Image by Sippanont Samchai
So you’ve developed your employer branding strategy, set-up your blog and started having conversations about your culture.
How do you get people to the site?
Today, I’m going to teach you how to market your employer branding blog.
How to Market an Employer Branding Blog
Before you start marketing your blog (and measuring the results), you need to understand what success is for an employer branding blog.
With employer branding in the social media space, success is really about two things:
- Awareness. How aware are people of your organization and its awesome culture because of your blog?
- Conversions. How many people do you hire through your blog?
Awareness always comes first. Once you have people who read your blog, you can begin converting them into candidates (and ideally new hires).
3 Ways People Find Your Blog
People who find your blog will get there one of three ways:
- Directly. They heard about it from you. Maybe you told them in person, or your career page or another one of your social media channels sent them there.
- Search. Someone was searching for something, and they serendipitously stumbled onto your blog.
- Referral. Someone thought your blog was awesome and told other people about it.
Initially, traffic will come to your site because you tell people about it. You’ll link to it on your career page. You’ll tell candidates, peers and fellow HR pros about it. You’ll share your articles on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels (I’ll get into this more in later articles).
As you build more awesome content, people will start landing on your site from Google searches. If you’ve done a good job setting up your SEO, they’ll find your stuff valuable and keep coming back for more.
But the most powerful way to build traffic is through referrals.
Are you more likely to buy something if the person selling it says it’s great, or if your friend does? Blogs work the same way.
So how do you get people to refer others to your blog?
First, write killer content. The stuff you’re writing about has to be valuable, interesting, and worth telling a friend about.
Next, start building relationships. Connect with people on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (and in real life, too!). Comment on other blogs that you find interesting. Once people become more aware of you and what you do (and assuming you’ve got great content), they’ll start sending people your way.
I’ve seen new bloggers ask people to link to their stuff. Don’t do this! Instead, let them know you like what they do, and ask how you can help them.
(Most comment forms on blogs let you add your own URL. Make sure you do this!)
Remember, it’s about building relationships.
What Now?
Here are a few things you should be doing right now to market your blog:
- Add a link to your blog on your Career Site.
- Tell your employees, candidates and network of external HR pros about the blog.
- Start reading other career-oriented blogs. Leave valuable comments and engage in conversation.
In a few days, I’ll teach you how to measure the success of your blog. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section below.
PS: This article is part of an ongoing series about Employer Branding through Social Media. If you liked it, you may want to check out the rest of the series.
I love the line “First, write killer content.”
That reminds me of an early Steve Martin skit, where he’d give lessons on “How to be a millionaire and not pay any taxes.” He’d rip right through “Step 1, get a million dollars!” and launch, without taking a breath, into step 2.
Writing great content is not easy for most, and people should be prepared to spend time on their work! It takes a lot of practice, more than a little daring, and gobs of discipline!
@Jason – Thanks for stopping by. You bring up a good point. I throw out “write killer content” as if it’s inherently easy. As you note, it’s not.
It takes time. Dedication. Hardwork. I touch on what makes content killer in another article, but for someone just stopping by to the series this time around, it’s probably a point worth expanding.
Thanks again, Jason, and Happy New Year!
Your employees and your customers are very valuable brand ambassodors.
I always try to cooperate with marketing. I have a colleague who even thinks that employer branding is the best Marketing you can do, because when people know about who you are and what you stand for they will like you and be loyal and buy your services and products………
Whow …… is this a dream or ……
You have an enlightened colleague, Alexander!
I will forward the compliment, it comes close to what I mentioned earlier about employee branding. It also has to do with the fact that employer branding starts internally. You show what you are, not what you would like to be, that doesn’t work.
The problem is of course ROI. You know that half of your investments in marketing doesn’t have an effect. The problem is we don’t know which part………
Employee branding is long term and will lead to happy customers because likely if you do it right, your employees will become more aware of what they are part of and something like company pride will grow. Proud people tend to show their pride so from this point of view Employer Branding should be integrated with marketing.
Yesterday I went to a seminar where the discussion was raised EB : HR and/or Marketing responsibility.
Stuff for another interesting blog …..
@Alexader – Any take-aways? Where do you think it belongs: HR, marketing, or both?
For me not really relevant HR, Maketing, Recruitment, PR, the RPO partner… If there is a shared vision at the top and at employee level and everybody understands that you can empower each other by “using” synergy options.
Collaboration, sharing, transparency, authenticity, well you know all those modern terms of the Web 2.0 age. If you can act accordingly you should be able to make some steps …… provided you are able and willing to listen to your target groups.
Alexander, who sets the vision?
The owner, the Board, the entrepreneur, the leader, top management advised by in- and outsiders …….. the one or ones that are giving direction to the organisation. That depends on the phase of development of the organisation.
For me it is about living your brand, that is what you are, so vision ……. It will also emerge from your customer/supplier/employee opinion & satisfaction feedback. If there is a dialogue with the employees, customers and suppliers they will tell what they like and don’t. Likely EB itself is than piece of cake.
The challenge is to translate it into words, images, emotions etc that represent what you are. Specialists can help.
Is this an answere to your question?
@Alexander – Absolutely, and I’m not sure there’s really a definitive answer here.
I think Zappos has a great model. They’re about providing great service. That’s represented in their business model and strategy, but also in their values and how they behave culturally day to day.
They empower their employees and trust them to spread the word about Zappos, because they’re living the culture.
In terms of getting people to your blog and creating good advocacy, I find Twitter to be one of the best ways of doing it. It can create a personable, real time version of your blog, so that others can interact with you, and then go to the blog if they want more information on a particular topic. From an SEO perspective I reckon it has it’s benefits as well ;)
@John – I agree. I started using Twitter really just to get info about my blog out there (I actually thought it was really stupid). It’s now my go-to social media channel. Twitter’s one of those things – you don’t get it until you really use it.
Just checked out your website. Recruitment advertising… cool stuff! It’s like marketing for HR!