What happens behind the scenes in your organisation? Your culture is a crucial component in both talent attraction and your organisational success, which is why you need to showcase it. In a Recruitment Marketing Magazine exclusive three-part series, Tanya Williams shares how to use your people, culture and communication as part of Leverage Marketing, a cost-effective strategy to amplify your existing assets. Part 2 of this series focuses on culture!
These days, your culture is your marketing. Your brand culture is the authentic part of the “people puzzle”, providing an honest view of what happens behind the scenes. (Or, it should!)
What often happens, though, is that most organisations continue to silo the departments that should be playing together to elevate and showcase the culture of their business.
Sales, Marketing and Talent Managers (HR & recruitment) should play together as they are all marketing channels. They are marketing to people internally and externally and should not be siloed because they all have the same goals in mind:
- Communicate marketing messages to attract the right clients and employees
- Showcase brand culture to attract the right clients and employees
- Hire & look after the right people who can attract the right clients and employees.
They are all focused on people! So how do they intersect?
Sales assists marketing in understanding clients’ pain points, aspirations, and help them build client personas. They can work with marketing teams to better understand the client. One cannot work effectively without the other. Marketing without sales is like flying blind and hoping you get to your destination.
Marketing generates leads based on what sales tell them (more sales, more money for everyone). They can provide highly relevant content to educate prospects and help support the sales team during the sales process.
Based on what salespeople provide to marketing, they can personalise and customise content that talks directly to a certain client or segment, meaning it will cut through and get seen instead of being ignored.
Talent Managers can market and share culture to the right people. They should be liaising with marketing to talk about the culture you want to build (or maintain), the type of people you want to attract and the types of people you want working for the company. Marketing content should be included in onboarding and employee inductions. This could include the Social Media Policy, content rules and guidelines, personas of ideal clients, brand voice and so forth. The idea is to share the vision and give your people the ability to actively be part of the process.
Talent managers have a vested interest in the marketing game.
The intersection of these three business centres is mostly untapped. It’s what I call Leveraged Marketing – it uses your existing assets of people, culture and communication and leverages them to amplify your marketing. The leverage comes from every piece of your digital marketing – via sales, talent, and marketing teams. Then, extends this further to include those people in your organisation who play in the social media bubble. They all have influence in the process and therefore, should all have input.
This can be done by allowing your people to create content using their own voice and collaborate with each other and external partners to share on their networks. This means you can reach people that you wouldn’t normally have access to as an organisation.
For example, your marketing team creates a post to share. One of your people might add some commentary or even alter the original post and share with their network in their own voice (not your organisation’s voice). This works as part of your employee brand ambassador strategy.
Now, speaking of culture. Your culture should be one of the key things that attract the right talent to your organisation. Too often, I hear people say that they’re afraid to be honest about the culture in their marketing in case they miss good people. But you need to remember that the right people will be attracted to whatever you are offering. The wrong people won’t last in your organisation and it will end up costing you time and money – authentic is always best.
As part of your recruitment marketing strategy, you need to encourage your people to showcase your culture and existing teams. Authenticity means allowing your people to have a voice, not one that has been edited by marketing.
I suggest your marketing teams provide guidelines, but allow your people to change organisational content in a way that sounds authentic to them personally.
Posts from your organisation shouldn’t just be about your people hitting the “share” button. You need them to, at a minimum, add commentary to explain why they’re sharing the content to their network, otherwise it makes little sense to their network.
Allowing your people to recreate your original content in their own style takes this a step further!
For example, a boutique accounting firm I recently worked with had two key issues. Firstly, they wanted to build a Talent Community to attract and build relationships with potential hires. Secondly, they weren’t sure how to leverage their existing marketing and content, which was high quality, without throwing lots of money at it.
My solution was twofold. I set up a Talent Community using a “Showcase Page” on LinkedIn. This didn’t detract from what they were doing on their main company page and allowed the conversation to focus on the culture of the business, their current people and internal activities so they could attract similar team members. I also provided them with training on the types of content they needed to post and why it needed to be different from their company-driven marketing content.
The other part of the equation was to find their internal champions who would act as employee ambassadors. These were employees who were already somewhat active on social media, writing blogs and creating video content in their areas of specialty. It started by gaining buy-in from the directors and running a series of workshops to help the core teams understand the vision and ways to achieve it.
I then conducted one-on-one sessions with all their employees, including the directors, to refine and improve their LinkedIn profiles. (There’s no point in amplifying content if their profiles weren’t attractive!). We briefed their internal champions, incentivised them and provided them with guidelines around what they could do. And, most importantly, allowed them to have an authentic voice.
When you allow your talent to have a voice –an authentic voice and a seat at the culture table– you cannot edit authenticity. Remember that candidates and clients are savvy and they can see marketing fluff a mile away.
Stay tuned! Next week, in Part 3 and the final part of this series, I’ll share with you the final piece of the puzzle and how communication brings it all together.
Read Part 1 of this series on “people” if you missed it!
How do you support your brand ambassadors? How has it made an impact in your organisation? Share a comment below.
Tanya Williams is the pink-loving, sparkly Chief of Everything at Digital Conversations. She wears many hats; entrepreneur, best-selling author, digital trainer, and she is a Social Amplification Specialist with over 20 years’ marketing experience. She works with recruiters to uncover the hidden gold in their existing assets, find ways to leverage every moment of your digital marketing without increasing your marketing budget and amplify your internal champions to increase your visibility. Her goal is to make the hero in your industry sector. She has a simple, no-tech-talk approach and thrives working with established recruitment companies to tap into the opportunities they might miss, using practical & relevant tactics to drive business outcomes.