How to build a modern employer brand day-to-day [podcast #76]

How to build a modern employer brand day to day with Susanna Rantanen

Are you unsure how to build a modern employer brand?

You’ve listened to my podcast, read my blog posts but haven’t figured it out just yet.

It’s time to crunch through the details and talk about what it means in practice to build a modern employer brand according to the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™️.

How to build a modern employer brand strategically?

Strategic employer branding is premeditated and planned. This helps you significantly with your day-to-day employer branding activities. First you need a strategy. After that starts strategic planning. And only after that begins the actual employer brand marketing.

Your strategy gives you a concrete outline for planning your employer brand marketing activities:

  • What your messages need to be communicating?
  • Who needs to receive and become influenced by your employer brand messages?
  • Which channels and social media are likely to reach your intended audience the best?
  • What type of content do you need to create to those channels and media?

If you feel anxious about spending time on employer branding daily, it is probably more to do with a lack of a plan than the actual execution. So everything starts with a strategic plan.

Planning modern employer brand activities is the same as planning content and social media posts

The modern employer brand is developed mainly through systematic content marketing and social media marketing activities.

Many people misunderstand employer branding with developing employee experiences and company culture. While those absolutely form the foundation for the modern employer brand, developing those is not employer branding.

Just as branding is not product development as such. I blogged and podcasted about in the episode 66 when I spoke about “The Product Called Unique Employee Experiences”.

Of course, we are able to, can and must apply our employer brand strategy in all touchpoint we have with our employer brand stakeholders (this is employer brand management) but none of the other employer branding activities tend to place as often and as regularly as employer branding online and in social media.

When we plan our employer branding activities, we ideate, plan, produce, organize, prepare, repurpose, curate and schedule messages in various types of formats communicating one or more of our strategic employer brand key messages.

This type of work requires focus and takes up your time regularly.

The ideal posting schedule depends on your chosen social media platforms, but tends to circle on the average 3-5 feed posts and additional 4-7 stories. This is a lot and will need time regularly from your weekly schedule.

Adapting to a systematic routine is a must. Not only will it allow you to schedule and plan your own time more efficiently, it is also the only way to get your audience to form a habit around your content cycle.

Susanna Rantanen

Adapting to a systematic routine is a must. Not only will it allow you to schedule and plan your own time more efficiently, it is also the only way to get your audience to form a habit around your content cycle.

If you are not familiar with working strategically, you need to learn that first. I have a course now available at Talent Marketing School to get you started with becoming strategic. This is an important skill that will benefit you throughout your career and not just in talent marketing.

TMS banners Become strategic in talent marketing and building a modern employer brand

What my weekly schedule looks like

We are Trello Board super users at Emine. In fact, we use Trello for everything!

This is a screen shot of how I plan the modern employer brand and talent marketing pro -marketing. The strategy behind is to grow awareness and build a brand for myself as a modern employer branding coach for our international online business.

This same method (the Magnetic Employer Branding Method©) applies to building an employer brand, a business brand or a personal brand to professionally represent you or an employee advocate in your organization. In this case, I use it to build myself a brand.

Screenshot - Susanna Rantanen on how to plan and build a modern employer brand

The content is all planned based on our strategic key story themes for this particular brand strategy. I stick with the key topics because anything else will make it difficult from my audiences, for you to understand what I represent and how I might be able to contribute to your better life.

For example, I am frequently approach by people who want to become a guest on my podcast. I have to turn down a lot of those lovely people because their topic has nothing to do with mine.

The weekly podcast episode topic becomes the topic for the week

You don’t need to create a new blog post, podcast-episode or a video 3-7 times a week, no! Gone are those days when I blogged a new article every single day of the week!

Do like I do and choose one format that becomes your main format. Each week the topic in that new piece of content becomes your topic of the week.

My weekly posting agenda

Mondays

I post a how, what or why about the topic to start building attention to it. This goes to my personal LinkedIn feed and to @talentmarketingpro on Instagram

Tuesdays

I post with #talentmarketingexplained. This is a term or a word I use in modern employer branding which is explained in a picture card. I tend to explain a word or a theme connected to the topic of the week. This is also posted on my personal LinkedIn feed and @talentmarketingpro on Instagram.

Wednesdays

I publish the weekly podcast-episode on all of the primary podcast platforms together with a complimentary theme article for the podcast.

This is for those who may not have time or willingness to listen to the podcast. I want to cater to as many of my audience preferences as possible. But it also gives me the opportunity to improve our SEO with written content and links to other relevant content and sources. And promote Talent Marketing School like you can see in this theme article.

The podcast-episode is then shared across my and my agency’s social media feeds and selected groups on LinkedIn and Facebook as well as on our podcast account on Instagram: the @hr_podcast.

In addition to the podcast and blog post, I also send out the Weekly Podcast email with an exclusive tip to subscribers only.

Starting from this week, I will create a separate feed post for @talentmarketingpro about the podcast-topic.

Thursdays

Thursdays are for the #talentmarketingThursdayTip which again, is based on the week’s topic.

I try to make this a video (IGTV or Reel) in which case I share it only on @talentmarketingpro. If it’s a regular post, I share it on my personal LinkedIn feed as well.

Sundays

I take a break Friday and Saturday on the feed and return on Sunday with a #talentmarketingquote which is shared both on my personal LinkedIn feed and on @talentmarketingpro Instagram feed.

These are the weekly feed posts and then there are Stories which for me are currently pretty random because I have not had the time to plan them strategically yet.

Repurposing and scheduling in advance saves my day (and sanity)

Did you think I manage to do all this every single day?

I certainly don’t!

Right now I spend about 3 hours once a week to plan and copywrite, create or select images and schedule posts in advance for about 1-1,5 week ahead.

In addition, I spend about 2,5-3 hours each week to write this blog post and plan & schedule all the podcast-episode shares for social media in advance. The group posts I do manually typically Wednesdays in the afternoon EET.

I could not survive without the Trello Board, Canva and a social media marketing tool. Currently we subscribe to Buffer and also use Facebook Creator Studio (free) for our scheduling.

And this is only for modern employer branding. My team deals 100% with our agency brand marketing and soon I need to get help to get the Talent Marketing School brand marketing up and running as well.

The good thing about this is that this is exactly what we teach, consult and do together or for our clients. We are doing it for our own business as well so we can totally sympathize and share experiences with our clients.

There has got to be benefits for investing this much time to branding

Yes, absolutely!

As an entrepreneur, I have no desire to spend this much time on something that is not adding measurable value to our business. That’s the benefit of working strategically. You can measure everything you need to.

Many people ask “What metrics should we use?”

You don’t know the right answer unless you have a strategy clarifying what your goals and objectives are. Measuring what others measure or measuring everything under the moon are going to be the wrong answer.

Working this way turned into a sales person for our agency in Finland. All organic. We are not paying anything for advertising.

Susanna Rantanen

Working this way turned into a sales person for our agency in Finland. What we do is we invest our own time and the system produces us warm business and recruitment leads to our funnel regularly, We don’t pay anything for advertising our content. It is 100% organic.

When I started working for the international brand awareness, in 6 months time we started to experience traction in very relevant audiences. All organic.

Branding a business, an employer or someone as a professional takes time. But when you commit to a system your efforts begin to generate back the value you outlined in your strategy.

The key to it is to have a really good system to base it all on, relentlessly measure your efforts to become more and more efficient, plan ahead, prepare ahead and schedule ahead. Be ahead all the time so that you have time to breath.

I don’t like very many routines, but I love this!

Listen to episode 76 of the Building a Modern Employer Brand podcast

In this episode of the Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, I share how I build a modern employer brand day-to-day. Learn how to be more effective and what you benefit from planning and sticking to your plan.

Episode-length: 43:53 min

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