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Marketing Automation 101: The Basics of Building a Marketing Machine (2021)

“The core problem we’re going to have going forward is that you have two forces [that will] govern much of what [happens] in the future. The first is globalization, which we’re not going to repeal, and the second one is automation, which we’re not going to repeal.” – Eric Schmidt, Former Executive Chairman of Google, Inc

With the marketing world moving steadily towards more automation, it’s natural to take a step back and wonder: what is automation? 

Automation has been around since the printing press, the loom, and even the wheel. Throughout history, humans have found ways to automate repetitive or laborious tasks to machines: why would we stop now? While automation can conjure up images of machines from the Matrix, it’s less dystopian and more beneficial than you might think.

Simply put, automation allows humans to do more with less. 

Think about it this way: where would the automobile industry be without the creation of the assembly line? Where would we be without the machine-based search algorithm that Google built? Automation is a part of your smartphone, your coffee maker, and countless details of your everyday life. 

Marketing automation can be thought of in the same way that every other form of automation can be: it allows you to do more with less. Think of marketing automation as a way to do the work of a large marketing department, but for the cost of a single marketer.

Marketing Automation Basics

With automation, you can scale your staffing & recruiting business without having to scale your marketing team. In today’s world, how valuable is that?

In essence, with the proper techniques, you can create a marketing machine.

Marketing automation consists of software and tools that allow you to efficiently market to your customers throughout the entirety of their buyer’s journey. You nurture prospects with engaging and relevant content and then, with a few loving prods and pats along the way, you turn those prospects into customers. It’s one of the reasons that Netflix is ranked one the most reputable companies on the planet: they don’t just sell to their customers, they provide value-added service to them at every stage of the funnel. They have built a marketing machine that removes the friction between the customer and the company.

Here’s how you can get started.

5 Steps to get started with marketing automation:

  1. Generate relevant leads by creating great content and driving traffic to your website. Focus on making your content informative, not promotional. By providing educational information, you help solve your prospect’s pain points which allows them to move smoothly through the rest of your funnel.
  2. Build your marketing funnel using landing pages, email marketing, and content that is valuable to your prospective buyers, whether that’s a blog, an ebook, a whitepaper, etc.
  3. Create content that includes calls-to-action with other relevant content that will help your prospects to solve their problems. If you’re discussing obstacles in the recruiting world in an article, you should link to another piece of content at the end that helps solve those obstacles or presents new ideas.
  4. Send out relevant and timely messages to your prospects at the various stages of the funnel. Your prospects are always on the move, their information and needs change everyday–it is your job as a marketer to figure out what information will help them progress along their journey. Sending the right information at the right time is critical to building trust with your customers, and solving their problems, even after they’ve become a customer, is how you build a reputation as enviable as Amazon’s.
  5. Work with your sales team to integrate your marketing and sales efforts, by creating a delightful sales experience for your prospects and customers, your sales team will begin to understand your customers from their perspective. Rather than interrupting your leads with irrelevant messages and cold calls, marketing automation allows your marketing and sales department to work in harmony to understand and help your customers every step of the way.

The key to successful marketing automation is remaining customer-centric. Much like Netflix’s mission of being the most customer-centric company on the planet, marketing automation is all about your customer, not you. 

Where we see many fall short with marketing automation is when they only focus on their existing mailing lists and ignore the rest of the 99% of the market out there. Marketing automation is not just emailing your leads to death; it’s a holistic approach to creating great marketing that is non-intrusive, relevant to prospects, and delights the customer at every stage of the funnel.

happy woman with glasses in hand

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

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 


Related Post: Is Your Online Brand Aligned With Your Personal Brand? ➢


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.  


Related Post: Is Your Online Brand Aligned With Your Personal Brand? ➢


Close the Deal 

Visuals used to close a sales deal should be informative and help solve a problemYou 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.  

 

modern stairs

Keyword Research: The Basic Steps to Take

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. 


Related Post: The Importance of Local SEO and Why You Should be Investing There ➢


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.  


Related Post: 4 Tips to Optimize Your Business for Local SEO ➢


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.   

group of business professionals waiting in line

Buyer Persona: What It Is & Why You Need One

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.  


Related Post: Inbound Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide For Recruiting Firms ➢


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.  


Related Post: 6 Signs You Need a Content Marketing Strategy ➢


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 

desk with keyboard and notebook

How to Generate Quality Blog Topics as a Recruiter

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


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


Identify Your Target Audience

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

Industry Trends – What are People Buzzin’ About?

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

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

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

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


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


Topic Generation Tool

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

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

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

Don’t be Afraid to Reach Out for Help

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

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

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

Content Marketing Webinar

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Why Recruiters Should Target Candidates with Their Content Marketing

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.


Related Post: Content Marketing: Your 3-Step Recipe For Lead Generation ➢


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.


Related Post: 5 Simple Ways To Repurpose Your Best Content ➢


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 Webinar

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5 Simple Ways To Repurpose Your Best Marketing Content

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.


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


 

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.


Related Post: Gated Content vs. Ungated Content: When to Use Each➢


 

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.


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


 

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.  

hanging lights from ceiling

Repurposing Content: What to Do and What Not to Do 

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.


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


 

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.


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


 

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!

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.

two coworkers reviewing strategy

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

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.


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


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.


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


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

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?

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


3. Create a Content Calendar

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

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

4. Involve Your Team in Topic Generation

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

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

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


5. Lead by Example

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

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

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

Next Steps:

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

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

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