Employer Branding. Galvanise your brand from the inside
Your brand might be gaining precious market share. But what does it feel like to work for your business? A lot depends on how you communicate it. From retention and performance right through to recruitment. Building a stand-out proposition and employer brand strategy should be part of your thinking.
Good news for busy people officers and brand managers alike – we can help.
Whether you’re a start-up, scale-up, or an established blue-chip business, your employer brand brings your unique culture to life. People will gather behind it and want to work for it – whether they’re currently employed by you or not.
For nearly 30 years, we’ve been building meaningful brands, crafting distinctive identities, and delivering strategic campaigns that drive measurable returns.
You might be building your employer brand from scratch. Or adapting your current messaging and identity to keep pace with the ever-changing world.
Good stories, better told
In the fight for attention, salience, and loyalty, when it comes to employer branding, the right strategic foundation separates the leaders from the thanks-for-comings.
First, we’ll help you define a compelling value proposition and an authentic narrative. Capturing your culture, what you offer and what you expect as an employer. Then, we’ll create the verbal and visual assets that cut through the market noise and bring your story to life.
And that’s just the beginning. Every brand touchpoint and experience is an opportunity to reinforce and amplify what you stand for and why employees should care.
We’ll craft insight-led campaigns and communications that contribute to building the value of your brand every time.
Brand definition
Working with us means you can be confident your employer brand is built on the most robust strategic bedrock.
It all starts with defining your employee value proposition – creating absolute clarity on what you stand for and why it matters.
Our proven methodology, honed over time, will guide and challenge you toward a focused and compelling employer brand position. And this will be the foundation for a story that’s easy to understand and articulate.
Brand discovery
A rigorous exercise in building understanding and gaining insight. Candidates, competition, company, and context – we leave no stone unturned.
Brand positioning
What do you want employees and prospective candidates to say when they talk about you? The goal here is to bring absolute clarity to how you want your employer brand to be perceived.
Brand articulation
With your employee value proposition defined and your story clear, the challenge is to tell it well – so well, that employees will want to tell it too.
This requires a crafted employer brand. Something that complements the consumer side of your marketing, but is distinctly different. The verbal, visual, and behavioural expression of who you are and what you stand for.
As an agency that’s been creating brand identities for ambitious organisations for years, we’re well-placed to help you build a story that will transform your recruitment and retention objectives.
Verbal identity
What you say and how you say it is a huge and often overlooked opportunity to drive distinctiveness and build salience in a competitive, employee-driven market. We work with our clients to create brand languages that go hand-in-hand with your visual identity to help you stand out.
Visual identity
Together with verbal identity, we’ll ensure your look reflects and reinforces your brand positioning, communicating through distinctive assets (or brand ‘codes’) who you are and what you stand for.
Brand amplification
From external recruitment campaigns to consistent internal communications, every touch point is an opportunity to build trust and credibility in your overall employee experience.
Few organisations truly recognise this, and short-term tactical projects are often the norm. The key is balance. A well-executed employer brand is crucial for attracting, retaining and inspiring top talent – which helps deliver on every other strategic metric you can think of.
Through periods of growth, attrition, mergers, acquisitions and diversification, we’ll make sure your employer brand experience fulfils its immediate purpose and contributes to the long-term brand value.
Campaign strategy & creative
Dramatising the solution to your customers’ problem in the most engaging and compelling way.
Integrated marketing communications
Insight-driven, joined-up activity, where a multi-channel approach has impact.
Employer branding
Attract and retain the best employees to help you achieve your goals.
Internal communications
Realising the full potential of all your people pulling in the same direction.
The new name and identity was received by staff very positively because of the clear and meaningful story underpinning it. It made the change process much easier than expected. The new website was a step change in perception of the company from a recruitment perspective. It has definitely improved the first impressions.
Marketing Manager, Clearview Intelligence
This campaign successfully provided us with a clear communications framework, during a time of significant change and impact for our colleagues. Our intention was that everyone would feel valued and included and ‘Altogether Better’ delivers this in such a positive way.
Pepper Money
Got questions? Here are a few we are most frequently asked.
Is an employer branding strategy effective in the short-term, or is it more of a long-term benefit?
Well, both, really – if executed well enough. Its immediate aim is to show employees that the brand they work for has integrity, by internally exuding the values it pushes out into the wider world. Long-term benefits then stem from this. When a brand is consistently true to its values and an employee feels like they’re part of something special, they become advocates and actively promote the brand on their employers’ behalf.
Are employees sceptical about employer branding?
If done poorly, then they probably will be (and rightly so). But this only tends to happen when employer branding focuses on incentivisation rather than storytelling and brand building. The ultimate aim of the game is to make your people sell your brand on your behalf. But telling them to do so will always result in ill-feeling. The infinitely better approach is to win loyalty and advocacy through a genuine commitment to your employees, your values, and your culture. Something the most enduringly attractive brands, we call magnetic brands, understand only too well. Generosity and authenticity goes a long way.
How is mark-making* different from other agencies?
Our clients tell us that what makes us different is a combination of our expertise and our culture. We’re the best at what we do and our goal is always to add value. We also recognise the day-to-day stresses our start-up clients are often under, so our focus isn’t just on producing effective work – making our clients’ lives easy is something we’re proud to be known for too. It probably explains the exceptional longevity we have in our client relationships, some now spanning over 20 years.
Is employer branding a separate workstream from integrated marketing campaigns?
Absolutely not. In fact, it’s a key part of any integrated assault. Integrated marketing falls into three media types: paid, earned and owned. Your employees are essentially ‘owned’ channels (in that you have automatic access to them without incurring additional expense). If owned channels are not respected and utilised, a campaign cannot be truly integrated.
What sort of budget will I need?
No two situations are the same. Our approach to brand creation and brand development is based on a proven and robust methodology. Whilst the process is consistent, the inputs and deliverables may be flexed as necessary to meet different needs and objectives. Whatever stage you’re at, we can support you, starting with an initial chat. And if we don’t think we can help, we’ll be sure to recommend alternatives.