Most companies want to invest in their employer brand, as the bottom-line impact speaks for itself. The question a lot of talent acquisition teams are faced with today is how.
To find out, we asked 4,125 leaders in talent acquisition a simple question: what channels or tools have you found to be the most effective in spreading your employer brand? Here are their tabulated responses, in graph form:
As you can see, a company’s website is still its meat-and-potatoes when it comes to spreading its employer brand, but its importance has dwindled over the past two years. Meanwhile, what’s becoming increasingly more important is thriving in the places where prospects are already spending their time: social media platforms and professional networks, most notably LinkedIn.
And while there are many ways to use LinkedIn to improve your employer brand, one way to supercharge it quickly is through Sponsored Content. What are the advantages? Consider the following:
1. Reach people you otherwise wouldn’t have
When we surveyed those 4,125 talent acquisition leaders about what they were looking to achieve when investing in their employer brand, the number one answer (50 percent of all respondents) was “to raise general awareness” of their brand.
In other words, a lot of these companies believe in their employer brand and are building great content showcasing it. The issue is that your company career page and your social media sites are easily discoverable only by people who already know about your brand and have you top of mind.
What about people who have no clue about your business and are not already following you on social media?
The best way to get their attention is through LinkedIn Sponsored Content. Sponsored Content allows you to reach the entire LinkedIn network of over 364 million members.
An example is Lyft, which used Sponsored Content to recruit software engineers:
2. Reach the exact people you want to reach
It’s great to reach a lot of people, but quality matters just as much as quantity. One of the advantages of LinkedIn’s Sponsored Content is that you can target the exact audience you want.
For example, if you want your sponsored content to only be seen by software engineers in Boston, only software engineers in Boston will see it. This ensures your money is spent wisely.
A perfect case study of this was done by Intel:
3. Use analytics to find out what works (and what doesn’t)
The third benefit of Sponsored Content is that it's data-rich. Each piece of content comes with its own dashboard that shows you the post’s impressions (how many people saw it), clicks, interactions, the amount of followers acquired because of it, and the engagement percentage:
Obviously, these analytics help you control cost and show the overall effectiveness of a post. They also let you easily perform A/B testing and give you an understanding of what resonates with your audience, plus what doesn’t.
Final Thought
As our own survey found, industry leaders are increasingly finding LinkedIn to be one of the most effective tools for building their employer brand. That’s caused many to put real effort in perfecting their LinkedIn presence.
LinkedIn Sponsored Content serves as gasoline to these efforts: it showcases your content to people who otherwise wouldn’t see it in a data-rich and targeted way. The end result is more of the right people talking about the brand you’ve worked so hard to build.
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Topics: Employer brand
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