Marketing Recruitment Agencies Power Your Business with Experience And Expertise
According to a study, companies are finding it difficult to hire for marketing positions, driving many companies to partner with marketing recruitment agencies to meet their staffing needs.
Here are some ways in which a marketing staffing agency can power your business with experience and expertise.
Finding the Right Talent
Marketing staffing agencies are specialists in recruiting for marketing positions. Whatever your marketing staffing needs may be, the recruiting agency can hire for most marketing positions including:
· In-house corporate marketing positions
· Product marketing
· Event marketing
· Public relations
· Corporate or brand marketing
· Web and interactive media
· SEO/SEM/Social media marketing
The marketing staffing agencies have years of domain experience that helps them identify the right skills needed for every marketing position.
The staffing agency will understand your company’s needs and can identify the right candidate persona for every marketing position. Determining the right candidate’s persona will help you decide the qualification, attitude, mindset, skills, and goals the candidate needs to have to be successful at his new job.
Find Passive Candidates
It is not always the active employment seekers who are the best fit for a particular job. For many organizations, passive candidates are like hidden gems that have the latest marketing knowledge and experience to draw innovative marketing strategies.
Unlike active employment seekers, passive candidates are already working. They are less likely to visit internet job boards and may not know about job openings in your company. It is tough for internal recruiters in the organization to know and reach such passive candidates.
The staff of marketing recruitment agencies keeps attending industry events, seminars, conferences where they meet a large number of people working in different positions. In simple words, they have extensive networks.
Many passive candidates who are looking for career growth opportunities are in contact for marketing staffing agencies. It is possible for a marketing staffing agency to reach the right passive candidates and discuss job opportunity in your organization with them.
Access to Talent Pools
Recruiting agencies maintain a database of candidate profiles that are known as talent pools. Based on the sector the recruiting agency hires for, the talent pool might be limited to a specific area of expertise or a broad group of individuals suitable for various marketing roles.
Talent pools could have candidates who have applied for marketing jobs, referred and sourced candidates, silver medalists, or candidates who have willingly joined talent pools. While the talent pools take a long time to build if done correctly can eliminate the need for advertising and get you quality candidates in less time.
Find Cultural Fit Candidates
Attrition is a big problem for companies. However, finding cultural fit candidates can reduce the attrition problem to some extent. Leading marketing staffing agencies go beyond assessing candidate by information given on resume. Staffing agencies design tests to evaluate a candidate’s personality and traits and measure them in a structured way.
Psychometric tests help staffing agencies to determine whether the candidate has the enthusiasm and motivation for the marketing job. These tests also determine if the candidate is a cultural fit for the organizational culture and the way of working.
Conduct Pre-employment Screening
Investing in the background of potential marketing employees is an essential part of the hiring process. It helps the organization to make informed decisions regarding prospective marketing candidates. Background screening verifies the claims made on the resume and reduces the chances of a bad hire.
Background screening involves education and certifications checks, reference checks, past employment checks, credit checks, criminal record checks, drug screening and testing, corporate affiliations.
Recruiting for the marketing department is not easy, and every organization wants the best marketing talent to reach and expand their customer base. Marketing recruitment agencies save your organizations time, money, and effort by recruiting the best from many.
Do you know any other benefits of using marketing staffing agencies? Please feel free to comment.
The Top Four Must-Ask Digital Marketing Interview Questions
When you are interviewing candidates for digital marketing positions, it is important to be aware that digital marketing requires specific skillsets that are quite different from those needed for traditional marketing. Technological knowledge wasn’t always a must in traditional marketing, but you can’t get very far without it in digital marketing. Potential candidates must not only have advanced digital skills, but they must also regularly update these skills or learn new ones to master new technologies as they appear in the market. In addition, candidates must know how to plan and implement marketing campaigns strategically.
Let’s look at some of the must-ask digital marketing interview questions that you should pose to all potential candidates for marketing positions:
Can you tell us what you understand about digital marketing and how it differs from traditional marketing?
This basic question serves as a conversation opener to set candidates at ease. It also lets you know how well the candidates understand digital marketing fundamentals and how well they can articulate their familiarity with it. They should be able to offer a clear definition of digital marketing and to explain why digital marketing trumps traditional marketing when it comes to reaching and influencing a wider audience.
They should also be able to tell you how they will go about planning digital marketing campaigns, how they will reach out online to current and new clients, and what steps they will take to keep their potential audience engaged. They should be able to explain the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing. They should be well versed in multiple digital marketing platforms and have a good understanding of conducting market research.
Why should we implement digital marketing? Can you tell us what the specific benefits are?
Here is a seemingly simple question with plenty of depth and scope in its possible answers. A candidate could start at the beginning and tell you how digital marketing revolutionized the advertising and marketing fields. Where once consumers were a mostly passive audience for all the marketing campaigns that advertisers unleashed on them, the digital marketing trend has now transformed them into active participants when and if they want to voice their reactions and opinions.
This allows marketers to gauge what the general public thinks of their products and marketing campaigns and if these are having or not having the desired effect. They can quickly alter or altogether change their marketing campaign to better fit in with public opinion. Such quick turnabouts are not easily and inexpensively achieved in traditional advertising.
What do you know about search engine optimization (SEO)? In your opinion, how crucial is it to digital marketing?
If anyone tells you ‘not crucial’, cross them from the list of potential candidates. Digital marketing depends to such an extent on SEO that claiming no knowledge of it these days borders on digital illiteracy. The candidates should be able to tell you how SEO makes it possible for search engines to find and index your website and web pages, using specific words and phrases that you have included in the pages. SEO influences your website traffic. Every time someone types certain words and phrases into a search box, the results display sites that have included them in their content.
No forms of marketing are all encompassing. What do you think are the limitations of digital marketing?
Having limitations isn’t necessarily a drawback. Candidates should tell you how it allows you to streamline your marketing process for better results. That said, the principal limitation of digital marketing is, ironically enough, its very inclusiveness. Everyone can post-marketing campaigns online to reach to a broad public, and so everyone does just that. Often, with unimaginative sameness, and the result is that the public will either miss you in the crowd or tune out from boredom. The candidates should offer suggestions to avoid this and to come up with fresh marketing ideas that give results without wasting time, money, and effort.
These and other must-ask digital marketing interview questions will highlight how knowledgeable the candidates are about this type of marketing. You can then pare down the candidate list for your marketing position. Pick the most well-informed, efficient, and experienced candidates.
Common Marketing Questions You May be Asked in an Interview
It is normal to feel anxious and nervous before the interview. With some preparation and planning, you can do well in your next interview and land your dream marketing job. To help you we have compiled here the most common marketing interview questions you may be asked in an interview.
►Give us an example of a project that you successfully planned and executed.
► Tell me about a campaign with which you were involved that did not go as well as expected. What do you think went wrong?
► Can you give us a customer trend that is happening in our industry right now?
Marketing interview questions can be very broad or specific. Most likely you will be asked about your strengths and weaknesses and projects you are proud of. Employers love numbers, so to measure the success of your project you can use metrics. While explaining what went wrong focus on how you bounced back and what you have learned from your mistake.
Skill-based questions
► What are the 8Ps of marketing?
► What is your expertise, B2B or B2C, or both?
► How have you successfully incorporated online marketing tools in your marketing campaigns?
Here the employer will check your technical knowledge of marketing. There are many marketing platforms available such as print, video, or search engine. Every platform demands a specific pattern of marketing. Before appearing for the interview make sure you decide your preferred marketing channels as the marketing interview questions will be asked accordingly.
Situation questions
► If you have a tight budget, how would you approach a big project?
► If you get a negative review of your product from a customer, how will you respond?
► How would you market a newly launched product?
These questions are aimed to understand your thought process and how you can work under pressure. Telling the employer about your qualification is easy, but talking about solving a difficult marketing problem is difficult. Stay calm and offer them a safe and realistic reply. The company will understand that you have done your homework and you can be resourceful in these situations. Keep in mind that situations keep changing in the marketing field. You need to come up with an idea which will be creative as well as cost-effective and beneficial to consumers.
Personality-based questions
► What do you love about marketing?
► How familiar are you with our target market?
► How important do you feel it is to communicate with the sales or product team?
Here the employer will check your passion towards marketing and your adaptability to different situations. Only qualifying the technical skills of a candidate doesn’t always ensure that you will be able to fit into the culture of the company. How you deal with the team and reach your target, and understand consumer behavior is also an important factor.
Now you know the most common marketing interview questions you will be asked in an interview. In addition to this, try to do some research about the company. Go through their website, social media pages, etc. Having some background information will help you to impress your interviewer and answer their questions positively.
Did we miss any important marketing interview questions to add? Please feel free to leave your comments below.
Five Effective Digital Marketing Tips to Make Your Brand Popular
Advertising through the digital medium has become an indispensable part of the marketing strategy of businesses large and small. Digital marketing provides brands with new and improved ways of increasing brand awareness while helping them reach out to a vast majority of existing and potential customers through the click of a button or the swipe of a finger. Setting up accounts and running advertising campaigns across search engines and social media pages are often simple, quick, and easy, which make digital marketing an effective tool for even companies with shoestring budgets. What’s equally appealing is that the medium also provides the opportunity to showcase your brand and offerings to a worldwide audience than just a localized set, but at the fraction of the cost of what you would typically spend on print media. With a little time, money, and effort, digital marketing in China can give you great returns. Here are five tips to help you in this regard.
1 – Define the right audience
To be able to sell your product or service, you need to identify the right target consumer. When applied to digital marketing, these consumers or potential ones become the audience for your online advertisements. Using a few defining features like the age, gender, profession, city of residence, etc., you can narrow down on the right set of people who the marketing campaign should be delivered to. Defining your audience not only helps reach target consumers more easily but also checks and spends that may otherwise overshoot from delivering the ads to people who are least interested in buying your product or service.
2 – Set a realistic budget
When growing your brand inorganically through digital marketing, it is necessary that you earmark a certain amount of money for advertisement and promotions through various online channels. However, to ensure that you spend the money prudently, set aside a specific budget for all digital marketing efforts. Split this across channels and media. Monitor the performance of your ads, campaigns, etc. to see which of them performs well and gives you the best returns. Even when ads are running, fine tune them when they fail to deliver expected results.
3 – Tap into the power of social media
The influence and reach that social media has on the people today makes it a lot easier for brands to target their potential consumers through such platforms. Web and mobile apps that rely on texts, microblogs, images, and video content to connect people online, actually help you connect directly with customers or potential ones while being available for them round the clock. Social media lets you create your own brand pages, promote them, and have direct conversations with customers, thus helping your brand build stronger relationships and better awareness about your product or service offerings. The feeds of such pages are also great means to announce new arrivals, offers, contests, special discounts, updates and alerts that entice customers. Vice versa, they also let your customers have conversations with friends about your brand.
4 – Use PPC advertising
The pay per click format is a highly sought-after and well-used format of advertising. This allows you to market your product or service based on specific keywords and you get charged typically when a customer clicks the ad displayed. PPC advertising is seen across search engine and social media marketing formats but may vary based on the provider or region. For instance, Chinese digital marketing typically uses Baidu PPC campaigns to reach out to the Chinese audience while Google is popular with Western countries.
5 – Leverage the power of customer reviews
Online reviews play the role of word-of-mouth referrals. Almost anyone today uses customer reviews as authentic means to gain information and to make decisions about purchasing a product or availing a service. Having more positive reviews not only improves your credibility but also enhances your visibility as people search for your business or similar ones through online media. Better customer reviews also mean improved results from digital marketing efforts.
The next time you set up or run a digital marketing campaign, keep in mind the above-mentioned tips and apply them to your digital advertising efforts to reap maximum rewards.
Weibo Advertising: Ten Tips to Maximize Results
Weibo is the microblogging site in China and was initially called Sina Weibo. It is like Facebook and Twitter in China has millions of active users which are increasing every year. No wonder why most brands are using it as a platform to grow their popularity and to increase their brand awareness. People in China also consider it as a source of news and information. Given below are some of the factors that should be considered by a business to maximize results using Weibo advertising;
The goal of the business: Like any other social networking site, advertising on Weibo also gets a business number of likes, shares, and comments which eventually increases its visibility on the internet. Therefore, it is important for a business to set a goal regarding the number of followers or shares their business would need to maximize results.
Budget: After the goal is clear, another important factor is to set the budget. Although marketing in China is comparatively less expensive but there are certain features that cost a little more and hence having a pre-decided budget in mind helps in successful marketing and advertising.
Weibo marketing agency: Everything that happens on the internet in China is censored by the government and therefore it is important for foreign businesses to hire a local agency to assist them in Weibo advertising.
Account registration and verification: To begin the advertising, the business needs to have an official account in the name of its business. The information required at the time of registration is the name of the company, URL of the website, email address, location of the local office or local assisting agency. The business is also required to have a local phone number which is used to send a verification code to verify the account. After verification, the business is allotted a username and a password for the Weibo account.
Account customization: Once the verification is done, the next thing required is the customization of the Weibo page. This includes setting up the company profile picture, cover picture, banner picture, setting up the background of the page and adding another brand related information on the home page.
The audience: Depending on the type of products and services, the audience of the business varies. What might interests the students or the youth of the country, might not be of any concern to the corporate class. Thus deciding the target audience is required while preparing the ads.
Suitable ad format: Weibo advertising has different formats of ads that are: display adverts, Weibo SEP, Fan tunnel and Fan headline. All these formats work in the slightly different manner in the way they appear on the screen and the audience that they target. The display ads are the traditional way of advertising available in both web and mobile versions. These are often placed on the search pages. Then comes the Weibo SEP which is the best way to improve the traffic by browsing through the user’s accounts, posts, and pages depending upon the keywords. Fan tunnel format displays the advertisement as the headline at the top of the user’s news feed and allows the brand to reach the new users. Fan headline also works like the fan tunnel with the only difference that it targets the already existing users and their connections with the aim to increase the sharing options.
The right content: After selecting ad format and sorting out the keyword and the target audience, the content of both the advertisement and the website matters to attract the right amount of traffic.
Consumer trend: China has been the fastest growing market for both the brands and the users, it is, therefore, important to keep a close watch with the changing trend while doing Weibo advertising. The penetration of the internet has increased the number of consumers in small cities also, and there has also been increased interest in luxury products and brands.
Analysis of past results: Even if the previous experience has not been able to pull the desired result, it is always good to always better to analyze it while deciding the new strategies.
A Guide to Weibo Marketing
Social media is interweaved into every aspect of people’s lives across the globe. For Chinese people, Weibo has become the backbone for everything, and their online lives are like a tapestry that is woven every moment that they breathe and live. Weibo is one of the popular social media sites and has close to four hundred million active users per month. It is mostly used in entertainment, and trend spotting and the users follow famous bloggers, celebrities, etc. Due to Weibo’s open nature, in terms of marketing it is good for vendors and brands for increasing awareness of the brand, gain followers and growing the popularity among the masses. The brand can use multiple resources on the platform for inviting Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), launching campaigns, and displaying paid ads. The Weibo Window option on the platform helps the vendors in selling directly. For connecting with a large audience and converting the users into potential customers, you need to establish a noticeable presence on Weibo, and we will be discussing some steps to guide you on Weibo marketing.
Registration and Verification of Account – The initial step is to do registration of an official account for your company on the official website of Weibo. Enter all the personal details and give a catchy username. Then your account needs to be verified. The verified accounts have V sign displayed on their profile picture and enjoy extra services like more customization settings for your page, extra space to put your brand information in detail, own platform for campaign management and mass messaging.
Customizing your Account – After registration and verification of your account, you can put images on for your background pic, profile pic, banner pic, and cover pic. You can also add information about your brand on the homepage.
Develop a Good Content Strategy – As Weibo is an open platform, brands posts material related to marketing on a daily basis. Therefore, sometimes it is difficult for creating good marketing content that will have a positive impact on the users. So, it is necessary to have the right content for Weibo marketing. For companies, there are primarily four types of content, which you can post daily on Weibo like KOL content, interactive content, soft content, and product-based information. Let us understand with an example. One of the sought-after kitchen appliance brands in China has attractive content in Weibo. In addition to updating the brand news daily, they interact with their followers, post various recipes daily as per the user’s request as a soft content, forward the posts published by KOLs and engage with the audience by launching UGC campaigns. Talking about the format of the content the users on Weibo prefer live streaming, short videos and Weibo Story that will help them to stay connected for a long time with a brand.
Acquire followers at the initial stages – A brand having a huge follower base is essential for increasing the awareness of the company on Weibo, so the first step for Weibo marketing strategy is to expand the follower base. Never expect from the users that they will find your company on Weibo and starts following. Ask your colleagues, friends, and family for spreading information about your brand. The great idea is to link the icon of Weibo to the social bar of your company’s site. Another way is adding the name of the Weibo account on your id card.
Rolling ads, KOLs, and campaigns – Now you have gathered quite a number of followers on your account, aim for high levels of Weibo marketing. The popular campaigns like UGC collection and lucky draws are a hit where the users interact with other users, helps in attracting new people and increase in the exposure of the brand. On Weibo, there is a huge demand for multimedia content so, one should display video ads that are distinctive and creative by telling mysterious stories that help in arousing the public mood. Highlight real-life stories to the audience by focusing on a particular theme. The most important thing is to have a proper budget that solves your specific needs.
Five Content Marketing Improvements That You Should Consider
In order to optimize your web page in SEPRs and sustain its ranking, it has become crucial to creating relevant, customer-engaging contents on a regular basis and posting them at the right time through right platforms. If these three criterions mismatch, you simply cannot reach your target audience and that is where the task appears overwhelming in the highly competitive digital marketing era. However, with proper planning, thorough research, and expert techniques you can harvest the best outcome of a content marketing strategy and stand out in the global market. Following are five improvement techniques you can follow to reach your aim.
Objective Based Contents
Typically, your content marketing strategy should be seamlessly focused on your business goal that you are intended to. Your long-term goal needs to be realistic and scalable, while by narrowing them down, you can comprehend your short-term business objectives. Defining the goals and objectives right from the beginning you can make your content marketing strategy easier, achievable, and productive.
Target Audience
Equipped with Google analytics tool you need developing a complete database of potential customers for your product/services base on their age, buying habits, interests, locations, etc. This is a great source of information which can be effectively used to work out the content types you need to post to educate or make your audience revert back with queries. If you’re just introducing in the market and don’t have any database, think of following content types of your would-be rival companies as well as the social platforms they use and type of engagements. Choosing the platform where your clients are online, and types of content, types of videos can help you brilliantly to deliver or improve your content marketing mechanisms.
Content Type
The types of contents created and posted perform as a powerful marketing representative of your company and brand online. This needs you to decide the type of contents which can impact maximum on the target audience. You can always consider researching content types, websites of competitors who are successfully operating in the market. Unlike traditional advertising mediums, the longevity of digital content can last longer when made evergreen in nature. Publication of evergreen content types such as educational, FAQ pages, blogs, video, and infographics to display product features, functionalities, and benefits help you get fast customer query. And managing them efficiently helps boost your content marketing endeavor.
Resource Efficiency
Before implementing your content marketing strategy, it is essential to decide whether you like to use your in-house human resource or consider outsourcing content writing services. Managing a full-fledged in-house online marketing team of experts who play the crucial role of content marketing strategy is quite overpowering and costly since your core business area is different. This brings the concept of outsourcing expert content writing and content marketing services to enhance your brand image over and over again. Outsourcing services are cost effective and less burdensome when it comes to business overhead.
Analyze Results
Finally, content marketing strategy needs measuring earlier outcome and result in analysis that displays through your sales graph and ROI. You enjoy immense room to bring changes as well as improvement based on your online customer’s hunger for content types, methods, and requirements.
Digital Marketing – Different Tactics And Channels
Once you decide to go digital, it becomes essential for you to determine which sets of digital marketing channels and techniques should be the best mix to promote your brand. Not necessarily, you need to follow each and every tool since the inputs they need typically vary in terms of one’s business objective, expertise, and budget. As of today, an array of digital marketing channels and tools are available for you, and here five popular of them are explained.
SEO
Indisputably, your success in digital marketing and SEO travel abreast. Search engine optimization is the core of your internet marketing drive. Considering Google, the largest and most acclaimed search engine, it can be said that optimizing your page ranking in Google’s SERP is a major determining factor toward your business success. However, the ongoing changes of its algorithms still appear confusing to SEO experts. On the contrary, if you have greater grasp on Google’s set of rules and abide by them while posting your pages, none can stop you from enjoying high ranking.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
When it comes to online marketing, the demand of SEM is increasing steadily being a highly productive digital marketing technique. Efficient search engine marketing in combination of PPC (Pay-per-clip) and SEO can make magic in search engine optimization. Interestingly, while SEO is not an absolute solution, SEO, SEM and PPC work together to benefiting businesses with long-term organic results, paid ads, and page optimization. Holding rank consistently for long period is highly difficult and needs chasing digital marketing techniques and tools properly that eventually helps achieve solid brand image.
Pay Per Click Ads (PPC)
PPC involves effective positioning of your paid business ads on search results pages generally at the bottom. As customers click on the ad, it takes them directly to the relevant web page or website. How the advertisement appears and its position on the page is chiefly determined by several factors such as relevance of ad texts, CTR, bid amount, quality score in Google’s record, performance and more. Google’s pay ad platform which is globally demanding is known as Google AdWords. The feature is provided by all major search engines like Yahoo, Bing etc.
Social Media Marketing
SMM is, no surprising, amongst the most popular digital channels all over the world. The uniqueness of social media platforms is that they offer you the easiest, effective, and affordable way to reach potential audiences. No matter, whether you are a small business person, freelance service provider, professional or multinational business house, social media platforms works at the core of digital marketing as a brand building means. Apart from globally popular social mediums like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn you can put your product ad pages in Pinterest, Instagram etc depending on your product profile, target audience who use them. Use of social media channels helps you promote your market reach through B2B, B2C communication channels.
Content Marketing
Customers come online to obtain various services and product solutions. For buyers who advertise their services or products need to convey those potential customers all about the features, product plus points, solutions through text, video included with graphical presentation as per need. This helps customers to easily find the kind of services they are in need of. This is the whole objective of putting content in pages and that needs to be quality oriented, informative, and appealing to the audience. With well-planned content marketing integrated with one or more tools stated above helps you can raise your brand awareness to an apex point.
