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.

The post Leverage Marketing series: culture is your marketing appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

We live in a world where attention spans are less than a goldfish’s. We move at a cracking pace and are bombarded, and often overwhelmed, with so much information that it can be paralysing. There is always new technology, new software, new tools and the latest and greatest gadget that promises to give us everything we ever wanted, as well as the kitchen sink.

As business owners and hiring managers, it can be hard to separate the “could’s” from the “shoulds”. That is, all the stuff we could do versus the things we should be focused on. However, you don’t need to overcomplicate what you’re doing. That is why I created a framework for Leveraged Marketing. Let’s start with existing assets you have in your organisation.

What is Leveraged Marketing?

Put simply Leveraged Marketing uses your existing assets of people, culture and communication and leverages them to amplify your marketing and employer brand. It combines three of your departments, sales, marketing and talent engagement (HR & Recruitment), and looks at how they can play together in the sandpit, rather than being siloed. (But more of this next week when I share with you Part 2 of this leveraged marketing series.)

It’s such a simple concept, yet 98% of organisations that should be using this formula aren’t utilising it!

This strategy, however, is not for everyone. It’s most successful when you have more than 50 employees, although it can work for smaller organisations if you have a highly engaged team. But the rule of thumb says that a bigger team equals bigger results. It’s often the shared responsibility between People & Culture Managers, Operations and Marketing, so I highly recommend fostering collaboration across internal teams.

Everything in marketing starts with your people. Technology is simply an enabler.

Start with your people

In Part 1 of this three-part series, let’s start with the people element of the formula.

Everything in marketing starts with your people. Technology is simply an enabler.

Your employees have extensive networks of friends, followers and connections on social media who can be reached with the click of a mouse. If you partner with and empower your people, you can tap into new networks to help them build their personal brands and increase your organisational reach. With me so far?

Leveraging your social presence will turn one marketing manager into many, simply by leveraging your employees’ profiles to amplify your brand messages to more of your target audience. This benefits everyone!

This is why banning employees from social media is the dumbest thing you can do!

If you add up the connections and audience size of all your people across their social media networks, the numbers can get very big. Collectively, your people will have a much larger following than your organisation. These are people you’re unlikely to reach through your own organisation marketing.

This is why banning employees from social media is the dumbest thing you can do!

The power of social sharing

Because interactions on social channels are authentic, people are more trusting and engaged. It’s an effective way of building talent communities and online networks and relationships with clients, as communication is coming from peers, not from owners or marketing teams. By using the collective power of your teams digital and social presence, you become much more powerful and visible. A bit like when Clark Kent turns into Superman.

Your people can authentically share your brand and team culture. They are the ones down in the trenches experiencing it every day, at a grassroots level. People do business with people they like. Clients and candidates no longer wanted to see fancy brochures full of stock photos. They want to see the real people behind the scenes.

And the numbers stack up too. A 12% increase in social sharing from staff, on average, equals a 2X increase in revenue.

Why does it work so well? It’s a powerful way to authentically promote your Employee Value Propositions and Employer Brand. Leveraged Marketing focuses on real-time sharing, relatability, authenticity, transparency, a fresh perspective and believability.

Find your champions

One of the starting steps in the “people” element of leveraged marketing is finding your internal champions. Who are they? What departments do they live in? Are they internal influencers?

They are usually a small group of passionate, motivated, enthusiastic team players who love their job.  As part of your Leveraged Marketing strategy, you need to find them, partner with them, reward them and encourage them to be your champion.  

Make sharing easy

The key to gaining buy in and partnering with them is to make it easy for them. Give them quality content to use, make it accessible and allow them to have a voice. For this to work most effectively it needs to be authentic, otherwise it will just look like just another push from the marketing department.

Let them mould the content so it’s shaped with their voice. This makes a huge difference in engagement and reach.

Offer training

Train your champions and give them the skills they need to help you. Bring in subject-matter specialists to show your internal champions how to best create and share content in a way that will increase engagement with your clients and potential candidates.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do it, so let’s get it right.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I hope these tips and strategies help in getting you to think about how to leverage the collective power of your people.

Next week, in Part 2, I’ll share with you how brand culture fits into the Leverage Marketing framework. Stay tuned.

Learn more

Activate your employees for growth  

Authentic sharing

For more great videos, check out Digital Conversations on YouTube

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.

The post Leverage Marketing: how to amplify your employer brand using your existing assets appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.