Empower Your Brand: Steps to Captivate and Compel with Employee Stories

Follow these steps to create compelling, research-driven stories that will bring together an employer brand full of authentic, emotionally rich content that repels the many and compels the few...

Research - get to know your employees

1. Ask killer questions - see 6 Qs to always ask
2. Work hard to really understand the pain, challenge, adversity and harsh reality of the person’s employee experience
3. Make your employees the heroes of every story outline you design
4. Build a strong story arc with an authentic reveal.

Design a content calendar

1. Produce a series that does nothing other than get to know the real people in a team
2. Create content around the theme of gratitude and admiration for peers
3. Capture and record a challenge designed to prove the reality of each employer brand pillar or Give & Get
4. Start with a profound achievement and tell the contributing stories of how it came to be.
5. Design a series around alumni and how they’re doing now - the more successful the better, especially if they attribute some success to your organisation.
6. Be brave enough to tell stories of the challenging aspects of your employee experience and what people need to prepare themselves for if they join.

Incentivise and motivate your people

1. Thank everyone who has contributed and celebrate their content. Send links, a gift, a personal thank you and social cards/graphics to make it easy to share content in a humble way. Win their hearts by creating affinity with your new employer brand project.
2. Officially launch the campaign with a celebration that everyone will enjoy being part of, during which you ask people to help make it a success by sharing. 
3. Run an employee competition based on levels of activity and engagement. Make the entry a video submission. Learn how to make great video content here.
4. When you post your content externally, make sure you let everyone know internally and ask for help to promote it, this will encourage advocacy and create ambassadors for your EB. Get them using the same vocabulary so that they are aligned with the brand can see how their colleagues are buying into it.
5. Add the content to your standard employer brand toolkit, learning and development and on-boarding processes and create posts or links pointing to it on any other standard content that gets regular internal traffic.
6. Run paid media ads advertising the content specifically to your employees. Learn how to do it right here.
7. Write a secondary tier of external content that links to the employee stories in order to build the chances of the content being found and make it easy for that content to be shared too.
8. Offer ‘special’ swag for anyone who takes on that ambassadorial role by sharing, commenting, uploading content, referring someone or updating their LinkedIn profile. The level of internal engagement is a good early indicator of the success of your employer brand.
9. Publish a list of traffic and engagement results of employee content, celebrating them all - everyone likes to be further up a list, so you’ll get a second wave of engagement to improve the current standing. 
10. Invite contributors to special events or privileges and make it known why they received their preferential treatment.