Are you confidently leveraging data analytics to refine your employer branding efforts?
Or does the data-driven approach make you anxious?
Or perhaps you are struggling to figure out what metrics you should even measure and where you get the data.
I hear you, my friend! That’s why I will dedicate this episode to data analytics and a data-driven approach to employer branding.
My intention is to take away that creeping anxiety and the fear of the unknown when it comes to dealing with employer branding data and analytics.
In this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast, we go directly to the deep end, but with our favourite safety gear to keep our heads securely above the water and feel confident paddling in the sea of marketing data.
If you are new to this podcast, my name is Susanna Rantanen. I am a seasoned employer branding expert and content & social media marketing coach for professionals struggling with winning and keeping the talents a business needs to succeed.
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What makes data analytics so essential?
Data analytics is essential to improving your employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts. By leveraging data and metrics, we can make more informed decisions about our actions, not only after the fact but also during the marketing activity.
Data analytics is essential to improving your employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts. By leveraging data and metrics, we can make more informed decisions about our actions, not only after the fact but also during the marketing activity.
Susanna Rantanen
This is equally important in long-term employer branding and short-term recruitment campaigns.
The data-driven approach to talent marketing helps you steer your work towards the intended goals while you can still make changes and drive the desired results.
All you need to do is decide what the success looks like and make it as specific as you can.
When you start with defining your goals and objectives for employer branding or your recruitment marketing campaign and make it very specific and quantifiable, it’s not difficult to check the data and see how you are doing. I guarantee you that!
Data analytics are essential because they help you save time, money and the migraine of not knowing whether you will succeed in your work.
What metrics should you analyse in a social media or content marketing campaign?
You are most likely using social media and various online and digital content when promoting your open jobs and employer branding.
When evaluating the success of a social media or content marketing campaign, there are many key metrics that should be taken into consideration.
These include the reach of your content, impressions of your posts, content engagement rates, click-throughs from your paid adverts, traffic to specific pages on your website and the size of your audience.
In our Instant Employer Brand Accelerator™️ program, we help you define the relevant metrics for your recruitment campaigns to support your employer branding efforts and recruitment success.
Focus on measuring the effectiveness while you promote, not after the campaign ends
Measuring the effectiveness of your employer brand marketing and recruitment campaigns can help you adjust strategies in real-time to maximise impact and reach.
I’m emphasising this because the most common way to use your available data is to look at the results after the recruitment campaign or a promotional employer brand content campaign.
The most common way to use your available data is to look at the results after the recruitment or a promotional employer brand content campaign. While it’s important to know if putting money on it was worth anything, once the budget is eaten and the campaign is over, you can no longer impact the outcome.
Susanna Rantanen
While it’s important to know if putting money on it was worth anything, once the budget is eaten and the campaign is over, you can do nothing about it.
The data-driven approach to employer branding
Data analytics is critical not only during a recruitment campaign but also when measuring ROI – that’s the return on investment – for your employer branding initiatives.
Employer branding being a marathon as opposed to the sprint nature of a recruitment campaign, it is imperative to use data, not to go about it blindfolded.
Data is like a navigation system for you, your compass in the middle of a deep forest, keeping you secure so you are not getting lost.
Data gets you to your employer brand milestones and end destination while you still have water, food and dry shoes; that is: resources left to make wins.
With a data-driven approach to employer branding, you need to be strategic about employer branding.
A data-driven approach requires defining first what success should look like
It is impossible to analyse your data without knowing what success should look like.
Without specific goals and objectives, you’ll stare at random figures that mean nothing and add no value to your work.
Analysing your data without knowing what success should look like is impossible. Without specific goals and objectives, you’ll stare at random figures that mean nothing and add no value to your work.
Susanna Rantanen
If you get 800 of something, is it good or bad? And, what’s more, is it enough to turn your time and money into smart work, or will you be nothing but a cost to your boss? Important to know, isn’t it?
Even if it was 700 last month and 800 this month, you still don’t know if this data is even relevant to anything you work for.
That’s why you need to set your employer branding goals and objectives first.
If you have trouble turning your employer branding into strategic employer branding, our Employer Branding Agency Emine can help you.
Our Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️ provides a strategic framework and a systematic marketing approach to data-driven employer branding.
Simply contact me to set up a discovery call to assess whether our Helsinki, Finland-based employer branding agency could be your ideal partner!
What are some of the data-driven techniques to track HR marketing performance?
You are probably eager to hear what some of the data-driven techniques are, you could use to track your HR marketing performance. Whether you want to measure the success of your ongoing recruitment marketing campaign or understand the impact of your marketing on your employer brand perceptions, you’ll need to explore some techniques.
So, let’s crack that box open!
Separating your social media data analytics from your website data analytics, and your job application data
First, let’s separate your social media analytics from your website analytics and job application data.
- Social media analytics tell you how your content performs on a chosen social media platform. Whether people see it, react to it and do something about it.
- Website analytics tell you, for example, how many people clicked through a link and arrived at a page or post on your website.
- You can also find out where they found your link, how much time they spent on your page or a website, and whether they came back. These are all pretty relevant when it comes to recruitment campaigns specifically.
- Then, you can get the number of applications you received for your vacancy.
- You can compare this against the number of times people clicked on the apply now button on your website to calculate the percentage between somewhat interested and very interested post viewers.
- Or to see if you have a too high number of drop-offs once they see, for example, how much work sending their application entails.
- What you cannot analyse from website data is the quality of your applicants. You can do that job once you start interviewing and testing your applicants.
- The quality of applications does not matter because it has nothing to do with the applicant’s ability to succeed in the open role, specifically in your organisation. And you cannot use website analytics to evaluate that either.
Evaluating the impact on your employer brand
Analysing data to understand your marketing impact on your employer brand differs from analysing recruitment campaign impact and results.
With employer branding, getting applications is not your goal. Your goal is to analyse what type of messages and marketing best help raise employer awareness and build employer brand affinity. Your employer brand marketing analysis helps you drive the conversion value your business benefits from investing in employer branding.
This is slightly more complex than analysing recruitment campaign data, but it is ever so important if your employer invests resources in employer branding.
Let’s tackle analysing social media messaging and marketing first
- A consistent growth in social media reach and audience is evidence of growing employer awareness.
- Social media engagement grows reach but also tells you your messages and content are interesting and inspiring enough to get reactions from people.
- Those engagement reactions indicate the sentiments of your audience towards your employer brand: Are they positive, negative or neutral? You can learn an awful lot about them!
- When people engage with your posts, you should engage back, as this influences the positive sentiments about you as the respondent and the company you represent. Taken, your responses are positive!
- A growing engagement to a post grows reach, which is necessary to raise your employer awareness and grow the size of your organic audience.
- The more you engage with your audience, the more you learn about them, like doing target market research without enduring a massive research project!
- A growing number of social media followers tells you your messages and marketing resonate with people.
- Regularly analysing who your new followers are tells you whether your messages resonate with your target audience. If not, you need to change your messages and points of view.
- The number of followers is irrelevant unless they are the audience you need.
- It is not the value your boss wants from investing in employer branding.
- However, the size of your audience does indicate your employer branding work is more likely to return on investment when it resonates with the right audience.
What about website data for employer branding?
If you look at Google Analytics, for example, you’ll find an overwhelming amount of website data you can analyse. You should not spend time analysing it all.
The most relevant website data to analyse for employer branding impact are:
- Website traffic to your career site and specific career site content.
- For growing employer awareness, you want to see a growth in the number of new visitors.
- And, for an indication of employer brand affinity, you want to see a growth in the number of returning visitors.
- The average time spent on your career site pages indicates if your content is relevant and interesting.
- If people leave your content quickly and do not return, they are not finding your content relevant and valuable. And vice versa.
- Which content gets the most visits or is growing consistently indicates that the topic is relevant and valuable for the visitors, and you should promote it and create more of it.
- You can also access data about the demographics and behaviour of your career site visitors to analyse what kind of audience finds you and where they find you.
- This data analysis helps you to evaluate who you convert and how.
- Another way that data analytics is transforming employer branding efforts is by allowing employers to build a more comprehensive view of their target audience.
- By collating data from multiple sources, employers can create detailed personas that will help them better tailor their messaging and content to reach the right people.
- Using more advanced techniques, such as UTM links in your shared content, gives you even more specific information about your marketing conversions.
Check out this Hubspot article on UTM links
And finally, which data tells you if you are getting a return on employer branding investment?
It’s important for companies to remember that employer branding isn’t just about creating a strong social media presence or getting people on your career site.
Once you get your audience to do that by consistently providing them reasons to engage with you on socials and check your website for relevant information, you must move your audience forward on their Candidate Journey with your company.
It can be an extremely valuable return on investment if your employer brand marketing starts to generate leads at the start of your recruitment funnel.
However, converting your audience into recruitment leads is not the same as getting job applications.
Leads are prospects who are not looking to change jobs right now, but qualifying them and then building social connections with qualified leads can massively start decreasing the cost of recruitment for your employer. That is a specific ROI for employer branding.
Another example of ROI is the impact of internal employer branding on the lifetime value of employment, and the cost of hire through better retention, higher job satisfaction and business goals delivered by teams and individuals.
Leveraging data analytics in employer branding helps you to maximise efficiency and ROI
At its core, leveraging data analytics in employer branding efforts is all about maximising efficiency while gaining valuable insights into your target audience and learning what works best in consistently converting employer brand value for the business.
Whether you’re just starting out or already have an established employer brand, data analytics should be at the top of your list when it comes to refining your branding efforts.
These detailed insights into how passive and active job seekers engage with your content help you make informed decisions in building a stronger employer brand and attracting more qualified candidates through your recruitment marketing efforts.
With data, it’s possible to measure your success in real time, adjust strategies accordingly, and measure ROI for your employer branding and recruitment marketing initiatives.
Phew! That was a lot, wasn’t it?
This is probably an episode that you need to save for yourself and share with your colleagues so that you can discuss and plan data analysis collaboratively.
At Employer Branding Agency Emine, we love working with data in the most straightforward way to make it a super-efficient time investment for you when we work together.
We help you to focus only on data that makes sense strategically for you and guide you in using data as your teacher, just like we do too!
Once you get the sweet data experience with us, you stop seeing it as a danger zone and start seeing it as your most passionate love affair!
Ok, that’s all for this week, my friends!
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Also! I decided to do a season of interviews in this podcast.
The other week, I had my friend Suzy Welch on. That was episode 146, and we talked about how to figure out this thing called life, career and being a great boss.
People have loved that episode! Listen to it or watch our conversation.
I have a couple of people in the line for near-future episodes, and I’m happy to receive your tips and suggestions on who you would love to hear me interview on my podcast and about what!
I’ll then promise to do my best to make your wish come true!
Thanks for listening, and thanks for watching it!
This is Susanna Rantanen, your coach and guide in the world of modern employer branding!
It was lovely to have you listening to this episode!
Until next week! Moi moi!