Visuals in employer branding have a much higher potential for your business when it comes to winning attention.
Picture also tells a thousand words. This means that you’d have to write a thousand words in other to be close to describing a setting in the same detail as a photo is able to tell us.
Yet, the power of visuals is greatly overlooked in general business communication and marketing.
When cleaning my bookshelf the other weekend, I came across to a book called The Power of Visual Storytelling.
The authors Ekaterina Walter and Jessica Gioglio write: “Instead of relying on text-heavy content, a successful visual (storytelling) strategy requires a show-not-tell -approach”.
“Instead of relying on text-heavy content, a successful visual (storytelling) strategy requires a show-not-tell -approach”.
Using visuals in employer branding
When I use the word visual means photos and other illustrations. The impact of visual is easier to capture on a photo though. This is because to capture ALL the information a photo can hold requires us to have the talent of drawing, painting or other form of produced illustrations.
So what does using visuals in employer branding even mean?
It means most often, the use of photographs on our career site content as well as on other content we produce for talent marketing and employer branding such as:
- Blog posts
- Articles
- Job posts
- Social media posts
What exactly should our visuals tell?
Employer branding is about building an employer image and influencing our talent audiences about how they feel about us as places of work, as businesses and as the people connected to our business.
The product being branded are the employee (and candidate) experiences connected to a particular company.
Employee experiences about:
- What we do and believe in as a business.
- Our customer promise and the values that impact decision making in our organization.
- Our leadership culture.
- Our people as humans in connection to how each of them experience working with us and working for us.
- How we are able to improve the lives of our employees because of what we represent, enable, offer and how we treat people here.
No business is alike when you put it like this and like we teach in the Magnetic Employer Branding©️method I developed.
A visual in employer branding is a visual presentation of a product called employee experience about your business.
One image is meant to replace your “thousand words”
Imagine the amount of words required to explain all of this in such detail that all the people who came across those words would understand it exactly the same way.
What if you used photographs to set it out for them? It is as simple as that. Using photographs visualizing those types of scenarios and messages I listed in bullet points above.
We often help our clients to reformulate and recreate their career sites. When I look at a career site, I usually see a whole bunch of text. Rows after rows.
I see very little images. Little in the actual sense of size, or little in the number used. A great website has a lot of images appealing to our visual sense. Not necessary only photos, can be graphic illustrations as well.
What you could write in words can be 100% replaced with an image. And it will actually get seen.
Are stock photos ok?
I get asked, what if we don’t have any photos. Are stock photos ok? I say stock photos are million times better than no photos at all! Just be selective there too. If the goal is to visualize to others, outside your business, what you experience and see on a daily basis, which stock photo would be likely to describe that.
Are stock photos ok? I say stock photos are million times better than no photos at all! Just be selective there too. If the goal is to visualize to others, outside your business, what you experience and see on a daily basis, which stock photo would be likely to describe that.
What other types of easy-to-use visuals can be used in talent marketing?
Photos are not the only type of image that can and should be used. Especially when it comes to social media, there are a whole lot of other options to add to our variety.
Quote posts about our employer brand
We love quote posts here at Emine! Quote posts are in fact images. They just consist of text, sometimes also an image. Here are a few examples of a sentence of mine in this blog post I copy pasted as a quote for there versions of the same quote image. I made these in Canva in a few minutes using a template and just tuning it a bit.
GIFs in employer branding
I’m a HUGE fan of GIFs. In my team, we communicate to each other a lot just with GIFs. My employees even made me my own set of 18 GIFs for my 45th birthday recently! That’s how much I love GIFs!
A GIF is “just an animated set of images” in the format of GIF. GIF is a format, just like .png, .jpeg or .jpg.
When a photo is static, GIF moves. GIFs are often times so much more humorous than a photo. More like a meme, but animated.
Whatever GIFs you make or use, make sure they relate to your employer brand. Using random GIFs is as bad as all ad hoc employer branding ideas!
This Buffer-blog gives us an “Ultimate Guide to GIFs”, how to make and use them” >>
GIFs obviously don’t go everywhere, but they are excellent when used in a more casual conversation with your talent followers on social media. Each social media has their own GIF-collection to pick a GIF from if you are not keen on creating your own.
Listen to episode 41 of Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast
In this episode of Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, I talk about the power of visuals in employer branding.
Episode-length: 22:46 min
In this episode:
- Why visuals impact humans like they do.
- Why visuals are so powerful in employer branding.
- Why visuals help you to generate engagement on social media.
Links mentioned on this podcast-episode:
Humans are visual creatures >>
The book “The Power of Visual Storytelling” >>
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