Here's a nice write-up on what to expect in the next decade of marketing.

Are you ready for experiential marketing? Well, if you define it as VR goggles and pop-up shops, it may feel out of your reach. But what if you defined it as advocacy? Anything that creates a deep and immersive "moment" qualifies.

I like to keep one eye on what the consumer and corporate marketers are up to, and it turns out there's a wholesale shift happening where even the CMOs are spending more and more time working on the company's brand. Why does that matter? You know how every time someone asks you what's the ROI of employer branding? You can always say that if branding isn't important, why is the most important marketing person in the company working on it so much?

interesting pieces about what employer brand really means. To Emily, the employer brand is the company's conscience.

Feeling like you're behind the curve (and the 8-ball) on adjusting to the new reality? Don't feel confident taking a big leap forward? Don't feel like your leadership knows how to help you change? Take some queues from consumer brand shifts as they try to figure how to reach customers who aren't buying.

Speaking of "pivot," how deep are you in pivoting your content strategy? Here are two good guides on how to make a quick change of direction from Hubspot and Talent Brand Alliance.

How has Google changed its marketing tactics in light of the pandemic?

Some great quotes from business marketing leaders on how COVID has changed their view of how they can market their business to the world. It doesn't take much to read between the lines and see all the room for employer brand to be a strategic partner to marketing. But don't wait for them to come to you: go make that appointment to chat right now!

I've been thinking about recruiting in closed/finite tale pools (people with security clearances, veterinarians, clinical researchers with MDs, aeronautics engineers, etc) lately for the podcast and I was wondering if this is a situation ripe for micro-influences. Vets know vets. If you want vets (et al) to get interested in you, get a vet to say nice things about you.

Need to ask for budget? Right now, many companies are shutting down anything without a clear ROI (meaning: brand marketing is going dark to make room for more "butts in seats" pushes). So here's some data that shows that consumers still want brand marketing to help answer their "bigger" questions. It's an easy leap to say that candidates already know how to find the jobs, but they will likely have "bigger" questions around the brand they need answered before they will ever think of applying.

We don't talk about corporate comms much (well... we complain about it sometimes, but that doesn't count). Hubspot has a nice writeup on how to level-up your corporate comms strategies. What? You didn't know you were in the corporate comms business? You think someone else does that? Yeah, you're going to be far more effective at building internal allies and advocates once you learn to lean into the corp comms stuff.

If you are looking for ideas on how to improve your employer brand marketing, here is a laundry list of great projects to consider. Allow me to point out that they list "improving your search rankings" and that isn't a project I hear EB'ers talk about much. Do you spend any thought/time at all to making your job postings pop up higher on job boards and Google? Maybe you should.

In uncertain times, helpful content can bring companies and consumers closer together. Learn how to build a content marketing strategy to best address your audience's needs in times of crisis.

Marketing emails are on the up, but are brands making the most of the channel, and how can they ensure best practice during this time? Here’s a look at some recent email stats and examples.

There's always a contingent looking "ahead" at cool marketing tactics. For them, I ask: are you thinking about interactive marketing yet? Be they games, AR/VR, even "choose your own adventure"-type story-telling, getting people to make choices within your marketing makes your messages more engaging and memorable. Okay, I scared you with the AR/VR thing, sorry. But quizzes count (sorta). And what if instead of "a day in the life" video, you let people choose what the employee was going to do? Get coffee or prep for the meeting? Research a client via Google or other channel? Make a series of options that people can choose and see the impact those choices make in their day. Maybe double down and work with your instruction-design people (assuming you have one of those) to show how each choice suggests that the candidate is or isn't a likely fit with your brand (without being ham-fisted about it).

A New Human Normal. "Think of this as a “KonMari” moment for brands"

Interesting LinkedIn Stats. My fave? Pinterest is FAR MORE trusted than Facebook. I bring this up because FB is about to be a VERY problematic place to run ads, I believe.

How to run a grassroots marketing campaign. Good EB is very much a grassroots marketing problem.

This is interesting because we may have entered "Covid fatigue," where we're all sick of getting those emails on how that company you bought a puzzle from three years ago is changing because of the pandemic. My take away? Less talk, more showing. Nike doesn't talk about design as much as it shows it, which is why people see it as authentically design-focused.

How the creative director of Spotify uses data. This is a great video, but I suggest you watch to see ways Spotify could have used data in the aggregate to tell a big boring story. But instead, it found unique slices of the data to say something interesting, about themselves, about their listeners and about the world.

This list of five things every brand marketer needs to be doing right now is focused on consumer brand, but you don't even need to translate ideas like Lean Into Purpose and Rethink Your Brand Culture into employer brand terms to see the thought processes.

I know you want to make BFFs with your marketing team, but a lot of you are having trouble making making it work. The culprit? It's that marketing doesn't understand you. They still see your team as a funnel-filler or Glassdoor review watcher. They treat your team as untested and untrained dilettantes "playing at marketing." Which is why I wrote this for you (to give to them): The CMO's Guide to Employer Branding. It's a long read, I'll grant you, but it should speak their language about your value.

If you're thinking about a CRM of some sort, here are the top reasons why people subscribe and unsubscribe to emails (and yes, they are VERY different lists)

"Learn more about how to shift and evolve your content marketing during and after a crisis, to speak to your community, get connected, and stay relevant."

Let's talk Tik Tok! Or maybe we shouldn't! Just as the all-dancing, all-singing social platform starts to gain traction as a legitimate branding platform, it gets branded as a state agency intelligence operation. But when has a little espionage stopped "the kids" from singing? (That's the entire plot of Val Kilmer's Top Secret, btw.) So if you're ready to ignore potential Trump/Bezos bans of the social channel, here are so suggestions on how to do it right. My favorite? Think of it as an education platform first.

Further evidence that you and your marketing team should be spending more time together and occasionally taking long walks on the beach: employee advocates are the new “influencer.” In a lot of ways, influencers made a kind of sense in a world with a million options (or products, services, lifestyles, etc) because they acted as a kind of “native guide” to these things. A Kardashian can point to weight loss products and fashion because it’s something they know about. But as influencers as a celebrity become stale, the new advocate is the insider, someone with the inside view on things. They have a more credible voice and are seen as more real than marketing and can change people’s minds about your company (both as an employer, and as a vendor).

So I was deeply impressed when LinkedIn (and I don’t often use the words “impressed” and “LinkedIn” together) posted a directory of their own alumni who were recently let go. We’re in a world where leaving is no longer the stigma it once was, but it’s rare that companies actively support their alumni. The obvious outcomes of this kind of project is that it makes LinkedIn look good, but it creates an army of people connecting with all new networks who now have very positive brand associates with LI.

I love how Forbes wrote a whole article about the power of employer brand when marketers and leadership gets involved, and then had the gall to suggest that employer brand was “territorial” about their part of the brand and didn’t want to let marketing play their game. I’ve talked with dozens (if not a hundred) EB owners and they all, to a person, would have loved for marketing to acknowledge their existence, let alone combine forces and/or resources.

So, anyone who reads my blogs or follows me on Twitter will probably know two things about me. 1). I like to be practical; Blue Sky Aspirational Thought Leadership is alright on a stage somewhere but how does it translate into day-to-day "doing it" and 2). I like to look at low cost options as a lot

On the recruitment marketing side of things, we are faced with a slew of cool tools to help us place our message in front of people who just visited our career site, or are a lot like people who follow our Facebook page. There are two issues with that. One, most of us are just pushing out lame job ads to these people, as if applying for a job is the same as downloading a whitepaper (it’s not). Two, we don’t spend time thinking about how or why the tools are designed to work. We just get thrilled by the “extra clicks” or “deeper awareness” rather than thinking through how to use the tools properly. So here’s a Hubspot article on how to approach your behavior-targeted ad (I bet you didn’t even know that that was what that was called).