Smart and creative employees are the backbone of your company. Retaining your employees and attracting new talent should always be on the top of your agenda.

Meaningful content is one of the most effective tools you can use to connect with your current and prospective employees. If you haven’t updated your content strategy for a while, this article will guide you through this process.

Here are seven steps you should take to create quality content and boost employee engagement.

Design a strategic plan

The first step is a critical one. You need to define which type of content resonates with your audience to develop an effective content plan. You can start by answering these questions:

Who is my talent persona (e.g. skill set, qualification, role, ambition)?
What interests does my talent persona have?
What sites/apps/platforms do my target persona use the most to get information about my company (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Press)?
What type of content does my audience expect to get from my company that would be make them excited (e.g. work culture, growth metrics, business mission and vision)?
What tone of voice will appeal to my audience the most (e.g. formal, informal, friendly)?

You might need help to get your content strategy in place if you don’t have a dedicated team. A freelance content strategist on TrustMyPaper or Upwork might be a good option to start your employer branding project the right way.

Take into account your employee lifecycle

For effective branding, you need to consider your employee lifecycle. If you focus on one specific goal and one specific stage of the employee lifecycle, you will create more relevant content and boost engagement.

Do you strive to improve talent acquisition, onboarding, retention, or offboarding? Optimize your employer branding content strategy in accordance with your business goals to generate the best outcome.

Don’t focus on facts, focus on stories

Pretty often, companies build their content around facts and digits. And that’s a big mistake. Captions like “We have 30 offices in 10 countries” or “We started our XYZ company in 2000” do not work well. Why? Because they don’t help to build an emotional connection with employees.

If you want to engage your audience, you should leverage storytelling. You should tell stories of your brand, your employees, and your loyal customers. It will help you to grab attention and get people emotionally attached to your brand.

Take a look at this Ford’s post on Instagram. This is just a perfect example of how one can use storytelling to create meaningful employer branding content.

View this post on Instagram

Parts manager, Jim Pippert, has worked in Ford dealerships for 44 years — 30 of them behind the parts counter. He has also taken his Ford passion home and passed it on to his two sons, Jeff and Justin. Together, they’ve enjoyed working on their collection of Ford Mustangs, which include an ‘84 GT and two ‘87s. • • “Being together to keep these muscle cars running strong is something we take a great deal of pride in. My dad knows and respects every single part that goes into these beauties, and he’s taught my brother and I to do the same.” - Jeff Pippert • • Ford inspires pride in all sorts of ways. What makes you proud? • • #BuiltFordProud #Ford #FordMustang #ClassicCars #FordFamily

A post shared by Ford Motor Company (@ford) on May 2, 2019 at 9:16am PDT

Leverage employee-generated content

Your loyal employees create content that relates to your company, and you can use it to your advantage. You can share interesting posts created by your team members across different platforms, for instance, on your company blog and Facebook business account.

Your task is to come up with a branded hashtag and encourage employees to use it. For instance, if the name of your company is Orange, you can choose hashtag #OrangeDreamTeam.

Why is it a good idea to leverage employee-generated posts? Employee-generated content works in the same way as customer-generated content does. It helps to convince the target audience that your company is a trustworthy one. When job seekers see that your employees are proud to work for your company, they get a desire to join your team.

View this post on Instagram

Today is International Flight Attendant Day and so we would like to thank all our dedicated crew members for making it a priority to bring all passengers home safely! 💙 📸 by @runningangelfrouke.nl #KLM #internationalflightattendantday #crew

A post shared by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (@klm) on May 31, 2020 at 8:28am PDT

Use visuals

Do you write remarkable articles and tweets? That’s great! Just don’t forget to add visuals to the texts you create. Use photos, videos, vector images, funny memes, or hilarious GIFs to enhance your message and win the audience’s attention.

If you don’t have design experts as part of your Marketing team, you can design visual content using image editing tools like Canva and Piktochart. Tools like these have an easy to use interface, and it will not take you much time to figure out how they work.

Do you want to get ready-to-use visuals? Feel free to buy images at the photo and video stocks, or use Creative Commons media for free. Unsplah is also a great starting point.

Put quality over quantity

Don’t try to create as many articles and blog posts as possible. Focus on the quality of content rather than its quantity.

Why is it so important? Content of poor quality can bring you more harm than good. Hence, you should share trustworthy content or no content at all.

Make sure that every piece of content you publish online is a high-quality one. Do you use images? Check whether they are high in resolution.

Do you write blog posts? Make sure that they are free of grammar errors and typos. Don’t know how to check texts properly? Use proofreading services like GrabMyEssay, BestEssayEducation, or Grammarly.

Measure results

What should you do once the content is created and published? You need to find out whether this content engages talent. You should check whether your employees like and comment on your social media posts and blog posts.

Take a look at metrics. What results do you see? Are you satisfied with the current level of engagement? If so, keep your content strategy without the changes.

But if you want to get better results, try to analyze and question the current strategy. Which of your posts have gotten the most likes? Which of your posts has brought low engagement? Spot the difference and iterate on your employer branding content strategy accordingly.

Collect feedback

Do you struggle to understand what you do right and what you do wrong? Ask your employees to share their opinion about your current branding content strategy. Also, encourage them to provide you with suggestions of what content to publish.

Be open to new ideas and be ready to accept criticism. Learn a lesson from your mistakes, adjust your content plan, and find your own way to engage your talent.

Wrapping up

You don’t need to be a professional content strategist to build a successful employer branding content strategy. If you have a good idea of what content your talent expects to see, you will face no difficulties in designing a content plan. Be honest with your employees, use storytelling, leverage user-generated content – and you will get the desired results.

About Diana Nadim: Diana is a writer and editor with a Masters degree in marketing. She combines her passion for writing with her interest in research to create thought-provoking content in various fields. Besides working as a contributing writer for SupremeDissertations, Diana also does some editing work at TopEssayWriting. What inspires her most in her writing is traveling and meeting new people. Follow her on Twitter.

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Diana Adjadj

Freelance writer and editor