do specific things from people that have chosen to be experts in their field

Cutting-Edge Strategy

The goal of our digital agency is to take the accumulation of what we know about staffing, what we know about marketing, and what we know about digital strategy to create the best solution for your business.

We have access to opportunities that many internal marketers in your shoes may not. We collaborate with staffing firms across the country every day, listening to their pain points and working with them to solve them. You may not have time to regularly research best practices in the market. Your team might not work with every marketing medium daily, you can’t be an expert at every medium. And that’s ok.

Even as an awesome marketer you can’t be everything to everyone. Our value is in the fact that we know strategy. Trying a lot of things will get you some results but tying intention and purpose to your efforts yield the best results. By partnering with a digital marketing agency, you take the weight off your shoulders; collaborating on a master plan and focusing on executing pieces of the plan.

Driving Progress and Projects

Our agency is great for helping internal marketing teams in a pinch. You know your company best, and you can see when a project may be backed up. We’re here to support you and your company’s efforts and get results.

Maybe you have a great plan for the year but a couple of months in you’re already behind because of “other duties as assigned.” Let us help you get back on track with your original plan with a one-time project or take some other tasks off your plate on an ongoing basis.

If you’re already maxed out every week but more projects keep coming, give us a call. Starting our partnership with an emergency project helps us understand how we can serve you and build a trusting partnership.

Like I said before, we love working with internal marketers. We don’t want your job. Our sole purpose is to help other staffing firms learn and grow through digital marketing. Contact Parqa today to learn how we can drive your digital marketing efforts.

Keyword Research: The Basic Steps to Take

March 27, 2019

Prior to building an effective content strategy, one of the first things you must tackle is keyword research. With the continuous evolution of search engines, it’s crucial to consider the approach to keyword research differently than in the past to ensure a solid content strategy now and going forward. Here are the basic steps to take when developing keyword research to set your content strategy up for success.

Think About Your Buyer Personas

Before you dive into your computer to do a little research, you should always begin with finalizing your buyer personas. Who is visiting your site? Where are your leads coming from? These are questions you need to ask yourself to specify their goals, needs, challenges, etc. Putting yourself in their shoes is a great way to get a better understanding of what they’re searching for and answer any questions you may have. Keep in mind, you can have as many buyer personas as you’d like, just don’t overdo it.

Do Research

Once you have built out your buyer personas, start researching other top-ranking blogs within your industry. This will give you a better idea of what other businesses and competitors are talking about, which will help you produce a few topic ideas, ultimately providing you with a good bucket of keywords to use going forward.

Don’t Shy Away from Keyword Tools

If you’re feeling stuck and are having trouble brainstorming more keywords, I highly recommend using a keyword generation tool. There are several tools out there to give your keyword pool a boost. I find Google’s Keyword Planner tool to be the most effective and user-friendly. Inside, you can view the search volumes of your keywords to narrow down the terms most applicable and worth your time.

To get a better look at what keywords are attracting visitors to your site, use Google Analytics. By being able to see specific queries individuals are using to get to your site, you can efficiently plan the content you create.

Take Some Time to Analyze

Finally, spend time going through your keywords to decide what terms you have the opportunity to rank for. The more you build-up the Domain Authority for certain terms, the higher the likeliness you will rank for competitor terms. Only a select number of your keywords are likely to rank if domain authority is closer to 100, so the more keywords you have the better.

As you can see, keyword research is a necessary part of building an effective content marketing strategy. Content is what helps your business grow, therefore the more time and effort you throw into keyword research the better.

blurred image with Google Analytics on a laptop

Proper URL Tracking Attributions Recruiting Firms Must Know

March 19, 2019

With so many options available to them, many recruiting firms just don’t know where to start when it comes to digital marketing. If you are in the recruiting and staffing industry and you’re not currently doing some sort of digital marketing, you’re behind. But now’s the time to start.

If you found this blog post organically, I’d be willing to bet that you are performing digital marketing and are trying to figure out how to attribute marketing dollars to what is working for your firm and what is not. Here are some key methods you can use to measure the effectiveness of your spending. Once you have the data, you can make informed decisions to allocate more money to the strategies that work.

Related Post: PPC Match Types For Recruiters ➢

Let’s Talk Tracking

If you’re not using a tracking system on your digital marketing activity, stop right now and go implement Google Analytics (GA) on your website. We’ll be looking at this platform and discussing URL tracking and specifically UTM, which are the tracking parameters GA uses.

Once you’ve implemented GA on your site, the next step is to figure out which digital marketing activities you are currently running: PPC, SEO, LinkedIn organic, LinkedIn ads, Facebook organic or Facebook ads. After your finalized digital strategies are running, put those to the side, we’ll come back to them later. Now, go to the Google URL campaign builder. This tool helps you create the proper URL parameters making it easier to monitor how your digital activity is doing.

UTM Codes and Naming Conventions

UTM Codes and Naming Conventions For example, let’s say your job link currently looks like this:

Company.com/job1234/job-title/

By appending a UTM tracking query to your URL, you allow GA to collect data. Here’s an example of a proper tracking URL you might add to the above job link:

?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=job123

The new tracking URL above says that you are using paid Cost per Click (CPC) to promote your job on LinkedIn. You can also put the name of the job in the “utm_campaign” section allowing you to easily reference the specific job.

Some other examples of naming conventions/parameters are:

utm = google analytics tracking parameters
? = triggers the tracking query after the URL
& = used to separate multiple variables in the query
utm_source = (google, linkedIn, bing, facebook)

utm_medium = (cpc, social, email, display)
utm_campaign = (job123, spring_sale, salaryguide2019)
utm_term = (cpc keyword)
utm_content = (ad title, ad dimensions)

Not all UTM codes/parameters are needed and technically only the “utm_source” parameter is required.

Using these naming conventions, you can experiment to figure out what works best for you and your firm. The one thing I want to stress is staying consistent with your naming as well as ALWAYS using lowercase naming conventions. Lowercase naming conventions help keep your data clean, making it easier in GA to gather and read the data.

For instance, if you create a lowercase name and later write the same name with uppercase letters mixed in, Google registers these as two unique tags. This will split your traffic between the lowercase source and then uppercase source. Here is an example:

Let’s say you are tracking all your “Newsletter” traffic. If every other month you are using a capital “N”, you’ll notice in your google analytics reports that half your traffic is coming from the source “Newsletter,” and the other half is coming from “newsletter.”

Channel Groupings

Now back to the list you created of your digital marketing activities. Using the previous information, you can create URL tracking parameters that are consistent and match your digital marketing activities. Your data will tell the person looking at the data who, what, and where traffic is coming from. Having the proper data shown in GA allows you to see exactly where your candidates or clients are coming from.

Example of Channel Groupings in Google Analytics:

Key Takeaways

1. Poorly executed UTM tracking can lead to inaccurate and messy data

2. Always use lowercase UTM parameters

3. Be consistent with your naming

4. If you have a lot of UTM’s to build, do it in Excel

group of business professionals waiting in line

Buyer Persona: What It Is & Why You Need One

March 13, 2019

Have you ever taken on a client who may not have been the ideal client? They may be the wrong sized company, not have best practices in place, or be in a slightly different industry than you were hoping for.

There are several different reasons why someone might not be the ideal partner (and this can go either way) and no company wants that. We all want to be clients of choice and be capable of being selective of our current client base. But where do you start determining who your ideal partner is? I’ve outlined a few simple steps to narrow in on that buyer persona.

Definition of a Buyer Persona

As HubSpot describes, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.” Buyer personas are designed to be a realistic version of the ideal person you’d like to have as a client.

Determine the Title of Your Buyer Persona

Most recruiting firms deal with two to three different people when working with their clients. The people I typically see are the HR Director, the CEO/CFO/COO, or someone supporting the office who’s been tasked with finding a recruiting firm, such an Office Manager, Marketing Coordinator, or Executive Assistant (depending on the size of the company). There could be a few other titles or positions, but these seem to be the most common ones we see in the recruiting industry.

The next step is to narrow it down to one ideal persona. In this case, I’ll say our ideal buyer persona is the HR Director.

Curate the details of your buyer persona

If our persona is the HR Director, we want to gather all the details about this person. We can say on average, this person is usually a female, usually middle-aged, and has been in the industry for about 15 years. She is most likely married, has a few children, and lives within 20-30 miles of her office. She’s worked in the recruiting space of HR before, but her primary job is not to recruit new members of the company. The company is mid-sized, about 300-400 employees, so she has many different initiatives to work on.

Design the Buyer Persona Story

Here is the story we can now put together about our persona:

Human Resources Hallie

Hallie is 42 years old, married, and has three kids (aged 6, 10 and 13.) She works as the HR Director for a mid-sized insurance company. They have multiple locations throughout the state and employ 320 people on average. She’s worked for a handful of companies over the years and has been with this company for the last 5 years.

In one of her past HR roles, she spent time recruiting for internal roles, but it isn’t what she loved to do. Since there aren’t enough people on her team, she’s tasked with handling a large amount of the HR responsibilities and doesn’t have a lot of time when there are numerous open positions to fill within the company. She’s never worked directly with a recruiting company and thinks they can be kind of expensive for what her company is looking for. Hallie tends to use LinkedIn and search engines on the internet to find the information she needs to solve the problems at hand.

Now with all that information on Hallie, we have a lot of different ways we can target Hallie to make sure our recruiting agency is the one she calls when she needs to find talent. On the next blog, we’ll discuss how we can target Hallie based on the information we know about her!

Digital Marketing

About the Webinar

Presenter:

Jared Hummel

Get Curious

Create a Fun and Positive Work Environment

Challenge Yourself and Others

Allow Time for Freedom

Reward When Necessary

Brand Credibility

Attract Potential Prospects to Your Business

Generate Long-Term Leads

Close the Deal

Brand Credibility

Online Visibility

Lead Generation

Wide-Ranging Industry Expertise

Cutting-Edge Strategy

Driving Progress and Projects

Think About Your Buyer Personas

Do Research

Don’t Shy Away from Keyword Tools

Take Some Time to Analyze

Let’s Talk Tracking

UTM Codes and Naming Conventions

Channel Groupings

Key Takeaways

Definition of a Buyer Persona

Determine the Title of Your Buyer Persona

Design the Buyer Persona Story

Related Posts

Subscribe to our newsletter