How to actually build a modern employer brand? [podcast #7]

It’s all well and dandy to talk about strategy and various theoretical methods one might use to build a modern employer brand. But what do you do exactly?

How to actually build a modern employer brand?

In HR marketing, we have a long tradition in face to face marketing, such as recruitment fairs and other recruitment event marketing. But the most common example of HR marketing is of course a job post followed by career stories.

Today, we have social media. And social media brings us a wide range of available content formats to share information and stories from “behind the job scenes” and in relation to who we are and what we represent as a business and a workplace. We can do content marketing.

Content marketing is the most effective way to build your business a modern employer brand.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the child of the internet and social media marketing. Content refers to company produced content that is relevant, timely, interesting and provide immediate value add for the target audience.

Your content can take any format from a blog post to a long video, from a photo to a powerpoint presentation, from a podcast to Instagram story and from an infograph to a social media post, and so on.

Businesses are able to use content marketing strategically to build interest, trust and rapport with customer target audiences about their products and services. The more the company wins over their target audiences with valuable content, the more likely that audience is to (this is marketing language) convert into sales leads for them.

Good content marketing can be a tremendous value for a business in building brand awareness and supporting sales. Face to face selling is very expensive. Businesses can cut personal selling costs with good content marketing.

HR content marketing and modern employer brand

In the Modern Employer Branding Method I have created, we take the advantage of content marketing in order to do the same for us, but instead of prospective customers, we target prospective talents.

The content marketing process is planned according the modern employer brand strategy with the objectives of winning attention, growing awareness, building affinity and eventually converting ideal talent audiences into recruitment leads and applicants.

Exactly the same logic as in commercial content marketing, but in this context, we specify the content marketing as HR Content Marketing.

HR content marketing is the actual practice how you build your modern employer brand. For your HR content marketing to be as effective as possible, you will need a strategy in which you decide the frame for your HR content marketing.

Successful HR content marketing in employer branding is not targeted to current recruitment audience. That would be recruitment marketing.

Make a distinction between your recruiting audience (active job seekers) and your employer branding audience (passive job seekers). They have very different content needs.

Active job seekers are looking for:

  • relevant and interesting job opportunities (job posts)
  • information about recruiter contacts
  • information about how the recruitment process flows and how one can prepare to succeed in it
  • information about career development opportunities in a given workplace
  • information about opportunities to develop one’s skills and competencies at a given workplace
  • information about prospective colleagues, nearest team members and nearest manager in a given workplace
  • employee experiences about working in the given workplace

What passive job seekers google for?

Recruitment talk is totally irrelevant to passive job seekers. Your content marketing plan will require content that is interesting, inspiring, entertaining or educational for your ideal talents.

In other words, content they google for.

But not just anything. Your Modern Employer Brand strategy consists of Key Storification Themes, topics that are relevant and mutual between your business and your ideal talent audiences. That would be the content you focus on.

Remember that, the passive job seeker is not planning to change jobs anytime soon. You are highly unlikely to win their attention and get them into a Candidate Journey with your company if you only talk about jobs, benefits and careers.

Your Modern Employer Brand strategy is executed through HR content marketing plan consisting of content targeted, relevant and immediately valuable to your ideal, but currently passive job seeker -talents.

Your HR content should be either inspirational, informational, educational or entertaining to be noticed. And in the content format your ideal talents are most likely to prefer to receive their content.

Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast 7 HR content marketing by Susanna Rantanen (1)

The accompanying podcast-episode

In the episode #7 of Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, I will explain how we actually build the modern employer brand.

Episode-length: 16:28 min

Listen to this episode on Soundcloud >>

> (opens in a new tab)”>Listen to this episode on Spotify >>

Episode content:

  • How to actually build the modern employer brand?
  • What is content marketing?
  • What is HR content marketing, specifically in the context of employer branding?
  • What type of content passive job seekers tend to look for?

About Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast

Building a Modern Employer Brand-podcast is a weekly podcast bringing you a modern breath of air into HR marketing and employer branding. 

This podcast is dedicated to all modern growth companies and modern employer branding practitioners who want to really influence their talent audiences and add measurable value to growing and scaling modern businesses with HR marketing and employer branding.

The Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast is sponsored by Employee Experience Agency Emine and scripted & hosted by Susanna Rantanen.

Find the podcast on Soundcloud and Spotify.

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