Digital marketing for employer branding [podcast #73]

BLOG #73 Working as a Digital Talent Marketing Manager (series 3:6) - Building a modern, magnetic employer brand podcast with Susanna Rantanen

Digital marketing is used as an umbrella term to cover all of the marketing efforts companies can do online. Companies are using digital marketing to promote their goods, services, their career opportunities and their employer brand.

Online marketing can be extremely cost effective which makes it our primary landscape in modern employer branding.

In this blog post I explain what digital marketing means in the employer brand context. Scroll down to the podcast-episode in which I introduce the role of a Digital Talent Marketing Manager.

What is digital marketing?

You are probably familiar with the term online marketing?

That’s what digital marketing essentially covers.

Digital marketing refers to all the marketing messages, content and adverts we can receive and consume on our computer desktops, mobile phones, tablets and other devices that are connected to the Internet.

What this means is, we use digital platform, software, digital tools and apps to distribute our company promotional messages to our target audiences.

In the context of talent marketing, think posting jobs online to job boards in comparison to posting jobs on a print media like we used to a long time ago.

Digital marketing entered the HR job 20 years ago

About 20 years ago our work at HR started it’s transformation from print to digital with the introduction of online job boards and career sites.

This was followed by the rise of social media starting from LinkedIn followed by Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many other popular social platforms we can use today.

Many companies regularly use the following common examples of digital and social marketing:

  • Seeing social media ads on your social media news feed.
  • Following companies and brands on social media.
  • Engaging with influencers promoting brands.
  • Receiving newsletters from companies and brands to your email inbox.
  • Spending time watching videos or listening to podcasts online.
  • Being exposed to adverts when you browse news or stream TV on your device.

Comparing digital marketing to traditional marketing

In comparison, what is considered as traditional marketing are things like print adverts and advertorials on magazines and newspapers, billboards at events and in city centers and direct paper mail you receive in your mail box.

Digital marketing is much more cost effective and environmentally-friendlier than print marketing. It takes less time to produce, no one needs to drive anything anywhere and there are no paper waste ending in the pin.

Your audience can be much larger with the fraction of the cost you would need for print marketing.

What is Digital Talent Marketing?

Digital talent marketing is marketing targeted to your company talent audiences using digital platforms.

The most common ones probably being:

  • job posts on the Internet job boards
  • social media posts promoting your vacancies, career opportunities and other career content
  • social media campaigns distributing your content outside your immediate organic audience
  • content marketing from and to your career site
talent marketing quiz

What is digital marketing in employer branding?

If you think about the Candidate Journey of the Information Era©, you can see the journey of an unknown talent out there becoming a recognized person in your talent audience is an actual journey.

The length of this journey depends on:

  • how relevant and interesting your company appears to be for those individual your company would like to reach
  • the readiness of your target audience to consider new career opportunities

Digital marketing works really well for both recruitment marketing and employer branding.

Recruitment marketing is usually about short-term campaigns with the intent to convert to applicants as fast as possible. That’s why various digital campaigns work really well for recruitment marketing. You can achieve pretty targeted campaigns which can result in much higher ROI.

Employer branding being a long-term activity you must give your target audiences consistently reasons to tune into your marketing messages. Marketing automation and the application of systematic content marketing can do wonders here.

Examples of digital marketing in employer branding

Search engine optimization (SEO) on your career site and blog content.

Content marketing: Distributing content like blog articles, eBooks, podcast-episodes and video content to regularly win the attention of your target audiences.

Inbound marketing techniques can be applied to generate recruitment leads to your recruitment funnel.

Marketing automation is a great technique to start building your company an email list of target talents, but also to automate your social media posts.

Social media marketing we are probably already familiar with all. Instagram is currently the best social media for employer branding.

I love online PR because it fits so well with talent marketing and building talent communities.

Advertising our employer brand content

Does your company regularly advertise their career sites, blog posts and jobs on social media? This is called Pay Per Click (PPC) method and we use it to drive traffic from social media to our career site and blog.

Similar to social media advertising are sponsored posts. This is called native advertising. I like to call this “boosting my post”, because that’s what is essentially does. Gives your post a bit of a boost to show it to more people.

If you are interested in learning more about digital marketing, check out this very informatic article by Hubspot.

modern employer branding

Data analysis as part of the Digital Talent Marketing Manager’s role

Regular data analysis is key to successful digital talent marketing.

That’s why I included data analysis as a key responsibility area for a Digital Talent Marketing Manager.

The purpose of data analysis in digital employer branding is to sport patterns of behavior and drive your employer branding decisions based on those patterns.

Read more about what is digital analytics from here >>

You may have heard the term big data?

Digital marketing produces massive amounts of data from multiple sources all the time. Regular data analysis on those touchpoint and metrics that are relevant to your work gives you transparency how well your digital talent marketing performs. Without it, we are working our eyes blindfolded.

Think of data analysis as your navigator guiding you the best route towards your employer branding goals.Without a navigator, it is easy to get lost on this long journey.

Start with setting your goals first

Making any sense of the data requires having your talent marketing goals and objectives firmly set.

For some reason, I find a lot of talent marketers are working with metrics-first approach. I’ve participated in countless of social media conversations where someone is wanting to know what metrics they should follow without having their goals and objectives set first.

There are thousands of data collection points, metrics, to measure and not knowing what is most relevant for your company leads very quickly to a huge workload with little meaning to anyone.

Your digital talent marketing starts with setting measurable goals and objectives.

The benefits of digital talent marketing management

I want to make this really simple: managing your digital talent marketing is the only way to know what is the actual cost and return of what you do online.

The advantages of managing your digital talent marketing

You actually keep track of what you do online and how well it works for you.

The data you collect and analyze can give you an incredible amount of insight about your audience, their behavior and likely patterns of behavior.

Managing your data helps you to make better digital talent marketing decisions.

Understanding your audiences better helps you to create more personalized and more effective marketing campaigns.

You can measure every step of your digital marketing journey giving you insight into how well your processes, your career site and your recruitment system work for you.

Being present online for your talent audiences builds transparency and trust which are often a road to brand loyalty and engagement.

You can build digital journeys for your target audiences and actively invite them forward on their Candidate Journey with your company generating valuable leads for your recruitment funnel.

Your budget and resources are more effectively used for actions and activities that matter.

You personally have a better control over your talent marketing.

Is it starting to sound like a good idea to start managing your digital talent marketing?

Listen to episode #73 of the the Building of a Modern Employer Brand podcast

In this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, I’ll introduce the third role in the modern, Magnetic Talent Marketing Team, the role of a Digital Talent Marketing Manager.

  • What does a Digital Talent Marketing Manager do?
  • What is digital talent marketing and why does it need managing?
  • The very basics of digital talent marketing that need to be up-to-date

Episode-length:  30:52 min

Download the free eBook covering all of the 6 roles in the modern, Magneting Talent Marketing Team >>

Check out the podcast-episode 69 in which I introduced the role of the Employer Brand Manager >>

Check out the podcast-episode 71 in which I introduced the role of a Talent Community and Social Media Manager >>

Do you prefer to listen to this podcast on one of the following apps? 

Click on the link and you will be directed to the Building of Modern Employer Brand -podcast. Click follow there and you will be notified weekly on a new episode!

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Join my Talent Community on Instagram!

I teach modern talent marketing and employer branding in bitesize on Instagram! Follow @talentmarketingpro if you don’t want to miss out on my talent marketing tips! What a great opportunity to expand your talent marketing acumen all for free! 

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