What do brands like Google, BMW, and Starbucks have in common? All have built powerful brands not only with customers and prospects but with a critical, often forgotten audience – employees. We’ve released new research in partnership with LinkedIn revealing that many of the most successful brands build great strength by including this forgotten audience.
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How to Bridge the Gap Between your Employer and Consumer Brands
1. The Secret Sauce of Top Companies:
Aligning Your Employer & Customer Brand
2. Power of a brand
2
36%
*Cumulative stock performance over 5 year period
Stronger financial
results due to
strength of
consumer and
talent brand
3. A Strong Talent and Customer Brand is a Powerful
Combination
3
LinkedInTalentBrandIndex
Lippincott Customer BrandView Index
Cumulative stock performance over 5 year period
36%
28%-6%
10%
HighLow
HighLow
4. What can you do today?
4
Turn marketing inward
Understand your brand inside and out
Measure it
Align Talent Acquisition & Marketing
Inspire belief and enable action
5. Unmovable Unstoppable
Align Talent Acquisition & Marketing to align prospect
experience (e.g., messaging, process) with overall brand story
Start at the top
Your CEO and their team must get behind your brand alignment, and commit
to helping promote it. Keep making the case until they’re on board.
Bring partners to the table
Don’t go it alone. Your talent brand is part HR, part Marketing, part
Communications - and it’ll need IT support.
Brand Task Force
Leverage cross-functional expertise by including them in a cross-functional
talent brand task force. With more skin in the game your colleagues will help
you succeed.
5
6. Understand your brand inside and out, and advocate
for it everyday with authenticity and purpose
Listen Up!
Listen to your customers, employees and candidates, and listen well. Ask
questions. Gather facts, opinions, and stories - the building blocks of your
brand. Put aside your own biases about what you should hear, and seek to
understand their views.
6
7. 7
Are >90% of team members
aware of, excited by, and
empowered to execute on
the mission? Do brand
ideas get executed
spontaneously?
Do employees and the
outside world notice these,
in a way that they realize
that it is real, the company is
serious and something
exciting is happening?
Are the daily moments in the
customer experience
meaningfully different in a
branded way?
Create an environment that inspires belief and enables
action in support of your brand
8. Turn marketing inward to a forgotten audience, the
employees, to create understanding, belief and employee
action in support of your brand
Ensure your executives are on board.
Get C-suite support to drive widespread participation.
Educate employees on your brand.
The more connected they are to the brand, the better ambassadors they’ll be.
Encourage share and tell.
Share authentic stories, pictures, and company events across a variety of
media so your employees (and followers) can repost and drive viral discussion.
Monitor for success.
Measure engagement and create action plans to build your foundation of
engaged, enthusiastic brand ambassadors.
8
9. Measure your talent brand over time as you change
your tactics, approach and messaging
In-house
Your offer acceptance rate goes up
Employee retention increases
Internal surveys confirm your employees are excited about your
company as a place to work
Online
Traffic to your career site, your employee video testimonials, etc.
increases
You double the number of employees with an optimized social presence
Talent Brand Index
Your Talent Brand Index score rises versus your peers and in the
segments that you care most about
9
12. 12
Talent Brand n.
• the highly social, totally public version of your
employer brand incorporating what talent thinks,
feels, and shares about your company as a place
to work
• a significant asset for both hiring/retaining great
talent and promoting your corporate image to the
market
13. We assess two components of your brand: Reach and Engagement
Talent Brand Reach
Talent
Talent that’s familiar with you as an employer
Talent Brand Engagement
Talent that is interested in you as an employer
30,000members
5,400
members Researching company and career pages
Following your company
Viewing jobs and applying
Viewing employee profiles
Connecting with your employees
13
14. Talent Brand Reach
Talent Brand Engagement
Talent
Talent Brand Index
=
Talent Brand Engagement
Talent Brand Reach
xyzCo's
18%
30,000members
5,400
members
What percent of people who know about you, show an interest?
14
15. Immediate benefits for your organization
15
Reduce employee turnover by up to 28%
Influence the conversation — before others do
Lower your cost per hire by as much as 50%
You’ll positively impact the perceptions of
your brand among customers and clients
Source: LinkedIn Eda Gultekin, What’s the Value of Your Employment Brand?, http://lnkd.in/valueofEB, (December 1, 2011) .
Editor's Notes
JOHNThe result – was this. Explain what 36% means and what 6% means. Quick explanation of how we did the research using these two metrics.Be prepared to explain sample size and how this was actually done (John)
LIZSo what can you do – as a marketer, a recruiter, a strategist, an HR executive – to ensure you are one of these top performing financial companies?
JOHNThe third rule is about your people, and it recognizes brand’s role today is bigger. We at Lippincott don’t see it as much of a communications tool as a management tool, a way to unite thousands of employees in a unified direction, to energize them.When we look at our data, we see a critical pattern : a correlation of internal alignment and energy with external success. We believe the extent to which your employees are both energized and empowered to deliver the brand, is the true leading indicator of your future brand power.
JOHN
JOHNHow did we figure this out? We looked at two different, but very much interrelated, measurements. – the first, BrandView, Lippincott’s measure of Customer Brand strength.(Explanation)
LIZ-Third takeaway – turn your marketing inward to an often forgotten audience – your own employees. Your employees are your unofficial marketers and recruiters – show them the way to do just that!-Start at the top with your C-level executives. Ensuring senior management is on board will help drive widespread participation-Educate your employees on your brand. Make sure they know and understand your brand’s mission, beliefs and goals. And then -Encourage share and tell amongst your employees. Show talent how they can use LinkedIn and other social media to best represent your brand. Encourage them to bring your brand to life by sharing stories, pics, events etc. amongst friends and connections-You can use company all-hands, your intranet, your own social media assets to do this. Or, take a note from Dell and build a formal program in order to educate.-Employees who are more connected to your brand will work harder to be your brand ambassador and make your company successful.-And don’t forget to monitor for success. Measure how engaged your own employees are with your brand, how well they understand your brand message and create action plans to build your foundation of engaged, enthusiastic brand ambassadors. Revisit this strategy often and periodically remind employees of their importance, of the rockstars they are.
LIZ [BRIANNE - Should we make a note here about measuring a consumer brand? This is talent-focused. OR is the point, you probably already have a way to measure your consumer brand… but what about your TALENT BRAND?]-While our research shows 83% of employers plan to maintain or grow their investment in their talent brand in 2013, only one-third of TA leaders say they consistently measure their employer brands.-By measuring your talent brand over time so you can understand how changes you make to your approach, tactics and internal and external messaging affect your ability to attract top talent.-Here are some metrics that you can put in place to monitor and better understand the impact of your talent brand initiatives.1- Measure it in house. Look at metrics like offer acceptance rate and employee retention. If these rates go up, it’s a good indicator of a strong Talent Brand. Also run surveys periodically to your employees to confirm their excitement about you as a place to work.2 – Measure it online. Look at traffic to your career site, your employee video testimonials, your jobs. Also look at your employees’ social media presence and remember they are an extension of your brand. Are they representing themselves and your company the way you want them to? Are they “sharing” and “telling” the right stories?3 – and finally, use Talent Brand Index as a simple, quantitative measure of your ability to attract external talent. You can measure Talent Brand Index over time, versus your peers, and in the geographies and job segments you care most about. Then use this information to revisit and redefine your messaging. Contact us or your LinkedIn representative if you are interested in learning more about what your Talent Brand Index looks like today.*End point – by doing these four things in your organization tomorrow – collaborating across marketing and talent acquisition, understanding your brand inside and out, turning your messaging inward, and finally, measuring your brand, you will begin to position yourself as a company and as an employer of choice. You will create ambassadors across both talent acquisition and marketing – your customers and your employees - your most important brand assets. And as a result and perhaps most importantly, your company as a whole will benefit financially.
LIZLinkedIn, we have Talent Brand Index which gives brands a means to measure the strength of their brand as an employer. How easy is it for you to attract talent? How are you perceived in the market among top talent?We start by looking at the reach and engagement you have with external talentTALENT BRAND REACH: Includes the people who know what it’s like to work at your company—those that are familiar with your company as an employer. Defined by those viewing or connecting with your own employees – your internal ambassadors.TALENT BRAND ENGAGEMENT: Includes the subset of people within your reach who are interested in you as a potential employer. Raised their hand is someway by researching your company, joining your talent community by following your company, or actively engaging with your jobs.Because these activities happen in billions of interactions on LinkedIn, we can measure them. So we can see that at xyzCo, you have XXX members within your reach, and YYY of them have engaged with you and shown an interest.
LIZWe use your talent brand reach and talent brand engagement to measure your talent brand index. Of those people who know about you ,how many of them have shown interest in you?Your talent brand index is x%, and we will use this number to benchmark and compare your employer brand to peers, over time, and across functions and geographies.