Blog: 5 steps to boosting your talent brand through content

Employer Branding

5 steps to boosting your talent brand through content

Sharing content with your prospects explaining your company culture is one of the best talent branding tools
5 steps to boosting your talent brand through content

Content marketing may be all the rage with our marketing colleagues, but it is also catching up with recruiting. The concept of sharing content with your prospects in order to add value to their day and subtly, yet powerfully, explain your company culture is becoming one of the best talent branding tools.

As content marketing is quite new to recruiting, however, many companies struggle with scaling the process and coming up with a structured and efficient way to sharing content. Not to mention that many are not sure what content to share and how to find/create it.

To help with that, we created the 5 Steps to Boosting Your Talent Brand through Content ebook. The ebook outlines how you can go about creating a content marketing plan, developing and sharing content, amplifying and measuing your impact. Here is a quick overview of what you will learn:

Step 1: Plan

The first step in building out a content marketing strategy is planning out the processes. This means figuring out who you want to target with your content and developing an editorial calendar.

It’s important to know your target audience because this will allow you to serve them very tailored messages. A good idea is to develop personas (similar to what marketers do with their customer personas) for the people you target and outline what type of content would be relevant to them. For example, you may want to share career advice or inside peek into your internship program with students, and engineer meetup details or technical tips with computer programmers.

Then sit down with your team and figure out how frequently you want to post and what topics. A good editorial calendar will help you stay organized and will give you weekly or monthly visibility on what’s coming up. You can see a sample editorial calendar in the ebook.

Step 2: Develop your content

This is often the most intimidating step in any content strategy. All recruiting organizations are stretched so thin – who has time to create content from scratch.

Well, the good news is that you do not have to stress just yet about creating original content. Even the most well-resourced companies curate majority of their content marketing posts from third party sources like popular news sites. You can also check out your company blog – it will surely have fresh content that you can share with your prospects on social.

Once you are confident that curated content gives you enough sharing volume, you can brainstorm a few projects where you create original pieces like videos or presentation decks or infographics. See an extensive list of examples in the ebook.

Here are some key topics you should curate around:

  1. Talent Brand: Highlight things that make your company a great place to work such as a unique culture and values, outstanding leadership, cool office space, and diverse employees.
  2. Thought leadership tips and insights: Hook your audience with content that appeals to their professional interests and aspirations. The more relevant your message, the greater its impact.
  3. News: Share industry, company, or product information. LinkedIn Pulse, Google Alerts, and Alltop.com are great sources to track external news.

 

Step 3: Share your content

Now that you have a plan and great content it’s time to share it with the world and watch your talent brand go viral. There are many social platforms that you can utilize and each serves a unique purpose – for example LinkedIn allows you to target your messages to different followers, Facebook is great for lifestyle posts, Twitter is effective for sharing news. Focusing on Step 1 (understanding your audience and defining you talent targets) will help you determine what content is most appropriate for what platform. Many pieces can and should be shared across all social media avenues that you are using to broadcast your talent brand message.

A few things to consider when sharing content on social media:

  1. Post at peak activity times
  2. Post frequently
  3. Lead with a catchy headline
  4. Be responsive
  5. Reciprocate

 

Step 4: Amplify

Just sharing great content isn’t enough; you have to amplify your message to make sure you are getting it in front of as many people as possible. One of the best and most effective ways to do that is to leverage your own employees as Talent Brand Ambassadors. You can send them emails with suggested social media updates and encourage them to share these messages with their networks (this would be new untapped audience for you). Additionally, sponsoring content  on social media is a great way to grow your reach beyond those that have chosen to follow you.

Step 5: Measure and adjust

It’s important to pay attention to how your posts are performing and do more of what’s resonating with your audience. How do you know what’s hitting the mark? By tracking follower growth, impressions, engagement (likes, shares, and comments) and click-through-rates you will know if your audience is finding the type of information you are sharing useful. Remember, you must adjust your strategy over time to get your talent brand messaging right so don’t be afraid to experiment and think outside the box.

These are just a few of the basics of content marketing for talent acquisition. To learn more in-depth about these 5 steps and get specific examples and tips, download the 5 Steps to Boosting Your Talent Brand through Content ebook.

Disclaimer: This is a contributed post. The statements, opinions and data contained are solely those of the individual authors and contributors and not of People Matters and the editor(s).

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Topics: Employer Branding, #TalentBrandingWeek

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