The start of a New Year is a time for reflection … and strategy. For many companies, there’s a rush to engage consumers with learnings from the past and to share snippets of campaigns to come.
But besides that, it’s also a time for internal attention. Take a moment to consider how you can use employer branding to attract new talent and strengthen employee relationships going forward.
Whether you’re thinking of expanding your team in the next year or you simply want to retain your top performers, incorporate employer branding into your overarching marketing strategy.
Here are some of the best employer branding ideas to add to your marketing strategy:
1. Send Out a Satisfaction Survey (and Publish the Results)
According to Glassdoor, around 86% of employees and job seekers research a company’s reviews and ratings before deciding whether to apply for a job. The more you can show how happy and satisfied your employees are, the more likely you’ll be to attract new talent. That being said, you should take the time to publish the results of a “satisfaction survey” on your website’s blog, your social media page/s, and even on your “careers” page. This can boost your chances of connecting with relevant job seekers. What’s more, by sending out a satisfaction survey, you show your employees you’re invested in their happiness. You might even discover ways you can improve the employee experience.
2. Publish Reports that Highlight Company Culture
Transparency is a big thing among job seekers today. Every employee wants to work for a company that’s honest, straightforward, and authentic. A good way to show your employees’ transparency and highlight the work you’re doing to improve the company culture is to publish a relevant report.
For instance, every year, Microsoft, one of the world’s leading technology businesses, publishes its “Global Diversity & Inclusion Report.” This elevates the company’s employer branding by demonstrating their commitment to supporting employees from all walks of life.
It also shows that Microsoft is committed to giving its employees a voice. Each report includes feedback from employees about their feelings related to the company and its processes. These kinds of reports don’t just engage employees; they can make your company more appealing to customers searching for ethical brands.
3. Highlight Meaningful Accomplishments
As mentioned above, the New Year is often a time when many of us reflect on the last 12 months and what we’ve accomplished. A great way to boost your employer branding strategy is to create a social media campaign highlighting some of the biggest internal achievements over the past year.
Draw attention to the awards you’ve won, the customers you’ve served, and even the challenges you’ve overcome to reach company goals. To boost your marketing plan even further, collect quotes from your employees to support these posts. For instance, if you’re promoting an award you won in 2023, ask your employees how they felt about that accomplishment and share it online.
Focusing on accomplishments related to your brand and company culture can be particularly valuable. For instance, you could highlight how you’ve increased engagement by offering customers more hybrid work opportunities in the last year.
4. Recognize Your Employees
When you’re drawing attention to your accomplishments over the past year, don’t forget that you wouldn’t be able to accomplish the same without your dedicated team. Recognizing your employees isn’t something you should just do once a year. However, the start of a new year is an excellent opportunity to stop and take a moment to celebrate your team.
Send each employee a personalized “thank you” on their social media channel. Consider sending out gift boxes, and ask your employee advocates to promote “unboxing videos” on their channel.
You can even create carousel content drawing attention to the accomplishments of individual employees in each team at the end of each year. For instance, you might have a post dedicated to your marketing team that thanks your CMO, social media manager, and SEO specialist directly.
Where possible, it’s important to continue this activity throughout the year. Drawing attention to the ways you actively recognize your employees can make your corporate culture more appealing. Remember, up to 46% of employees leave jobs because they don’t feel appreciated.
HubSpot shares some great day-in-the-life posts from their employees on @HubSpotLife to highlight the unique components of their employer brand all year round:
5. Combine Social Media with Your Website
Social media is an incredible tool for showcasing employer branding and connecting with talent. Around 77% of companies even use LinkedIn as part of their employer branding strategy. However, it’s important to remember that employees and job seekers will be looking for insights into your company on multiple channels.
As you head into the new year, it’s worth thinking about how combining your social strategy with your website can help you attract and engage more talent. For instance, rather than just having a basic “About Us” page on your website, you could embed a LinkedIn Feed onto your website that showcases the recent accomplishments of your teams and the posts of employees.
You could even transform your job or careers page with a social media feed created with a social media aggregator, using it to highlight reviews and testimonials shared by your existing employees on your career-focused profile. For instance, a company like IBM could showcase top posts from their @LifeAtIBM page on their careers page to show job seekers what the company culture is really like.
6. Share Your Vision for the New Year
A good way to enhance your LinkedIn marketing strategy and your employer brand is to create a New Year marketing campaign that showcases your vision and goals for the next 12 months.
You might create a video outlining all the things you want to accomplish in relation to things employees care about, like equality or sustainability. Alternatively, you could create a thought leadership piece, complete with quotes and predictions from members of your staff. This is a great way to give your team members a voice and encourage them to participate in advocacy campaigns.
You can even encourage your employees to interact with your “New Year” posts by hosting polls and asking them to vote on which initiatives they consider to be the most important. This creates an image of transparency that appeals to both existing and future talent.
7. Design a Hashtag Campaign for Employees
Finally, one of the best ways to elevate your employer branding and unlock new opportunities at the beginning of a fresh year is to activate the voice of your team members. The chances are your employees have valuable insights to share or even predictions for the year ahead.
You’ve probably already used branded hashtag campaigns to encourage customers to share user-generated content. You can do the same thing with your employees. Create a hashtag specifically for your team members, such as #Goals2024, and ask your employees to post videos, photos, or standard LinkedIn content to it.
You can ask them to share their opinions on a specific topic, discuss what they liked and disliked most about the previous year, or just explain what they’re looking forward to in the year ahead. This not only gets employees engaged, but it also gives you lots of valuable social proof you can use in your employer branding campaigns going forward.
Add Employer Branding to Your New Year Marketing Campaign
It’s easy to get caught up in focusing on traditional marketing strategies designed to capture the attention of consumers in the new year. While it’s definitely important to connect with your customers as you move into a new season, don’t overlook the importance of your talent too.
Adding employer branding strategies to your New Year campaign could be the perfect way to elevate engagement and satisfaction among team members. Learn how to align your employer branding efforts with a social media embedding solution like Juicer.
