The Bright toolkit for building a better brand for your employees
You can’t take feeling good about work for granted, can you?
With a supportive culture and some amazing clients, we’re lucky at Bright. And as some of us start stepping back into the office, Employer Branding Awareness Week seems more extra-relevant this year.
But not just to us.
According to research by Wonderful Workplaces, 94% of candidates consider an employer’s brand when applying for jobs. And 45% of passive job seekers would apply for a job if it was to work for an amazing brand.
So whether it’s attracting new candidates, keeping the ones you have happy or talking the language of your target audience, a healthy brand means better business.
But where do you start?
Taking a deep-dive diagnosis and creating an employee value proposition
According to Mark Riston, Virtual Marketing Professor on the Marketing Today Podcast, you’ve got to diagnose your brand before you think about improving it.
Ritson suggests the ten sources of insight that brand managers should be looking at are:
“You split up brand management into three distinct slices, the first part diagnosis, the next strategy, the final part tactics,” says Ritson.
Undoubtedly, this insight will give you everything you need to ensure your brand position is unique and desirable to customers. But what about your staff?
An EVP is essential for the modern brand — especially as we pivot into more remote ways of working.
“Essentially, it’s a ‘people promise’ where you outline what you uniquely offer as an employer and what you expect to get in return from the people you hire,” says Victoria Heyward, our Employer Brand and Communications Manager at Bright.
An important piece of work, it covers all aspects of the business, says Heyward. “From recruitment and learning, to reward, recognition and culture building, the EVP has a direct role to play in shaping what it’s really like to work for your company,” she said.
But what should it include?
According to Smarp, leaders in employee communications & advocacy, a good EVP includes :
Graphic design company Canva has a great employer value proposition. Along with benefits like meals prepared by in-house chefs, free gym memberships and a relocation budget, they have a flexible workspace and contribute to various sustainability projects — allowing employees to feel good about their work.
Taking stock of your assets — and getting them aligned
Social imagery is an area that often trips brands up. And not just because of the constantly shifting goalposts around sizes and text overlays.
Making some small tweaks to the style of your assets can make a big difference in how much engagement they receive.
- Maintain a consistent palette — use one main colour and a few accent hues to make your images feel distinctly you
- Evoke a feeling with filters — filter consistency can also give your pictures a similar look and feel
Want to learn more about how you can create a cracking design brief for your brand? Check out The Big Bright Podcast below!
Our own Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions Asset Bank & Dash make it easy to optimise your digital assets so that they’re ready to go. Once you’ve uploaded your brand assets into the DAM system, you’ll be able to crop and download preset sizes — handy for the ever-changing rules of social media. Not only that, you’ll find options to help with web and email marketing image formatting as well. Once you’re done, it’s easy to share single assets or curated collections with teams or external partners — great for keeping things consistent.
But images and videos are only part of the puzzle; your words have got to work just as hard, too.
Balancing authenticity and originality in storytelling
But you’ve got to be authentic.
For the planet, consumers and your brand.
According to marketing strategist Kate Richardson, some brands are confusing the need to stand for something genuine with standing for something worthy.
But it’s not just false advertising brands should be aware of.
Consumers bring their own biases with them when they make purchasing decisions — albeit subconsciously.
In a crowded market — and one where your target audiences are being led by a number of unconscious biases — being distinctive is one of the most important things your brand can do.
Now, we’re not saying the brand’s success was down to its cutesy dog logo alone; but in a space full of asymmetric shapes and graphs for brand marks, it certainly makes them memorable.
So, stand out to get noticed — makes sense. But is it possible to create the sort of brand that people actually love?
Create unbreakable bonds with employees and customers
The results were surprising.
Across seven experiments — including placing their hands in an ice chest — those that saw their favoured brand on a laptop during the test reported lower levels of pain.
The authors concluded that favoured brands have become ‘relationship partners’ to participants. But Helen Edwards, columnist at Marketing Week, thinks this explanation is a little reductive. She argues there’s no common thread that creates this ‘brand for me’ sensation.
Because just like any good partnership, one that’s built on trust and loyalty, they’ll need to fall for the real deal for it to last.
The ultimate Bright brand toolkit checklist — a summary
1. If focusing on your Employer Brand, formulate an employee value proposition aka, your ‘people promise’
2. Ensure your digital assets are up to date and aligned with your brand
3. Create your authentic brand story
4. Build an unbreakable bond with your customers
5. And — most importantly — be yourself
Originally published at https://www.builtbybright.com on June 10, 2021.
