Employee Branding: What it is and Why You Need it

Have you ever heard the saying, “you’re only as strong as your weakest link”?

When it comes to business, your employees are your links. Unfortunately, one bad link can have a severe negative impact on your business’s reputation and success. 

On the other hand, good links can make your business stand out from the crowd and give it the competitive edge that it needs to achieve maximum business growth. 

That’s where employee branding comes into play. 

This article will teach you everything you need to know about employee branding, including what it is, why you need it, and how to implement it into your business. 

What is employee branding?

Employee branding is the process of helping your current employees internalize your desired brand image and represent that image to the outside world. 

With the business world becoming increasingly competitive both on and offline, consumers rely on intimate brand experiences now more than ever when purchasing products and services. 

Therefore, with the help of good employee branding, your staff members will be more engaged, which will result in them providing excellent customer service. 

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Employer branding vs. employee branding

But what is employer branding, and how is it different from employee branding? 

Employer branding involves promoting a business as the ideal employer amongst a specific employee target audience. 

With employer branding, businesses aim to attract, recruit, and retain their ideal employees to grow their business more effectively with stronger staff members. As such, employer branding plays a vital part in the talent acquisition process. 

Whereas employer branding focuses on promoting the business to these ideal candidates, employee branding focuses on changing the way a company’s current employees see their brand. 

Organizations with a strong employee brand often have more engaged employees, leading to more productivity and increased success. 

Benefits of employee branding

Here are the top five benefits of employee branding: 

1. Creates consistency

A good employee brand creates brand consistency and predictability, which makes your brand more professional and easier to trust in the eyes of your ideal customers. B2B customers are very picky with who they do business with. As such, you want every aspect of your business to be consistently high quality. Employee branding can do this for you. 

A higher level of consistency leads to more sales and profit for your business. Brand consistency can actually increase annual revenue by 10–20%.

By investing in employee branding, you won’t only enjoy a better overall company culture and consistency within your organization. Your sales will also increase tremendously since consumers will trust you more than your competitors. 

2. Aligns employees with the brand

If your employees believe in your brand’s goals and values, they’ll feel like they’re part of something bigger, which will make them more engaged and productive. 

This will lead to an excellent workplace environment and company culture that they won’t want to leave behind.

Not only that, but by having a purposeful mission, your company will also see a lower attrition rate (up to 49% lower). 

By effectively communicating your brand’s purpose, meaning, goals, and values, you can expect to save a lot of unnecessary recruitment work and fees. 

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3. Gives you a better talent pool

If your staff members are happy and represent that to the outside world, other potential candidates will be drawn to your company. 

In turn, this will make your talent acquisition process much easier since quality candidates will approach you instead of the other way around. 

Because of your positive brand reputation, you’ll have a lower per-hire cost since you won’t have to invest tons of money on job ads and hiring strategies. 

4. Increases employee retention

The first 3–12 months are the most critical part of an employee’s time with a company. This is the time where they choose whether they’re going to stay or go. 

Around 40% of employees who receive insufficient job training early on leave their jobs within one year. This makes it easy to see why 77% of companies focus on the overall employee experience to increase their retention rate.

By including effective employee training into your employee branding strategy, your staff members will be more satisfied, and retention rates will improve. 

5. Creates strong brand representatives

If your employees trust your brand, the target audience will be much more likely to trust your brand as well. 

As such, by ensuring that employees are strong brand ambassadors, you’ll see an increase in sales and profit. 

The best part is that after your employees manage to convince potential customers to buy from you, those customers will likely convince other customers as well. After this, it becomes a word-of-mouth ripple effect.  

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How to create an employee branding strategy

Here are the five steps to creating an effective employee branding strategy: 

Step 1: Align employer and employee branding

For you to implement employee branding effectively in your organization, you first need to have a good understanding of your brand. This includes your existing employer brand, improvements that are needed, challenges that you’re currently facing, etc.  

From here, you’ll be able to see which staff members you need to hire to help your business grow and overcome these challenges. 

After you’ve determined which employees you need, you have to craft your employee value proposition (EVP). This shows what your company stands for, what it needs, and what it offers to potential employees. 

Step 2: Develop effective recruitment marketing strategies

It’s difficult to turn your employees into brand advocates if you aren’t hiring the right kinds of people in the first place. 

To avoid hiring people who don’t fit into your brand, you need to make sure that your recruitment marketing strategy is targeted at the right candidate persona to attract people who align with your company. 

This is where your EVP comes in. A great way to communicate your EVP to potential employees effectively is to use employee testimonial videos. For example, have a look at Datasite’s employee testimonial video: 

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This video showcases exactly who Datasite is and what it does. It gives candidates a sense of what they can expect if they decide to work at Datasite. 

As a result, it’s possible for prospective employees to “qualify” themselves and see if the company truly aligns with their career goals. 

If it does, these candidates won’t only be more likely to apply for a job, but they’ll also be happier and more engaged when they end up working there. 

Step 3: Educate your employees on the brand

After you’ve attracted and recruited your ideal employees, you need to educate them about your brand by taking them through a training process. This can either be through in-person training, virtual training, or video training. 

Provide these employees with effective onboarding, internal brand training, and compliance training to show them exactly what’s expected of them and vice versa. Use employee training videos to help. 

Make sure to educate them on your brand’s goals, mission, values, company culture, and desired brand image in their training session to set expectations right from the start. 

After this, you need to continue conveying your desired brand image in your internal communication to continuously remind them of their roles as brand ambassadors. 

Step 4: Incentivize alignment

Employees love acknowledgment and rewards. Around 76.3% of employee creativity is a result of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. 

This means that staff members aren’t only more productive when a company offers incentives and rewards, but they also bring forth better quality work. 

Offering incentive plans and reward programs in your organization offers you many benefits, including: 

• Healthy internal company competition 
• Higher company sales and growth 
• Higher level of employee engagement 
• Higher employee satisfaction 
• Lower staff turnover 

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Step 5: Analyze effectiveness through feedback 

It’s not enough to simply throw your employee branding strategy into gear and never look back. 

You need to constantly be measuring whether the strategy is working and if it’s making a positive difference to your business. 

Analyze your employee brand success by: 

• Measuring results: Look at your organization’s overall performance regarding sales, growth, and customer satisfaction. 
• Employee surveys: Ask your employees to fill out anonymous company surveys that ask them about their overall experience at your company. 
• Stay interviews: Managers can have monthly or quarterly “stay” interviews with employees to get their feedback about company processes, culture, environment, and training programs. 

Benefits of video testimonials for employee branding

Here are the top four benefits of employee video testimonials for employee branding: 

1. Sense of belonging

When your employees are asked to star in one of your testimonial videos, they feel a sense of pride and belonging. 

BetterUp’s research shows that nurturing your employees’ feelings of belonging can decrease turnover risk by 50%. Better yet, it shows that employees who feel a sense of belonging in an organization take 75% fewer sick days. 

Asking your employees to represent your brand in your employee testimonial videos will: 

• Increase employee engagement 
• Create a better company culture
• Reduce turnover
• Make your employees better brand ambassadors

2. Engaging

Videos are highly engaging and interesting since they involve a combination of visuals and text. On top of that, many testimonial videos are short, sweet, and to the point. 

For example, have a look at this employee testimonial from Valuize: 

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This video is only 41 seconds long, yet it conveys a powerful message. By including employee testimonial videos in your onboarding process, as well as in your employee training program, your recently hired employees will get snippets of what they can expect. 

Whether you plan on creating short training videos or a more comprehensive corporate training video that includes video testimonials, it'll get your new employees excited to be a part of the team. 

3. Customizable

Once you’ve got the testimonial video recorded and stored, you can continue using it in the future for many purposes. 

Whether that be sharing it across your platforms to create more brand awareness amongst both potential employees and customers or to include it in future employee onboarding and learning campaigns, the sky’s the limit. 

However, for this to be true, you need to make sure that your video content and video production are of top quality so that you can continue using them for years to come.  

4. Sharable

Not only are video testimonials easy to distribute, but they’re easy to share as well. 

This means that you’ll be able to share videos (or video links) of your employees’ experiences at your company across your recruitment strategy platforms — whether that be social media, YouTube, job boards, or your own website. 

This will attract better talent to your company, which will give you better employees that are already aligned with your business and meet your requirements to the tee. 

As mentioned above, this leads to lower costs for talent acquisition, meaning you’ll have a bigger budget to spend elsewhere. 

Ready to create your employee branding strategy?

Now that you know what employee branding is and how to create a winning strategy for your business, you can go ahead and start implementing it today. 

Want video testimonials that will properly attract talent and onboard employees? Learn how to choose the best video testimonial provider here. 

Or, if you're ready to start creating impactful employee testimonial videos to build trust and showcase your company, get in touch with us today.