We regularly talk about how important current employees are when it comes to brand building and promotion, but a lesser-known long-reaching recruitment advertising strategy is working towards creating a solid network of employee brand evangelists. Brand evangelists are enthusiastic promoters of your brand who want to share their positive experience. The key aspect of that kind of employee is their genuine feelings about your company and the fact that they aren’t requesting something in return. This means in order to isolate this sort of good will ambassador, you’ll need to work on your company culture and listening skills.
Per Entrepreneur Magazine, “Make sure they have the internal space to share their thoughts and insights about the company, their co-workers, and managers – whatever is on their mind.” It all starts with listening and allowing employees to share their feedback in a safe space. You can then build on that listening strategy by sharing them more publicly (with their permission of course) and even allowing them outlets for public speaking. After all as Daniel Roth stated recently, “The best [companies] are actively encouraging their employees to get their voice out there—by supporting their writing, suggesting content for them to comment on and share, or making suggestions of what people might want to tackle and then curating and sharing the posts.”
While building your evangelist fan base, here are three strategies you should keep in mind that will ultimately boost your recruitment advertising efforts.
1. Keep it REAL
Your employees may be beneficial to your strategy, but they are not resources that should be harnessed purely for financial gain. According to Hubspot, “People don’t want brands talking at them as if they’re dollar signs – they want authentic communication.” If you want to have your employees continue to say positive things about the company they work for, help them do it, but don’t push them into becoming disingenuous. If they start feeling like they are being prompted with a specific agenda, they are going to feel less like helping you. In addition, make sure to monitor what they say, but don’t orchestrate the process. It should be grown organically if you want the nurtured feeling to last.
2. Communicate with Employees
3. Be Relevant and Stay on Brand
Stay on brand. Develop stringent guidelines of what your recruitment brand is about, who it is for and what kind of feel it should emote. Do that, and don’t stray. The easiest way to lose employee engagement is a sudden, tumultuous change in direction that doesn’t align with the company culture.
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