7 Simple Ways To Effectively Communicate Your Employer Brand On LinkedIn

In today’s over-saturated world, it’s hard to stand out and create content that truly resonates with people on an authentic, one-to-one basis.

For talent acquisition leaders, this challenge is all too familiar. Many organizations struggle to a) define their own unique employer brand, b) differentiate themselves from their competitors and c) communicate those messages effectively to multiple talent audiences.

LinkedIn, especially, can be a difficult place for some companies to achieve cut-through and engagement. But there’s good news – it doesn’t have to be this way!

Below are seven tried, tested and proven strategies that will genuinely help you reach, engage and attract talent to your organization.

1. Start looking in the right place

Believe it or not, the employer brand industry is looking for answers in the wrong place. In our search to find what makes us unique and compelling, many have been obsessed with finding the strengths, benefits and opportunities within our organizations.

But to communicate your brand effectively, you need to seek out the adversity within your organization. This will help you define a fully authentic employee experience.

2. Craft a balanced value exchange

Once you start looking in the right places, you’ll begin to find stories of adversity – moments where people are required to overcome challenges, big and small, in the pursuit of personal success and fulfilment.

These “vulnerabilities” or “weaknesses” are actually your greatest assets and enable you to craft a balanced value exchange rather than a one-way broadcast of your strengths.

To build engaged audiences on LinkedIn, it’s vital that you leverage this mutual value offer. If candidates don’t feel motivated or inspired to rise to the challenge or occasion, then you simply become another company looking to hire someone for a role.

3. Take a step back and understand your employee experience

To stand out on LinkedIn, you need to craft honest, powerful and authentic stories that will truly resonate with people on an intimate level. Achieving this, however, requires finding out what your internal audiences really think about your organization.

Take the time to research your employee experience and speak to multiple stakeholders and employees across the business. Find the passion and pride, then look for the threads that run through the employee view, the leadership view and the wider market view.

Remember, to communicate your brand effectively, you need to have an unbiased view into what your employer brand actually stands for. Persona and empathy mapping, stakeholder interviews and online surveys are all useful techniques that can help define your unique employee experience.

Don’t forget an important lesson, though: data tells you what, people tell you why.

4. Tell human stories of adversity and challenges

Once you have a deeper understanding of your own employee experience, you can look for the stories that will bring these messages and values to life.

Employee-led content is one of, if not the most, effective ways to communicate your employer brand on LinkedIn (or any platform or medium, for that matter). The stories of overcoming adversity and challenges can often be seen as negatives or “vulnerabilities” in your employee experience, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

These moments, when employees are dealing with challenges, demands, commitments, sacrifices and expectations, are actually where the gold is found. Find a way to bottle these experiences and let your employees tell the story for you.

Talent on LinkedIn will be much more drawn to content from people like themselves than when messaging comes from the appearance of one big, faceless organization.

5. Not everyone is going to like you – and that’s ok

Here’s a truth that applies in life just as much as it does in business: not everyone is going to like you. Deep breath.

And do you want to know the truth? That’s actually a good thing.

It takes guts to feel comfortable with knowing that not everyone is going to be an ideal cultural match for your brand. Rather than trying to please everyone, your LinkedIn content will be much more effective when you lean into your unique stories of adversity and wear them as a badge of honour.

Your brand of difficult is what makes you different, so champion this and let it be represented in your external communications. This is actually necessary in order to truly compel people towards you.

Weave this into your LinkedIn content strategy and you’ll start to repel the many and compel the few that could truly excel at your organization.

6. Use imagery, videos and multimedia – bring posts and content to life

You can have the best written content in the world, but it can easily get lost in the mix when talent is scrolling through a busy and cluttered LinkedIn feed.

Imagery is a relatively quick and easy way to boost the reach of your posts and drive engagement. In fact, it has a much higher conversion rate than simply posting static content.

Videos are now the most popular way people consume content in their personal lives, so why not match this behaviour trend in the talent space? Employee-led videos, for example, are a simple and easy way to create organic content that is eye-catching and easily shareable.

Don’t be afraid to use GIFs and other multimedia, as well. Incorporating a variety of visual media to your LinkedIn posts will make a substantial difference to your reach and engagement rates.

7. Measure, tweak and learn

Don’t just post LinkedIn content into a vacuum. You need to have a clear, targeted and measured approach. This means tracking the results of your posts and figuring out the best strategies to maximize reach and engagement.

For example, is there a particular style of post that works best? A certain type of content? Is your audience more active at a specific time or day of the week?

All of these factors can help facilitate a more robust and comprehensive LinkedIn content strategy.

To find out more about how you can communicate your employer brand effectively, my new book, ‘Give & Get Employer Branding’, is available now on Amazon and at all major book retailers.