Why Your SMB Should Do Employer Branding

employer branding

The majority of marketing that a small business does is aimed at their customers and their potential customers. You present your product or service in the best possible light and you hope that this will attract more and more customers.

Today, however, we will be talking about a different type of SMB marketing – marketing of your company as an employer. This is called employer branding and, believe it or not, if you do it right, it will do wonders for your small business.



What is Employer Branding?

Simply put, employer branding is the branding that you do for your SMB in order to promote yourself as the best possible employer, a company where everyone will love to work. You promote your company culture and the fantastic way in which your employees are treated and managed. You emphasize the good things about working for your small business and you manage your reputation as an employer.

But, what exactly can you achieve with employer branding and why do you need to do it for your SMB?

Attracting the Best Talent

The most obvious reason for doing great employer branding is attracting top talent in the industry. There are fields where this is extremely important. For example, if you run a small software development company, the experience and the expertise of your coders will directly influence your product and your success. If you provide a B2B service of some kind, you will want to have the best people on board. This is where DBS (employee background) checks come in place – do not expect everything you should know about a candidate listed in their CV. Even if you run something as seemingly simple as a local restaurant, having a great chef in the kitchen and the best waiters on the floor will make a huge difference.

The people you employ are the most important cog in your SMB machine and having the best people come to you will pay off for any effort and money you sank in employer branding.

employee talent

Retaining your Employees

Attracting top talent is incredibly important, but it is just as important to keep them as your employees. The days of employees who stuck with a company throughout their careers are long gone and people nowadays feel much less loyalty towards their employers than they did in the past.

Hiring a great coder will mean very little if they leave you after six months. Your restaurant will take months to recover if your chef leaves you. Employer branding reminds your existing employees that your company is a great place to work.

The Effect on Customers

Every time the media writes or speaks about a company boasting abhorrent working conditions, this company’s reputation falls, their brand suffers and their revenue drops. Conversely, if your customers see your SMB as a place where people love to work and especially if they can read about it online or in local media, they will feel better doing business for you.

An SMB that does its employer branding the right way will feel the beneficial effects of it when it comes to their customers as well, not just their employees and their future employees.

customer focus

A Few Tips On Doing Employer Branding The Right Way

Now that we have identified the most important reasons as to why you should do employer branding, we should probably say a thing or two about how you can do it.

First of all, you need to decide what it is that you want to accomplish. Perhaps your SMB is growing and you wish to employ the best people in your area and your industry? Perhaps your employees have been leaving you and you want to stop this? Perhaps you have noticed that your customers talk about you as a bad employer?

Once you have identified what you want to do, decide on how you will know if you are doing the right thing. In other words, identify your KPIs. These can be really varied, like maybe the number of applications you get in two weeks after you have posted a job add or improved reviews on employer-rating websites.

It is then time to start doing it and the best place to start is the internet. For one, you will want to make sure that your website emphasizes how important your employees are and why people love working for you. Your employees should also start contributing to your company blog, in case they hadn’t already. Also, share employee stories and stories about your company as a workplace on your blog.

You should also ensure that your social media channels are full of employee stories and you might even try to encourage your employees to talk positively about their jobs on social media.

employee branding tips

If your company is using software that ensures a better working environment, make sure prospective employees know about this. Just as an example, maybe you run a restaurant and you use the latest restaurant scheduling software. Your potential employees will like to know about this as this will make sure they get a fair treatment and are not overworked.

You might also think about doing local events where your employees will have fun and where other people will notice that they are having fun. Stories in local media also go a long way, especially for locally-active SMBs. Of course, old-school recruitment brochures can still do a good job, especially if they are not ordinary, run-of-the-mill ones.

Closing Word

Employer branding is extremely important for an SMB and it is not something you should neglect. It is important to set yourself apart from other similar businesses and the last advice we will share with you is to be unique.

Make your SMB the most unique amazing place to work.



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Dan Radak

VPS Security Specialist
Dan Radak is a web hosting security professional with ten years of experience. He is currently working with a number of companies in the field of online security, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies. He is also a coauthor on several technology websites and regular contributor to Technivorz.

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