Marketing and People & Culture : Creating a Standout Employer Brand

Who owns employer branding? Is it People & Culture or the Marketing team? The truth is, both play crucial roles. Employer branding is a collaborative effort where People & Culture provides valuable insights about employees and candidates, while Marketing helps shape and promote the brand. Together, they create a strong, attractive employer brand.

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What Makes Employer Branding Different from Regular Corporate Branding?

Regular corporate branding is about making a brand that customers love, based on a place, product, or service. Employer Branding, however, is about creating a brand around your workplace. Instead of trying to get new customers, the goal of Employer Branding is to attract great employees and keep the ones you already have.

To make Employer Branding work, Marketing and People & Culture (P&C) teams need to work together, teamwork is the key to its success.

Want to get started? We've outlined four strategies for Employer Branding that Marketing and the People & Culture teams can work on together to help you launch a winning Employer Brand for your workplace.

Strategy 1: Understand Your Audience

Just like a marketer needs to understand their audience to attract more customers, you need to know who you want to attract to work at your business. With over 30% of frontline workers leaving their jobs in the first 60 days, understanding your audience is super important for the foundations of your Employer Branding as getting the right people who fit your workplace culture will help keep employees longer and reduce hiring costs.

This is a team effort between People & Culture (P&C) and Marketing. P&C brings data about the candidates they want and the traits of current employees. Marketing helps organise this data to create profiles of ideal candidates.

What's the Process to Understand your Audience Better?

Gather Insights: First, sit down together and see if you have enough information from candidates and employees. If not, you might need to do some research or use existing data about what people want from their employer.

Design a Candidate Persona Template: A candidate persona is your guide to the ideal candidate. Before starting research, it’s helpful to create a template for your candidate persona.  By doing this upfront, it ensures you capture all necessary information. Include insights like qualfications, skills, goals, personality traits and communication styles.

Segment Your Audience: Once you have your insights, group your audience into segments, like job roles or experience levels.

Analyse your Data by Segment: Look for common traits within each segment. For example, you might find that the personality traits of front-of-house (FOH) team members are similar, while back-of-house (BOH) staff show different personality traits. Group these to find patterns.

Create Candidate Personas: Use your insights to fill out your candidate personas.

Review Together: HR and Marketing should review the final personas together to make sure everyone agrees on the ideal candidates you want to attract to your business. For marketers, these personas are like cheat sheets to help build your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and craft your brand narrative and marketing strategies.

Strategy 2: Develop Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

Marketers write customer value propositions every day to describe the benefits customers get from a company's products and services. A good value proposition starts with customer research to identify what customers need, their pain points, and benefits they seek. This helps you to match your products or services to their needs.

An EVP follows a similar process but focuses on what candidates and employees want from your company. It defines why your workplace is unique and helps attract candidates while keeping current employees happy.

Top Tip: Use your research and personas to help you understand what motivates and inspires your audience when they’re at work. Look for common themes like career goals, desired experiences, personality traits, communication preferences, and challenges they face. Then figure out what your company promise is to address those needs... that's your EVP.

Strategy 3: Storytelling and Brand Narrative

Bringing your employer brand to life requires a compelling brand narrative—one that is authentic, consistent, and sprinkled with creativity and fun. This is a perfect strategy for Marketing and P&C to collaborate on, crafting genuine stories that showcase what it’s like to work at your company.

A great framework for developing a consistent brand narrative involves using your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and aligning your promises with proof points that demonstrate how your company delivers on these commitments. Here's an example below: 

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Here’s how to develop a compelling brand narrative:

Identify Key Themes: Use your EVP to identify the key themes you want to promote to the world that your business does really well. These might include career growth, work-life balance, company culture, or unique employee benefits.

Gather Real Stories: Collect stories and testimonials from current employees that align with these themes. Highlight personal experiences, achievements, and day-to-day moments that reflect your company’s values and culture.

Create Diverse Content: Develop various types of content to share these stories, such as blog posts, videos, social media updates, and employee spotlights. Ensure the content is engaging and reflects the authentic voice of your employees.

Maintain Consistency: Ensure that all your storytelling efforts are consistent across different channels. This means using a cohesive tone, style, and messaging that align with your brand narrative.

Infuse Creativity: Don’t be afraid to get creative. Use humor, unique formats, and interactive elements to make your stories stand out and resonate with your audience.

Engage Your Employees: Encourage employees to share their own stories and experiences on their social media platforms or when talking to their friends and family. This not only amplifies your brand narrative but also makes it more relatable and authentic.

Measure and Adjust: Continuously measure the impact of your storytelling efforts. Use metrics like engagement rates, shares, and feedback to understand what works and what doesn’t. Adjust your strategy based on these insights to keep your brand narrative fresh and effective.

Strategy 4: Spread the word

You’ve started creating great content, but how should the Marketing and People & Culture teams share it with the world to show that your business is a great place to work? The answer: Promote it. Wherever your audience is, be there too.

• What do they read? Publish there.
• What events do they attend? Speak there.
• Where do they hang out? Network there.
• Who do they trust? Improve your brand presence with them.

Employees who love coming to work are your best brand ambassadors. Encourage your team to spread the word about their positive experiences. They can share their enthusiasm by liking or resharing your company’s social media posts on their own channels.

By effectively promoting your content and leveraging your employees' networks, you can amplify your employer brand and reach your teams audience, who knows, they may share the same values, have the right qualifications and be perfect for another open role you may have.

You're on your way

Launching an effective employer brand requires the combined strengths of both Marketing and People & Culture teams. By understanding your audience, developing a compelling Employee Value Proposition, crafting an authentic brand narrative, and strategically promoting your content, you can create a strong and attractive employer brand.

There are lots of other pieces that make up Employer Branding, but these 4 strategies are a great place for the Marketing and People & Culture team to jump on the collaboration train together. Follow these strategies, and you'll be well on your way to establishing a powerful employer brand that stands out from the competition and helps you showcase what makes your company a sought-after place to work.

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