Blog Archives
7 Great Tips for Marketing Strategy and Building Your Brand
You don’t need the luck of the Irish to find the pot o’ gold this St. Patrick’s day. KRT is here to remind you about “The Seven Golden Rules of Marketing” that will help you get lucky when it comes to building a stronger brand.
The seven golden rules, provided by The Brand Factory, remind us that a strong marketing strategy is essential for a successful business. At KRT, we specialize in recruitment marketing, where we apply these “golden rules” to create a strong brand that candidates will gravitate to. Below are the 7 Golden Rules with a KRT twist:
- Highlight your uniqueness – Avoid talking about what it is you do. Focus more on what makes your services unique compared to your competitors. Instead of discussing what you offer, talk about how you offer it. You might have a special way of presenting clients’ accounts or a system of assessing their advertising needs. At KRT, we take an organized and creative approach that shows our clients exactly what kind of ROI they are getting from our vendors.
- Be consistent – Once you’ve presented your unique selling proposition (above), apply it! Don’t be tempted to leave old messages out there. New prospects can come to you from all kinds of ways – business card, website, phone call, newsletter, blog, print, online ads and so on. Read the rest of this entry
Did Someone Say “Spring Training”?
I know the first thing that popped into your mind was the excitement of baseball, the anticipation of the new season and the smell of ballpark snacks. What about “Spring Training” for your talent acquisition team?
Today’s media platforms are ever-changing and improving their tools to assist your recruitment teams in “catching” the most QUALIFIED applicants. Just like choosing a great ball team, you only want the “best of the best” to come to the tryouts or be screened for the application process.
We at KRT think that setting up trainings for your team is essential for a great recruiting season!
LINKEDIN
Depending up your level of comfort, LinkedIn has training for everyone! From showcasing your employment brand, to spicing up your recruiter profiles to turning your team into a recruitment machine, LinkedIn has the training to get your staff into pitch perfect shape! http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/530
INDEED
If you weren’t aware that you could get FREE access to Military personnel resumes, or any resumes in Canada or India, you haven’t been through a recent Indeed training. What are you waiting for? You’ll hit one out of the park with this training session. http://www.indeed.com/resumes
SOCIAL MEDIA
Wondering how to hit a home run with your Social Media recruitment plan? Let KRT’s Social Media experts join your team as a clutch hitter and train your team to hit one out of the park!
Contact KRT today to get you recruitment team ready to have a winning season!
List of Interesting Social Media Tools, Cool Productivity Apps & More – Part II
Continuing the list of great and promising tools here is another list of tools and apps. (You can see part I of the Social Media and Productivity tools & apps list here.) Just as a reminder, some we use here at KRT Marketing, others I use personally, and some I’ve never tried but read good reviews and included them on my “tools-to-test” list.
Also this is not an in-depth review of the tools, it’s just a list of social media and productivity tools that we hope you’ll find useful. Here is today’s line-up:
Bottlenose
A nifty search engine that provides live social intelligence after crawling all the major social networks. You can, in real time, find out what’s trending, monitor, analyze, target and engage. You can setup several accounts and post updates, replies etc… And yes! The light version is free! The Pro version is coming soon.
Skitch
This is a free app that makes it really easy for you to capture a graphic and a portion of your screens and edit it. You can draw attention to pictures using their annotation and markup feature. You also have the option to include shapes, arrows and text. Once you are done, you can drag new graphics to presentations, emails, documents or export to several file formats. You’ll be totally hooked on this one.
Quozio
This handy and free tool allows you to create an image out of text. Think of that perfect quote you want to post on Pinterest . It gives you different fonts, backgrounds and filters. It also comes with a bookmarklet option, which makes it easy for you to create that image while browsing the internet.
Walk into 2013 with a BRAND new YOU!
Many of us enter the New Year with resolutions to lose weight, save money, take a trip, etc., but the truth is, most of us never stick to these resolutions. So, here’s my real challenge for the year – to get rid of empty resolutions, and focus on improving my personal “brand.”
I recently attended the “Dine with Alums” event at Saint Mary’s College, and the keynote speaker was Susan Chritton,.Ed.- she wrote the book, Personal Branding for Dummies in which she explains why branding is so important for corporations, celebrities, and ourselves. (Did I mention that she is a Saint Mary’s alumna?) According to Chritton, branding helps position us for success through image transformation and self-prominence.
Here are ten cool tips from Chritton’s book to help you build your personal brand:
2012: An Intern Odyssey (Part 1)
My internship journey at KRT Marketing began on Oct. 9, 2012. The fact that my first official day in the office also happened to be John Lennon’s birthday felt like a good omen. The journey itself began much earlier, because like all journeys, the story behind how one arrives at the starting line is a separate chapter of its own.
The story of my arrival at this internship is a long one, so instead of boring details, here’s a quick snapshot: After being away from the formal office environment for over 10 years (while experiencing the adventures of full-time motherhood), I decided it was time to brush off the dust and get back into the working world. My “b.c.” life (before children), had been engulfed in various facets of the music industry. I adored all of the different jobs that I’d held over the years, but in the decade that I was away everything changed. And by everything, I mean everything. It became clear that I needed to look for a new gig. After much pondering and a bit of research, I came to the conclusion that because I had always loved the marketing aspect of my previous endeavors, marketing was what I needed to pursue. One day a friend casually mentioned that I should consider looking for an internship. Interning was a revolutionary idea which I’d never thought about, but it lit up the light bulb in my rusty little head immediately! I decided to pursue the idea despite the fact that I am well past the customary age of most interns. I found KRT within a week of my search, and the journey commenced.
So, what has life been like here at KRT these past two months? The most significant aspect for me so far has been the kindness, acceptance & guidance of the staff (which I will expand upon in Part 2). I’ve had access to client meetings (by being a “fly on the wall”), had time to meet with each employee individually, and am constantly encouraged to ask as many questions as I need to in order to expand the learning process.
Who Still Reads the Newspaper? The Relevance of Print Advertising in the Growing World of Internet Marketing
In this day and age, it takes a certain skill to grab the attention of readers and passersby in our bustling lives. With so many things working against the future of classified print advertising such as social media, it is more important than ever to know how to maximize your reach for potential candidates in print media. We at KRT continue to place ads for our clients.
That’s what she (or he) said! – The importance of companies taking an active role on employer review sites.
This week’s news of Glassdoor receiving $20 Million in funding to expand internationally is confirmation that workplace review sites are becoming a permanent fixture in the recruitment landscape.
When you examine the vast amounts of traffic that these portals receive (i.e., Glassdoor, CareerBliss, Indeed Forum, etc.), employers can no longer turn a blind eye on what employees (past and present) are saying about them.
Mike Larsen penned a great article on ERE,”Anonymous Employer Reviews — Opportunity or Threat?”, that identified both the pros and cons that these sites present.
At KRT, we’ve worked with our clients to embrace these portals and have developed strategies to take an active role in monitoring reviews in real-time and, as appropriate, responding to comments. We firmly believe that companies need to demonstrate to candidates that they’re listening and engaging with what’s being said about them.
Additionally, we offer services to consolidate ALL feedback/reviews into a quarterly dashboard that categorizes content and ranks each post as positive, negative, or neutral. This report becomes an invaluable deliverable to present to senior management on what’s working — and what’s not — within their company — a report that’s certainly less bias than any internal surveys.
Contact a KRT representative today to discuss how we can assistance with managing your employment brand reputation.
#RallyZito #RallyEnchiladas? – The power of hashtags on Twitter
Writer’s note: This entry was written before the San Francisco Giants won the 2012 World Series.
As a baseball fan, a dedicated and devoted San Francisco Giants fan that is, I wanted to take a look at the impact the #PostSeason and the #WorldSeries has had on Twitter.
Hashtags are a powerful Twitter tool. It’s a way to follow a conversation , and it can lead to a trending topic – local or worldwide.
Take for instance, Barry Zito, left-hand pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. Game five of the playoffs against the St. Louis Cardinals was a do or die game. Fans were there to support him on and off social media, but it was that game that not only helped keep the SF Giants in the playoffs, but elevated him to also become a worldwide trending topic with #RallyZito.
10 Examples of Social Recruiting using Facebook
For a while now, HR departments have adopted Social Media for recruitment. When you think of Social Recruiting, LinkedIn automatically comes to mind. Indeed, LinkedIn is the most popular Social Channel used for talent acquisition (see infographic at the bottom of this post). However, using Facebook as a social media recruitment tool is growing in popularity.
Since the Facebook job search feature will be launching soon, I thought it might be helpful to highlight a few examples from companies that have integrated Facebook into their recruitment marketing strategies.
Top 10 Facebook Recruitment Strategies
1- Heroes Work Here
An initiative from Walt Disney Company on their careers Facebook page where they highlight the veterans that work for the company. That shows they value Veterans recruitment.
2- Promoting Referrals
We all know how important referrals are for talent acquisition – DaVita takes it to Facebook reminding the existing workforce to refer their friends. Can the design be a bit better and effective? Yes! – but the idea is there.
Topsy Changes the Twitter Scene Yet again – by Sean Poirier (Intern)
Topsy, a company that wanted to change the way consumers surf the web, has proved to be a major innovator in the Twitter community. The ability to search tweets is an extremely valuable tool, especially for marketers. Whether you are a company searching to see how hashtags are used, or you want to see which part of the country is particularly excited about a certain product, the ability to access this information is priceless. We currently use Topsy at KRT to analyze Twitter for some of our clients, including Airship Ventures (See graphic below).
We recently monitored Topsy for Airship Ventures’ #ZeppMe tweetup in Long Beach.
Topsy Analytics Pro (see example below), which was announced this week, is a new service that will allow marketers and brands to access a huge amount of data on Twitter. What does this mean? Companies will be able to monitor and keep tabs on the popularity of a word, hashtag or trend over a period of time. “Access to this quantity of data, and Topsy’s ability to process and store tweets going back several years, will create a valuable product for businesses,” said Topsy Vice President Jamie de Guerre.
