Transforming recruitment with custom templates: A guide to scalable employer branding
Papirfly
8minutes read
In today’s highly competitive landscape, the best talent doesn’t just arrive at your website ready to apply. To truly succeed, you need to tell candidates why they should consider you for their next career move.
In the same way a customer must be nurtured along their journey to buy, modern candidates must be guided along the path to apply, led by content that places your employer brand at the centre of every conversation.
From social media posts that highlight your core values to prospects, or onboarding documents that emphasise your company’s values to your latest recruits, a constant flow of compelling content keeps applicants on the hook.
But how do you maintain the quality and brand consistency today’s job seekers expect across every touchpoint, within increasingly tighter schedules and budgets? How can you efficiently and practically scale your employer brand content with your changing talent acquisition requirements?
The answer: investing in custom design templates. Below, we explain what they are, how they can revolutionise your recruitment strategy, and the key signs of great template creation software.
What are custom design templates?
Think of custom design templates as a constant head start for any kind of on-brand asset creation. A framework based on your brand guidelines, enabling your designers, recruiters and wider employer brand team to produce high-quality content with speed, precision and assurance.
To achieve this, effective design templates include locked-down elements, such as asset dimensions, logo positions and design layouts. These cannot be moved or changed, so users stick within the fixed parameters of your guidelines.
From here, they can then switch out customisable elements, such as calls-to-action (CTAs), colour schemes, imagery, copy and more with creative freedom, knowing that they cannot steer far from your brand identity.
As you can imagine, having access to these branded templates can massively ramp up the production of recruitment ads, job listings, corporate communications and much, much more. The right templating tool is a real game-changer – giving your hiring teams the confidence and skills they need to break away from costly third-party agencies, time-consuming approval processes and design limitations.
How can custom templates help with your recruitment efforts?
When you consider that 71% of recruitment-focused teams face challenges creating the content they need, custom templates can be a powerful tool to create the variety of collateral required to properly promote your employer brand.
This is because design templates can:
Expedite the creation of personalised social content
In our increasingly digital world, it’s no surprise that 79% of applicants turn to social media platforms to conduct their job searches. But the breadth of these channels, with distinct optimal posting frequencies, can make it a challenge to generate the content required to stay top of candidates’ minds.
To tap into this marketplace of millions, customisable templates empower your teams to produce on-brand, studio-quality assets in minutes.
With elements like CTAs, colour schemes and imagery able to be instantly swapped out to suit the nuances of a particular region, platform or branch of the business, intelligent templates make it possible to produce well-optimised social media posts in a truly scalable way, without sacrificing consistency or impact.
Empower employees to become brand advocates
While a strong employer brand instils confidence in your potential candidates, it’s hard to ignore that 76% of individuals are more likely to trust content shared by a brand’s employees over assets from a brand itself.
To allow your most passionate employees to champion your culture, values and company mission through compelling, highly engaging material, custom templates give your strongest advocates an avenue to express their views and build trust, without compromising your brand’s identity.
By allowing employees to follow a helpful framework, even those with zero design skills can be empowered to develop exceptional assets for their personal profiles. This means your employer brand can reach a wider audience in a more targeted, organic way than simply through your company pages.
Create a full suite of onboarding content
If you’re at the stage where your job openings are filled and your new hires are well on their way to becoming full-fledged team members, it can be easy to direct your employer branding technology toward the next campaign.
But in recent years, so many organisations have lost potential hires at the final hurdle due to a negative or frustrating candidate experience. To ensure your employer brand is just as strong inside as out, customisable templates allow for the quick, easy and scalable creation of company manuals, brand guidelines and other essential internal communications.
With these templates, you can guarantee that your new hires have the information they need to start work swiftly and confidently. And, to give them a real sense of belonging from the outset, these can also allow you to easily personalise standard guidebooks and manuals for each recruit.
Streamline video production
Over 65% of businesses use video in their recruitment efforts. You can see why when 43% of candidates say they’re more likely to apply for a job promoted through video content.
Able to turn this traditionally long, costly and intensive process into something effortless, custom templates are a lifeline for any forward-thinking recruitment team eager to stake their claim in the video-centric future of search.
The right custom template software will include tools to make dynamic, on-brand edits in a standardised format, so you can produce this eye-grabbing content with greater ease.
5 benefits of using custom templates for recruitment
1. Speed up time-to-market
Filling an open position takes an average of 44 days. When you factor in the weeks, months or even years it can take for a new hire to settle in, skill up, and reach the desired level of competency, talent acquisition is a lengthy and disruptive process for any organisation.
Quicker and more scalable asset creation with design templates enables your team to produce videos, job adverts, office posters, employee testimonials and other collateral as quickly as possible – especially important if you’re running a high-volume recruitment campaign.
2. Achieve complete consistency
In a world with more opportunities for candidates than ever, first impressions matter. Inconsistent visuals, incoherent Employer Value Propositions (EVPs), fluctuating tones of voice – they simply don’t cut it with today’s savvy job seekers.
Inspire the right kind of relationship with your ideal candidates from the very beginning. Intelligent templating allows you to align every piece of collateral with your unique brand guidelines. This helps you secure complete coherence in any design, across any platform, at any time.
But how do you ensure that the employee experience meets expectations? While there’s much to consider, custom templating tools are unquestionably important, unlocking the creation of studio-quality onboarding documents that prioritise what matters to your candidates – be it DEIB and employer branding, work-life balance or monetary perks.
Plus, with the effort behind the creation of employer brand collateral reduced and shared among your entire workforce, your employer brand specialists and senior leadership team can concentrate on establishing initiatives that propel your company culture forward.
What to look for in the right template creation software
Now you know what customisable templates are, how they can be applied to your talent acquisition efforts, and the plethora of advantages they offer, there’s just one final topic we want to discuss – the key signs to look out for in template creation software.
Although any templating tool can improve the quality, consistency, cost and time of your asset creation, not all software is created equal. If you’re keen to truly revolutionise your recruitment efforts, here are our 7 must-have features to prioritise in your search:
1. Limitless on-brand asset creation
The last thing your team members need is software that stifles your output and limits creativity. When looking for templating tools that can help you find, engage and attract the best talent, it’s essential you find a solution that allows you to create on-brand assets without restriction. No limits, no monthly credits – just the means to produce any volume of assets whenever required.
2. Multichannel compatibility
To reach your target audience wherever they are, it’s also important to have template creation software that can accommodate asset creation for any medium. Be it graphics for LinkedIn, videos for career pages, banners for job fairs, or posters for internal communication – ensure the solution you invest in enables you to create templates for any purpose.
3. Straightforward functionality
Creating and executing professional, persuasive recruitment campaigns demands an intuitive templating system. One your recruiters and advocates can easily pick up and use whenever they need to produce effective, on-brand content at pace.
Accessibility and functionality should therefore be top priorities in your template search, so anyone in your team can be elevated to create without a steep learning curve.
4. Approval measures
For complete confidence that everything your recruitment teams or employee advocates produce is in service of your long-term business goals, acquiring a platform with approval measures can be incredibly advantageous.
With these extra security measures in place informing users of what’s off limits, and a seamless way to send assets through for final sign-off, your recruitment campaigns reach audiences far sooner.
5. Streamlined localisation
Responding to recruitment needs in any region is a must for any global brand – and something only possible when you opt for a platform with dedicated, time-saving localisation tools. Look for a platform that instantly enables you to switch up languages and cultural imagery, so you can meet the demands and sensibilities of your local markets.
6. Cloud-based accessibility
Whether you’re a local business of dozens, or a conglomerate of thousands, manually installing software to employee machines one by one is a long and tedious task. Avoid this logistical headache by choosing a recruitment template creation tool backed by cloud software, meaning your worldwide teams can access it with minimal fuss.
7. Wider brand management features
Finally, while consistent, high-quality content is an important pillar of your recruitment campaigns, it’s far from the only part you have to consider when it comes to building, administering and evolving your employer brand.
By broadening your search to an all-in-one brand management platform featuring customisable design templates, you can also effectively educate your users on the foundations of your employer brand, store all collateral in a dedicated DAM system, and gain a bird’s-eye view over the execution and performance of your campaigns.
Launch a new era of success and scalability for your recruitment campaigns
When it comes to recruitment, content is crucial. It’s how your employer branding stands out, captures the attention of top talent, and ultimately fills your open roles. But not any content will do. In today’s competitive landscape, potential employees have become increasingly selective about who they work for.
Customisable templates give your recruitment teams and wider employees the keys to create captivating, consistent content on an otherwise unachievable scale. Look into the options available to understand how they can drastically reduce the costs, time and resources involved in building professional recruitment collateral, and make meeting your ever-growing recruitment demands a seamless formality.
The global brand manager’s ultimate guide for unbreakable brand guidelines
Papirfly
12minutes read
Global brand consistency is the aim of any proficient brand manager – a coherent, harmonious image and identity across all touchpoints that your target audience understands, recognises and resonates with.
Yet achieving this is easier said than done. With an abundance of marketing channels and multiple teams scattered across the globe, it’s easy for inconsistencies to creep into your communications. When this happens, your audiences lose trust in your brand’s identity, impacting their loyalty and willingness to engage with your organisation.
In this ongoing battle to ensure brand consistency, brand guidelines are one of the biggest weapons in your arsenal. Defining your vision, style, tone and much more, your guidelines are the key to educating the people responsible for creating and promoting your brand, and keeping your brand assets uniform on every channel and in every location.
However, the quality and effectiveness of brand guidelines vary from company to company. Some keep brand image locked down; others simply gather dust in a file cabinet.
In this ultimate guide, we harness our decades of experience in helping brands stay consistent to share our tips for truly unbreakable, actionable brand guidelines.
What are brand guidelines?
Your brand guidelines are the heart and soul of your company’s identity. It’s the manual that dictates your brand usage across all areas. It captures the essence of what your brand represents and its unique personality. It tells the brand story that forges emotional connections with your audiences, both internal and external.
Whether you’d rather refer to this as a brand style guide, brand manual or brand kit, the principle remains the same – your guidelines are the foundation for absolute brand consistency:
They deliver greater quality control, ensuring all content is produced with your brand’s reputation and identity in mind
They increase the understanding of your corporate branding across your marketers, graphic designers and wider staff
They enable better brand recognition by guaranteeing a consistent, coherent visual identity across your collateral
Or at least they should. While over 85% of organisations say they have brand guidelines, only 30% are enforced properly. Problems such as a lack of awareness, poor communication and inaccessibility commonly prevent guidelines from having their desired impact, enabling inconsistencies in visual elements, tone of voice and other critical areas.
When brand design guidelines are ignored or misrepresented, your consistency – and consequently your overall company performance – suffers.
Is brand consistency that important?
Imagine a coworker who is always smartly dressed. Tailored suit, tucked-in shirt, polished shoes – everything neatly aligned. One day they come to work with messy hair, stains on their shirt and worn shoes. You would probably be confused and want to know if something was wrong.
The same logic applies to your brand and your customers. Your branding is the personification of your organisation, what people come to know and love. If that image frequently changes, it becomes impossible for your audiences to build trust as they don’t know where you stand.
This is why consistent, harmonious brands enjoy 33% revenue increases over inconsistent brands. Or why consistent brands are 3-4 times more likely to have excellent visibility in their market.
Consistency breeds confidence from your consumers, fosters loyalty, and builds lasting customer relationships. Your brand guidelines are the lynchpin of realising these benefits.
Cementing your identity before creating your brand guidelines
Before you can write up your brand guidelines, there’s some initial groundwork you and your team must take care of. Whether you’re undertaking a rebranding campaign or establishing guidelines in a long-established company, the first step is to cement your brand identity.
After all, if you aren’t clear about what your brand represents and how it should be portrayed, what exactly are your guidelines protecting? To get your guidelines off on the right foot, here are the formative steps you should know:
Conduct a thorough brand audit
Begin by examining your current brand elements, communications and collateral in a comprehensive brand audit. This should give you a sense of what personality your brand is projecting to your audience: is it coherent on all touchpoints? Is it aligned with what we want our brand to represent?
It’s vital your audit is approached objectively. You must be honest about whether your current messaging represents your brand in the manner you intend. Canvass your stakeholders, customers, employees and more to build this universal view of your brand’s perception.
Your analysis will establish the strengths and weaknesses of your current branding, and what your brand guidelines must include to present your brand correctly.
Understand your target audience
Your brand is designed to foster a connection with your customers, employees and the wider world. So, it’s important your brand guidelines are grounded in what your audience wants and expects from your organisation.
To build your buyer personas, consider the following:
What are their demographics and characteristics?
What are their habits?
What are their concerns and pain points?
What values do they care about most?
What are their hobbies and interests?
Where do they look for information?
Examine your competitors
Competitor analysis is vital when forming your brand identity to establish areas where you can set yourself apart from the crowd.
Examining their colour schemes, tone of voice, mission statements, social media platforms and beyond can inspire ideas for your own branding, while pinpointing unique characteristics, visuals and offerings that will help you stand out.
Determine your visual identity
As prominent graphic designer Paul Rand once said: design is the silent ambassador of your brand. When you have audited your brand and researched your audience/competitors, you should nail down the visual elements that will encapsulate your brand’s identity.
This takes your brand from conception to reality, forming the bulk of your brand guidelines. You may enlist the services of an external design agency to bring these initial assets to life, which you can later harness for wide-scale asset creation through branded templates.
What should be included in brand guidelines?
This is the fundamental question in your creation of brand identity guidelines. After cementing the essence of your branding and visual presentation, what must you include to ensure this is properly communicated across all your marketing?
Clarity and comprehensiveness are the order of the day here. While you want your guidelines to be digestible and accessible, the more detail you include here, the less room there is for your teams to misinterpret and misrepresent your brand in future.
Brand vision and mission statements
Your brand vision and mission are your brand’s purpose and how it aspires to achieve that goal. They’re the core values that tell your customers, employees and beyond who you are, what you represent and where you’re going.
Consider these as people’s introduction to your brand and the foundation for your relationship with them. That’s why your vision and mission statements should sit at the front of your brand guidelines, so those using the guide can understand this immediately.
Brand logo
The Nike swoosh. McDonald’s’ golden arches. The Starbucks Siren. Your brand logo is the visual face of your brand, and one of the most important tools in building recognition and brand equity among your audiences.
However, your brand guidelines should not simply display and explain the rationale of your logo. It must set parameters for how your logo should be used in all brand assets. How large should it be? Where should it be positioned? Does it look different on a letterhead than a social media post?
In your guidelines, include all approved versions of your logo and include the following:
Different sizes and layouts of your main logo
The white space required around your logo
Approved colour variations beyond your main logo
Reversed and mono versions of your logo
Responsive logos for smaller screens (mobiles, tablets, etc.)
Iconography
Icons are important parts of your branding as they can be recognisable across different languages and cultures in a way that written text cannot.
Your brand guidelines should identify aspects like the size of your icons, what they indicate and situations where they are appropriate for use. If you use outlined icons or solid icons, this preference should also be pinpointed here as well.
Colour palette
Colour is arguably the most powerful means for people to recall your brand. In fact, colour is estimated to increase brand recognition by 80%. Therefore, your distinct, unique colour palette must be clearly outlined within your guidelines.
Most brands will typically choose three or four primary colours of different hues for different purposes:
A lighter colour for backgrounds
A darker shade for text
A neutral hue
A flashy colour that pops off screens
Dutch brewing company Heineken follows this pattern in their own guidelines:
When presenting your colour palette in your brand style guide, precisely indicate your primary and secondary colours, and any distinction between colours used on the web (RGB colours) and in print (CMYK colours). Also ensure you include the following details:
Their colour match, using their Pantone name and number
Their CMYK number
Their RGB colour and HEX code
Typography
Typography is the variety of font styles your brand uses in its copy. This could be a single “family” of fonts, or include a mixture of styles you want to use across your digital and print channels.
Consistency is key here, so it’s not ideal to have numerous wildly different fonts. A good rule of thumb for brand managers is to use a different typography for your logo than your “main” font style. This creates a contrast that stands out more to audiences.
Within your brand guidelines, outline the typography used for different types of text – headings, paragraphs, bullet points, etc. – as well as the preferred alignment of text and spacing between words and paragraphs.
Tone of voice
Your tone of voice describes how your brand communicates with your audiences and influences how they think about you through your messaging.
This is often the segment of brand guidelines most open to misinterpretation. To ensure that doesn’t happen:
Use a tone of voice scale, including examples of the tone used for greetings, sign-offs and other key CTAs
Alternatively, a tone of voice table can illustrate your various voice characteristics and when they should be employed
Provide best practice examples to guide your copywriters on what is acceptable and what isn’t
Align your tone with your brand personality, connecting it to 3-5 adjectives that underlie your core values
Imagery
The imagery section of your brand guidelines should guide your whole team on what types of photos, illustrations, designs and more are appropriate for your brand.
You can make the distinction between good and bad imagery clear in your guidelines in several ways:
Best practice – Show examples from your collection of photos, illustrations and other imagery that performed well for your brand, demonstrating to designers which ones fit your range of channels
Aspiration – Don’t have an internal collection to lean on? The same effect can be achieved by using imagery that you’ve found from brands that inspire your organisation
Mood board – Collect images and themes that convey the feelings you want to get across in your brand imagery
Signage
Whether the signage is physical posters, banners and billboards, or digital bulletins on retail websites and beyond, these will have specific dimensions and elements that you’ll want to ensure stay consistent across all locations.
Are your signs flat, plastic and vinyl? Are they built up and illuminated? Are they static or animated? All of these elements should be highlighted in your brand guidelines.
Guides for physical and digital marketing channels
Finally, you should dedicate part of your brand guidelines to clarifying your various physical and digital marketing channels. Denoting how your logos, colours, visual elements and more appear on specific channels ensures a coherent, harmonious flow of content on these platforms.
Perhaps dedicate a page or two of your master guidelines to each channel to illustrate nuances or restrictions that differ from your core guidelines. Alternatively, you may want to produce distinct brand management guidelines for each platform, which can be incredibly useful if you have professionals dedicated to different areas of your marketing ecosystem.
Making your brand guidelines accessible and actionable
While nailing the components and structure of your brand guidelines is no doubt essential, equally as crucial – and often overlooked – is the accessibility of your guidelines.
What’s the point of having a thorough, informative, end-to-end guide if no one knows where it lives or follows it? That’s why there is such a discrepancy in the number of organisations that have brand guidelines and the number that use brand guidelines.
In order to achieve the all-encompassing consistency your brand demands and your audiences expect, making your guidelines easy to access and understand is essential. Here’s how you achieve it:
Structure and design your guidelines for ease of use
First, take time to design and lay out your guidelines for maximum engagement and comprehension. There’s a lot of information to be communicated here, but a guide with wall-to-wall text will likely inspire eye rolls and shoulder shrugs.
Remember, this is a resource that a brand-new designer, marketer or agency will use to grasp your brand and produce assets to the standard you expect. If it’s confusing, bland or poorly structured, people won’t follow it closely.
For truly accessible brand guidelines, consider the following:
Be concise yet informative in each segment, only providing as much information as necessary without going overboard with text
Use imagery and interactive elements to engage readers more effectively
Rely on simple, easy-to-digest language so anyone, regardless of their design knowledge, can follow along
Create checklists alongside your guidelines to offer step-by-step instructions for how to apply and present your branding
Here are 3 great examples of organisations with engaging, digestible brand guidelines:
Ollo
Ollo’s creative, colourful brand guidelines include an interactive game demonstrating how users can manipulate their logo, making this segment more engaging and understandable.
Wolf Circus
Wolf Circus’s guidelines leave no confusion over the colours and imagery at the core of their brand identity. It comprehensively covers everything from the company’s mission statement and logo variants to specific campaign guidelines, while maintaining a minimalist and clear structure.
NJORD
NJORD’s minimalist approach gives readers everything they need in a straightforward, no-nonsense way. It doesn’t skimp out on relevant details, delivering everything someone would need to produce their array of digital and print assets.
Harness the power of video in your guidelines
92.3% of users watch videos every week. It’s the most powerful form of online content and people retain more information from it than something they simply read or hear.
Converting your written brand guidelines into a series of video explainers and tutorials can help users easily understand your brand identity and its usage. Think of it as a “show not tell” approach that can reduce the risk of misinterpretation.
Translate your guidelines in relevant languages
For global brands with worldwide locations, ensure there are versions of your brand guidelines written in every relevant language. This removes any jeopardy of people misunderstanding the instructions in your guidelines, and makes these much easier to follow for your teams across the globe.
Establish a digital “home” for your brand guidelines
Where you house your brand guidelines is crucial – it cannot simply be a single printed booklet in your office. While you can produce printed guidelines for all personnel, this is not exactly cost-effective or environmentally friendly. So, we recommend establishing an online brand portal to contain your digital brand guidelines.
Taking this approach ensures:
Users worldwide can access, read and download guidelines with a couple of clicks
You can incorporate interactive features and videos within your style guides
Any adjustments and updates to your guidelines can be applied instantly without any administrative headaches
Create a single source of truth for brand assets
As your brand assets offer the clearest guide to how your branding should be portrayed across all marketing channels, having these contained in one intuitive location helps you lock down consistency.
Investing in a standalone Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, can make it far simpler for your teams to locate exemplar assets to use as a template for future campaigns.
Turn your brand guidelines into brand templates
Speaking of templates, the best way to ensure your guidelines are steadfastly applied throughout your brand assets is by making these the framework for dedicated design templates.
Creating templates for each type of asset you require, constructed under your brand guidelines, makes it impossible for designers to steer beyond these boundaries. This can lock down the size and position of visual elements, typography and much more, meaning people don’t have to study your guidelines meticulously to apply them.
Furthermore, high-quality template software empowers anyone on your team – not just those with a design background – to create content, completely secure in the knowledge that everything produced is 100% brand-consistent.
Control your brand like never before with unbreakable brand guidelines
Now that you know the essence of great brand guidelines, we hope you can use this blog to take your own guidelines to the next level.
Making these as engaging, comprehensive and accessible as possible for your workforce is critical to always communicating the right messages to your audiences, leaving zero room for inconsistencies.
By applying the techniques and tips above, you set your teams up for a future of consistent, coherent marketing campaigns, and build a strong brand that is understood, trusted and beloved by customers, employees and others globally.
Reputation is everything for today’s brands. Your brand’s reputation is how people perceive your organisation, from your day-to-day consumers to your employees and stakeholders.
Fundamentally, the stronger your reputation, the more you’re trusted and respected by those around you. This in turn increases customer loyalty, boosts sales and grows your market share. Those are incredible benefits, but they come with a hefty burden, as just one or two missteps can cause your reputation to tumble, and put you on a long road to recovery.
Maintaining a strong brand reputation demands long-term, end-to-end management, addressing both the positive and the negative. In this guide, we share strategies we’ve learned across our 20+ years of working with global brands to help you stay in good standing with your target audiences.
What is brand reputation management?
Brand reputation management is the steps and strategies you take to monitor, govern and protect your reputation with your audiences.
In this digital age, most of that takes place online. From comments on your social media platforms to dedicated review websites such as Yelp, Trustpilot and Google Reviews, there are many forums for your customers, employees and beyond to share their thoughts about your brand, products and services.
And what they say matters. Around 90% of consumers say they won’t frequent a business with a negative reputation, while nearly 70% of job candidates would reject job offers from a company with a poor reputation – even if they were unemployed!
What does brand reputation management involve?
As much of what dictates a brand’s reputation happens online, managing this will typically include:
Monitoring brand mentions, comments and messages on social media
Checking your platform’s online review pages and responding to comments
Responding to customer enquiries through emails, contact forms and other communication channels
Developing public relations strategies to handle how your brand is presented in the media and manage crises
Collaborating with industry experts and influencers with strong reputations
Creating expert content on your website and wider platforms to demonstrate your thought leadership
However, it’s equally important to manage your brand offline. Communications with customers and appearances in local publications can majorly contribute to how people perceive you.
How do I measure my brand’s reputation?
While there is no clear-cut way to know if your brand has a good or bad reputation, several indicators can help you gauge public opinion:
Tracking these metrics will give you a solid sense of how people view your brand, and whether you must take action to repair any damage.
The importance of a positive brand reputation – and the costs of a negative one
The importance of your brand’s reputation cannot be overstated. As mentioned earlier, it’s one of the biggest influences on trust between your brand and your core audiences. A negative reputation won’t inspire confidence in potential customers or employees – particularly if your competitors have a more positive stature.
But its value goes far beyond trust – a positive brand reputation:
Boosts sales and revenue
When you have many positive reviews from satisfied customers, others will naturally want to experience the same quality. Conversely, an abundance of 1-star reviews will scare potential customers away, costing you revenue.
Builds customer loyalty
A consistent reputation breeds loyalty among your audience, as they understand they can trust you to deliver on their expectations. As you can imagine, having a constant stream of loyal customers coming back time and again contributes significantly to your ongoing success.
Attracts top talent
Modern candidates are increasingly concerned about the reputation, ethics and social responsibility of the brands they work for. The better your reputation, the better your chances of recruiting and retaining the best available talent.
Opens doors to partnerships
Did you know that 69% of consumers trust recommendations from their favourite influencers? These personalities also have reputations to uphold, so a strong brand reputation is crucial to secure these beneficial partnerships.
Increases brand awareness
There’s an old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. However, constant negative feedback results in the wrong type of brand awareness – the type that wards away potential customers. Effective brand management helps you appear in the right places to attract consumers, from search engines to social channels.
Grows brand equity
Greater loyalty and awareness among your target audiences contributes to better brand equity. This helps increase your market share among competitors, and enables you to charge more for your goods and services.
Minimises the impact of a crisis
Every organisation makes mistakes or unpopular decisions from time to time. With a healthy brand reputation, you’re in a better position to navigate troublesome moments and minimise the repercussions. If you have a weak reputation already, these moments may prove the final straw for your audiences.
7 effective brand reputation management strategies to protect your stature
Now you understand the value of a strong brand reputation, what can you do to establish and preserve this?
Of course, the core of any good brand reputation is offering quality products and services. Nothing will redeem you long-term if you fail to meet this benchmark. But from this foundation, there are numerous steps you can take to reinforce your status:
1. Encourage authentic reviews and ratings from your customers
First, regularly encourage feedback from your customers, both positive and negative. When they buy your product or use your services, ask them to share a review either in person, via email or attached to your invoices. 65% of people will leave a review if prompted by an organisation.
Ideally, your overall review rating should be between 4 and 4.7 stars. 57% of consumers won’t use a business with a rating below 4 stars, but the likelihood of purchases also dips the closer you get to the full 5 stars, as many customers consider this inauthentic or inflated.
Authenticity is essential. Whether people love or loathe your products or services, potential customers want an honest assessment to make their judgements. Fake positive reviews don’t benefit you or your reputation.
2. Respond promptly to any customer concerns
From a critical email to a negative review, you must proactively respond to customer issues with your brand. 89% of consumers say they are likelier to frequent businesses that respond to all reviews, positive or negative.
Brand sentiment analysis and social listening tools can help you here, spotlighting any negative online comments or reviews so you can promptly respond. With your responses, remember to:
Provide a solution to their issue where possible, or reassure the person that you are actively working on one
Demonstrate empathy for their frustration or dissatisfaction
Maintain communication while their issue is being resolved
Follow up with the person once their problem is solved, and potentially encourage them to rescind or update their review
For more efficient responses, you may establish template answers for frequently asked queries or problems you have identified. However, you should use these only as a base and tailor your specific responses to the customer’s direct concerns.
And remember, negative feedback can be the springboard to positive improvements for your organisation, so always welcome these with open arms!
3. Maintain consistency across your brand assets
Your reputation is judged by more than your online reviews. Most customers expect consistent messaging across every engagement they have with your brand. Any break in your tone, visual identity, brand colours and more can make your brand appear disorganised and unprofessional, harming your overall reputation.
It’s essential your branding and marketing stay consistent on every channel. To achieve this:
Establish clear brand guidelines that tie down your brand’s identity
4. Create brand reputation guidelines and a communications strategy
In a similar vein, it’s beneficial to establish specific brand reputation guidelines to define how you communicate your brand and respond to feedback. These guidelines could include:
Your brand values and mission statements
Your brand’s visual identity, including logos, colour palettes, typography and imagery
Your tone of voice, ensuring messages reflect your brand’s personality
A framework for crafting messages, comments and responses in line with your brand identity
Crisis communication protocols to manage negative publicity quickly
Social media guidelines that dictate how you engage with followers on your social profiles
Customer service standards that set expectations for all customer interactions
Partnership and sponsorship criteria that ensure you select partners and sponsors that align with your brand’s values
With a solid communications strategy in place somewhere readily accessible to your marketing, PR and branding teams across the globe, you help ensure a consistent approach and reputation at all times.
5. Invest in online listening tools
It’s impossible to stay abreast of everything people say about your brand manually – at least not without a considerable investment of time and resources.
Online listening tools can monitor and track references to your brand on social media, Google, review sites and beyond. This allows you to instantly see, digest and respond to any negative sentiment, as well as measure the performance of branded hashtags and specific marketing campaigns.
Some online listening tools will cost you nothing to set up. Google Alerts is a great example, one every brand should pay attention to, sending you daily email notifications for particular keywords and phrases you want to track online.
68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, and they are among the most trustworthy sources of information for consumers. Therefore, the higher your website ranks on search engines, the more reputable your brand appears.
Devoting time to your SEO strategy helps your brand get noticed on these essential destinations, and establishes you as a thought leader in your industry. To ramp up your SEO efforts, consider:
Creating engaging, relevant content that addresses your audience’s questions and needs
Keeping your content up-to-date to maintain its relevance and freshness
Optimising your content, titles, images and more with the correct keywords to generate search traffic
Improving the structure of your website through internal linking and a consistent URL layout
Acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry
Ensuring your business information is consistent across online directories and listings
Enhancing user experience (UX) by making your website easy to navigate and visually appealing
7. Harness user-generated content and brand advocates
Lastly, we noted earlier how consumers are more inclined to trust individuals than brands. This is nothing ground-breaking, but it does make user-generated content (UGC), testimonials and similar assets incredibly effective at raising your brand reputation.
By showcasing customers using your products or services in videos, or sharing employee experiences on review websites such as Glassdoor, this presents an authentic impression of the quality of your organisation.
The more third-party advocates and influencers you have promoting the benefits of your brand, the more trustworthy and reputable you appear to your target audiences.
Build your reputation on an on-brand culture
With your brand’s reputation fundamental to your long-term revenue, recognition and success, we hope this guide gives you the foundation to control this across all platforms.
Of course, a strong brand reputation is based on a robust on-brand culture. An environment where all your teams understand your values and identity, and have the tools to communicate these across your marketing operations.
Identifying an effective Digital Asset Management and Content Creation solution gives your teams the foundation to maintain this consistent presentation. With this structure, your customers, employees and beyond are encouraged to gain trust in your organisation, keeping your reputation solid and stable for years to come.
Refreshing employer branding: webinar insights from PepsiCo and Papirfly
Papirfly
4minutes read
In today’s competitive job market, with global companies trying to maintain a consistent reputation across all markets, a strong employer brand is more crucial than ever. Using brand and content management solutions have become essential when scaling and streamlining branding efforts.
Recently, Papirfly collaborated with PepsiCo to deliver an insightful webinar on the evolution of PepsiCo’s employer brand. Featuring Sally Elbassir from PepsiCo and Espen Getz Harstad, Chief Branding Officer at Papirfly, the session highlighted strategic innovations and practical approaches to maintaining brand consistency and empowering employees – anywhere in the world.
Strategic collaboration and innovative employer branding
The discussion underscored the strategic innovations PepsiCo implemented to transform its employer brand. By establishing clear visual identity guidelines, PepsiCo ensured brand consistency and empowered its teams to create customised, cohesive brand assets.
Having worked historically with each market or region working with their own agencies and partners, creating assets with consistency was difficult. “Maintaining brand consistency was just so challenging,” noted Sally Elbassir from PepsiCo. “All it takes is a little tweak here and a little tweak there, and then suddenly your brand doesn’t look like a brand anymore.”
PepsiCo’s challenges and solutions
One of the key challenges PepsiCo faced was balancing budget constraints while maintaining a cohesive global brand identity. Sally Elbassir explained, “Every market has a different marketing budget that they can allocate. So with Papirfly, we ensured that folks could create assets that are a bit customised but maintain that global brand.”
Empowering employees was another crucial aspect of PepsiCo’s strategy. “With Papirfly, one of the cool things is that it’s a tool everyone feels empowered to use. We made sure that we set it up so folks could take the templates and then create and use them to build assets that are still a bit customised but maintain that global brand,” said Elbassir.
Enhanced asset creation, workflow efficiency and agency collaboration
Papirfly significantly improved on-brand asset creation, transforming how PepsiCo worked with external agencies. Day-to-day assets can now be created in-house without the external back and forth of review and sign-off, releasing agency budget to be used on more specialised creative work. The platform optimised campaign execution and workflow management, ensuring timely and effective communication.
“Papirfly has transformed the way we work with agencies. We can use budgets to focus on the more complex creatives, and with both parties using Papirfly’s DAM, agencies can understand our brand and access and upload preapproved photography and other assets with ease. It’s been a game-changer,” shared Elbassir.
During the Q&A, Espen highlighted the evolving relationship with agencies. “Instead of eliminating agencies, we are focusing on improving collaboration. Papirfly enables us to work better together, with agencies gaining a deeper understanding of our brand and seamlessly contributing to our campaigns.” Sally confirmed, “This collaborative approach has led to more efficient use of our resources and higher quality outputs.”
Enhancing employer brand engagement and activation
Empowering employees to activate the hard-fought results of the employer brand development process has led to a stronger sense of belonging and loyalty, making them feel valued and more connected to PepsiCo’s global brand. Making every employee excited to be a brand ambassador in this way has been pivotal in maintaining brand consistency and reconfirming the positive values and visual identity in PepsiCo’s employer brand.
PepsiCo’s journey to enhance its employer brand showcases a commitment to maintaining a cohesive brand image while allowing for regional customisation. Creating a centralised brand asset management system has significantly streamlined PepsiCo’s employer branding efforts, ensuring consistent and compelling messaging across all markets.
Revolutionising talent attraction and retention strategies
By centralising brand assets and empowering local teams to create on-brand materials, PepsiCo has revolutionised its talent attraction and retention strategies. This strategic move has enhanced the global brand presence.
As well as improved brand visibility, using the Papirfly Platform for employer branding efforts has ensured potential candidates receive a coherent and engaging narrative about what it means to work at PepsiCo – more effectively attracting top talent and providing a consistent experience for those employees after they are hired.
Strategic insights for employer branding professionals
Employer branding professionals can draw valuable lessons from PepsiCo’s experience:
Clear visual identity: Establish tight guidelines to maintain brand consistency across all regions.
Empowered scalability: Equip global and local teams to create on-brand assets instantly, creating agility and saving time.
Cost efficiency: Balance regional budget constraints while maintaining a global brand identity.
Papirfly’s role in PepsiCo’s success
All of this was possible with Papirfly. By providing tools for centralised brand management, template customisation, and employee empowerment, Papirfly enabled PepsiCo to maintain brand consistency and streamline asset creation processes. This partnership helped them to set a new standard for employer branding excellence.
Enhanced employee empowerment: Teams felt empowered to create customised, on-brand assets.
Optimised budget management: Efficient use of regional marketing budgets while maintaining global brand standards.
Increased talent attraction: A compelling employer brand attracts top talent more effectively.
Greater employee retention: Empowering employees to share their experiences fostered a more profound sense of belonging and loyalty.
A blueprint for future success
The collaboration between PepsiCo and Papirfly demonstrates the transformative power of strategic employer branding supported by advanced SaaS technology. For companies looking to attract and retain the best talent, the insights shared in this webinar serve as a blueprint for leveraging employee voices to create a compelling and authentic employer brand.
Watch the webinar in full to discover more about how PepsiCo utilised Papirfly’s brand management platform.
Graduate recruitment: 4 major employer branding mistakes to avoid
Papirfly
11minutes read
Mistakes are important. They help us learn, grow and improve over time. Unfortunately, many brands fall into the same bad habits in their attempts to attract, recruit and retain an evermore sophisticated wave of graduate recruits.
At the same time, today’s graduates can access and assess potential employers more closely than ever before – researching company culture, values, career development opportunities and more in a matter of clicks.
Repeating the same mistakes with your graduate brand prevents you from engaging this fresh, hungry generation and losing top talent to your competitors. To help you better tap into the graduate talent pipeline in an increasingly fierce job market, this guide will help you steer clear of common blunders.
As a company with years of experience empowering organisations worldwide to unleash their employer brand, below we outline 4 major graduate recruitment mistakes and our top solutions to avoid them.
Graduate recruitment mistake #1: Not understanding your audience
The core of a strong employer brand is knowing your audience. What are potential new hires looking for from an employer? What do they know of workplace culture? How do they like to be communicated with?
These questions will encourage very different answers, depending on the age, experience and background of whom you ask. A graduate fresh out of university or college will have different wants, ambitions and tendencies than someone who has worked for 2 or 3 decades.
So, to ensure you connect with the next generation of candidates, you must tailor your employer brand strategy to meet their expectations. And for that to succeed, you must understand what Generation Z wants from employers.
What do today’s graduates look for in an employer brand before applying?
Today’s graduates are firmly Gen Z, a generation that is estimated to make up 27% of the global workforce by 2025. They’re as digitally-driven as it gets – the first generation that doesn’t recall a time before the Internet was widely available.
As such, how Gen Z consumes content and judges an employer’s reputation is far removed from those who came before them. They are hypervisual, resilient and less entitled – and have preferences that modern organisations must prioritise in their graduate recruitment campaigns:
Gen Z candidates want transparency over salary
While Gen Z is less single-minded on salary than past generations, they still want to be paid fairly and well. 65% of Gen Z candidates say that pay transparency is one of their biggest motivators for applying for a job, so you should make this prominent in any job descriptions and adverts you share.
Gen Z candidates care about workplace diversity and inclusion
Today’s graduates prioritise a diverse, inclusive work environment more than generations before. According to research by Monster, 83% of Gen Z candidates say a company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion influences who they apply to, and 69% are more likely to apply to jobs where the employer branding reflects an “ethnically and racially diverse” workforce.
Beyond this, graduates also have strong feelings toward sustainability efforts, environmental practices and social responsibility initiatives, and want to work for companies whose values align with their own.
Gen Z candidates are tech-savvy
Gen Z has been brought up on smartphones and social media, so employers must focus on these devices and channels to reach graduates on their level. But beyond this, Gen Z also cares about the quality of technology they’ll use in their job – 70% of these employees would leave a current role for one offering better technology.
Gen Z candidates want flexibility
Work-life balance is one of the major concerns of graduate recruits. Gen Z candidates are 77% more likely to check a vacancy that mentions “flexibility” than one that doesn’t, while 72% of Gen Z employees have either left or considered leaving a job because their employer didn’t offer a flexible work policy.
Gen Z candidates want to learn and grow in a role
Finally, Gen Z is conscious about upskilling and evolution. 67% of younger recruits want to work for companies that actively teach skills to advance their careers, so promoting learning and development programs in your employer branding is a powerful incentive for today’s graduates.
The solution? Tailor your graduate recruitment strategy
Taking what we know about graduates, Gen Z and their employer preferences, you should use this to craft a distinct employer branding separate from your other campaigns.
For example, graduate recruits typically want to see diversity and inclusivity, so ensure the imagery of your campaigns makes this immediately apparent. They want career development opportunities? Dedicate a whole section to this on your recruitment website or brochures.
By tailoring your graduate brand around this audience’s priorities – adjusted according to your specific industry and company values – you are far more likely to leave a positive impression on top candidates.
Graduate recruitment mistake #2: Failing to use the right marketing channels
As mentioned earlier, Gen Z is the most tech-savvy generation to date (until Generation Alpha enters the workforce in a few years). Old-school approaches to promoting roles and your overall employer brand are becoming less and less effective – advertising in newspapers is hardly effective when 46% of graduates apply for jobs on their mobile phones.
Where you promote your employer brand is just as crucial as how you promote it, so you must consider the right channels to get your message across.
Social media is a standout example. 95% of the UK’s leading recruiters in The Times’ Top 100 Graduate Employers utilise social media in their talent attraction efforts, while over 50% of college grads use LinkedIn to research graduate job opportunities.
Videos are another powerful tool to connect with graduates. With Gen Z having grown up on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, video content stands out as a powerful way to communicate your messages in a way they actively enjoy.
But these aren’t the only ways to successfully reach modern graduates – also consider:
Creating a dedicated portal or page on your website dedicated to graduates, highlighting the perks and information that resonates with them
Attending university career fairs and campus engagement events, where your representatives can speak to interested candidates one-on-one
Developing graduate internship programs that allow them to understand your company culture and help you assess their potential
Using online job platforms such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster and more that graduates readily turn to when seeking out opportunities
Distributing brochures and leaflets at local universities and colleges to offer something different and more personal to today’s digitally-centred recruits
Furthermore, make use of your existing employees where possible. Younger candidates are far more likely to believe the experiences of a current employee when researching an employer than the employer themself.
Clever usage of employee testimonials, interviews and videos on your recruitment feeds can help graduates truly understand your work environment, and inspire graduates to examine your opportunities more closely.
But this poses a problem – with so many social networks, forums and channels you can use to reach graduates, how do you maintain an active presence on these while staying within time and budget limitations?
Investing in a powerful employer brand platform can empower your teams to produce high-quality assets for all potential digital and physical channels remarkably quickly. With smart, predefined branded templates, your teams can produce content faster for every touchpoint, giving you greater coverage for your graduate recruitment for much less effort.
Today’s job-seeking graduates know the importance of protecting their own online presence. 70% of employers use social media to screen potential hires, so top recruits understand they must keep a clean, unproblematic image on their profiles.
Similarly, modern companies must take the same sensible approach to communicate a clear, unified and consistent image across every recruitment channel they use.
Think of your employer brand as your promise to potential recruits and existing employees. Any inconsistency or deviation in this image can quickly erode the confidence and trust of your audience. This costs you applications and sends top candidates to your competitors.
What causes breaks in brand consistency? There are multiple reasons, but some of the most common include:
Departments and locations working in silos, resulting in individuals misusing your graduate brand or making errors, which over time will cloud your brand’s identity
An overreliance on external agencies, who are not as closely tied to your employer brand, causing misinterpretations
An abundance of recruitment channels can cause inconsistencies to creep in – having one look on your website and another at a campus presentation can create a disconnect
You never want potential candidates to get the wrong impression of your mission, values and company culture, or perceive your employer brand as chaotic or disorganised. Brand consistency is key to building trust, so how do you maintain this?
A central home for your employer brand guidelines
Establishing a distinct online destination for everything that dictates your employer branding – brand guidelines, colour palettes, your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) – means everyone responsible for producing your campaigns can refer to this whenever necessary.
Developing a true brand hub keeps your content consistent and aligned according to your core identity.
A single source of truth for your digital assets
Next, investing in Digital Asset Management (DAM) can give your teams worldwide access to a dedicated library of approved, on-brand assets, imagery, videos and beyond.
Again, this provides a single source of truth for your graduate recruitment collateral, so your campaigns never deviate from your brand message.
A collection of locked-down design templates
Using templates does more than accelerate asset creation; it also ensures certain elements such as your logo, design elements and imagery are formatted correctly on every new asset produced.
Having these as part of one comprehensive brand management solution boosts your efforts to attract top talent across the globe.
Graduate recruitment mistake #4: Having a poor onboarding process
Imagine this – you’ve successfully attracted a hungry, motivated graduate to your team, and they passed their interview with flying colours. The hard work ends there, right?
Wrong. The recruitment process may be over, but your graduate brand must still work hard to nurture a sense of belonging within your latest recruit.
Especially because Gen Z is a generation of job-hoppers. 83% of Gen Z employees describe themselves this way, while over 22% of workers aged 20 and older spent less than a year at their jobs in 2022.
Retaining top talent for the long term is a persistent challenge, and starts with your onboarding process. This sets the tone for new arrivals, and a negative experience can instantly have them eyeing the exit door.
Poor onboarding experiences may also hinder your efforts to attract graduates in the future if someone shares their negative experience online. On the opposite end of the scale, a positive onboarding experience is estimated to improve retention rates by as much as 82%.
So, what steps can you take to enhance your hiring process with effective onboarding?
Establish company mentors and “work buddies”
Entering the workplace is a daunting prospect for many graduates. Providing a mentor or buddy can help them ease into this transition and allow them to settle in far sooner.
Plus, it helps build a community within your organisation, providing your graduate hires with reassurance and familiarity from the outset.
Provide everything they need from day one
No new employee wants to arrive on their first day flustered about what they’re doing or where to go. Ensure new hires feel comfortable from the get-go by preparing everything they need to get started, including:
Setting up their workstation
Printing off all required paperwork
Organising all login details and entry cards they need
Presenting them with a schedule or calendar
Creating a dedicated employee handbook
Invest in introductory videos
As we highlighted earlier, Gen Z is much more accustomed to video as their preferred form of content. Creating accessible, repeatable videos that explain your company culture and your new hire’s responsibilities helps them understand your business sooner, while allowing your existing employees to focus on their tasks.
Introduce new hires to relevant training programs
Finally, demonstrate that you’re invested in their career development by setting them up with training programs and courses related to their work.
By giving new hires access to these learning courses, they will feel more empowered to deliver for your organisation. Your company benefits from a more motivated, skilled employee, while they form a more positive impression of your brand.
Support your company’s future with a great graduate brand
Your graduate brand is an integral part of your organisation’s long-term strategy. Ensuring you can consistently attract, engage and appeal to the next generation of candidates is key to a sustainable, lasting workforce – so it’s vital you get your campaign execution right.
By dodging the mistakes above, you go a long way to stealing a march on your competitors to seal the services of top, up-and-coming talent. Applying the techniques and strategies we’ve outlined, coupled with effective brand management software and a solid recruitment team, you can keep yourself firmly in the focus of young, aspirational job seekers.
18 powerful employer branding tools to activate your campaigns in 2025
Papirfly
9minutes read
With job seekers increasingly selective about who they work for, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of a strong, consistent employer brand.
It’s your unique selling point against a wave of competition. Your window into your company culture. Your vehicle to excite and build trust with potential candidates. Simply put, it’s the heart of modern recruitment, and something that demands a great deal of attention.
Fortunately, today there is a plethora of software, tools and platforms designed to streamline your efforts, unite your global teams and maintain a consistent, regular flow of content to recruits and employees.
In this guide, we break down 18 standout tools you should be paying attention to in 2025, so you can activate your employer brand with complete confidence.
Papirfly’s brand management platform empowers you with the tools to create and communicate your employer brand in one comprehensive solution.
This platform offers numerous features to unleash your employer branding on a global scale, including:
A dedicated online brand portal for your employer brand guidelines, Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and other key documents that define your brand’s identity
A comprehensive, industry-recognised Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, allowing you to store and share on-brand assets for your recruitment campaigns
Intuitive design templates that enable fast, cost-effective content creation without any risk of breaking your brand guidelines
The capacity to rapidly adapt assets for local markets with the right language, imagery and cultural nuances to connect with job seekers globally
Collaborative, easy-to-use campaign execution tools that keep your marketing activities aligned and well-coordinated
Rally® Inside™ is a similar employer branding platform that employs real-time data and best practices to develop campaigns that attract and retain top talent.
Allowing you to identify and engage with potential candidates wherever they are online, Rally® Inside™ also helps you understand the topics that resonate with your target audiences. This can play a role in focusing your employer brand strategy around your specific goals and ambitions.
Plus, it’s free for a single account user, making it a good entry-level option for smaller employer brand teams with limited budgets.
One of the world’s most recognisable names in content creation, Canva’s wide range of templates and design tools empower your professionals to produce high-quality graphics to support your employer branding efforts.
From infographics and visual storytelling assets for your digital channels, to presentations and posters to inspire your existing employees, Canva can help you maintain brand consistency and generate engaging campaigns for your audiences.
Did you know that job postings with video content receive 34% more applications than those without it? This makes tools like Seenit incredibly valuable, allowing you to collect, create and distribute user-generated video content from your employees, customers and beyond.
By encouraging your employees to submit video testimonials, behind-the-scenes footage and clips that showcase what it’s like to work at your company, you can develop a library of employer brand videos that capture the imagination of ideal candidates.
As AI continues to evolve and expand our horizons, ChatGPT can greatly speed up the production of written content across your employer brand campaigns, from feeder text on your social posts to job descriptions and email marketing.
With effective prompt engineering, you can train ChatGPT to write in your precise tone of voice, allowing you to go from raw notes to brand-consistent first drafts in minutes. Especially for teams with no dedicated copywriter or content agency, this can feel like a new member of your team.
Recruitee is a tool that promises to reduce hiring times and increase the reach of your recruitment campaigns. This includes the ability to create a dedicated careers page through their tried-and-tested templates, empowering you to present a strong employer brand to desired candidates with little effort or coding skills.
Furthermore, Recruitee allows you to automatically post job listings on the most active job boards, including Indeed, Monster and Glassdoor. This again eases the recruitment process, and ensures your ads are where they need to be to attract top talent.
Rather than a careers page, Jobbio encourages its users to create a company channel. Similar to a social media channel, this approach lets you create a distinct profile, share employee-driven content, and gradually build an audience of relevant candidates.
From this channel, you can directly communicate with followers to maximise employee engagement, as well as create an unlimited number of job ads targeted around your ideal candidates’ skills, experience and preferences.
Cliquify is an employer branding tool that enables companies to generate assets for their social recruitment campaigns. Primarily a content creation platform, Cliquify’s templates guide your teams to produce on-brand collateral for your various channels, highlighting your company culture, values and achievements.
This solution also allows you to measure and monitor the performance of your social media assets, helping you to refine your campaigns over time.
It cannot be overstated how valuable your existing employees are to your long-term recruitment efforts – up to 86% of candidates will check employee reviews on Glassdoor before applying. An army of brand ambassadors can greatly elevate your hiring process, and a tool like Social Sender helps you build one.
A dedicated employee advocacy solution, Social Sender makes it simple to send targeted company news, events and posts to relevant employees based on their positions and interests. From here they can push this content on their social networks, sharing positive employee experiences with prospective candidates.
Another effective employee advocacy tool is Sociabble, a platform offering multichannel content distribution for your employees’ social media channels. Leveraging their networks, this tool extends the reach and awareness of your employer brand through fresh, compelling content delivered by your workforce.
Plus, to keep your team members active advocates, Sociabble adds gamification to this process, letting you track your most effective ambassadors and reward them appropriately.
Maintaining a consistent employer brand across every channel and location requires a single source of truth for your assets. Brandfolder’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution gives you a central repository of on-brand, up-to-date collateral, so your teams worldwide can access the latest approved content for their recruitment campaigns.
With the ability to categorise assets according to type, location, language and much more, your marketing materials stay well-organised and your marketers can identify the assets they require instantaneously.
Candidates want to work with a reputable employer; a perspective backed up by 84% of job seekers who consider reputation before applying for a job opening. The Employer Brand Index (EBI), developed by Link Humans, uses data from over 6,000 user-generated sources to measure what past, present and future employees are saying about your company.
This helps you gain an objective view of your employer brand reputation, benchmark this against your competitors and address any negative feedback directly. With this insight, you can adapt your communications strategy where required on your path to becoming an employer of choice in your industry.
Another in the growing wave of employer branding AI tools, Olivia is an innovative assistant designed to optimise candidate capture, screening, scheduling, communication and engagement.
Guided by your brand’s tone of voice and communication strategy, Olivia automatically answers candidates’ questions and eliminates repetitive admin tasks. This streamlined approach frees up time to create a more bespoke, one-to-one recruitment and onboarding experience for each candidate, helping you nurture them into your team.
Pathmotion enables better candidate experiences by letting your existing employees directly engage with your prospects, answer their questions and share content. This supports a more comfortable, seamless onboarding journey for new recruits, and helps candidates self-exclude themselves, saving you time and money on unsuitable applications.
Pathmotion can also host virtual events for candidates, automate nurture emails, send out onboarding materials, and integrate with your company and employee social media channels. This makes it a great tool to build a community between your current team and your future hires.
Greenhouse is an excellent Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that helps you present candidates with a consistent, reassuring experience. To do this, the platform includes several features, including:
Talent sourcing that scales with your organisation
Customisable career sites and application processes
Tracking for candidate interactions and communications
Schedules for follow-up activities and onboarding activities
Smoother talent acquisition workflows
Candidate scoreboards for better hiring decisions
It also tracks and measures several key employer branding metrics, including time-to-fill positions, cost-per-hire and candidate conversion rates.
Another effective ATS solution is TalentLyft. This system can reduce the time associated with posting job ads, screening applications and scheduling interviews through one all-inclusive platform. Handling this all through one portal helps you preserve consistency across both your employer branding and candidate experience.
TalentLyft also enables you to track applications to measure the performance of your job adverts, and create a branded career site illustrating your company’s values, culture and mission.
In our attempts to achieve more for less, Monday.com promises to significantly increase the efficiency and productivity of your employer brand workflows. Through this planning platform, your teams can gain a bird’s-eye view over all tasks, from individual job postings to large-scale recruitment campaigns.
For optimal productivity, Monday.com lets you hone in on each distinct task of your employer brand initiatives. This empowers you to manage your resources more effectively, and keeps everyone aware of what must be done and when.
Want to know if your employer branding efforts are reaping results? Ongig offers up this valuable insight by scoring your job descriptions and adverts in real-time, suggesting improvements to support your diversity, equity and inclusivity (DE&I) hiring.
In addition to analysing the performance of your content, it offers templates for future job postings, and handles the publishing of hundreds (or even thousands) of job adverts automatically.
Can you have too many employer brand tools?
These 18 employer branding tools merely scratch the surface of what’s available to help you attract, recruit and retain the best available talent. Hopefully, this has helped you consider where you can streamline your processes and unlock your brand’s potential.
However, a word of warning. While these tools can benefit your employer branding in numerous ways, introducing too many can become a detriment to your long-term recruitment efforts. That’s because an abundance of employer brand solutions can:
Increase the complexity of managing your brand and campaigns
Confuse your employees with too many logins
Eat away at your budget
Make maintenance and upgrades a hassle to complete
Require significant amounts of time to train your teams
Cause inconsistent messaging on your various channels
And consider, if you do choose to invest in your employer brand, be sure to think about integration. If you can seamlessly bring solutions together into one united platform, activating your employer brand becomes a lot less complicated.
Take steps to activate your employer brand
Technology can play a valuable role in the reach, consistency and performance of your employer brand. But, this must be accompanied by a well-constructed employer brand strategy, high-quality assets and the support of your existing employees.
If you’d like to learn more about how to attract and retain top talent in this highly competitive landscape, read our ultimate employer branding guide.
Your essential guide to consistent branding on social media
Papirfly
10minutes read
Whether we like it or not, social media is a fixture in our daily lives – and a space marketers can’t afford to ignore.
Here’s why: more than 5 billion people worldwide use social media channels at least once a month – and that number is expected to touch 6 billion by 2027. It means social platforms have become one of the most powerful ways for brands to communicate directly with their audiences, tell their story, and build long-term trust.
A strong, consistent brand presence on social media is no longer optional – it’s essential. When your audience can clearly recognize who you are and what you stand for, they’re more likely to trust, follow, and engage with you. But when that consistency breaks down, your brand reputation can suffer real damage.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to keep your social branding consistent across platforms, and offer you practical tips for building a long-term social media strategy that strengthens every interaction.
What is social media branding?
Social media branding is how your brand shows up across your social platforms, and about how you use them to promote, evolve, and bring your brand identity to life.
Because social media is often the first touchpoint between a brand and a consumer, it’s critical that your content reflects your values and voice just as clearly as your website or ad campaigns do.
85%
of consumers use social media to research new brands
Source: Tintup
85%
of consumers use social media to research new brands
Source: Tintup
What are the key elements of social media branding?
To build an effective social media brand, there are several key elements you need to get right.
Content creation: You must develop and share relevant and compelling types of content, including imagery and video content, that connects with people and aligns with your branding.
Engagement: You must actively interact with followers, responding to comments, messages, and mentions to foster relationships and build long-term loyalty.
Brand voice: You must establish a distinct, authentic brand voice that reflects your organization’s personality and values.
Community building: You must cultivate a community through user-generated content (UGC) and create opportunities for your followers to participate and support your brand.
5 key elements of social media branding
While each element is important, brand consistency is the most essential piece of the puzzle – and often the most challenging to enforce.
The importance of social media brand consistency
Consistency is key for any stable, trustworthy relationship. The relationship between you and your social media followers is no different.
People want to connect with brands that reflect their own values. They’re looking for authenticity, shared priorities, and a sense of familiarity. Social media, with its more personal tone and real-time nature, amplifies these expectations. It’s where your audience gets to know your brand – not just what you sell.
If your content sends mixed messages or feels disconnected from previous posts, it creates confusion. And confusion leads to doubt, which ultimately damages your brand reputation.
An inconsistent presence can also make your brand look disorganized. Jarring shifts in color palette, typography, or format signal a lack of alignment behind the scenes. And for potential customers, that can be a red flag.
89%
of consumers buy from brands they follow on social media
81%
of consumers say it’s important that they trust the brands they buy from
90%
of consumers expect a similar experience with a brand across all marketing channels
89%
of consumers buy from brands they follow on social media
Source: Sprout Social
81%
of consumers say it’s important that they trust the brands they buy from
Source: Edelman
90%
of consumers expect a similar experience with a brand across all marketing channels
Source: CrowdSpring
Source: Sprout Social
Source: Edelman
Source: CrowdSpring
Further problems caused by inconsistency on your social media platforms include:
Reduced brand recall when customers are ready to purchase
Lower engagement and interaction with organic posts
Less effective performance of paid social campaigns
6 challenges to staying brand‑consistent on social media
How often should I post on social media to maintain brand consistency?
Brand consistency isn’t just about content – it’s also about timing. Your audience is more likely to engage with your posts if they follow a predictable rhythm.
Think of your posts like a favorite TV show. If new episodes drop at random times, audiences lose interest. But when they know what to expect and when, they’ll come back for more.
That said, every social channel is different. Algorithms, demographics, and engagement patterns vary across platforms. Here’s a quick breakdown of best-practice posting frequencies to help guide your approach:
Optimal posting frequencies for major social networks
Source: Sprout Social
Source: Sprout Social
Whatever content creation schedule you adopt, make it intentional and stick to it. A consistent calendar helps your team stay organized and ensures your audience has a reliable brand experience.
8 tips for building a consistent social media branding strategy
1. Lock down your brand identity and goals
Before posting anything, make sure everyone is aligned on your mission, values, and visual identity – and on what social media is meant to achieve for your brand. It could be for raising awareness, generating leads, or managing customer service. The important thing is that your global teams, local marketers, and community managers all understand this.
A centralized brand hub makes this easier. Give your teams access to up-to-date brand guidelines, digital assets, and style templates so every piece of content stays aligned.
2. Establish your target audience
Your brand can’t speak to everyone in the same way. Get clear on who you’re talking to, and how they behave on each platform.
Ask:
What age groups are we targeting?
Which platforms do they spend time on?
What problems are they trying to solve?
Different channels appeal to different demographics, so create specific personas for each platform to keep your messaging relevant and on-brand.
3. Define your social media channels
Not all platforms will be right for your goals – or your audience. Based on your personas, you need to select the channels where your efforts will deliver the greatest return.
For example, B2B brands often find strong engagement on LinkedIn, while younger audiences may be more active on Instagram or TikTok.
Focusing your efforts allows your team to go deeper, understanding platform nuances, content performance trends, and optimal posting times.
The average person uses approximately 7 social media networks every month
Source: DataReportal
The average person uses approximately 7 social media networks every month
Source: DataReportal
4. Create a social content calendar
When it comes to creative content marketing, timing matters. Here are some best practices that can help you get it right:
Keep feeds engaging by switching between a variety of content themes
Research each platform to identify optimal posting times
Follow the 80/20 rule – 80% of content should be about providing value, 20% promoting goods or services
Include space for user-generated content, special announcements, and more
Align content with holidays, events, and special dates
5. Build social post templates
For consistent digital content creation, you need dependable templates. By using pre-approved templates that align with your visual identity, you reduce the risk of off-brand content slipping through.
As well as locking down the position of your logo, brand colours, design elements and more, branded design templates enable you to create marketing materials for multiple channels and locations. Your templates can match the optimal size and layout of each platform and allow users to switch up the language or imagery for different countries and cultures.
Fundamentally, templates empower your social media marketers to work faster, confidently and cost-effectively, all while preventing inconsistencies.
Papirfly’s brand management platform results in:
80% reduced effort in asset creation
$200 reduction in agency spend per asset
80% reduced effort in asset creation
$200 reduction in agency spend per asset
6. Produce communication guidelines
Consistency isn’t just for posts – it’s also key to conversations. When followers interact with your brand, they expect a consistent tone and level of service.
Establish guidelines that cover:
Tone of voice for replies and DMs
How to respond to complaints or negative feedback
What kind of UGC can be reshared
Escalation processes for sensitive issues
By standardizing your engagement practices, you ensure every interaction strengthens your brand experience and brand equity.
7. Centralize your digital assets
Consistency can be a real challenge when teams are spread worldwide. It only takes one rogue post to disrupt your communications and damage your brand reputation. That’s why it pays to have everyone in your organization working from the same bank of digital assets.
The easiest way to achieve this is through a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. Your DAM enables you to store, share, and manage all approved social assets in one place, ensuring every team is using the right version, every time. It should also allow you to tag and categorize brand assets, so your teams can find what they need faster and easier:
8 ways to categorize social media assets on a DAM system
By managing your digital assets effectively, you can lock down consistency across every social media channel and campaign, without proofing-related bottlenecks.
8. Regularly monitor your social media channels
However carefully you’ve followed the previous steps, inconsistencies and errors can still slip through. That’s why frequent monitoring is so important. It allows you to react quickly to any problems before they cause any harm to your brand reputation.
Monitoring best practice says you should:
Monitor and track your social media channels multiple times a day
Give every post one final sense-check before it’s published
Respond quickly to any negative comments or feedback, so your audience can see you listen to feedback and don’t sweep poor reviews under the rug
Learn how real-time marketing materials elevate your social media strategy
Discover the value of responsive digital content
Understand the importance of consistent social listening & monitoring
Maintain a consistent social media presence on all platforms with Papirfly
Building a strong brand on social media isn’t about going viral. It’s about showing up consistently, with content that reflects who you are, what you value, and how you connect with people.
With Papirfly’s Digital Asset Management and templated content creation suite, you can empower every team to produce on-brand creative content marketing, so your social media becomes a space where your brand not only shows up but also stands out.
Does everyone create content that’s on‑brand, every time?
Find peace of mind with better brand governance.
Does everyone create content that’s on‑brand, every time?
How strong employer branding improves your high-volume recruitment campaigns
Papirfly
8minutes read
High-volume recruitment. Bulk recruitment. Mass hiring. Whatever you call it, most global organisations have at some stage needed to sign up a large number of new employees in a short window of time.
It’s a long-established practice, but it’s increasingly challenging when demand for top talent regularly outweighs supply. Whether your company is opening a new location or needs more hands on deck at peak times, you must use every tool at your disposal to engage your target market and fill your vacancies.
While technologies such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and video interviewing platforms are key to streamlining this process, you must reach and connect with candidates first – and few things help you do this more than a strong employer brand.
Here, we’ll explain how well-managed recruitment branding strategies enhance your hiring efforts, and how you can activate your employer brand to attract and retain potential candidates.
What is high-volume recruitment?
High-volume recruitment is when an organisation looks to hire a significant number of candidates in a short space of time.
Commonly used in retail, hospitality, customer service and practically any industry with fluctuating workforce demands, this strategy is deployed in many circumstances, like when:
Seasonal demand for products or services peaks, such as during Christmas
A business rapidly expands or opens new locations
Employee turnover reached a high point
An organisation offers a lot of entry-level positions, such as call centre operators
Why is a strong employer brand important for your recruitment efforts?
Your employer brand is your shopfront to potential candidates. It’s the values, perks, incentives and motivators that resonate with your target audience, stretching from the first job ad a prospect sees, right through to your day-to-day company culture.
In a highly competitive talent landscape, your employer brand is your chance to stand out from your competitors and secure exceptional recruits. It’s your brand’s identity for your workforce, and is crucial for bringing the right people on board.
How does employer branding differ between high-volume recruitment and traditional hiring?
It’s easy to overlook the importance of a solid employer brand for high-volume recruitment. For entry-level or temporary roles, candidates aren’t going to care about how clean or well-managed your employer branding looks, right?
Wrong. Over 75% of job seekers research an employer’s brand before applying for a role, while 69% of candidates say they would reject job offers from companies with a bad employer brand. When you’re trying to fill roles fast, you can’t afford this degree of rejection.
In many ways, a strong employer brand is more vital in high-volume campaigns than in typical hiring cycles. Because you’re advertising on many job boards and platforms at once, a negative reputation or lack of clarity can cause candidates to question why you have so many openings.
This uncertainty may deter high-calibre candidates from applying, causing your campaigns to suffer and drag out longer.
What are the key elements of a strong employer brand for high-volume recruitment?
Employer branding in recruitment at any level requires multiple key elements to achieve consistent success:
Personalised experiences for candidates, from pre-application to the onboarding process
A well-constructed careers page outlining your company mission and values
Carefully monitored and managed listings on employer review sites like Glassdoor
Employee advocates who promote your organisation within their own networks
A successful employer brand strategy is layered and consistent at every touch point – and this is just as critical for mass hires as it is for individual roles.
4 ways your employer brand helps with mass hiring
High-volume recruitment is fraught with challenges. Immediately it conjures up ideas of mass generic emails, automated responses and candidates left in limbo.
An impressive employer brand can help overcome many challenges associated with volume hiring, ensuring each potential employee feels special even when reaching out to thousands at a time.
1. Eliminate ill-fitting candidates
The biggest headache for large-scale recruitment is sorting applications to find suitable candidates. You can easily waste hours on this process, pushing your campaigns back with every ill-suited application.
With a clear, coherent and ever-present employer brand, candidates can immediately see your company values, benefits and culture, and visualise if they “fit” in your organisation. This helps reduce the number of inappropriate entries, resulting in higher-quality applications.
2. Reduce time and cost to hire
With so many roles needing to be filled, time is of the essence in high-volume recruitment marketing. A good employer brand is estimated to slash the time and cost of hiring in half, which results in substantial savings when you’re trying to fill dozens of spaces at once.
3. Improve employee retention
Focusing solely on filling positions quickly can compromise the long-term retention of your candidates. If this leads to a rushed interview and onboarding process, it becomes difficult to hold onto new hires, taking you back to square one.
Finally, it’s no great secret that potential candidates trust the word of employees more than employers – particularly if they’re already sceptical about the number of openings available.
Encouraging your existing employees to reinforce the reasons to work for your company on social media, employer review sites and word of mouth helps silence any doubt from your prospects.
Activating your employer brand for volume recruitment campaigns
Now you understand the difference an excellent employer brand makes for high-volume recruitment, how can you best “activate” it to reap the rewards?
Our employer brand solutions have empowered many world-renowned brands to navigate these turbulent times with ease and control, so here are our 6 top tips to help you achieve the same:
1. Understand your roles and ideal candidate personas
Knowing your target audience is even more pressing for high-volume recruitment than conventional hiring – you don’t want to be inundated with hundreds of irrelevant resumes for each role.
Take time to distinguish what skills, experience and characteristics the ideal person would possess for every position you have available. This will ensure your job adverts are tailored to these expectations, so you receive more appropriate job applicants.
Plus, understanding what makes your candidates tick will help you adapt your recruitment branding to the values most meaningful to them – do they prefer flexible hours, remote working or development opportunities?
2. Centralise your recruitment branding strategy
A disparate employer brand strategy creates inconsistency, which damages both your reputation and ability to hire in pressing times.
Bringing every element of your employer brand identity – guidelines, EVP, tone of voice, employee handbooks and more – under one dedicated brand hub will help ensure your materials are aligned, whether you’re reaching out about one position or dozens.
3. Harness tools to create personalised content
With mass hiring campaigns, it’s all too easy to send the same formulaic emails, adverts and job descriptions to each audience. But for the best results, it’s important to speak to candidates on a personal level – their wants, their language, their culture.
Particularly if you’re hiring for positions in a different country, it’s vital to translate your employer branding for local markets. With the right brand management platform, localising recruitment campaign collateral for specific audiences can be done in minutes, enabling you to tailor messages without major losses of time or resources.
Remember: think global, but act local.
4. Prioritise your candidate experiences
Employer branding doesn’t end with the application process. So many organisations have lost potential hires at the final hurdle due to a negative or frustrating candidate experience. You must carry your branding and company culture through this process as well.
Consider:
What do candidates first see at an interview or video call?
How can we streamline and uncomplicate this process?
What materials can we provide prospects to help them understand our work culture?
Who is best placed to support and guide new hires for a particular role?
Consistency is key to any recruitment campaign, but it’s especially challenging when advertising for many jobs concurrently on multiple platforms. Any break in brand consistency can lessen your appeal to candidates, and present your company as low-grade and disjointed.
To lock down your employer brand identity, invest in intelligent, on-brand design templates. This framework will ensure those responsible for creating your recruitment materials never deviate from your core branding, while offering enough freedom for their creativity to shine.
Furthermore, consider implementing a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution to support these templates. This comprehensive online library of assets can make sure your teams worldwide have instant access to the right content for their campaigns, keeping your local recruitment efforts in lockstep with your global identity.
6. Plan your campaigns with precision
Coordinating high-volume recruitment campaigns can be a real struggle without a centralised, birds-eye view of all activity – particularly when multiple locations or countries are involved in this drive.
Equipping your teams with proven campaign execution tools helps them organise activities more effectively. This minimises waste and provides much-needed stability during substantial times of change and upheaval within your organisation.
How can we adapt our employer branding strategies in periods of high-volume recruitment?
During high-volume recruitment, there are many ways you can adapt your employer branding to make a meaningful positive impact:
Emphasise your employer values and unique selling points to immediately capture the attention of applicants
Leverage technology for automated screening and personalised communication to improve the speed and quality of your recruitment processes
Harness a wider range of recruitment channels, such as social media and job boards, to maximise visibility
Offer referral incentives to your existing employees to encourage them to play an active role in your campaigns
Showcase your company culture through testimonials and success stories to give candidates a tangible sense of life in your organisation
Master your employer brand, maximise your recruitment efforts
Many of the biggest headaches attached to high-volume recruitment can be reduced or eliminated altogether with a healthy, consistent employer brand. We hope this article has helped you recognise this, and advised on how you can harness it to engage candidates on a mass scale.
One final piece of advice – continue to review and refine the performance of your recruitment campaigns. Candidates’ priorities and attitudes constantly evolve, and change from location to location. Investing in real-time campaign data and analytics keeps you on top of these trends, and illustrates what assets and activities are reaping results for your organisation.
Combined with further talent acquisition software, you can build an employer brand that connects with audiences globally and locally. Meaning that whenever there’s an urgent need to bring people on board, your organisation is at the front of the queue.
Your brand is your most valuable differentiator in a highly competitive landscape. Your unique personality, values and promises set you apart from the crowd, and enable the consumers, employees and stakeholders in your target market to emotionally connect with you.
But to achieve that ambition, it demands nothing less than full-time management. Working with over 1,500 global and growing brands, we recognise the immense importance of brand management in generating loyal customers, raising awareness and building brand equity.
In this ultimate guide, we’ll explain exactly why brand management is something today’s companies cannot overlook, and share our advice on how to set up your brand for lasting success.
Discover what brand management involves and who’s responsible for it
Explore the 6 defining principles of brand management
Follow our standout steps for successful brand management
Overcome the key challenges affecting modern brand managers
Ready to become better at brand management? Then let’s get started…
What is brand management?
Brand management is a very broad term. In a nutshell, it’s the strategies, techniques and processes your organisation uses to maintain and improve your brand in the long term.
Everything from your brand guidelines, strategy and overall identity, to the individual marketing materials that reach your audiences, must be carefully structured, directed, adapted and analysed to maximise your brand’s potential.
Is brand management the same as branding?
No. Your branding is the process of building your brand. It’s where you establish your brand positioning, visual identity, tone of voice, and the many other facets of your overall brand identity. Brand management is the process of monitoring, maintaining and evolving this identity once it’s established.
In other words, think of brand management as the vehicle that drives your branding to its true potential.
Marketing and brand management are not the same either. Brand management extends far beyond your marketing team – it incorporates your salespeople, customer service reps, HR professionals, recruiters and more. Essentially, any department that engages with your customers, staff or wider audiences has a role to play in brand management.
What does brand management involve?
So, what does strategic brand management mean in practice? Again, there’s a wide range of areas this touches, but typically it will involve:
Developing and continually refining your brand strategy
Adapting brand assets following any switches in strategy, graphics or tone
The evolution of your brand identity
Maintaining brand consistency across all communication channels
Monitoring your brand health and reputation among audiences, including crisis management
Overseeing the development and execution of brand communications
Strategies to improve brand equity and grow loyalty among your consumers
What is brand asset management?
Brand asset management is the specific management and monitoring of the various assets and marketing materials that promote your brand. It’s essentially how you organise and administer the logos, campaign assets, colour palettes, graphics and more to ensure these are completely consistent on all platforms.
Software such as Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems are essential to fulfilling this important task, allowing you to govern all approved assets your organisation creates in one central location.
Who should be responsible for brand management?
As noted earlier, the responsibility of brand management should not fall at the feet of your CMO or marketing manager. It’s a completely different animal, and demands a dedicated brand manager or brand management team to oversee.
Your brand manager should have a good understanding of marketing principles, including digital marketing and market research, but also maintain regular communication with your various customer and employee-facing departments. They may also be responsible for:
Identifying and installing brand management platforms and software
Analysing market data for brand-related insights
Developing your brand guidelines
Overseeing the budgets connected to strategic brand development
Conducting market research
Managing any updates to your branding or a full-scale rebrand
6 defining principles of brand management
Now we’ve discussed the basics of brand management, it’s time to dig a little deeper into the core principles of this topic. These 6 standout principles outline the purpose of brand management, and the positive impact good management can have on your organisation.
1. Brand equity
Brand equity is what separates a startup tech firm and Apple, or a generic local soft drink from Coca-Cola and Pepsi. It’s the value that your brand adds to your product or service, setting it apart from comparable offerings in your market.
The more you build brand equity, the more power you have in your industry and the more market share you enjoy. It’s what every switched-on organisation strives towards, and is only achievable through careful, deliberate management of your brand.
Any break in the continuity of your communications, or negative customer experience, harms your brand equity. By consistently monitoring and managing your branding, you reduce the risk of losing face with your devoted audience.
If you’d like to know more, check out our blog post explaining customer-based brand equity and the power it offers your organisation.
2. Brand reputation
A key part of brand equity is your brand’s reputation with consumers, employees, stakeholders and beyond.
The latest generations of customers and candidates place a much higher value on reputation and ethical consumerism, with many wanting nothing to do with companies that hold a negative reputation. In fact, 94% of customers say they avoid businesses after reading a bad review.
Brand management is vital to building a strong brand reputation. It helps to reduce the frequency of miscommunications and inconsistencies that impact your standing, and ensures you know how to handle a crisis or public relations challenges.
3. Brand loyalty
Loyal customers are worth their weight in gold – in some cases, quite literally. When 65% of the average company’s revenue comes from repeat business, having a devoted audience is the foundation for consistent, stable profitability.
Poor brand management can get in the way of growing a loyal fan base. By delivering consistent brand experiences and on-brand campaigns, you build trust and emotional connections with your most active buyers. This improves retention, boosts referrals, and supports your sales, helping ensure buyers stay beyond Christmas and other high-traffic occasions.
This is also key to the success of your employer branding. Employees who buy into your company’s vision and values are more likely to stick around and work to the best of their abilities.
4. Brand awareness
Does your brand exist if no one knows about it? One of the major objectives of brand management is to raise the profile of a brand, ensuring it has a clear, distinct presence everywhere your target audience is looking – from search engines to posters and billboards.
But, it’s not enough to simply be present with your audiences; you must make sure your company’s brand is presented consistently to build meaningful brand awareness. Otherwise, different people will have a different perspective of your brand depending on the channel they engage with – this confusion breeds mistrust.
So, brand management is critical to not only maintain a steady flow of content across all marketing channels, but also to monitor that this is aligned with your overall branding.
5. Brand recognition
Strong awareness leads to better brand recognition. This is when your audiences, through regular exposure to your branding, start to recall and think of your organisation without prompting. This is valuable in generating a loyal, trusting customer base, and from there converting consumers into fully-fledged brand advocates.
Brand management helps you build that familiarity by keeping your brand communications in lockstep at every touchpoint. From consistent TV spots and paid media posts that enhance ad recall, to maintaining the same tone across your social media comms, effective management of your brand presentation helps you become a recognisable name in your market.
Remember – it takes between 5 and 7 impressions for someone to remember your brand on average. Their journey with your brand must be managed with real care and attention.
6. Brand consistency
We’ve referenced this several times already, but it’s impossible to overstate the importance of brand consistency when managing your brand.
This is when your messaging, graphics, designs and overall brand identity are coherent on every platform. Your website, social media channels, advertising, brochures, emails – every piece of branding must sing from the same hymn sheet.
Effectively overseeing brand guidelines, templates and company portals, is an essential part of achieving this unbroken flow of communication.
Successful brand management makes a tangible difference in each of these critical areas – and gives you a competitive advantage over others who don’t prioritise this control.
Why is brand management important for modern companies?
As the developers of our own brand management platform with over a million unique users, we know how important this is in growing the value, understanding and equity of your brand.
But the benefits don’t stop there – here are 5 more reasons why brand management is an essential practice for your organisation.
5 benefits of effective brand management
1. A platform for market expansion
A well-managed brand creates a platform for your organisation to grow. Whether you want to expand your product and service offerings, or go through the rebranding process, having a loyal customer base formed through consistent, structured branding makes these efforts much simpler and more likely to succeed.
In addition, the stability of a well-managed brand can help make your position in the market less volatile over time. As every industry’s landscape shifts, this can provide a great layer of security.
2. Improved workflow and cost efficiency
Efficiency is the heart of better productivity and performance, and brand management software helps you achieve this both in your workflow and cost efficiency.
Having a team or platform in place to oversee the creation, sharing and usage of brand assets makes campaign execution significantly more seamless. No back-and-forth email chains, ad-hoc meetings and constant rounds of proofing – everything becomes smoother and more streamlined with brand management.
This enhanced workflow naturally leads to greater cost efficiency. With the support of a brand management team and/or solution, your marketers can find the assets they need and produce new collateral faster, all with the reassurance they are always on-brand. Campaigns get turned around quicker, and you achieve more for less.
3. Empowered and engaged employees
Modern employees seek engagement and purpose – a sense of belonging beyond their day-to-day responsibilities. Strong brand management cultivates this, helping ensure that all internal communications and branding are aligned, so that your teams stay connected to the vision and values at the core of your brand identity.
Furthermore, a dedicated brand management platform encourages collaboration across departments, which is essential for a brand that works on every level – from what your customers see, to how you engage existing employees and top candidates.
In addition to increasing sales and enabling you to upscale prices, great brand management also helps you achieve more value from your customers across their lifespan.
When consumers are presented with a consistent, continuous presentation of your brand identity and enjoy positive brand experiences, they are far more likely to purchase other products and services you offer.
5. Enhanced marketing strategies
Coherent brand management helps teams coordinate and strategically plan campaigns in real-time. Without a proper approach or the right tools, your teams can quickly end up working disparately, resulting in inconsistencies and miscommunications that damage your brand.
With a central, all-encompassing brand management strategy and platform, your marketing strategies become clearer and simpler to execute. This then leads to greater brand recognition, more loyal customers, and robust brand equity.
How does brand management contribute to long-term business success?
By delivering the expertise, tools and framework for a strong brand identity, brand management sets your organisation apart in your industry, and fosters a loyal following.
Naturally, forming deep emotional connections with your customers, employees and wider stakeholders is an ideal foundation for long-term business success:
Encouraging repeat purchases
Permitting premium pricing
Sustaining profitability
Improving brand advocacy
Building employee retention
Improving resilience to market fluctuations
Bolstering general reputability
These and so much more become attainable goals with better brand management.
6 steps to succeed at brand management
Now we’ve established the value that successful brand management can bring to your organisation, how do you achieve that success? Here are 6 steps we know can make a difference in keeping your brand under control and working for your business.
1. Define your brand positioning and identity
Start with the basics – how do you want your brand to be positioned? What is its unique tone, personality and visual identity? While this is more “branding” than brand management, knowing this sets the framework for the values and characteristics you want to present to your various target audiences.
After all, if your brand manager doesn’t have a firm grasp on what your brand represents, then how can they know if it’s being well managed?
Make sure all aspects of your branding are nailed down and documented, including:
Brand name
Logo
Graphics, designs and visual elements
Tone of voice
Mission and vision statements
Colour palettes
Typography
Brand story
2. Create effective brand guidelines
Speaking of documentation, arguably the most important document for a brand manager to keep on top of is your brand guidelines. This is your Brand Bible – the rules and parameters that ensure your brand is never misconstrued or misrepresented on any channel.
Amazingly, 15% of companies report not having brand guidelines, which is a huge oversight. Making sure you have these in place, and that they contain at least everything mentioned in the previous point, is essential to keeping your brand consistent at every touchpoint.
To succeed, they also must be accessible. With this in mind, establishing a dedicated digital brand hub – a single point for teams to locate everything they need to know about how to showcase your brand – can make managing your brand simpler and more comprehensive.
3. Focus on your corporate communications
Coordinating your corporate communications – both to your internal and external audiences – is one of the biggest responsibilities for brand management professionals.
From your marketing materials, email campaigns and customer service tools, to crisis communications at a pressing time, it pays dividends to craft templates around every style of message you generate. Not only will this speed up the time it takes to produce assets, but it also helps you stay on top of the consistency of your communications.
It’s also important to give your brand management and corporate communications teams goals to help ensure the performance of your comms never dips.
4. Bring your digital brand assets under one roof
Against the ever-growing demand for content among consumers, managing the sheer volume of assets your company produces can be extremely hard. Especially for global brands who want to tailor their messages to local audiences, it can feel practically impossible to keep track.
For brand managers, the solution can be found in Digital Asset Management (or DAM) systems. These platforms allow you to store, share and oversee every digital asset your marketing teams produce in one location – a single source of truth for your organisation.
For brand managers, this means much less stress following email trails and manually sending assets to your locations worldwide. Everything becomes much more manageable with integrated DAM solutions, establishing a structure that brings order to any asset-based chaos.
5. Regularly measure the success of your brand management efforts
Brand management is a broad topic, and there’s no universal metric that indicates whether you’re doing a good job or not. But there are several brand management KPIs you can monitor that will indicate the success of your approach, and guide you to worthwhile adaptations. These include:
Plus, examining analytics about the usage of branded assets, how often your digital brand guidelines are visited, and campaign behaviours can help you prove your team’s adoption of your branding – helping make sure your global on-brand culture is maintained.
6. Implement a brand management system
A brand manager’s job is tough, requiring oversight across multiple departments to keep branding consistent and coherent on every channel. That responsibility becomes a lot less daunting with the right software on your side.
Implementing a brand management system can make building your brand and expressing it consistently far easier – empowering everyone in your team to become their own brand manager. Through this technology, you can gain the ability to:
Contain all elements at the heart of your brand in one easy-to-access destination
Store all digital assets in a single location for your teams globally
Produce on-brand assets efficiently and accurately with smart, sophisticated templates
Plan out campaign execution in a streamlined, coherent way
Monitor how closely your teams are adhering to brand consistency
Fundamentally, the right brand management solution can streamline many stressful, manual tasks associated with keeping a brand stable. It also automates some of the tedious, granular aspects of brand management, meaning teams can focus more on bigger-picture matters.
3 common brand management challenges – and how to beat them
A brand touches every aspect of an organisation; managing this is already a tough challenge. However, in our conversations with brand managers across the globe, the same hurdles tend to come up in their bid to secure the consistency and performance they’re looking for.
Here are 3 of the most prominent brand management challenges we hear about, and our advice to combat them.
1. Multichannel marketing
First, the huge volume of marketing channels modern companies are expected to be present on is a major burden. Websites, emails, videos, digital adverts, social media marketing – today’s customers expect a consistent experience at every touchpoint. Any break in this chain can damage trust, forfeit sales and hurt your reputation.
So, how do you maintain this consistent voice in all areas, while still fitting your assets to the best practices of each channel? For brand managers, intelligent templates can provide reassurance that every asset your team produces is aligned with company guidelines, reducing the time, money and stress associated with multichannel marketing.
2. Globalisation
In addition to the plethora of communication channels, global brands must contend with adapting their messaging to meet the specific culture, language and expectations of local audiences. Without careful management, the risks of going off-piste in a particular location can harm your reputation – like when Ford informed customers in Belgium that every car has a “high-quality corpse”.
Here, brand managers should look to DAM systems to reduce the risk of these cultural blunders. Having a platform that allows you to store imagery, videos and more for a certain audience, and put in fail-safes to stop these from being used inappropriately, DAM technology simplifies how you manage your messages to every target market.
3. Rebranding
A complete company rebrand can be a minefield to navigate, even if pursued for the right reasons. Most people are naturally resistant to change, so this kind of upheaval must be managed expertly to prevent a costly failure – just look at Gap’s experience to see what can go wrong.
Reaffirm and settle on your company’s vision, mission and values
Audit existing brand assets
Secure buy-in from key stakeholders
Assign a team to oversee the rebrand
Update your brand guidelines
Communicate the change with your customers
Plan an effective launch campaign
What should you look for in a brand management platform?
Looking to invest in brand management software, but you’re not sure what the right system looks like for you? Here are 14 key questions to ask a potential vendor:
Does your platform allow me to organise, store and manage all types of brand assets?
Can the platform centralise our brand guidelines and other brand-related documents?
Does it allow our teams to work collaboratively?
Is the user interface intuitive and easy to navigate for team members?
Will it speed up the time it takes to locate branded collateral or create assets?
Can you customise templates for specific audiences while maintaining consistency?
Does it include Digital Asset Management capabilities?
Will it reduce our dependence on designers and external agencies?
Does it back up all assets and information contained in case something goes wrong?
Can the platform scale and adapt to evolving brand management needs?
Are there built-in analytics and reporting features to track its performance?
Can you prove that it will deliver a meaningful return on investment?
Can your platform integrate with various software our teams currently use?
Does it prioritise data security with features like role-based access controls and encryption?
Brand management is a massive priority in every organisation, so it’s important to ensure the software you select fulfils your expectations and helps make life easier, not harder.
5 companies harnessing the power of brand management software
If you’d like to better understand the difference high-quality software can make, here are 5 companies achieving brand management excellence with the right platform:
Unilever faced inefficiencies in brand asset management, lacking centralised coordination. This led to redundant efforts by local teams, creating assets from scratch and relying on external agencies.
With a brand management solution, Unilever gained greater oversight over their brand communications. By enabling custom workflows and approvals, fostering better collaboration, and reducing reliance on external agencies, they enhanced brand consistency while cutting costs.
Helly Hansen revolutionised their brand management with a seamless global solution, integrating online brand guidelines, Digital Asset Management (DAM), and templates.
This unified approach maintained brand consistency across markets and stakeholders, vital for a brand with extensive distribution such as theirs.
Faced with maintaining a uniform brand identity across 65 regions with disparate marketing teams, IBM brought management of their employer branding under one all-encompassing platform.
With this central location to oversee asset standards and design templates, IBM now enforces consistent branding that has benefited their recruitment efforts.
Vodafone achieved greater brand clarity, enhanced consistency in employer communications, and reduced time-consuming approvals by implementing brand management software.
Transitioning from a “telco to techno” brand, Vodafone is empowered by this technology to explore digital transformation opportunities for talent attraction and skills development.
BMW NE employed a brand management solution to automate and centralise their branding, enhancing campaign execution for local dealers with efficient communication and coordination.
With this tool, stakeholders can access and adapt marketing collateral with complete consistency, tailoring local materials in line with BMW’s core brand strategies.
How will AI steer the future of brand management?
The ongoing evolution of AI is influencing every industry; brand management is no exception. While this is still in its infancy, we’re already seeing how AI can further streamline and simplify brand management for teams worldwide – here are just a few examples:
Customer service automation
As AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants grow more sophisticated, they will be able to provide 24/7 customer support, answer questions and resolve issues, all while communicating in your brand’s unique tone of voice.
Automatic asset production
The growing sophistication of prompt engineering and AI-driven image generation will soon enable marketers to generate high-quality, on-brand assets at the press of a button. This will reduce companies’ reliance on external agencies, allowing them to produce at pace in-house.
Instant asset identification
Within a Digital Asset Management solution, “contextual search” is a developing trend that will empower teams to locate the exact assets they require from an extensive library just by inputting a relevant prompt.
Brand monitoring and sentiment analysis
AI tools can monitor online mentions, reviews, and social media conversations about your brand in real-time. This allows companies to manage their reputation and respond promptly to emerging issues or crises with greater immediacy.
At Papirfly, we’re constantly experimenting with AI to discover how we can unlock further efficiencies for our clients. If you’d like to know more, explore our AI solutions for brand management.
Empower your people with one brand management platform
We hope that this ultimate guide to brand management has shown you the importance of directing your brand at every touchpoint, and provided some helpful tips for approaching this vital task in the future.
At Papirfly, we are helping over 600 companies worldwide build an on-brand culture, create unlimited enterprise assets, and activate their brand everywhere with absolute control and consistency.
POINT: Control every aspect of your brand and deliver unbreakable brand guidelines
In the fierce battle to recruit and retain the best talent available, a company’s reputation means more than ever. With the latest generations of candidates becoming increasingly selective about the employers they work for, it’s imperative that today’s organisations pay close attention to the strength of their employer brand.
Without positive employer branding, hiring and retaining talent becomes a real challenge – and very costly. To put yourself at the front of the queue for top prospects and establish yourself as a great place to work, a solid employer brand is no longer an option – it’s a necessity.
With decades of experience helping global organisations maximise the potential of their employer brand, we know its value and the huge benefits it can unlock. After reading this complete guide, you will as well.
Learn what employer branding is and what it includes
Discover the advantages of a strong employer brand
Explore the steps to building better employer branding
See what the top employer brands are doing to attract recruits
Want to identify, engage and secure the right talent for your organisation? Then let’s get started…
What is employer branding?
Employer branding is how you shape and promote your company’s reputation as an employer. It’s the assets, processes and values designed to attract top potential candidates, retain high-performing employees, and create an inclusive, productive work environment.
Fundamentally, a strong employer brand encourages job seekers to explore your openings and makes your existing employees feel like part of a united entity. Conversely, a weak employer brand damages your ability to attract top talent and keep employees around long-term.
What does employer branding include?
Employer branding is more than your career site or your Glassdoor profile. It’s a multi-layered approach across numerous channels:
Essentially, your employer branding covers anywhere a potential candidate or current employee would engage with your organisation. So this must all be carefully considered and interconnected under one strategy to reap the best possible results (more on this later).
What is your Employer Value Proposition (EVP)?
One of the most important aspects of any employer brand is the Employer Value Proposition (EVP). Your EVP is the core document outlining the benefits, values and reasons why a prospective recruit should join your company. It’s the shining beacon of your talent acquisition efforts.
While the contents of your EVP will be unique to your organisation, these often contain:
Company mission, vision and core values
Compensation, benefits and perks
Work-life balance initiatives and details
Flexible or remote work opportunities
Training and career development prospects
Social responsibility and charity initiatives
Company social events and activities
Employer recognition efforts
Simply put, anything you believe would entice candidates and encourage your team members to stick around should be featured in your EVP. If it doesn’t include these key elements or is failing to connect with recruits, then maybe it’s time to consider an EVP refresh?
What is company culture?
Your company culture is the “personality” and identity of your organisation. It encapsulates the various values, activities, communications and more that shape how your employees engage with their work and each other – ranging from internal newsletters, training and career development, to company outings and social events.
Typically, a good, diverse and inclusive company culture improves productivity, wellbeing and talent retention. On the other hand, a poor company culture can negatively impact your team’s performance and encourage high turnover.
What are employee ambassadors?
Employee ambassadors are employees who actively promote the advantages of working for your organisation, whether that’s on social media, review websites or simply word of mouth. They are your biggest advocates in appealing to the competitive talent pool.
Ideally, you want every member of your team to be an employee ambassador, but this is often unrealistic, especially in large, global organisations. So, it’s a good strategy to introduce perks and benefits for employees to actively showcase your company’s brand in a positive light, giving them an incentive to organically share their experience with others.
How does employer branding differ from consumer branding?
Your employer brand focuses on attracting and retaining talent in the same way your consumer brand is designed to connect with your customers and generate sales.
However, while they appeal to distinct audiences, they can often influence each other. For instance, a brand that presents a welcoming and inclusive company culture will often reflect well on today’s more socially aware consumers, who want to feel good about the brands they buy from.
Why is employer branding important?
As noted earlier, your employer brand is essentially your employer reputation. A great reputation puts you in an advantageous position to attract and retain top talent. A poor reputation means you face an uphill battle in the intensifying battle for the best candidates.
With 9 out of 10 employers struggling to fill jobs in the current landscape, the importance of a fleshed-out, compelling employer brand is greater than ever. But its benefits extend beyond your recruitment strategy.
What are the benefits of a strong employer brand?
Improves your attractiveness to potential recruits
First and foremost, a solid employer brand helps you stand out to job hunters. The more you can say, share and promote the benefits of working for your organisation, the more likely you will appeal to the job market ahead of your competitors. When nearly 85% of candidates consider a company’s reputation before applying, this is an area you cannot afford to ignore.
It’s not only active job seekers that check out your employer brand. Approximately 82% of employees say they would switch jobs for a company with an excellent reputation. So, it not only raises your attractiveness to available talent, but also catches the eye of high performers already working in your industry.
Reduces your recruitment costs
You likely know how costly the recruitment process can be. Research by CIPD has found that the average cost of filling a vacancy is around €7,000 (£6,100). For managerial roles, this grows closer to €22,000 (£19,000).
Good employer branding can trim these costs in a big way, as you may be able to avoid employing hefty advertising campaigns or hiring recruitment agencies. Candidates who consider your brand attractive are more likely to apply of their own accord when opportunities become available.
Furthermore, if they have a better understanding of your brand’s culture, perks and values, those who don’t align with these will deselect themselves faster. This means you don’t waste time pursuing ill-fitting recruits, further benefiting your bottom line.
Increases your employee retention rates
Of course, the best way to minimise your recruitment costs is to keep your top-performing employees on board. Strong employer branding supports this by fostering a sense of belonging among your workforce, aligning people around shared values and business goals.
Research shows that better employer branding can reduce staff turnover by as much as 28% – resulting in a more experienced, stable work environment and less stress on recruiting and training new arrivals. So, by building an employer brand that addresses the reasons why people leave jobs, you can set your company up for a solid future.
Enhances employee engagement and productivity
Fostering a sense of belonging and pride naturally inspires employees to work harder because they believe in the values their company stands for. In fact, it’s estimated that employees connected to their organisation’s mission and values are 67% more engaged.
This greater engagement inspires greater productivity. If your employees feel part of a rewarding, comfortable and inclusive culture, they will likely feel motivated to do their best day in and day out.
Creates a more positive company culture
Have you heard of quiet quitting? It’s a growing trend in companies worldwide where employees focus on doing the bare minimum at work, with no ambition to evolve or pursue further opportunities. This often develops from a negative company culture, something a good employer brand helps address.
Better employer brand management can help reinforce the benefits and opportunities for progression within your organisation. This in turn can inspire reductions in stress and burnout, and positively impact employee health and wellbeing.
Encourages better company reviews on third-party sites
Did you know that 86% of job seekers look at company reviews and ratings to decide where to apply? Sites like Glassdoor, The Job Crowd and Work Advisor hold a lot of sway over your company’s appeal to recruits – too many negative reviews can cause real damage.
A strong employer brand can help counteract this threat by encouraging employees to become advocates and ambassadors. With clearly defined values and a more appealing culture, your team will be more likely to leave positive reviews, which then grows your reputation among candidates.
How can you measure the strength of your employer brand?
So now you understand the value of a strong employer brand, it might be time to assess how yours is performing.
While there is no all-encompassing “employer branding” metric you can track, in our experience there are several areas you can use to judge how your brand is performing, including:
Job application rate
Job acceptance rate
Time to hire
Cost-per-hire
Employee retention rate
Source of hires
Third-party reviews
8 steps to building your employer brand strategy
Your employer brand strategy is the foundation for how you will set your company apart in the battle to attract, recruit and retain talent.
Establishing and documenting a set strategy is vital to ensure your employer branding efforts are aligned, consistent and effective at every touchpoint. Based on our close relationships with employer brand teams worldwide, here are our 8 key steps to a successful strategy.
1. Conduct an audit on your existing employer brand
First, determine where you are right now:
How is your brand perceived by candidates?
What do your employees think about your company?
Do you communicate your values and objectives well?
These and further reflective questions will help you understand where your existing employer brand succeeds and where it struggles. It will also help you settle on the main identity, values and USPs you want to communicate to your teams and potential recruits.
2. Establish your preferred candidate persona
Who is your ideal candidate? What traits, skills and characteristics do they possess?
Much like you build your marketing around your target customer, you must mould your employer branding around the talent you seek, ranging from experienced industry specialists to graduates and Gen Z candidates.
This helps you tailor your messages to your prospects, focusing on the benefits, values and goals that speak to them.
3. Define your unique EVP
As the centrepiece of your employer brand, your employer value proposition should be drafted with careful consideration. Earlier we noted what your EVP might include, from pay, perks and benefits, to describing your company culture and mission statements.
On top of this, it can be beneficial to enlist the support of your marketing, communications and HR teams to help you draft this. Modern-day recruitment is closer to marketing than ever before, so their expertise can help you strike the right tone and translate your EVP across every channel it appears on.
4. Select your employer brand communication channels
Speaking of channels, next it’s important to decide where you will communicate your employer brand. It can take up to 18 interactions between a candidate and a company before an application is sent. So your employer brand strategy should cover all potential touchpoints, including:
Career site or page
Social media channels
Job and review sites
Current employee profiles
Networking events and career fairs
Email marketing
Job adverts
Interview processes
Internal newsletters
By outlining all channels and how you intend to communicate on each, you put yourself in a strong position to achieve greater employer brand governance.
5. Develop your employer brand assets
It takes more than a career page and job descriptions to activate your employer brand. There’s a myriad of ways you can showcase your unique corporate culture:
Video interviews with employees about their experiences
Company newsletters sharing your team’s achievements and milestones
A dedicated career portal promoting your values and brand identity
Day-in-the-life videos or blog posts presenting your culture
Slideshows expressing the advantages of joining your team
This is only scratching the surface. The possibilities to promote your employer brand are practically endless, but it’s critical you stay brand-consistent across every channel. Inconsistent presentation is a quick way to lose the buy-in of a top prospect.
Don’t have the time or resources to give your employer brand the attention it needs? Find out how you can create infinite on-brand assets faster with our Produce product.
Social media and employer branding
Social media is an especially valuable tool in your employer branding arsenal. With a majority of candidates using these channels to research potential employers, you should harness social media to highlight your employee stories, company events, charity initiatives and more to resonate with your ideal recruits.
And don’t restrict this to your company’s LinkedIn page. If your team members are active on social media, provide them with marketing materials to share on their own channels. After all, modern candidates trust a company’s employees three times more than the company itself to understand what it’s like to work there.
6. Cultivate your onboarding process
You only have one chance to make a good first impression; this is just as true for an employer as it is for a candidate. A structured, well-organised onboarding process can make a meaningful difference to a recruit’s initial experience in your company, and lay the groundwork for a long-term career.
Remember, 77% of new hires satisfied with their onboarding process say they could envision a long career at their organisation, compared to just 29% who didn’t enjoy this process. So from how you handle interviews to developing introductory guides, training packages and other resources, mapping out your full employee experience can be a huge advantage.
7. Create an employee advocacy program
Your employees are among your best assets to promote and reinforce the benefits of your organisation. Setting up an employee advocacy program helps you formalise the ways you encourage your team to share materials in their social circles, with incentives including:
Unique training and career progression opportunities
Public recognition
Tangible gifts and rewards
Exclusive content and information
8. Be authentic
Finally, for your employer brand to achieve lasting success, you must practise what you preach. It’s no good making promises on your EVP that you cannot deliver on, or presenting a rose-tinted vision of your company culture. In a landscape where employees feel more empowered to share their thoughts than ever, this is a recipe for disaster.
Therefore, before you rubber stamp your employer brand strategy, reflect on everything you’ve highlighted and question whether it’s attainable. Authenticity is essential.
6 organisations nailing their employer branding
As we’ve outlined above, employer branding is more than a fancy career site. Here are 6 brands who follow this mindset and are masters at employer brand storytelling.
This innovative series of videos, ads and other materials promotes the various roles contributing to Hilton’s high-quality hospitality. This has worked to both inspire potential candidates of the opportunities available, and showcase the skills of their existing employees.
2. Starbucks
As the world’s most recognisable coffeehouse, Starbucks employs close to 400,000 people globally. With this scale of operations, they firmly focus on employer branding, largely by harnessing social media to showcase employee experiences and success stories.
From a jobs playlist on their YouTube channel, to its celebrated College Achievement Plan, Starbucks is very effective at attracting younger generations of job seekers.
3. L’Oreal
L’Oreal is consistently rated one of the best places to work worldwide, and a large part of that is their commitment to refining and evolving their employer branding over time.
In recent years, they have adapted their EVP to raise awareness of L’Oreal as a tech-driven company as much as a beauty company. This, combined with their promise of delivering a thrilling experience and culture of excellence, helps set them apart as the thought leaders in their industry, and an attractive place to work.
4. Netflix
Netflix’s employer brand is well-known for its emphasis on creative freedom, responsibility and innovation. It promotes a company culture centred on autonomy and creativity, where employees are empowered to pursue bold ideas.
This vision and identity are coupled with tangible compensation and benefits packages, and a strong focus on diversity and inclusion. That is highlighted in Netflix’s detailed and engaging career site, making it easy for potential candidates to understand their culture.
5. Zappos
Shoe and clothing retailer Zappos focuses on employee happiness and wellbeing in their employer branding, as they understand that a happy workforce inspires great customer service.
Plus, they employ an unconventional yet strategic onboarding process: every employee hired, no matter the role, undertakes 4 weeks of training followed by 2 weeks as a customer service rep. Then, they are offered full pay for this training and $2k to leave if they wish. This aims to weed out people who are only there for the money, to build a more committed team.
6. Unilever
From its impactful career site, to its aspirational business strategy with sustainability at its heart. Unilever has a well-established global employer brand that instantly expresses its diverse opportunities and culture, with many testimonials from its existing workforce.
Furthermore, by utilising Papirfly’s brand management platform, Unilever has become incredibly adept at communicating its employer brand to its many local audiences. With this platform in place, Unilever tailors its global identity to each location, resulting in more personalised messages for its employees and potential candidates.
Adapting your global employer brand for local recruits
Today’s global businesses face a significant challenge in conveying their brand across diverse cultures and languages, both for employees and potential hires. These nuances and preferences must be considered to avoid alienating individuals and resonating with local audiences.
While maintaining consistent core values across locations is crucial, adapting these messages to emphasise the values most relevant to specific audiences achieves much better feedback. So, it’s worthwhile to invest the time to research and tailor content for specific candidates.
How can you achieve this?
Create specific candidate personas for each location you’re based in
Encourage your local teams to contribute to your employer branding and promote it on their profiles
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) evolves with each passing year, its influence on employer branding and recruitment strategies is also growing. Here are just some of the ways AI is already making a difference for employer brand specialists:
More personalised candidate experiences
Through intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants, modern candidates can now receive more immediate answers they have about a prospective employer. This leads to more personalised and responsive experiences, making the recruitment process more positive for candidates and simpler for employers.
Streamline the creation of job descriptions and materials
Training AI prompt engineering tools on your EVP and other employer brand materials can greatly speed up the generation of assets, both for your internal teams and for job seekers. In just a matter of clicks, you can generate the copy, imagery and video for a suite of recruitment ads and employee guidelines, all aligned with your values and vision.
Analysing employee and candidate behaviour
The efficiency of AI means it can analyse vast amounts of recruitment-related data in seconds, from employee engagement levels and retention rates, to candidate behaviour across the onboarding process. This can provide powerful insights on where to adapt your employer branding based on the challenges you are experiencing.
Although the use of AI in employer branding is still in its infancy, the rate at which this technology is developing means that these possibilities – and many more – are emerging to streamline and empower your recruitment efforts.
Create and communicate a compelling employer brand with Papirfly
We hope you’ve enjoyed this complete guide to employer branding, and feel ready to use these insights to enhance the way you attract and retain top talent in the future.
One of the biggest challenges facing employer brand professionals is maintaining a consistent and constant stream of assets, while dealing with ever-tightening budgets. At Papirfly, we are making it faster, easier and more cost-effective to become an employer of choice – all from one all-encompassing brand management platform.
Point: Unite everyone on the values, visuals and voices behind your employer brand
Place: Store, share and access a complete library of your employer branding materials in our globally renowned DAM system
Produce: Generate on-brand, studio-quality assets at unrivalled speed and scale with intelligent design templates
Plan: Simplify campaign execution of all talent acquisition activities with one universal planner
Prove: Measure and refine your employer brand strategy with enterprise-grade reporting and analytics
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