There are great people out there are considering joining your organization. Do they apply blindly? Probably not. Do they Google your company and read up on whatever they can find? More likely. I recently had a chance to speak with Todd Wheatland of King Content to find out why content is essential for employer branding.
Listen to the interview on iTunes, SoundCloud or keep reading for a summary of our conversation.
How do organisations use content marketing for employer branding?
"They don't. I'm a marketer, I came at this space very much from a "let's help marketers become publishers, let's help people understand that the world's changed and they don't have to keep going out and doing global funnel marketing or promotion", all that beautiful, wonderful stuff that content marketing represents in terms of philosophy.
What I've found though is that whilst that was the big opportunity, in the last two years in particular there's been a huge swing towards organizations genuinely wanting to apply these same tools and tactics towards solving their own audience challenges - whether that's talking to broader audience challenges, so not just in the traditional marketing silo but any particular organization that has an audience and an objective can really take advantage of the same type of approach, in building a greater sense of community and more authenticity and transparency and all those wonderful things.
I think organizations are absolutely getting the budgets that they didn't have two years ago and I see, year-on-year, I see doubling, tripling, quadrupling of budgets on employer branding from many organizations. Getting much more sophisticated in the analytics and the way that they apply that and especially for global organizations much more localized in recognizing the connection between geography and specific role demand.
And really building a connection between seeing that employer branding doesn't have to be a soft cousin of marketing brand thinking, but can actually have a very strong ROI connection to the actual talent objectives of the organization."
With budgets tripling and quadrupling, does that mean a lot more content is being created and published in the space?
"It does. But I think the shift at the same time - as we all know, we've seen the great promise of social media, six or seven years ago, it was going to be free forever and you could just shout your messages and people would click on your links and come pouring back to your website, because that's what they wanted to do. Or so we deluded ourselves into thinking.
The reality of those platforms is that that actually was so effective that everyone did it and we quickly killed it as a potential model. And Facebook, we've got client organizations under 1% for organic reach on Facebook now, we've seen even in the last three months, dramatic plunging in returns on organic visibility for many publishers.
They are media companies - and the opposite side of that, they've become much better at actually acting like media organizations. You've seen LinkedIn this week introduce programmatic, you've seen, and you'll continue to see, a huge amount more product focused evolution from LinkedIn, for example, as a paid media play. It'll become much easier, and they're really trying to tap into that big agency, big corporate spend, just like Facebook has done so extremely well."
Is the solution to create great content that will resonate with your audience?
"The solution is definitely not more content. The solution is developing content with intent and understanding before you create it, how you're going to get it in front of the right audience. It's much less about, "Gee I've got a blog and I've got four social channels so I need to produce a piece of content every day for the blog and shout it out in the social channels." It's much less about that, and much more about how to make sure every piece of content that goes out is actually trying to achieve an objective that I'm intentionally developing it for, and is actually getting a connection with the audience that I'm putting it in front of.
So it's not just, "Shit, it's Monday, I've got to do X". It's like, "Let's get one piece out every couple of weeks. Let's make it fantastic and let's use what savings we've made to actually pay to get in front of that audience" rather than thinking they're going to somehow discover it themselves."
Read the whole article at the Link Humans blog and follow Todd on Twitter @ToddWheatland.