Base your employer brand on a thought leadership strategy
“Thought leadership strategy and employer brand, a match made in heaven!”
Why is thought leadership so important for a modern organisation? Because it's at the very core of social selling and in attracting the best candidates to work with and for us. It's employer branding at it's best! And eventually, it's the foundation of an organisation's success and growth.
Base your employer brand on a thought leadership strategy!
Thought leadership strategy is not just a part of content marketing strategy, although it's also that. Thought leadership strategy and its execution requires you to help your employees become the personal brands they already are, even if they don't consider themselves being brands, or the employee advocates that you want them to be, that they don't necessarily want to become. Remember, best employer brands are built on employee brands!
I'm not talking about influencer marketing here, but a move to a much more strategic approach and overall strategy rather than content marketing with internal influencers. It's about building long-term image strategically as an organization that consists of top minds within our industry and beyond. No campaigns, no external influencers, but internal, long-term commitment to building personal brands for our top specialists. Helping them become the brands they already are, enabling them to reach larger audiences in a more strategic manner.
Start by asking yourself, "If I was a customer, what kind of information would I be looking for? What would add (value) to my knowledge and influence the decision making process?" And there it is, the basics of the content part of your new strategy! Answering this tells you now what kind of information you need to focus on. That's the quick and dirty approach.
Choose your media, where to reach your potential target audience, what are they interested in, how to attract their interest and reaction. You might even want to build “buyer personas” for your target audience.
But the Internet is full of noise. We could produce huge amounts of material that no one finds or is interested in. Seems like half the world has gone crazy on content marketing, creating enormous masses of content, just content.
Put effort on distribution, how and where people find your content! Remember, it's not about quantity, but quality, that builds thought leadership, but even the best of contents is worthless if no one can find it.
Content is always more credible when coming from an employee, a specialist, than via official corporate accounts or the CEO. It needs to be personal and one's own creation, not written by a ghost writer or the comms team. The author needs to stand behind the content and it needs to sound like him/her.
Focus on these 4 things;
Content - visuals and quality of thinking, but also confidence and risk-taking (visionary content). And it's quality over quantity.
Reach - networks or media. Building your own following and media or using existing communities to build your brand?
Consistency - requires time and dedication, quick wins are rare but possible.
Novelty - your content must (often, not always) provide new insights, ideas, provoke readers' thoughts in a way that hopefully makes them react - like, share, comment, follow - and eventually buy your services or consult you when making decisions.
Thought leadership strategy leans heavily on employee advocacy
Thought leadership strategy needs;
Buy-in from top management, as it requires new kind of openness and sharing of content that some may consider business critical. It also takes time, it doesn't happen overnight. And it helps if top management leads by example.
Buy-in from employees, they need to be the one creating the content - with help, support and even training from the marcomms team. Passion and true love for the line of work and the company never hurt thought leadership, it's employee advocacy on steroids!
It requires a certain type of company culture. In an organisation where it's been prohibited to talk about customer cases, to showcase personal expertise, or where communications has been strictly reserved for those at top management or at comms team, it takes time to create a culture of openness, employee advocacy and engagement. Culture is grown, it can't be brought in just like that, ready to roll when we say so.
It requires collaboration within the organisation to make it count. Specialists, our top minds, can't make it alone. Even if they would have the credibility, they often don't know the media for sharing the content, they may not understand the strategy and reasoning (the big picture), they don't have the budget or opportunity to work on content creation. Marcomms don't have the credibility, but they have the understanding of media, and often have budget for it. Sales is driven by numbers, not image, they need instant feedback as in leads and customers, and they don't have budget or understanding of media. Top management isn't credible, they don't have the skills, nor do they understand the media, but they sit on the budget and understand the strategic value of thought leadership. They all need to collaborate to build an efficient thought leadership strategy for years to come and markets to conquer. None of them can do it alone.
And thought leadership strategy feeds on ideas, innovations, novel ways of working, processes and technologies. You can't be a thought leader with ideas that you competitors have recycled year after year. You need to think out of the box and dare to say it out loud.
Last but not least, thought leadership strategy needs to be aligned with the overall business strategy, what do we want to sell, to whom, when, where, what price and what next.
Thought leadership is all about building pull instead of having to push
ITSMA had great metrics to measure the thought leadership impact; Reputation, Relationships, and Revenue. That's all. Easier said than measured, but doable.
Have you noticed that some of the top brands have already started implementing thought leadership strategies? Some of them already do this, but not from the employer branding point of view, but for social selling.
Now, let's take full advantage of it, employees are the true foundation of an organisation's growth and success.
Godspeed to your new path to successful employer branding.