Let’s be honest, it’s easy to forget to promote your own brand when you’re so busy managing, or actually ‘doing the do’ for your own business.
Nevertheless, it’s incredibly important to promote your organisation so that your prospective clients, customers, future employees and stakeholders can see your success and understand your company culture. We have pooled together some of our top tips for building your employer brand to support your business scaling strategy.
Audit your existing brand perception
Before you build your employer brand it is always good practice to look at your existing content and brand perception with a fresh pair of eyes. It’s time to search through your social channels, website and employment review sites. This is exactly what your potential clients, customers and employees will be doing. So, it’s good to be aware of what they’ll see and get started on ensuring it’s all positive and any obvious gaps are filled.
Social Media
Your social media should reflect your company’s values and show the faces behind the brand. Below are a few examples of themes to build your employer brand through social media:
- Meet the Team
- Team meetings and events
- Office life
- Milestones – celebrating birthdays, hitting targets etc.
- New developments – whether its new faces, new technology or new offices
Instagram has over 1.4 million monthly active users and is a visual network. At Refresh we like to showcase our team on Instagram and we use our unique hashtag #LifeAtRefresh to do so. We share when a team member celebrates another year with us, when we are appointed by a new client, or even what we get up to at the weekend!
Check out our Instagram here for more content and theme examples.
Website
Does your website clearly outline your company’s values? This is a great place to start when it comes to building your employer brand, after all it is your digital shopfront. It can be something as simple as a blog that outlines your employer benefits and your brand ethos, or sections on meeting your team – providing more in-depth information on your people.
Why not check out Refresh’s health and wellbeing page on our website as an example.
We’d also advise you consider having a section of your website dedicated to your company’s value. This can be really beneficial to your employer brand and helps tell future employees that you take employee wellbeing seriously.
Press opportunities
When was the last time you Googled your business? Well, potential clients, customers and employees are going to be Googling you. You want them to find out who you are in the best way possible, and there’s nothing quite like third-party endorsement from journalists and the media.
So, press opportunities could be the perfect route for you to build your employer brand and tell your story to a wider audience. Of course the team here at Refresh makes sure we live and breathe our own advice, so here is a feature piece that our managing director, Laura, did for the publication Prolific North.
It doesn’t just need to be trade publications where your efforts are focused though. As an agency, we also try to appear in regional media to shout about a new client who has appointed us or to celebrate winning industry awards.
Employee review sites
How many times did you check Glassdoor or Indeed employee reviews when you were applying for jobs? If the answer is no, then you will soon be in the minority. Employees are now using digital sites such as these to do desk research on a prospective company, often before they even apply for open roles.
Your future employees could be doing the same, so you need to make sure they are faced with positive comments about your company.
To start the positivity ball rolling, why not start by asking your existing team to leave a review online? This will help paint a real-time picture of who you are and your company’s ethos.
Be consistent
Keeping a consistent brand tone is key to building a string employer brand and supporting your scaling strategy. Your online content should be cohesive in terms of messaging, design and tone. Everything you publish should be reflective of your company values and ethos.
Consistency is key when it comes to building trust with your stakeholders and potential employees. It is very much worth spending some time establishing who you are as a business and what you want people to think when they see your brand name. If you are the leader, then owning and driving your own brand values can be exciting and can enable growth with new and existing customers or clients.
Most importantly, be authentic
We’ve all seen the ‘day in the life’ on social media that couldn’t be any further from the truth. To build a strong employer brand you must be authentic in your storytelling. It’s often hard to believe and build brand affinity with a brand or business that portrays a too perfect lifestyle or working environment.
Tell the real story of your brand, its people, and its services or products. Successful brands are based on authenticity and draw on real achievements, real strengths and real people.
Your employees are a great tool for building your employer brand. Ask them to answer a few questions about why they love working at your company and share them on social media as a starter for 10! Alternatively, has someone been working exceptionally hard recently? Recognise that and celebrate with your social network.
Here at Refresh, we always try to showcase who we are, what we stand for and what makes us that bit different. So, why not head over and follow us on our social channels, visit our meet the team page to learn more about our culture, or check out our other blogs on how to keep continuing to scale your business.