Employee Brands Must Be Part Of Your Search Marketing Strategy
by dave.b , Max Kalehoff,
Jul 18, 2008, 1:01 PM
It's simple: Employees steward personal brands that drive intrigue among customers and other external stakeholders. These employees include senior management, client project leaders, engineers, sales managers and customer service reps, among many others. So it's no wonder employee names become frequent and critical keywords that drive targeted search traffic to company Web sites. Which begs the question: why don't marketing departments embrace employee brands as part of their search strategy?
If a company's HR department embraces search to recruit the best people, then the marketing department should embrace people to boost overall company search performance. Strategically, you should think of your employees as critical brand assets within your company. And just like your core company and product brands, market activity will generate awareness and interest.
What stimuli drive personal brand searches to company Web sites? Consider news coverage, new hires, word of mouth, sales and customer-service interactions, due diligence on significant project engagements, agency staff assignments and performance awards. With infinite drivers of searches for employee names, companies should consider how to capture that stakeholder interest and connect in more powerful and relevant ways.
Here are six key factors to consider in embracing personal employee brands in your search strategy:
1. Employee Prominence. Employees who play more visible and important roles in the execution of a company's products and services should be weighted more heavily in search strategy. Of course, like with any branded search strategy, you'll need to consider things like segmentation, name competition and differentiation.
2. Paid Search. Just as you would for your branded products, you should consider purchasing keywords for employees with significant brand names. Invest in quality landing pages so quality score goes up - particularly, unique employee-branded pages. Optimize your buys around key market events, like an employee's conference speaking engagement, or association with a new product launch or other promotions.
3. Search Engine Optimization. Including key employee names and bios on the Web site is key for SEO. But go further and give individuals their own profile pages so there are more quality pages for search engines to index -- which you'd want anyway, for paid-search quality scores. Even better, presuming they're up to the challenges and responsibilities, empower employees with company-hosted blogs so they can generate more search friendly-friendly content. Also, encourage employees to cite your company brand externally -- especially on professionally oriented social networks and directories, like Linked.In or industry-oriented message boards and groups.
4. Employee Buy-In. Incorporating personal brands into search strategy can extend into uncharted territories of personal privacy. Whether disclosing, exposing, associating or advertising names, be sure you have buy-in from those employees.
5. Practice Etiquette. I'm sure you could come up with many examples of poor etiquette, but I think a top contender is buying the personal-name keywords of your competitors.
6. Defensive Strategy. Finally, define a nimble, defensive strategy to manage the fluid nature of employee-employer relationships. While search is becoming a more important facet of demand capture, employees are becoming more dynamic, sometimes transient company assets. They often resign, are terminated, join competitors or break out on their own. Inevitably, some become negative forces on your brand reputation -- sometimes in high-profile cases, and others in stealth, but targeted ones.
How do employees and personal brand names factor into your search marketing strategy?
If a company's HR department embraces search to recruit the best people, then the marketing department should embrace people to boost overall company search performance. Strategically, you should think of your employees as critical brand assets within your company. And just like your core company and product brands, market activity will generate awareness and interest.
What stimuli drive personal brand searches to company Web sites? Consider news coverage, new hires, word of mouth, sales and customer-service interactions, due diligence on significant project engagements, agency staff assignments and performance awards. With infinite drivers of searches for employee names, companies should consider how to capture that stakeholder interest and connect in more powerful and relevant ways.
Here are six key factors to consider in embracing personal employee brands in your search strategy:
1. Employee Prominence. Employees who play more visible and important roles in the execution of a company's products and services should be weighted more heavily in search strategy. Of course, like with any branded search strategy, you'll need to consider things like segmentation, name competition and differentiation.
2. Paid Search. Just as you would for your branded products, you should consider purchasing keywords for employees with significant brand names. Invest in quality landing pages so quality score goes up - particularly, unique employee-branded pages. Optimize your buys around key market events, like an employee's conference speaking engagement, or association with a new product launch or other promotions.
3. Search Engine Optimization. Including key employee names and bios on the Web site is key for SEO. But go further and give individuals their own profile pages so there are more quality pages for search engines to index -- which you'd want anyway, for paid-search quality scores. Even better, presuming they're up to the challenges and responsibilities, empower employees with company-hosted blogs so they can generate more search friendly-friendly content. Also, encourage employees to cite your company brand externally -- especially on professionally oriented social networks and directories, like Linked.In or industry-oriented message boards and groups.
4. Employee Buy-In. Incorporating personal brands into search strategy can extend into uncharted territories of personal privacy. Whether disclosing, exposing, associating or advertising names, be sure you have buy-in from those employees.
5. Practice Etiquette. I'm sure you could come up with many examples of poor etiquette, but I think a top contender is buying the personal-name keywords of your competitors.
6. Defensive Strategy. Finally, define a nimble, defensive strategy to manage the fluid nature of employee-employer relationships. While search is becoming a more important facet of demand capture, employees are becoming more dynamic, sometimes transient company assets. They often resign, are terminated, join competitors or break out on their own. Inevitably, some become negative forces on your brand reputation -- sometimes in high-profile cases, and others in stealth, but targeted ones.
How do employees and personal brand names factor into your search marketing strategy?
0 comments on "Employee Brands Must Be Part Of Your Search Marketing Strategy ".
Leave a Comment
Sign in to leave a comment. Don't have an account? Join Now
MAX KALEHOFF
Max Kalehoff is vice president of product marketing at Syncapse, a social marketing performance platform for global enterprises. Contact him here.
Recent Online Spin Articles
-
Radical Transparency is Coming to TV Advertising May 17, 3:09 p.m.
Transparency is coming to television advertising – radical transparency – and the marketplace will never be ...
-
The Perils Of Google Glass May 17, 10:37 a.m.
Most of us have been there: you’re sitting with a friend, maybe enjoying a nice meal ...
-
Can Responsive Design Provide Scale To Native Advertising? May 15, 10 a.m.
The question facing most marketers is one of scale, and probably the single most overlooked challenge ...
-
Gone Sailing May 14, 10:11 a.m.
By the time you read this, I will be a few hundred miles offshore in the ...
-
Get Hired: 10 Tips for Landing a Job May 13, 8:15 a.m.
Like a lot of tech firms, we’ve been making a number of hires recently. There are ...
-
The Most Important Thing In The Digital Age May 10, 4:34 p.m.
“He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata! He tangata! He tangata! What is ...
-
CMO: The Chief Muddled Officer May 9, 10:56 a.m.
This past week, we were treated to two very intriguing -- and yet seemingly contradictory -- ...
-
Automating The RFP And Buying Process (For Real) May 8, 9:30 a.m.
There’s an area of the advertising business that’s not so patiently waiting to be automated, and ...
-
Marketers: Don't Let Automation Dull Your Senses May 7, 11:17 a.m.
Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 216 ...
-
We Are Made In New York (Again) May 6, 10:29 a.m.
Last week I attended an event at The Standard Hotel in New York City hosted by ...
This is a great take on the value of a personal brand. I give a talk called Get Famous where I give people reasons to get better known in their geographic area and their industry. I then cite examples of people who have used this to their success. And now you've added the SEO part of the story. So I thank you! (BTW, I linked to your post from my blog, http://placemakinggroup.com/Dennis_Desk/ because one of my goals is to make you, Max, a little more Famous!)