Loopaa

Strategy. Marketing Strategy. That thin line between doing something great and knowing why and how you will do it, as opposite to leaving things to chance and hope for the best.

Have you ever found yourself in this situation? If so, this article will, hopefully, make you understand the whys, wheres and hows of marketing strategy.

If you are a CEO or HR/ Marketing person in an IT company, you have, most probably asked yourself more than once: how can I promote a healthy organizational culture, both inside and outside of my organization? How can I communicate outside the company all the beautiful things happening inside and how can I constantly remind people on the inside the core values of our brand? As you can imagine, the answer is simple and lies in a good employer branding marketing strategy. Now, only the answer is simple, because the solution itself involves a process, which we will describe briefly below.

As a first step, you need to take a really good look at your organization and brand culture. Do you have a strong, defined brand? And by defined, we mean – do you have a mission, core values and unique identity to communicate, both internally and externally? Are these expressed in any way, again – internally and externally?

A few things you can check inside the organization are if the office is appropriately branded, if employees feel they are a part of something bigger, if they acknowledge and apply the brand’s values in their day-to-day work. We, at Loopaa, take special care of this phase. It’s such an important step! You cannot have a great strategy for your employer branding if you don’t take the time to find out what the brand actually means to every person in your organization. We do this by conducting thorough interviews with employees at all levels – from top management to the guy who just got hired last week. Everyone has a special perspective and a unique story – these are, truly, fountains of creativity for us. We take every feedback, answer or perspective, mix it all together, and then we come up with the best course of action, inspired by the status quo in the company. This course of action is the base of all good strategies: it tells you where you are and gives you a glimpse of where you want to go. This means that if your company has not communicated clearly its values, we will define them and put them in line with your positioning. Don’t have a clear positioning? We’ll analyze your identity and your competitor’s identity to find your perfect spot on the market.

But what about what you communicate externally? It’s always vital to take a close look at your communication channels: are they the most efficient out there? Are you teaching or preaching? Are your messages in line with your brand values?  Are you attracting the professionals you are looking for? But, most important of all, does your image reflect what you want it to? Our job is to find answers to these questions, but also give you the best solutions when it comes to refreshing your image or repositioning yourself on the market. We do this through a series of actions that take into account all the communication channels and act as an integrated campaign, because the key to success in a crowded market is to have a unique and convincing tone of voice out there.

Now that you have the strategy, how do you get out there? How do you choose the best channels, visuals and messages? The key is to know your audience.

Our 5 years experience in working with local, national and international companies thought us that no great results come overnight. Developing the employer branding marketing strategy for your company is a complex process and it’s never finished – if you act smart and stay in touch with the market, you’ll always have something to add, to improve, to transform in order to get the best results. But there are, also, good news: you’re not in this alone. Loopies are here to help.

Here is a glimpse of how they helped Thomsons Online Benefits refresh their employer branding strategy, both internally and externally, using the employer branding strategy to illustrate creative visual concepts.

To communicate the fact that they were looking for tech-savy, smart and skilled professionals, we’ve designed a reinterpretation of a chess strategy, one that has an unknown, but heroic pawn in the middle of it – you:

When it comes to recruitment, they were also searching for fun, approachable and great to work with individuals. We’ve decided that the best way to say what we are looking for is to draw them: this is how stick figures came to life. The simplicity but also the complexity in which they represented different personalities was the winning concept. They represent the Thomsons Online Benefit employee – one that’s smart and skilled, but also fun and easygoing, and a pleasure to work with!

Internally, for their new office, we took a bunch of values and colours from their brand manual and turned them into magic: artistic and colorful illustration for the walls and glass meeting rooms. Each element was designed carefully to integrate a bigger story: The Thomsons Online Benefits Story.

We can say they agree with us when we say we’ve made a home of their new office. A friendly, cosy and familiar one. One that expresses all the beautiful things going on in their organization but, most of all, the unicity of each of its member.

In the end, when designing any employer branding marketing strategy, it takes a lot of passion and willingness to put in the effort. The best part of it is that it’s a joint venture – we’re here to guide you through the difficult times and amaze you with our strategic minds and creative skills. The rest is history. Your brand’s history. 🙂