Building a reputation for staffing companies with Jason Mudd | On Top of PR podcast

Jason Mudd describes how to build a brand and reputation for staffing and human resources companies using ADP monthly job reports. 

Watch the episode here

Listen to the episode here

Five things you’ll learn from this episode:

1. Build your brand and reputation by providing commentary for the monthly ADP employment reports for a TV station, magazine, newspaper, etc.
2. Get these opportunities by building a relationship with a newsroom reporter or news contact. Connect with them by phone, over lunch, or whatever your style is, but start building connections.
3. After the ADP report is released every month, write and send pitches to your contacts and be consistent with it. Eventually, your contact could use your commentary. 
4. If your pitch isn’t used that month, you can still use it for a blog post, social media post, podcast episode, or webinar.
5. Use the information from ADP reports to book yourself and talk to businesses and community groups about what the report data means for their business and for certain jobs.

Quotables

• “I do believe riches are in the niches, and it's a great way to differentiate and eliminate a lot of your competition.” — @JasonMudd9 of @axiapr
• “Either way, you just wanna get on the radar, and the best way to stand out on their radar is to bring a contrarian, provocative, right? Or unique point of view to the table that the existing sources they use do not bring, and that's how you stand out from the clutter.” — @JasonMudd9 of @axiapr
• “Now, again, they might not use you the first time, the second time, the third time, so it's important just to stay in touch and stay relevant.” — @JasonMudd9 of @axiapr
• “There's so many ways you could repurpose this from a news pitch into your own content elsewhere.” — @JasonMudd9 of @axiapr

If you enjoyed this episode, would you please share it with others and leave us a review.

About Jason Mudd:

Jason Mudd, APR, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia in July 2002.

Clients love Jason’s passion, innovation, candor, commitment, and award-winning team. In an increasingly tech-forward world, Jason’s grasp of technological demands on companies provides his clients in multiple sectors a unique advantage toward reaching their top audiences. After teaching himself HTML in 1994, Jason helped pioneer internet marketing strategies as an early adopter of e-commerce, SEO, and social media, inspiring tech giants like Yahoo.

At Axia Public Relations, Jason attracts, develops, retains, innovates, and leads top PR talent and clients. He oversees strategic communications for the firm’s national clients and provides high-level consultations to client leadership teams at billion-dollar global brands, both business-to-business and business-to-consumer, including spokesperson training, crisis communications management, analytics, social media, online reputation management, and more. He also speaks frequently to corporations and industry groups and writes about public relations trends and best practices for American City Business Journals and other national businesses.

Guest’s contact info and resources:

• Twitter

• LinkedIn

• More about Jason on APR

Additional Resources:

• First Wednesday: ADP (monthly) National Employment Report 
• First Friday: BLS Employment Situation report 
• Third Friday: States release their employment & unemployment reports

Sponsored by:

• On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes Magazine as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
• On Top of PR is sponsored by ReviewMaxer, the platform for monitoring, improving, and promoting online customer reviews.
• Burrelles has a special offer for On Top of PR fans. Check it out at burrelles.com/ontopofpr.

About your host Jason Mudd

On Top of PR host, Jason Mudd, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands and fastest-growing companies. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia Public Relations in July 2002. Forbes Magazine named Axia as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.

Find more On Top of PR episodes on: 

Transcript:

-[Narrator] Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd. This solo cast episode is brought to you by media monitoring company Burrelles. Learn more at burrelles.com/ontopofpr. And now here's Jason Mudd.

-Hello, and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm Jason Mudd, and I'm your host today for this episode. Today's episode is a solo cast. A solo cast is where it's just you and I talking, we don't have the guests like we normally do where we bring you a guest with fresh insights and expertise, but today I'm gonna be your expert with Axia Public Relations, and I'm gonna share this message today. This episode is specifically for staffing firms or companies who are involved in human resources-type activities, including and not limited to recruiting and staffing. What I wanna talk to you today about some unique ways to get some attention for your brand in the marketplace that you serve. And one of those things, some of you will know about and some of you won't or you'll know about it, but you're not really sure how to get involved in it. And that is when the employment numbers come out on a monthly basis and candidly almost on a weekly basis, this is a great opportunity for you and your spokespersons or leaders to get out in front of the market you serve as an expert in staffing trends and as well as supply and demand. So let's go through this a little bit through this episode that we're doing today.

So, first of all, again, I'm speaking to human resources, staffing firms, and just companies that are involved in human resources, consulting, and otherwise, that wanna build their brand and reputation in the market that they serve. And what I mean by that is the market they serve. So you might be listening to this episode and you are with a staffing firm or human resources company that's focused on one specific geographic market, or you might be in multiple geographic markets, or you might even be nationwide or even worldwide. You could also be a staffing or human resources company focused on certain industries like construction or accounting or professional services or legal services, or maybe you're an HR and staffing company just for executives or just for engineering or maybe for marketing companies or for marketing jobs. Whatever your niche is, and I do encourage you to have a niche for sure, I do believe riches are in the niches, and it's a great way to differentiate and eliminate a lot of your competition. So if you're in that business of talking about jobs and talking about employment and employment opportunities, or maybe even you're an economist, one of the best ways to build your brand and visibility is through earned media coverage, but also PR is very good with news, social, and web. And so I think whatever we talk about in this episode, you could literally apply them and create a news pitch, a social media post, a blog post, a website, I mean, excuse me, a webpage on your website, you could also transition this into an internal or external newsletter, you could do a webinar on this.

So there's a lot of ways to take what I'm sharing with you and to position it into news or earned media, social or shared media, and web or owned media content for yourself, your brand, and your company. And I think this is often neglected and overlooked by a lot of companies. So I wanna talk through this. Soon the first Wednesday or Thursday of each month, one of the largest payroll companies, ADP, does their monthly jobs report. And that usually comes out on a Wednesday, but now in the back of my mind I'm thinking maybe it comes out on Thursday sometimes, but anyway, whenever that comes out, it's the first week of the month, and they're talking about what data they're seeing from their payroll records on a national basis and they're proactively producing what's called the ADP Employment Report, and that's going out to the national media and it's getting picked up on every single month. And especially during times of economic highs and economic lows because people care about jobs, right? Everybody wants to know about their job. And so in an employment environment, people wanna know, is their jobs stable, and in other environments, they wanna know what's going on in the employment world as an employer and an employee. And then later on Friday, the first Friday of the month, the Feds and the Bureau of Labor Statistics release their employment report. And so ADP comes first, which is genius on their part.They pull all this data that they have that they're just sitting on and they pull that data together. They don't release individual companies' data, but just at a very macro level, they share information about what's going on with jobs in the employment marketplace. They also break it down by industry and types of jobs and many other micro reports within that data, but still not revealing about my company or your company, but just overall data about the marketplace in general broken into segments. That information is typically found to be very accurate and very reflective of what the entire marketplace is doing even though it's just data from companies that use ADP for payroll purposes. The Friday report that comes out, again, is the Fed report, it's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that's based on their surveying and other research they're doing. It's also based on their data of unemployment claims and other types of information. And that report comes out on the first Friday. The reason I'm going to so much detail about this is that a typical newsroom, whether it's a local TV station, a local newspaper, an industry trade magazine, or a national TV news show or TV station, or a national newspaper, is going to be looking every month for an expert to come on and give a custom commentary on what that report means to the marketplace and specifically to their audience, OK? 

And so this is your chance in the weeks prior to this report coming out to start building relationships.And on this podcast, we talk all the time about relationships. And so start building a relationship with the newsroom reporter or the news contact who is typically covering this announcement. Again, the announcement happens about once a month. It's almost always the same person. And so they probably have a go-to list of the people they go to, maybe it's one, two, or three go-to sources each month to include or feature in this segment that they do once a month. Now, they might have one person and that's their go-to which is great, but they might need a backup person, or they might need a backup of their backup or backup of their backup of their backup. Either way you just wanna get on the radar, and the best way to stand out on their radar is to bring a contrarian, provocative, right? Or unique point of view to the table that the existing sources they use do not bring, and that's how you stand out from the clutter. That's how you get them to elevate you from a backup to becoming their primary or the first time they might use you. So, my tip would be to get to know the person first, build a relationship with them even if it's on social media, maybe it's asking to connect with them by phone, maybe it's meeting up with them for a meal or drinks or coffee whatever your style is, and whatever availability or willingness to meet they might have. They might just keep it through email or direct message or social media at first. So you've gotta find ways to kind of be intriguing. One tip might be to comment on their coverage whether it's their article or social media posts on this topic. So, for example, we're recording this in mid-October, and so now would be the time to start talking to them either about what they've covered so far for October and sharing your unique point of view about that article or those numbers and what you're seeing and what you're thinking and what you would be sharing with their audience to position yourself for a couple of weeks when the November report comes out, or the December report or the January report, 'cause this, again, happens once a month. And so start writing this commentary as soon as you receive the data, as soon as you hear the data, as soon as you consume the data, and by the way, they don't typically get it early, they might get a little bit early, but they're not reporting on it early. So, as soon as they see the data, you see the report too. As soon as the report is released, you can see it too, and immediately you can schedule time in your calendar, you can wake up early if you need to depending on what time zone you're in, and be prepared to address, again, in a unique, provocative, and contrarian way what you think those numbers mean, what you're seeing, and what you think the numbers might look like next month or kind of giving some commentary on that report. Now, again, they might not use you the first time, the second time, the third time, so it's important just to stay in touch and stay relevant.

Again, if you write that pitch to that reporter whether they use it or not take that same pitch and put it on your blog, put it on social media, build a webinar around it. And so you could just do, hey, this is Jason Mudd with Axia staffing, and I just wanna give you, I wanna present to you a podcast episode, a video cast, a webinar, a blog post, a social media post, an email newsletter, maybe even a news release, giving you my thoughts on the most recent ADP Employment Report, OK? You take that and you do it and you get it out there massively. Then you do the same thing when the BLS numbers come out a day or two later. Then there's two more opportunities. The third week of the month is typically when each state releases their state numbers. Not only do they release statewide employment numbers, but they also release county by county and possibly even major Metro Market by major Metro Market numbers.This gives you an opportunity, a third opportunity, to get in front of those same contacts giving the same commentary or unique commentary based on this unique report, but specific to the niche that you working. So if you're a staffing company in Austin, Texas, then you wanna take the Austin data and be the expert in Austin on those employment numbers for the media, for the business community, for consumers, whether that's on a radio show, TV show, newspaper, magazine, or on your own social media, on your owned media channels like your website, a blog post, an email newsletter, a podcast, a video cast, your YouTube channel. There's so many ways you could repurpose this from a news pitch into your own content elsewhere. And then here's the fourth opportunity you have. The Feds always release a revised jobs report around the third week of the month as we get later into the month correcting or adjusting the numbers they originally announced with new data or more data that they have from the previous month. And the irony is almost always that revised job report is almost always in perfect alignment with what ADP announced first.

So what's unique is ADP's the first ones to announce and they're almost always correct. So sometimes ADP's numbers will be X and the Fed number will be Y but then eventually the Feds come back and end up being closer to X than they were before proving the ADP had really good data. And you as the expert in staffing and employment and supplying demand of workers and candidates in open job positions will be able to share that commentary each time you do a news interview, again, whether that's what the TV station, radio station, your own podcast, your own vodcast, a webinar, or a blog post, email blast. And I'm sure you can even come up with new and additional ways to do this. You could also book yourself to speak in front of business and civic and community groups about the most recent job reports and what it means for them. You can talk about jobs that are in demand, jobs that are not in demand. The trends that you're seeing over the last three months, a seasonal work up or down, as temporary work up and down, permanent jobs up or down, executive jobs up and down, white collar, no collar, blue-collar jobs. What are they doing? And especially if one of those spaces is your niche, you can wean in 100% and focus into those areas. Establishing yourself as a trusted advisor, as a credible source, as someone who is on top of the industry and following these trends closely, who can very well advise the community whether it's companies that are hiring or people who are looking to get hired. Use this as your opportunity to get out there and spread the word. If you work in the PR department, marketing department, or communications department for a staffing company, an HR consulting company, a company that specializes in employment law, this is a great way to build your brand and reputation in the marketplace you serve. And I hope you'll take advantage of these tips

If this episode was helpful to you do me a favor and share it with a colleague who would benefit from it. We'll put some links in the show notes to the type of information we shared with you today, and again, if there's a topic you're interested in hearing about, please let us know, we take customer requests just like a DJ. Anyway, this is Jason Mudd from Axia Public Relations, helping you stay on top of PR. Thanks for watching.

-[Narrator] This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd. Many thanks to our solo cast sponsor Burrelles for making this episode possible. Burrelles has a special offer just for On Top of PR fans. Check it out at burrelles.com/OnTopOfPR.