This episode, CEO and Chief Strategist of WideFoc.us Eric Elkins talks about the ways to identify soft skills in the interview process, red flags to look out for in employees, and how to avoid common hiring mistakes.
Eric Elkins is a strategist, author, professional speaker, and CEO and Chief Strategist of WideFoc.us a real-time social media agency that manages B2B and B2C social media outreach, paid ad campaigns, and monitoring and engagement for global brands to drive business goals like revenue, thought leadership, and lead generation. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:
- The dangers involved in working with partners.
- Getting your first marketing agency customers.
- How to avoid overwhelming your clients with the potential of social media.
- Ways to identify soft skills in the interview process.
- How to avoid hiring mistakes.
- Employee red flags.
- How AI tools will impact the future of marketing.
Resources:
Connecting with Eric Elkins:
Connecting with the host:
- Josh Hoffman on LinkedIn
Quotables:
- 13:28 – “I overwhelmed their marketing director very quickly with the things she should be doing to be successful on social and they were just too stuck in their ways, her boss eventually called me and said hey we really like working with you but it’s more than we can take on right now so we’re going to pause work until so and so feels comfortable with where things are going and it never came back.”
- 17:28 – “Know your audience, every writer knows and especially copywriter knows that you need to know who your target audience are and what their pain points are and what solution you can provide to them is the really important thing, and so knowing that not just on the marketing side but also on the interpersonal side, even as a coworker understanding what your other coworkers need and how to communicate with them in a way that resonates for them is really important.”
- 26:49 – “Ten years ago people would say you’re paying these writers to write four Facebook posts and three Instagram posts and five LinkedIn posts and twenty Tweets a week and you could farm that out to India, you could farm that out to a content farm and just have them write those posts for you don’t need the staff size you don’t need the headache of having all those employees you know the deadlines are going to be hit and my response has always been we differentiate ourselves on the quality of our writing, we hire writers first and their really good at what they do, we get them even better throughout own content review process and for the most part out clients the first thing they notice is the quality of the content.”
- 30:29 – “It’s always about target audiences and business goals, learning who your client wants to reach and what they want those people to do, and really crafting your overall plan and content and everything you do to match those goals. So much of what other social media agencies or even digital agencies who dabble in social do is they talk about building awareness or just having a presence on social because it’s important which it is but if you’re not crafting every bit of work to tie it back to goals and tie it back to specific outcomes and specific audiences then you’re just checking off a box, you’re not really doing something that makes a difference.”