At Blu Ivy Group, we never forget the importance of ‘employer brand awareness’. Ensuring our clients have a powerful strategy in place to be top-of-mind for their target job seekers is key to attracting the talent you want. Sounds obvious, however, far too often, we see organizations investing their employer brand dollars in platforms and strategies that have little to no impact on top of mind awareness. In our careers, we all decide which employers to pursue, and which jobs to apply for, based in part on our preconceived ideas of a company’s brand as an employer.
How well your brand ranks in the minds of job seekers is important. Many organizations invest all their efforts in new career sites and their social media landing pages and company content. The challenge is that these corporate platforms only serve the people who already know and follow that organization. To access the best qualified job candidates on the market, you need a diversified strategy and budget to build top of mind awareness and candidate experience.
Developing Employer Brand Awareness
The biggest myth to debunk is that if you build it, they will come. If only it were that easy – the fact is, ‘building’ your employer brand is only part of the job. Once you have a great Employee Value Proposition, or EVP, that is incorporated across your career site, social media and other marketing platforms, you need to invest budget, time, and effort into getting that message in front of job-seekers through brand awareness marketing in order to become top-of-mind for your target market.
What is Top Of Mind Awareness? In marketing, top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) refers to a brand being first in customers’ minds when thinking of a particular industry or category. It is often the employer brands that are “most remembered” or “most recalled” to a subset of target job seekers.
Today, the majority of organizations we work with are striving to transform perceptions of their workplace, and attract new, highly demanded skills. This increases the pressure on building top of mind awareness as they are no longer competing with employers just in their industry, but are also seeking to be top of mind with digital and design talent that may have only considered start up or tech firms three years ago.
While most organizations want to be a preferred, top-of-mind employer on the talent market, they don’t always budget and strategize to achieve that. Nor do they have a clear understanding of which platforms build top-of-mind awareness, as opposed to simply effective recruitment transactional marketing.
Refine Your EVP and Creative Assets
The more differentiated and targeted your Employer Brand messaging is, the better your ROI will be. We help our clients define exactly what their EVP is, and what it means for a specific target market and use messaging and images that will resonate with the talent group and will set you apart from the competition. It is also so critical to differentiate your employer brand visual and creative assets. If you are simply copying competitors with the office and pool table imagery and using stock photos, there is very little chance that you will stand out in anyone’s minds. If you want to stand out, you need to differentiate.
Understand what outlets are most effective for top of mind awareness
Your employer brand strategy must be informed by Talent Behaviour research. Ensure you have worked with your employer brand agency to conduct thorough external research to understand their job seeking and media behaviours. If the goal is to get exposure to the broadest target audience, you need to understand where they reside, what media they use most often and at what time, and what the highest traffic areas are to get their attention.
Typically building top of mind awareness will require exposure on television, radio, transit, display advertising, paid social media ads and SEO.
Make the Investment
Becoming a top-of-mind employer requires a well-planned media investment. You can have the best content in the world, but if it’s not getting out in front of the right consumers, it will, without exception, provide you with limited ROI. Whatever platforms you decide to include in your strategy, prepare and budget early to get the results you are seeking. Media buy can be more expensive than HR departments anticipate, getting the budget approvals early will be key to your success.
At Blu Ivy, we help guide our clients on the right channel mix to get as many eyes as possible on their EVP.
Allocate your Budget
After consulting with our clients, we develop a plan to allocate their budget to the most effective initiatives. A typical, and very effective, breakdown can look something like this:
- 15%: brand awareness
- 25%: educational marketing, i.e., conveying to the talent market your point of differentiation and what’s unique about your EVP, usually on forums like Glassdoor, Indeed, blogs, and other content marketing
- 60%: direct job advertising specifically search engine marketing, search engine optimization for jobs and job board advertising
Measure results and adjust
Programmatic advertising, top of mind awareness measurement are key to tracking success and making adjustments for continuous improvement. If you are planning a large scale employer brand campaign launch, ensure that you look beyond applicants and source of hire for success. The true ROI for the company and brand will be derived from top of mind, preference and mindshare.
Contact us today
Simply put, building a well thought out media budget is important because job seekers of every kind base their decisions on who comes to mind first. An effective employer brand marketing strategy attracts top talent by differentiating your organization from your competitors.
If you want to become a preferred employer, Blu Ivy Group will help you build out an employer brand marketing strategy that will get you there. Call us today at 647-308-2352 to learn more!
