How campaign design templates unlock creativity, not restrict it
Papirfly
5minutes read
You don’t have to look very far on the Internet to find templates for any number of marketing mediums. Website layouts. Email designs. Business cards. Social media. You name it, you can find a template for it.
The reasons why they are so widespread are fairly obvious:
They can be massive time and effort savers for design teams
They help preserve brand consistency by locking down critical elements
They can be moulded to the ideal dimensions for digital and print materials, from social assets to billboard posters
They make creating perfectly branded designs accessible to anyone, regardless of design skills
Sounds fantastic so far. But, these advantages are frequently contested with this counter-argument:
“By placing firm boundaries on designers and promoting the duplication of the same layouts, templates greatly restrict creativity.”
While this assumption that templates restrict creativity is understandable, when they are used correctly, this is far from accurate. In fact, they can give designers the opportunity to work more creatively and feel more empowered in their role.
Why do many designers despise templates?
As highlighted above, a core issue that designers have with templates is how they limit the possibilities to produce unique, bespoke graphics.
Quite understandably, this “conveyor-belt” style approach to asset creation goes against their passion for producing innovative, one-of-a-kind pieces.
A quick counter to this argument is that competent companies already place these boundaries through their clearly defined brand guidelines. This is critical to maintaining consistency across all communications, a powerful marker of brand quality and essential for building trust among audiences.
With strict guidelines in place in place, designers can only push the boundaries so far in order to preserve their brand’s identity – any further and you can quickly lose recognition and trust among consumers. Good templates should manifest these guidelines, ensuring that anybody using them can’t stray away from the core foundations of your branding.
But, alongside these limitations on creative thinking, designers have further concerns about relying on templates, such as fears that templates will diminish the importance of their roles, making them dispensable if less-skilled workers can create graphics.
Again, this is an understandable concern. However, we would never advocate that templates exist to replace designers. A designer’s discipline extends far beyond just choosing from a predefined list of colours and patterns.
Without the unique insight and understanding that only a skilled designer can provide into any form of visual content, templates can result in a constant flow of bland, uninspiring and cookie-cutter assets.
We recognise that the core role of designers is being the overarching creative forces behind the brand. Rather than be caught up in the minutiae of producing repeat assets and making an endless stream of subtle tweaks, using templates ensures that designers can shift their focus to bespoke projects and creative thinking, while other, less-skilled employees can confidently work on day-to-day asset production.
Do templates actually benefit creativity?
Rather than cut off designers’ flow, there are many reasons why templates go a long way to freeing up designers’ time and preserving their creative energy, while empowering others to play an active role in asset creation.
No more mundane tasks
The use of templates means that those with minimal design skills can take responsibility for the more straightforward, mundane asset creations and tweaks. This removes the burden on your more qualified designers, who could be at risk of burning out or becoming disillusioned by making repeated adjustments or copies of old assets time and again.
More time for creative thinking
By freeing up your designers’ schedules, they will have more time to drive new ideas, research the latest trends and think conceptually, helping you stand out in today’s crowded market.
Not everything you push through your marketing channels necessarily needs to come from a template. While these can notably scale up the amount of content you produce for less time and money, for campaigns that need that extra creative spark or bespoke touch, you need your best designers on the case.
While your wider team uses templates to keep your content ticking over smoothly, you’ll have total confidence that all other collateral is going out perfectly on-brand.
Furthermore, this creative thinking time is likely to also form the basis for future templates, or helpful adjustments to your existing ones, which will improve the quality and attractiveness of your assets for your global audiences.
Conserving energy
It may sound frivolous, but even the prospect of your designers being able to go home on time and maintain more beneficial work-life balances, because templates have freed up their schedule, can greatly enhance their capacity to create and find inspiration for future works.
Designers can find inspiration practically everywhere, from films, television and books, to walking in the countryside. However, they are less likely to find new ideas when sitting behind the same desk, making miniscule amends to previous assets.
Let your templates do their job, so your designers can do theirs better, both inside and outside the workplace.
How to make the most of your templates
With all of these benefits for using templates in mind, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Using templates to replace the role of your designers is a recipe for disaster. This approach will inevitably hamper the uniqueness of your content, as only the insight of an effective designer can craft visuals that really capture people’s attention and illustrate your distinct brand identity the right way.
The solution is to have your design team play an active role in the creation of your templates, so that these receive their seal of approval, before they can be harnessed by other, less-skilled members of your organisation to apply as required.
That’s why a solution like BAM by Papirfly™ offers you more than cookie-cutter templates that can be downloaded or bought online. As well as providing an array of pre-built templates, our powerful platform enables you to structure your own smart templates across all forms of collateral, which can then be harnessed by your wider team to produce high-quality, on-brand results every time.
Create templates for every channel; social media posts, video, posters, brochures, banners, signage. All this and more can be housed within your platform, equipping your teams to produce an infinite amount of perfectly branded assets.
This means total consistency and content production that’s faster and more cost-effective than ever before. The ability to quickly amend or adjust collateral for your global markets and sub-brands, all while your designers have more capacity and less pressure, allowing them to work at their most creative, without burning out.
Empower your team’s creativity with smart templates
When used effectively and with the direct input of your insightful designers, templates can result in massive improvements to the productivity, consistency and ROI of your marketing output.
While your designers might immediately be hesitant about the idea due to the fears that we’ve pinpointed in this article, after using BAM by Papirfly™ these concerns will be replaced with celebrations for greatly reducing their share of mundane, repetitive tasks, and giving them the freedom to do what they do best: conceptualise and create great content.
Easy-to-use software and intelligent templates make creating exceptional assets simple
Provide your input on a wide range of fully bespoke templates
Reduce your dependence on external agencies to produce content that you could be creating in-house
Locked-down elements give you complete confidence that all content produced is consistent with your brand’s identity
Accelerated content creation is just one way that BAM can revolutionise your approach to marketing. Discover the full scope of our platform’s potential – get in touch with our team or arrange your free demo today.
Ditching outdated personas for real-world examples
Papirfly
5minutes read
At the heart of great content marketing is a strong understanding of who your audience is. What do they do? Where do they go? How do they shop? What do they care about? Having solid answers to these questions is a big boost to your attempts to convince customers about your brand.
Customer personas have been a tried-and-tested technique that marketing teams have relied on to find these answers. Yet, even today many of these personas are grounded in factors such as age, gender, location, occupation, etc.
This isn’t to say that demographics don’t hold any weight in forming a content strategy. However it is possible to get too tied to these factors, which can lead to sweeping statements like:
“Millennials really want…”
“People from this town care about…”
“Teachers want to see…”
These generalisations ignore the incredibly diverse personalities that exist within each of these categories. So, for content marketing to really hit home with prospective customers, it is better to actually work with identifiable, real-world personality traits, and build your strategies around their patterns of behaviour.
To help you get started, here we will define seven updated customer personas based on a key characteristic, personality and actions, and how you can influence them with content across their sales journey with your brand.
#1 – The activist
The activist consumer has really emerged in the past couple of decades, as more and more people take a keen interest in the values, actions and stances of today’s brands. Companies can no longer stay neutral on major debates if they want to engage with this customer – and their content must reflect that.
Who are they?
Care about the values and ethics of brands
Long memories for any misgivings
Slow to build trust, but then fiercely loyal
Approach to buying
Examine a brand’s ‘about’ pages
Seek out third-party reviews
Care about how products are made
Your content strategy
Focus on strong value-based pages and resources
Share core value content on social media and other campaigns
Highlight your customers and employees’ experiences
Take a stance on significant news and events
#2 – The bargain hunter
As the name suggests, the bargain hunter’s biggest priority is sniffing out a great deal. Discounts, limited-time offers, competitions – these spur their interest and get them excited above all else.
Who are they?
Prioritise cost, value and ROI over quality
Prone to making impulse purchases
Challenging to build brand loyalty with
Approach to buying
More likely to shop online
Will browse price comparison websites
Drawn to discounts, vouchers, free shipping, etc.
Your content strategy
Track your competitors’ prices
Maintain a flow of special offers to your audience
Encourage sign-ups with promises of bespoke special offers
#3 – The time-sensitive shopper
The world today is more on-demand than ever – every movie and TV show you could ever want on Netflix, next-day delivery from Amazon, instant connections through Tinder. Whether it’s due to having to handle a ton of responsibilities at work and home, or living an active and varied lifestyle, time-sensitive shoppers don’t stay focused on a brand for long… unless you give them a reason…
Who are they?
Their free time is sparse and precious
Have short attention spans
Care about getting what they need when they want it
Approach to buying
Don’t appreciate being sold to
Respond to interactive, short-form content
Less inclined to research all possibilities
Your content strategy
Stick to simple, concise, clear messaging early
Split up content to make it easy to digest
Personalise content to connect with individuals
#4 – The researcher
Unlike the time-sensitive shopper, the researcher is willing to devote plenty of time and effort into finding everything they can about a brand and what it offers. They will search far and wide to reach a solid consensus over which companies they will get behind.
Who are they?
Devote time to comparing brands, products and services
Look at cost, quality, production, brand values, etc.
Conduct research both online and in-store
Approach to buying
Browse online reviews, testimonials, etc.
Appreciate long-form content and want the full details
Buy from brands with depth
Your content strategy
Present in-depth information on product/service pages
Create FAQs, white papers, guides, feature comparisons, etc.
Encourage reviews and feedback from existing customers
Develop a range of in-store branded materials
#5 – The fence-sitter
Indecisive, pensive, non-committal – the fence-sitter is more cautious and doubtful than the other customers found in this list. They take a fair amount of convincing before they will pledge themselves to a brand, but your content can help you overcome that blockade.
Who are they?
Really need to understand a product/service before committing
Will talk to others before making a decision
Cautious when building trust with a brand
Approach to buying
Visit websites multiple times before buying anything
Check through ratings, reviews and other feedback
Can be spurred on by limited-time offers
Your content strategy
Use high-quality video content that emphasises your brand
Develop informative downloads to address any doubts
Lean heavily on social-proof content
#6 – The pioneer
The early-adopters. The trend-setters. There’s nothing a pioneer loves more than getting involved with a product, service or brand before it goes mainstream. They want to know what sets your brand apart from the crowd, and settle for nothing less than special.
Who are they?
Seek out independent, niche brands
Frequently review products and services
Generally wealthier than other consumers
Risk-takers and optimists
Approach to buying
Look for emerging brands on forums or social media
Prioritise the potential of a product over cost and current quality
Care about a brand’s story and journey
Your content strategy
Share news and developments on social media
Produce content audiences can engage with
Highlight your company’s story in videos
Attract user-generated content where possible
#7 – The enthusiast
Say it quietly, but the enthusiast is every brand’s favourite customer. The ones that provide repeat business. Advocate your service. Refer you to their friends. But because they’re already loyal does that mean you can safely ignore them to pursue no business? Absolutely not!
Who are they?
Devoted loyalty towards your brand
Will often share your content on their platforms
Recommend your products/services to friends
Approach to buying
Expect special treatment for their loyalty
Have their ‘go-to’ products and services
Don’t need to learn more about your brand
Your content strategy
Feature their experiences in your marketing
Send them personalised content and offers
Produce community-driven campaigns
Getting content to your customers on brand, every time
Focusing your content strategy on the unique characteristics and personalities of today’s customers is key to forging and maintaining strong relationships with your audience. We hope that this insight into several standout customer types will make a difference in how effective and engaging your content is moving forward.
Of course, while it’s important to vary your content based on consumer characteristics, some things about content production will always remain true. It must be high-quality. It must be consistent. And it must be on-brand.
BAM by Papirfly™ helps you fulfil these core requirements so you can produce an extensive range of content to capture the imaginations of as many of these customer types as possible.
Create an infinite amount of marketing collateral in-house, with minimal training required
Bespoke, intelligent templates ensure that asset creation is simple and there is no risk of going off-brand
Easily adapt campaign materials, text and imagery for your global audiences
Embrace the future of marketing today – discover the full possibilities of BAM by arranging your own personal demo, or get in touch with our team.
8 brand tools every successful customer service team uses
Papirfly
4minutes read
Customers are the bedrock of any business. Large or small. Global or local. Startup or established. Your customers drive revenue and lend credibility to your company’s offerings.
Few would disagree with this statement. So, it is odd that numerous marketing teams tend to overlook the value that their customer service team brings to the table.
There should be no questioning the significance that strong customer service offers to an organisation:
96% of customers consider customer service a key component of their loyalty to a brand
Increasing customer retention by just 5% can lead to profits increasing 25%
72% of customers will share positive experiences with 6 or more people
67% of customers would pay more for better customer service experiences
Investment in customer experience can increase employee engagement by 20%
But, its value doesn’t just extend to helping people and fostering better customer relationships. These teams can bring valuable insight to marketers and companies overall.
In a landscape that is increasingly guided by data, and appears keen to understand customers on a more detailed level than ever before, who better to provide this perception than those directly interacting with customers on a daily basis?
However, to help them acquire this insight, and to enhance their ability to build their brand’s reputation through strong customer support, they need to be properly equipped. Below, we highlight eight crucial brand tools to maximise the benefits your customer service team brings to your business.
1. In-depth knowledge base
Particularly in extensive global organisations, your customer service team can’t be everywhere at once. So, it is vital that customers have a way to serve themselves if they are in need of information. A robust, regularly updated knowledge base should be at the heart of this.
From a range of blog posts, FAQs and other resources on your website, to extensive sales collateral to inform your internal teams, a good knowledge base is a cornerstone of a successful customer service team. With this knowledge base, you are better-placed to:
Keep customers happy and informed
Consistently deliver support when your customers need it
Proactively respond to your customers’ concerns
Limit the amount of time devoted to phone calls, emails and other messages
Build your reputation as an authority within your industry
2. Empathy maps
When it comes to directly engaging with your customers, your customer service team is on the frontline. They have access to first-hand information about what your customers enjoy about your brand, what they don’t like, what they would like to see improved and what their pain points are.
Unfortunately, it is all too easy for the flow of that information to begin and end with a customer service rep. An empathy map can help ensure that the right data is gathered to guide the content your marketing team develops day-to-day.
Through these maps, you gain a categorised, clear layout of your audiences’ thoughts and feelings, including:
What problems they are looking to resolve
What their biggest fears and concerns are
What their goals and ambitions are
What content or support they would like to see from your brand
Where they are engaging with your brand
What they do, see hear, and say on a daily basis
With this knowledge collected by your customer service team and laid out during strategy meetings, your brand is better positioned to address your consumers’ needs and wants through your marketing.
3. Persona profiles
It is also important that your customer service team has a good understanding of your brand’s “ideal consumers”. Without this, they may be left in the dark about how to respond to a customer’s request or issue. Messages will need to be escalated up the chain of command, hindering your efficiency.
Creating persona profiles based on your insight into your preferred audiences – something your customer service team can help you gather – will give these teams a stronger sense of how to handle those who reach out to them.
Of course, every customer is unique, and personalisation is important. But these profiles can give your representatives a starting point to best guide this interaction. This can result in faster, more focused responses to messages, improving your customers’ experiences.
Download the full whitepaper
To explore our complete list of brand tools that help unlock the true potential of your customer service team, click here to get hold of our latest whitepaper.
Amplify the power of your customer service team
Equipping your customer service team with the right tools unlocks their true potential, not only in how they support your audiences, but in how they steer your marketing strategy.
The insight that these professionals offer on how your customers think, feel and act can be invaluable when harnessed properly. We hope that by emphasising these tools above, you too can get more value out of this important strand of your company.
Of course, a comprehensive platform such as BAM by Papirfly™ can help you take a massive step towards fully equipping your customer service teams with the resources they need to best perform their role.
For more information about the full capabilities of BAM and how it can positively influence every aspect of your marketing efforts, get in touch with our team, or book your free demo.
5 quick marketing strategies to keep customers beyond Christmas…
Papirfly
3minutes read
Building brand loyalty is often spoken about as if there’s some kind of magic formula. The truth is, there are hundreds of ways to do it, and no one method can be suitable for everyone. It can take years, months or in some cases just a couple of minutes to build depending on the exact motivations of your individual purchasers.
Luckily, there are some very popular methods that can be tried, tested and tweaked to optimise your success.
#1 Email marketing post-purchase
This is the simplest and arguably most effective way to keep the conversation going. Contacting customers any time past the return period will push your brand front and centre, encourage reviews and feedback, and remind them of what will have hopefully been a pleasant shopping experience. If the prospect had forgotten their purchase, this will give them a friendly reminder while helping to build brand familiarity.
#2 Use their data to personalise their experience and build a relationship
If your website required a customer to sign up and they gave you permission to collect information, you can do some very clever things to help them feel loved. This could include any of the following:
Recommending items similar to what they have purchased
Giving them the opportunity to save items or request to be notified when something is out of stock
Letting them know when sets of items have been purchased together frequently
Tailor promotions and content to them
#3 Provide incentive for a follow-up sale
If someone has committed to spending their hard-earned money with you at Christmas, consider that they may be looking to tighten the purse strings in the new year. This means their thought process for purchasing may be more considered. Give them an incentive to make a repeat purchase, but also keep them excited about the generosity of your brand with an early opportunity to access sale items or discounts. Even just 24 hours before it’s made public will be enough to make some first-time customers feel special and appreciated.
#4 Unlimited delivery
A popular option for large retailers is to offer a whole year of ‘free’ next-day delivery, for a small annual fee. The cost of the whole year is usually comparable to two single delivery costs, which makes it a very attractive deal for customers. This helps to breed loyalty because if a consumer is torn between your brand and another, and they hold what they see as unlimited delivery with your brand, they are more inclined to make the purchase with you.
#5 Memberships
Creating a points system or VIP account option with incentives can make you more attractive than your competitors. It might be that you can cash in your points for money off or rewards, receive a gift or discount on your birthday and get access to VIP sales or promotion earlier than regular customers.
Being reactive in retail
As we outlined earlier, what hooks each customer will differ depending on their motivations and circumstances at the time of marketing to them. There are many different ways to engage customers both digitally and in-store, but the latter can be difficult without any digitisation or data capture.
The more data you have, the more opportunities you have to focus your messaging and tailor your promotions to your audience’s preferences. Beyond this, a strong brand, purpose and marketing strategy to stay front and centre will act as an integral foundation layer to all this additional activity. Over and above this, your team needs the tools to be able to react quickly to trends and opportunities, and shouldn’t be bogged down by limitations such as budget and time.
What are digital assets and how do you manage them?
Papirfly
4minutes read
Digital assets are indispensable valuables. They consume our surroundings more than we probably are aware of. In your private life alone, you have family photos, video recordings, insurance papers, banking papers, and personal papers to name a few. At work, any file you create, capture, copy or consume on your digital devices are considered digital assets. In 2020, this data required 64.2 zettabytes, in 2025 this number is expected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes.
Where is this data stored, and most importantly, how is this data stored? Do you have control of your digital assets, and are you prepared for the data growth?
Every company and every person has some sort of system for their digital assets, but the devil is in the details. How you do this means the world of difference and the impact when something backfires can be devastating.
Digital assets are valuables
Images are a good example of why digital assets are valuables. We constantly take pictures with our phones or cameras because we want to preserve a moment, whether it is of our kids, pets, partner, or a place. But then what? Do you store these images on your iCloud, Google Photos, or do you just leave them on the memory card?
Digital assets are indispensable valuables. They consume our surroundings more than we probably are aware of. In your private life alone, you have family photos, video recordings, insurance papers, banking papers, and personal papers to name a few. At work, any file you create, capture, copy or consume on your digital devices are considered digital assets. In 2020, this data required 64.2 zettabytes, in 2025 this number is expected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes.
Where is this data stored, and most importantly, how is this data stored? Do you have control of your digital assets, and are you prepared for the data growth?
Every company and every person has some sort of system for their digital assets, but the devil is in the details. How you do this means the world of difference and the impact when something backfires can be devastating.
Digital assets are valuables
Images are a good example of why digital assets are valuables. We constantly take pictures with our phones or cameras because we want to preserve a moment, whether it is of our kids, pets, partner, or a place. But then what? Do you store these images on your iCloud, Google Photos, or do you just leave them on the memory card?
Digital assets are indispensable valuables. They consume our surroundings more than we probably are aware of. In your private life alone, you have family photos, video recordings, insurance papers, banking papers, and personal papers to name a few. At work, any file you create, capture, copy or consume on your digital devices are considered digital assets. In 2020, this data required 64.2 zettabytes, in 2025 this number is expected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes.
Where is this data stored, and most importantly, how is this data stored? Do you have control of your digital assets, and are you prepared for the data growth?
Every company and every person has some sort of system for their digital assets, but the devil is in the details. How you do this means the world of difference and the impact when something backfires can be devastating.
Digital assets are valuables
Images are a good example of why digital assets are valuables. We constantly take pictures with our phones or cameras because we want to preserve a moment, whether it is of our kids, pets, partner, or a place. But then what? Do you store these images on your iCloud, Google Photos, or do you just leave them on the memory card?
Employer branding – how important is your employer brand?
Papirfly
22minutes read
In any organisation, the skills and dedication of the workforce is the lifeforce powering its future. You want to attract the best possible talent to your company, and retain them for the long term to bring continued success to your business.
Employer branding is critical to achieving this objective. How effectively you market the values that underpin your organisation, emphasise the unique benefits of working for your company, and demonstrate a strong, defined culture will have a powerful influence on your ability to capture the imagination of those at the top of the talent pool.
This guide is designed to help you unlock the true potential of your employer brand in 2021 and beyond. Settle in and discover everything you need to know in today’s landscape.
What is employer brand?
Employer branding at its most basic is the way a company promotes itself as a place to work. It comes from the external reputation the company has as a business and the way its employees view it. Having an effective employer brand in place can lead to benefits including:
Reduced turnover of staff
Attraction of high-quality talent
Help in retaining valued employees
Less money spent on hiring new staff
Engaged employees
In the modern world of business, employer branding and recruitment have become entwined, creating strategies that are as much Human Resources department initiatives as they are marketing.
Employer branding and employee branding are different too. Employee branding is really a focus on how the employees act in accordance with the values of a company, and how the organisation promotes this.
Employer branding and corporate branding differ in that the latter focuses on a value proposition to customers, defining what your organisation offers to the marketplace.
Some employer branding statistics
When you’re successful in employer branding, the numbers really stack up. These are just some of the statistics reported in the employer branding space:
43% decrease in hiring costs
67% of employees would accept a lower wage if a company has positive reviews online
69% of employees are likely to apply if the company actively manages its brand
84% of employees consider leaving their current job if another company has a better reputation
88% of millennials believe that being in the right culture is important
72% of global recruiting leaders believe that employer brand has a significant impact on hiring
79% of jobseekers are likely to use social media in their job search
A good employer brand leads to 50% more qualified candidates
Staff have serious expectations of what they want from a company. And one of the very bottom line commercial benefits of employer branding is that staff turnover can be reduced by 28%.
High turnover is demoralising for other employees and costly for a business. Taking into account recruitment hiring fees, it can cost an SME £5,500 to replace a member of staff on a national average salary wage.
Stats revealed by Staffbase below show just how costly employee turnover can be for corporates:
While a company may consider its staff as its greatest asset, so many organisations still don’t employ effective processes when it comes to hiring staff. And retaining staff once on board, is often something that falls by the wayside. Even companies who do recognise the importance of retention, sometimes struggle to dedicate the time to implement change.
In an increasingly competitive market, hiring and retaining talent is tough, but attracting the right people to your positions can be pretty much impossible without a powerful employer brand.
Messaging, creative and distribution of campaigns need to be targeted and carefully considered. That’s only made possible with employer brand initiatives, driven by the employer branding teams.
…For hiring and retention
Your business should make employees feel proud to work there. Company culture is of course important for most people, but particularly for those from generation Y, who are more likely to read reviews and use social media to determine if they are a good fit for your brand.
Having an effective employer branding plan really helps retain employees and recruit new ones. People are the core of any business, so you will want to find the best. Having a popular brand makes it easier and faster to hire good staff.
This is because with good employer branding the Human Resources team will spend less time trying to find quality candidates. Talented people will want to work for your company and be drawn to it for all the right reasons. Hiring time can be as much as two times quicker with a strong employer brand. Generally, the hiring process will differ depending on the candidate’s circumstances such as how much notice period they need to give, but this top-line process from Google shows how an average application might unfold.
…For more engaged employees
When employees are happy and engaged with the brand they work for, they’re more likely to evangelise about these positive experiences. They become ambassadors and you’ll likely see more applications as a result of direct referrals.
…For reducing costs
There are two ways of looking at cost reductions in relation to great employer branding:
Firstly, if you have a good reputation a lot of the hard work in recruiting the best people is already done for you. Staff are looking for good companies with positive reviews and experiences. Applicants will seek out good companies to work for, and will see your brand as a good place to work.
Money is saved as hiring is quicker and talent is placed in the business sooner. It can be spent strategically instead of on recruitment costs.
Secondly, having a lower staff turnover reaps significant savings to the overall recruitment budget.
Cost per head goes down and potential staff are willing to accept a lower salary if the company had very positive reviews online. This is because the value of a good environment is worth more than a higher salary in the wrong environment.
How has the global pandemic reshaped employer branding?
The ground-shaking consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic turned the marketing landscape on its head several times over, and employer branding was not immune to its effects. While the pandemic itself will eventually subside, its ramifications will live on for significantly longer.
In times of crisis such as what many in the world experienced in 2020, or the uncertainty with which we entered 2021, employer brand teams will need to work harder to meet the expectations of available talent and existing employees.
Here’s a breakdown of what changed for employer branding since the start of the 2020s – and how you can adjust to meet this new landscape.
The response to COVID-19
Many organisations were hit hard by the global pandemic. The hit to the economy and restrictions to certain industries, namely retail, leisure and travel, resulted in many redundancies and cost-cutting measures.
Unfortunately, no matter how unavoidable these were in the circumstances, a brand’s response to COVID-19 will live long in the memory for many past and prospective employees.
75% of prospective employees consider a brand’s reputation before deciding to make an application (CareerArc)
Brands that demonstrated a desire to put people over profits during the hardest months of this pandemic will have strengthened their reputation among today’s talent. Even if they were forced to proceed with mass lay-offs, companies that handled it with compassion, like Airbnb, came away with credit for when the world returns to some semblance of “normal”.
Conversely, those brands that failed to convey this will need to spend the coming months and years rebuilding their image.
COVID-19 left employer brand teams with a valuable lesson – it’s not enough to say you care about staff, but this must be reinforced when times are tough. It will pay dividends for employer brand managers to explore the best and worst brand responses to this crisis to inform how they approach circumstances like this in future.
Values matter more than ever
The fallout from COVID-19 has put a magnifying glass on company values like never before. The worst company responses to the pandemic have made talent particularly skeptical of the values that an employer brand emphasises. To combat this, employer brand teams should go to greater lengths to demonstrate these values in action across their content.
Promote the ways you have prioritised the wellbeing of your employees throughout this challenging period, and harness employee stories of how they’ve appreciated your support in these strange times.
Any authentic stories of this nature will hit home with prospective employees in a way they never have before, helping your company stand out as a destination that cares about its team.
Global talent wants more from employers in 2021
Newly-hired remote workers want their onboarding process to be as robust and reassuring as it would be for ‘traditional hires’
Employees want to know their company has clearly defined remote and hybrid working models
Talent wants to see companies pushing their diversity and inclusion efforts further than ever, especially following the events of 2020
The need for clear communication
The excessive amounts of misinformation and hearsay about the global pandemic have made it more important for employer brands to deliver clarity and consistency to both existing employees and available talent.
In order to meet people’s need for clarity in times of substantial uncertainty, employer brand managers should:
Facilitate regular meetings/video conferencing calls with teams to communicate important information and check on employees’ wellbeing
House up-to-date company policies and guidelines in a shared, accessible space
Share positive events and stories where possible to build morale
Approach any bad news earnestly and empathetically
Investigate straightforward chat/workflow management systems that will keep remote employees connected
Up to a third of employees have contemplated leaving their job due to poor communication from management (Dynamic Signal)
Remote recruitment and onboarding
The greater emphasis on remote working inspired by the pandemic will have a long-term impact on how recruitment and onboarding will take place. Video interviews are now commonplace. Employees are hired and start work without ever having stepped inside an office.
While traditional, face-to-face interviews will never disappear entirely, employer brand teams should work to better facilitate these evolutions in order to deliver the biggest benefits to new recruits and your overall organisation.
Consider including someone from your branding team in video interviews to give recruits a strong picture of your company culture that they can’t experience in person
Account for technical issues on either side that might affect the interview
Make clear company literature available for newly-recruited employees to inform their understanding of your operations
Assign recruits with a remote “buddy” to ease their integration into your team and handle any initial problems they may be facing
Immediately engage them with your IT team to demonstrate anything they need to know to work effectively from home
Include them in team social events and gatherings so they don’t feel distanced from the brand following their introduction to your team
Remote working is not the only recruitment-based challenge that employer brand teams will need to confront and conquer this year:
Harness data for continuous improvement
Employer brand teams should be empowered to track the response and engagement to the content they promote, and use this data to inform agile adjustments over time and to guide future campaigns based on what resonates most with their audiences.
Restructure company material for the new reality
With a marked shift towards recruitment materials that prioritise empathetic, authentic storytelling over lists of perks, now is the time for employer brand professionals to reassess their content and determine the right story to tell prospective recruits in the current climate.
Remove barriers to internal recruitment
Internal mobility gained a lot of momentum in 2020, and employer brand managers in 2021 should work harder to emphasise this possibility within their teams. Consider what obstacles must be eliminated to educate talent on their potential to switch roles within the same company.
Supporting company culture
Finally, it’s important to recognise the impact of the pandemic on company culture. The transition to remote working across numerous organisations has rendered traditional office hotspots for socialising and creature comforts unavailable for the time being.
But, that doesn’t mean that company culture can be put on pause until COVID-19 is behind us. For many in the modern landscape, a strong, welcoming culture trumps salary and other perks in attracting them to work for an organisation:
With this in mind, the onus is on employer brand experts to rise to the occasion and find ways to maintain (and even strengthen) company culture for the remote-working era.
Document your company’s values clearly and make them accessible to all
Ensure consistency across all communications to make your values and identity inherent to everyone
Showcase the history and future of your company to help employees find their identity within your company
Harness your video conferencing technology for company social events like gaming, movies or friendly get-togethers
The importance of employer branding to an organisation
Two in five organisations say that hiring is becoming tougher. Businesses are having to become more flexible in finding the right candidate.
With a powerful employer brand strategy, you’re looking to become an employer of choice. By creating a strong, positive reputation you’ll stop talented employees from voting with their feet.
Potential candidates will often look to an employer of choice before all others. Positioning yourself in this way starts with the following:
Creating a positive candidate selection process
Having a focus on career growth opportunities
Putting the company’s values at the heart of everything
Reviewing your pay scales and benefits
You might also like to consider these eight values when positioning yourself as an employer of choice. They’re part of what may help attract a person in the first place:
Flexible placement – this is where an employee has opportunities to work in a variety of roles and settings within the organisation, where they have an interest in expanding their understanding. Employers should encourage staff to work in a variety of roles too, to give them a better view of the overall business.
A customer focus – business should be customer-centric and understand that for the employee the customer comes first. Managers should give staff the tools needed to achieve this, and support the idea that the employee serves the customer’s needs first, before those of the manager. For example, a customer service employee would want to satisfy a customer’s complaint, before serving a manager’s needs. This would require the entire organisation to have a customer-centric mentality.
Performance focus – employers should use performance and benefit-based rewards to support staff development and keep them motivated. This might include additional days off or performance-related pay bonuses.
Project-based work – where possible, employees should have work structured around internal projects rather than organisational functions. For example, this might see employees in a marketing department working collaboratively on a new project from the start, rather than being focussed only on their singular role within that project at the time it’s ready to go to market.
Valuable work – work needs to be meaningful for staff. If tasks become menial or meaningless, it can cause them to become disengaged.
Commitment is important – staff should be committed to the outcomes of the organisation, while employers should be committed to helping staff do their jobs to the best of their abilities.
Ongoing learning and development – the company should encourage staff to learn and develop within the organisation. Whether that’s a certified CPD course or discovering the way another area of the business works – professional development can be invaluable to employees. A typical process for keeping employees at their best can be found below, but will of course vary from business to business:
Share information – employers should help staff by giving them access to a wide range of company data. In return staff should be willing to digest this information and show initiative to help move things forward, address any issues and drive productivity.
Creating and maintaining these processes are part of a culture change that needs to be supported in the long term by the HR staff. Building this relationship is critical when it comes to an effective employer brand strategy.
Whether it’s holiday allowance, perks or salary, great talent demands great benefits. But they also want a culture they can identify with.
So, in this context employer branding strategy becomes a combination of economic benefits, functional rewards and psychological attributes that make employees connect with your company on an emotional level too.
If you can understand these benefits and what they mean to staff, you can create an attractive benefits package, which helps create a stronger employer brand.
By investing in your employer branding tactics, you can engage better with prospective and current employees whose values fit yours. It’s this that will make your brand stand out to the right people.
Always begin with understanding who you are trying to reach, and what they want.
To be successful, and as with any form of marketing, you need a good employer branding strategy to help create and promote your campaigns.
Audit your brand’s perception
How does the world see you? What do your employees really think about working for your company? Unless you’re fully engaged in your internal employer branding you probably won’t understand how employees genuinely feel about working in the organisation. And working in hectic global organisations can mean these get forgotten, albeit unintentionally.
There’s a host of places to look. Check employment review sites – did you get five stars as an employer? Staff often post on social media too. Are they proud of their work or are they critical? Do they say nothing? Look for the underlying message. Other options for feedback include internal surveys or using an agency to monitor your reputation.
Whichever method you choose should uncover where staff are happy or where changes can be made.
Also check for brand consistency. Do you convey the right message at all times? Do your visuals and tone match that message?
It’s important to have a realistic understanding of how you are perceived. Then you can begin to address the issues with your employer brand.
Decide what makes your company unique
Once you know what makes your company unique you can create your story. Look at your company’s mission statement, its values, its social responsibility and culture. Look at what makes your company stand out. Is it the best? Is it the fastest? What do you stand for? Do you have a social responsibility stance?
From here you can create your brand story for prospective employees. By having a brand story you’ll be helping candidates to match their personal values to those of your organisation and your employer brand marketing. A story will also help provide clarity for existing staff too, and drive better employer branding internally and externally.
Create an EVP – an employee value proposition
This is a mission statement or marketing promise to employees. It’s important that it’s truthful, and that you intend to stick to it.
And it’s important that it creates a sense of passion for the business and working there, as well as relaying how many days’ holiday you get by joining. It might include any positives about corporate social responsibility, or how valuable staff are at your organisation.
It can also be shared with recruiters. It’s designed for everyone who interacts with your employer brand.
The employee should be at the centre of your EVP and ideally your proposition should have been well received within your organisation. Think about all the things that are important to staff. These might include:
Professional development
Workplace culture
Additional benefits such as healthcare
Flexitime
Quality of work
Bonuses
Office location
Perks such as free fruit, gym memberships and social outings
Company values
Work-life balance
People want to feel their work is valued and meaningful, and that the company culture is the right fit for them. Creating an Employee Value Proposition cements this for the entire organisation. It’s a chance to showcase your positive impact as a brand.
Offer career development and learning opportunities
What’s the reason most people leave their jobs? Its staff feeling bored and wanting a new challenge is at the top of the list.
By offering learning opportunities to staff you’re showing a commitment to the employee, and gaining a staff with an improved skill set.
By making their roles challenging will help stave off the risk of staff feeling like they’re stuck in a rut. You should find they’ll be less likely to move on, or in reality won’t move on so quickly as they might have otherwise.
Developing staff skills is an easy solution to the age-old problem of workplace boredom. Perhaps it’s strange then that still employees cite lack of challenges as the primary reason to leave, and organisations aren’t responding.
Employer branding begins at home
Current employees will be your best advocates, provided they’re happy. Candidates frequently use testimonials from current employees in the research as to whether to join a company or not.
Use testimonials on your website or encourage employees to leave reviews on sites where staff talk about where they work. Recruitment company Glassdoor is one of the most widely used in terms of encouraging testimonials.
Encourage staff to use social media to post about fun events that have taken place in the company. Staff posting about these things, whether corporate team building or a night out, will show your company as an exciting place to be and a vibrant place to work. If someone likes it enough to post about it in their spare time it shows you to be an employer that promotes a happy workplace.
This is important. Test and refine – success is only measured against goals or targets. Doing all the above is imperative but measuring the effectiveness of your employer branding marketing is the only way to know if it’s working. The list below should help with how to measure employer branding in your business.
Useful employer branding metrics
Quality of hire
It’s hard to measure, but the quality of hire defines the value a new employee brings to the company by performing and improving tasks and helping others. It is one of the most important metrics if you can get the data.
The value or performance of an employee generally drops when dissatisfaction kicks in so it’s a good indicator of the effectiveness of your employer brand. Unhappy employees are less productive and will not stay with you for long.
Job offer acceptance rate
Keep track of how many applicants reject your job offers and ask for feedback on why you’re not their employer of choice. Also, try to find out which company they have chosen instead and note at what stage of the process they dropped out.
Employee referral rate
Employees recommending your organisation to their family, friends and network as a great place to work means they like your employer brand. Employee referrals are a great source of talent. So if you don’t have a referral programme in place it’s probably time to start one.
Employee retention rate
There is no such thing as a static workforce. Employees will leave. However, the lower your voluntary attrition rate, the better because happy employees will want to stay and keep working for you. It also reduces the amount of confusion and disruption to daily projects and delivery.
It’s a powerful indicator of a strong employer brand and the savings in having a reduced staff turnover are great. Be sure to conduct exit interviews, as you can get valuable feedback.
Giveaway/takeaway ratio
This measures how many of your applicants come from direct competitors and how many of your current employees leave to join the competition. It’s a good direct comparison of employer brands.
Hiring manager satisfaction
Companies often overlook the hiring managers, but their feedback is valuable in determining the strength of your employer brand and the candidates it attracts. Are these managers satisfied with the number and quality of applicants, their fit with role expectations and company culture?
Number of open applications
Open applications are those received for no specific job opening but more to express interest in the organisation. Candidates are applying to you as a company because they feel there is a good cultural fit. If you’ve got a high number of open applications, it’s a good indicator of a strong employer brand.
For many prospective employees, the first engagement with a company’s culture is often their website. An attractive and engaging website remains a powerful tool in an employer’s arsenal when it comes to attracting new talent.
Modern progressive companies use their site to set themselves apart, fostering a positive, welcoming employer brand through their inclusive approach, open engagement and simplicity in navigation and application. They demonstrate care for their employees, a pride in their image and cultivating a desire in candidates that this is a company worth working for.
The careers hub
Beyond simple job ads and application procedures, a careers hub offers space and scope to introduce the candidate to additional content that supports the positive employer brand message. Think testimonials, links to your employee value proposition and company values. These should all make a good case as to why candidates should come and work for your organisation.
Staff contributed blogs
Just as happy staff are your greatest advocates; staff blogs can offer a glimpse of the company culture too. Having employees share positive stories is often directed towards social media. But populating staff-led content on your website shouldn’t be overlooked.
For example, look at the following themes:
Contributions on industry issues – shows that you trust your employees’ levels of expertise and value their opinions enough to publish them under the corporate banner.
Contributions around ‘out of work’ topics – employee biographies, stories of fundraising or personal achievements foster an inclusive culture. The organisation cares about the person beyond their job.
Prospective employees are immediately being offered an environment of inclusivity, engaging them in the culture of the organisation even before they’ve started their application process.
Brand-promoting content
It’s worth remembering that your website offers you complete control when it comes to building a positive employer brand. Again, this can be achieved by incorporating inclusivity into the content used on the site, as well as creative use of video and new media technology.
It’s a chance to blend the corporate nature of the business with the personal side. On the one hand, you have space to deliver video presentations that take candidates on the journey from application to successful career. While ‘off-setting’ this with supporting content from throughout the company, creating the rounded view that everyone has bought into the company philosophy.
Having campaigns that are country-specific isn’t just about having the copy in the correct language. There is culturally appropriate imagery, legal details, contact information, colour palettes, logo considerations and a whole host of factors to think about. Trying to make one campaign apply to multiple countries by tweaking it slightly won’t land well with prospective and existing employees.
If you don’t have a tool like BAM by Papirfly™ in place where all of this is made easy, you should consider involving team members that are based in the country you’re promoting in. Ultimately you will need to make sure your employer brand is consistent but the insight will need to come from someone that truly understands the market.
Employer branding online goes beyond just posting company updates and recruitment drives on LinkedIn. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Quora and Pinterest can all be excellent places to represent your employer brand.
But it is easy to get social media wrong. When using your employer branding through social media remember it’s a conversation, not a soapbox. Your first step should be to understand the conversation people are already having about your company. Then join in.
Here are some tools that can help you find out what people are already saying about your company:
Social Mention – These tools look at what people have been saying about you on social media and provides useful data such as the number of comments which are generally positive compared to those which are negative.
Google Alerts – The free Google Alerts service is a great way to find out what is being said about your company and have it delivered straight to your inbox.
Sites like Reddit and Quora can also be great for discovering what employees want from an employer in general. Here people are more than happy to express opinions about their experiences in detail.
Your communication should be friendly and open while still maintaining a sense of professionalism. Having your employees contribute to your organisation’s Facebook fan page is another great way to create content and show a human face for your company.
LinkedIn groups and company pages are another good way to develop your employee brand. Potential employees who follow your company page will receive updates into their news feed. This is a good way to share videos, articles and other content which helps people understand what your company is about. Pinterest is less used than the other major social networks but is perfect for showing the fun and creative side of your business.
Candidates from this group want idea sharing and innovation. Remember the co-founder of Google, Larry Page, is a Gen X, so don’t think digital is lost on this generation of employees. They’ve seen how digital has changed the working world.
They’ll visit your website and they’re sometimes on social media too. They’re looking for work-life balance and forward-thinking organisations, so ensure your messaging really reflects this where you offer it. Remember to tailor your recruitment campaigns depending on your audience’s needs. While you can’t generalise every person in a generation, you can use guides to steer your strategy, such as the one below:
A focus on employer branding reflects a change in the hiring market. Employees want to work for companies that have an excellent reputation, for example where a company has a particular corporate social responsibility in place.
Graduates are becoming more discerning when choosing a company to work for.
This means there’s an opportunity for a new approach for HR departments. Maintaining brand reputation becomes more of a consideration when building HR policies, because it has important implications for how HR departments recruit and retain staff.
The HR function becomes an extension of a brand achieving dominance in the market. They can get more access to, for example, marketing or other areas where traditionally they might have struggled to be an influence.
For HR practitioners, the focus on employer and employee branding is all part of an overall goal of getting existing employees and potential employees to identify with the brand. It’s not a ‘facing out’ process. It’s facing both in and out.
This Reputation Management Study from global recruiters MRINetwork, shows 35% of job candidates think that a strong employer brand is important and a further 34% regard it as ‘very important’. Employees want to see a strong, definable identity – and if it is not there, they will likely look elsewhere.
In tech, the skills gap is huge. Talent shortages are a global phenomenon – affecting sectors as diverse as construction through to healthcare. So, when it comes to talent, it’s most definitely a seller’s market.
And resource management is becoming more difficult. One estimate suggests that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 have not yet been invented.
It’s becoming increasingly hard to predict precisely what type of roles you will need to fill in a few years’ time – and you may need to redeploy or recruit staff into new roles at short notice. If you have already built up a definite employer brand identity, you have a head start in attracting the right people into those new positions.
Trends to consider
Authenticity and employee authorship
Whether candidates are thinking of joining a company or mulling over whether it’s time to move on, people want to hear what real people have to say. And your employees are your most valuable asset.
Consider snippets of info that showcase the working environment, updates on projects they are involved with, individual career progression updates, fly on the wall videos, news relating to internal redeployments. Collectively, they provide an incredibly compelling and authentic picture.
Companies need to get creative – but stay consistent
How do you make sure that your central brand message stays consistent? If companies are doing more campaigns and content types this year, they will also need to look very carefully at ways to overcome this challenge.
For this, you need a clear set of rules, governing everything from what you can and cannot say in individual Tweets – right through to how and where your logo and straplines should appear.
The continued rise of VR
Virtual Reality makes it possible for new candidates to dive right into the workplace environment and to help employees get to grips with an organisation’s unique culture.
If you are considering making immersive digital experiences part of your branding strategy this year, just make sure that these experiences are authentic.
Doing more with less
Faced with the pressure of reduced budgets the focus is on doing more with less. For instance, is it possible to reduce your agency spend and still produce effective employer branding initiatives?
That’s why this is the year to equip your people with employer branding solutions that enable them to produce amazing assets – even without specialist knowledge.
You can understand why employer branding initiatives are important in an organisation. If a company’s biggest asset truly is the staff, then the quality of the staff is the same as the quality of the business itself. And therefore, investment should be put into getting the best.
But it’s not just about employer branding and talent acquisition, it’s about retaining that talent too.
Your culture is fast becoming the main reason candidates take on a role. So make sure your values are clear and communicated in everything you do.
Get feedback from both successful and unsuccessful candidates and ensure that your selection process is engaging. Career development and growth opportunities matter to employees. Review your pay and benefits where possible.
In summary
Involve, not just marketing, but HR, the CEO and find brand champions within the organisation. The combined efforts of all involved will reap benefits.
As an organisation you’ll find the speed of recruiting is increased, costs are decreased and staff churn is reduced.
And measure what you do to track its success. Even the smallest piece of data can lead to an improvement.
Employer brand building. If it’s not your present, it needs to be your future.
Marketers are used to adapting to new technology and speedy marketing trends – It’s comes with the job. Nevertheless, that does not mean that it’s easy. On the contrary, the fast changes surrounding the Martech development forces us to create and publish more. If it was one format and multiple channels we wouldn’t have to stress. But the reality is different.
Banner adverting is one of many tasks’ marketers need to take into consideration. Although this type of advertising has not been for everyone, we are becoming increasingly digitalized and who’s to say what the future holds? Will print still have a place in the future of advertising?
Create banners ads that stand out and avoid blockers
Design smart, elegant and target relevant banner ads
You need to avoid ad blockers. And from the looks of it, the way forward is beautiful and relevant designs. Another important element in digital ads is personalization. This is not a new concept in consumers vs. sellers. Think about the times you go to the store and personnel asks if you need help. They do so to provide you with personal assistance based on your needs. Personal display ads have the same objective; to provide you with personal assistance. Zalando is a great example on how they try to connect with people on a more human level.
The question is, do you have the skills and insight to do this on your own, or do you need expert help?
With a banner ad creator tool, you don’t need to be a skilled UX designer or have any programmatic knowledge. Because a resourceful banner ad creator will do the job for you.
Now, it’s recommended to use a designer for the actual design and layout. Once that’s in place, you’ll create ad templates based on the design. After that, anyone can design beautiful and unique display ads with a few simple steps. It doesn’t matter what format, platform, or channel you need to create banner ads for. This is all handled by the banner ad creator.
And when changes are due, you’ll be able to update your ads in real-time without worrying about different formats, asset optimization or hiring help from a skilled designer. You are completely self-serviced.
Benefits of a banner ad creator
You’ll be in control of your ads in any channel or platform from one single place.
Agency costs are reduced as you can solve changes on your own.
Marketing efficiency will increase as you will have one place for maintenance, updates, and publishing.
Brand consistency is secured. One single source of truth ensures your ads look the same everywhere.
One platform, multiple outputs. Designing banner ads is time-consuming because of all the different formats. With an ad creator this issue is eliminated.
Personalization and audience relevancy is neatly handled by the tool.
Avoid wasting ad money. The beauty of digital ads is the ability to see your performance in real-time and optimize when necessary.
There are plenty of free ad creators or platform specific tools (Google Ads, LinkedIn, Instagram ++) available and it’s easy to think that this will be good enough. However, there are some downsides you need to be aware of:
Is your brand image respected? Free tools usually don’t offer customization which makes it hard to design display ads that are on-brand. Fonts, buttons, logo placement, colors and more is based on fixed standards. Creating that unique and beautiful look becomes impossible.
Are you able to optimize your brand assets for all ad formats? Display ads are not “one size fits all”. When creating ads, you have to optimize each format individually to secure optimized designs. Controlling this with free tools are difficult.
Can you publish directly from the ad tool? If you use Google Ads, the ads you create will only apply to Google and its network. If you use LinkedIn, your ads will only be published in LinkedIn and so on. This is tedious and time-consuming. And don’t even get us started on the maintenance…
Can you change the ads in real-time? Ad relevancy is important, and changes are bound to happen. How do you secure ad relevancy if you have created your tools in a free creator, or used platform specific tools?
If you’re still hesitant if you need to invest time and resources in banner advertising, you’re probably not alone. There are still many companies that are serving a more traditional audience and print isn’t dead just yet. Regardless, Millennials are turning 40 and Generation Z is about to start their working life. Will they use printed media? Or should you consider investing in technology that keeps your brand visible and valid for the next generation as well?
A brand is your company’s most valuable asset, it’s the asset that attracts attention and when done correctly, it’s what establishes loyalty and engagement. When you master your brand, your business will grow.
Branding would be easy if there was no competition, but of course unrealistic. Most brands and companies must work hard to get their markets attention, securing a growing customer base and loyal customers. So, what are the factors that will give your brand the outstanding edge? Logo colours? Images? Tone-of-voice? Or your choice of marketing channels?
What’s unique about your brand, why should the consumers choose your brand over your competitor? How do you make sure your brand stands out from the crowd?
There is no simple answer to this, it’s a bit more complex. Before you can build a stunning brand that stands out, you need to know how to communicate your brand, you need to know your audience and you need to know your competition. Let’s take it step by step.
1. Know your competition
One part of brand building is to separate your brand from your competitors. To do that you need to know who you are up against. Who are your competitors, what are their unique selling points and advantages? What marketing channels and to whom do they reach out?
Without customers you can’t succeed. So, you need to attract them. How? First of all, you need to understand their needs and their buyer journey. Who is your target audience and how do you communicate with them? What channels do they engage with and what are their buying triggers? Why is your brand relevant to them?
Just like a competitor analysis, a customer analysis is just as important. There’s simply no point in communicating your brand before you know what language to speak.
The key here is to recognize the distinctiveness of your brand, but of course it needs to be appealing for your audience as well. Ask yourself what will make the audience choose our brand over your competitors? Spend some time on this one. It will set the grounds for your next steps in building a brand identity that stands out.
Before you start shaping your brand’s identity, investigate market trends that will impact your choices. For example, authenticity is a fairly new concept pushed forward by Millenials, is this also something you have to deliver upon? Trust is another important factor. In other words, you can’t get away with b…shit. Your brand needs to be authentic, reliable, and transparent if you’re going to have any chance of getting noticed.
For many marketers this is the fun part. This is the creative part where your brand comes to life. But let’s not forget that your brand will be your company’s most valuable asset, so as fun as it may be, this is also a crucial step in creating a stunning brand. As you are shaping the life of your brand, you’re also shaping how you want your customers to perceive you. Now thinking back on your audience, it’s a good idea to ensure that the way you want to be perceived lines up with what your audience cares about. If you don’t, you will be shooting blanks.
When shaping your brand’s identity, test different variations of your brand. Dare to be different and evaluate reactions and perceptions. Use focus groups for an external audit, but don’t forget your company and colleagues. Sales and customer service also know your target audience, and you can get valuable insight that could impact how you should shape the identity of your brand.
Elements you need to include in your brand identity are:
Logo: This is your brand’s ID – your fingerprint and passport. Your logo represents your company, your offerings, your employees and more.
Tagline: The short and memorable description that communicates your brand message. This is the element that alongside your brand name, needs to tell your audience in a few words, what you are offering.
Colour palette: The power and symbolism of colours is complex. You don’t have to be a colour expert, as luckily you can find information online for this. Nevertheless, do some research to define a colour palette that fits with how you want your brand to be perceived. Never forget that colour symbolism can be very different, and can carry different weight in different countries. And so if your brand intends to have a very wide international profile, you should take this into consideration.
Typography: Just like colours, fonts also have a significant purpose when shaping your brand’s identity. Make sure you choose the font that along with your colour palette shapes your intended brand identity.
Brand assets: Illustrations, icons and imagery are visuals that really count when it comes to your brand’s identity. This is where your designers have to create that edge that differentiates your visual brand from the competitors.
Tone of voice: How do you want to communicate with your target audience? This can’t be random. You need to carefully choose your voice based on your target audience and how you want to be perceived.
When the above is defined and neatly put together, you have your brand’s identity.
Make your brand stand out
The expression “one does not exclude the other” complies with brand building. It’s a process and it takes time. Most importantly, you can’t ever take your eye off the ball. Your audience will change, the market trends will change, and you need to make sure your brand changes with them.
To make your brand stand out, you need to pay attention and preferably stay in front of your competitors 24/7. Yeap, managing a brand is hard work, luckily there are tools available that can help ease your brand management burdens significantly.
What good does any of it do, if all of the above ends up in a drawer, never to be looked at again? If no one knows how to communicate your brand or apply your brand correctly, the harder it will be to manage your brand building with ease.
Remember that branding is not a job for marketing alone, you need everyone in your company to move in the same direction if you’re going to have any success with your brand building.
At this point you should look into a brand management platform and how that can help you establish a brand that stands out.
Collect everything about your brand in one single place
Is it sensible to buy a boat without first thinking about a berth? The answer is an obvious “no”.
Yet many companies invest millions in rebranding or marketing campaigns without thinking about how to manage and care for them.
The summer months we have just left behind will probably go into our collective memory as the “stay at home” summer. Sales of leisure boats, among other things, are said to have exploded, and along the coast, there have at least been plenty of examples of clearly new captains where the pride in the new boat surpasses the knowledge of navigation and seaworthiness.
I recently thought about this in a conversation with a customer. They had invested several million in a new profile, followed by a rebranding campaign because their agency had said: «OK, this is the new you. But where will the brand live?”
Is it sensible to buy a boat without first thinking about a berth? The answer is an obvious “no”.
Yet many companies invest millions in rebranding or marketing campaigns without thinking about how to manage and care for them.
The summer months we have just left behind will probably go into our collective memory as the “stay at home” summer. Sales of leisure boats, among other things, are said to have exploded, and along the coast, there have at least been plenty of examples of clearly new captains where the pride in the new boat surpasses the knowledge of navigation and seaworthiness.
I recently thought about this in a conversation with a customer. They had invested several million in a new profile, followed by a rebranding campaign because their agency had said: «OK, this is the new you. But where will the brand live?”
Is it sensible to buy a boat without first thinking about a berth? The answer is an obvious “no”.
Yet many companies invest millions in rebranding or marketing campaigns without thinking about how to manage and care for them.
The summer months we have just left behind will probably go into our collective memory as the “stay at home” summer. Sales of leisure boats, among other things, are said to have exploded, and along the coast, there have at least been plenty of examples of clearly new captains where the pride in the new boat surpasses the knowledge of navigation and seaworthiness.
I recently thought about this in a conversation with a customer. They had invested several million in a new profile, followed by a rebranding campaign because their agency had said: «OK, this is the new you. But where will the brand live?”
Why empowering employees makes great business sense
Papirfly
4minutes read
Feeling empowered and being empowered gives us a great deal of confidence, and a sense of purpose and value in our careers. What can be difficult though, is transferring empowerment into something tangible.
Because empowerment might mean different things for different employees, or take a range of steps to initiate, it can also be hard for senior management to justify the time and expense this may take to action. However, the benefits of empowering employees often far outweigh that of the investment.
Particularly in today’s climate, employees are feeling uncertain in their roles. Having absolute empowerment starts with some basic steps and can progress with further nurturing, all of which we will explore in this article.
Knowing the role, understanding expectations
If you asked your team to write down an exhaustive list of their responsibilities and duties, could they do it? Often when we progress in a role we end up taking on more and more until the lines become blurred.
Having a definitive job description, including who to report to for what, from day one will help your team know exactly what they should be doing, avoid confusion and give your employees the confidence to deliver. If a role evolves, ensure your employees get updated digital job descriptions to ensure absolute clarity.
Allowing for growth through mistakes
Though mistakes in the workplace can cause a lot of additional pressure, stress and tension, it’s the way in which they’re dealt with that determines whether they can help or hinder an organisation. If training and CPD have been lax, you will have to expect mistakes to happen at one point or another.
What’s important is that, once identified, a de-brief takes place. From this debrief you can create a plan of action, or introduce a new process to prevent this from occurring again. In doing so, you tighten processes, and your team members learn a valuable lesson. Your team also gets used to the debriefing sessions, and could use this method to problem solve with their own workload.
Providing the opportunity to upskill
When an employee’s knowledge becomes stale or outdated, it can leave your company exposed to a substandard pool of information, and greatly misrepresent what your brand signifies. There are a few ways you can ensure people stay developed:
Provide a training allowance for online courses, books and other materials
Introduce regular CPD sessions, either individually or for whole teams
Encourage self-development hours once or twice a month, they can use this time freely to explore subjects they feel will help them with their career and put together a short slide deck or document in order to share with others
Investing in an employee’s development is good for business whichever way you look at it. For example, the employee feels they are valued and progressing their career, and your organisation benefits from a new skill. The only negative in the financial commitment is if somebody leaves, they take this skill with them. Ensure that any person bringing these new skills into the business are documenting any new processes or knowledge so this can be used for training further down the line.
Likewise, if you’re going to make a considerable financial investment (such as for a degree), ensure there are terms surrounding this – for example the employee would have to pay back the cost of the qualification if they leave within a certain amount of years.
Investing in tools and processes that streamline
Work smarter, not harder. An employee shouldn’t need to be constantly running around stressed to showcase how hard they work. Aside from stress having a negative impact on workplace culture and general happiness, things that can make life easier for employees will make them more productive and free up time from monotonous tasks for more strategic or creative thinking.
What you get…
Giving people the ability to make decisions means they are accountable
With responsibility comes accountability. When an employee is empowered to make decisions for themselves, they understand that the pressure falls on their shoulders, and will usually do all they can to avoid any failures.
Quicker problem solving
When the right individuals have their positions elevated, they feel more confident to make contributions to higher-level conversations.
Better job satisfaction
When people feel they are trusted and their opinions are valued, they generally have a better experience in the workplace and a more positive perception. Those that are happy may evangelise to others, either through word of mouth or through advocacy on social media. This helps strengthen your employer brand and recruiting prospects.
More stringent processes, less room for error
Giving someone a new responsibility or training is usually coupled with new processes, systems or tools. This means looking at an area of a business that may have been previously unexplored, and provides an opportunity to tighten the workflows within an organisation.
Employees are more aligned with the organisation’s goals
Being empowered in the workplace makes people feel more emotionally invested in a company. When they feel part of the conversation and valued as a colleague, they are buying into the brand, the business and the ethos the company holds.
Empowering employees doesn’t mean giving inflated responsibility for the sake of it. It’s much more about identifying opportunities to enhance the working lives of promising team members.
By doing this, in turn you create a much more rewarding place to work and a more efficient, streamlined workforce.
Global brands across the world are empowering employees by giving them the freedom to create through BAM by Papirfly™. The all-in-one brand activation management tool gives teams the ability to:
Create an infinite amount of assets to support your marketing and with easy-to-use design software. Give employees complete autonomy to create professional brochures, videos, emails, social media assets and more without any design skills needed.
Adapt campaign materials, text and imagery for use in markets across the globe in just minutes.
Organise, filter and store every campaign asset in your collection. Logos, fonts, imagery, videos and more can be found, downloaded, shared and modified by teams across the world.
Share and distribute guidelines, training videos company-wide to keep everyone on the same page.
Find out more about BAM today or get in touch for a demo with one of our expert team.
