Foto von Austin Chan auf Unsplash

Take away #1: Brand and Reputation need to come together but this is a board topic and need the whole company to be aligned. Marketing can drive all of it.

Marketing needs to fill our pipeline and not only with sales leads but with candidates to hire as well - that is true but what does it require.

While building a brand and addressing your target audience Marketing needs to create traffic and reach. Ideally the traffic and reach serves three main topics:

• Building the brand
• Creating Leads
• Attracting Talents

To create reach you need an ecosystem that is ready for traffic. It all starts with what you have to tell - the content. Content has many flavors: Company news, product announcements, strategic advice in white papers or webinars, survey results, hints & tips, customer reference stories, investor presentations.

The content can be created and published by marketing but in many cases marketing depends on the other functions to deliver input, have speakers and giving meaningful insight. Valuable content is key to succeed in creating reach.

Second your ecosystem needs to be ready. That means you need the whole process chain up and running. No matter if you create traffic with events, fairs, advertisement or the below the line approach (online marketing, SEO etc.) there needs to be a corporate website that is able to point the visitor in a user friendly way to the relevant content. There should be a marketing automation software behind to achieve GDPR compliance, ability to identify the visitor and provide analytics. Valuable content can be provided in exchange for customer data such as name, email, phone number (gated content). The marketing automation software will do all of this, follow up with eMails and measure the interest of your visitors. At some point the visitor becomes a lead will be contacted by inside sales and handed over to sales after qualification.

Same applies for your ecosystem on the people & culture side, when traffic hits your website, your ecosystem should be ready to get interested talents informed, attracted and easily apply for a job through a real time job portal. If the user journey is great, you get far more candidates.

As soon as you have valuable content and an ecosystem that is modern, user friendly and automated, you create more traffic. Traffic comes through channels, they can be traditionell such as advertisement, TV, Radio, fairs and events or through social media, search engine optimization etc. You need to define your target personas and have a team with the right skill to place your message (content) through the channel to your target persona. This is a clear marketing task of a highly specialized team.

Your cost per lead and candidate will be optimized when your content, ecosystem and skills are excellent. Marketing can lead the effort in creating the content, setting up the ecosystem, managing traffic but it requires IT, P&C, Sales to be supportive and aligned. 



Take away #2: Creating leads and attracting candidates is using a similar approach and requires great messaging based on valuable content with an automated ecosystem and highly skilled team. It is a team play across multiple functions and an investment decision for the board.

Executive Summary: The CEO's expectation towards corporate marketing can be that they lead the process of brand building, reputation management, lead generation and candidate attraction but it is a team play that starts with the board, IT, P&C, Sales, Public Relations and many others to succeed. It requires alignment, investment and highly skilled specialists. At the end it is all about leadership.