Great employer brand content does nothing if nobody sees it.

Coca-Cola has never spent millions making a TV ad and then run it once.

Nobody in marketing would dream of it. Advertisers know that if you want people to remember you and prefer you, you need three things. Reach, so enough of the right people see it. Frequency, so they see it more than once. And emotion, so it actually connects when they do.

Employer brand content plays by exactly the same rules. We just tend to forget the first two.

Most of the people you want aren't looking yet.

Here's why reach and frequency matter so much. Research from Australia's own Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that businesses typically switch providers like banks or law firms about every five years. That means only around 5% are in the market in any given quarter, and the other 95% aren't looking at all.

Talent works the same way. At any given moment, most of the people you'd love to hire are happily busy in their current job. They'll move eventually. When they do, they'll lean towards the employers they already know and think well of.

So the job of your employer brand content isn't just to convince the few people applying this week. It's to be familiar to everyone else before they start looking.

We spend on making, and forget about showing.

This is the pattern I see all the time. An organisation pours time, effort and budget into creating beautiful employer brand content. Then it vastly underinvests in getting that content seen.

The content goes up on the careers page and gets posted once on the company page. Maybe a few employees like it. And that's about it.

To be fair, a careers page video still does useful work. It helps people who are already in your hiring process say yes. But if your goal is to become a genuine talent magnet, somewhere the best people want to work (the EVP Strength Finder will tell you how close you are), that's only a fraction of the job.

The value of content isn't that it exists. It's that it reaches the right person.

What happened when Bentleys amplified its careers videos.

We made a set of careers videos for Bentleys, the accounting and advisory network. Nothing flashy. Their people talking honestly about their experience, with different parts of the business explaining why they liked working there.

The magic was what we did next. We put a modest amount of money behind the videos.

On LinkedIn, we ran campaigns to professional accountants at similar organisations. Then on YouTube, where you can target on almost anything Google knows (and Google knows a lot), we did something I probably shouldn't be sharing. We built a custom audience of people who had been browsing the careers pages of other big accounting and advisory firms. Then we showed those people videos of Bentleys' people.

Highly relevant, and highly targeted.

The result was more than 800,000 impressions across Bentleys' employer brand videos. The top video passed 430,000 views and the second reached 193,000. You can see it on their YouTube channel.

Same videos. A little bit of amplification. A completely different outcome.

We saw the same thing with PKF, where targeted YouTube campaigns took its careers videos past 500,000 views.

How to improve employer branding reach without a big budget.

Even without a big media budget, you can get far more out of what you've already made:

• Share it on a schedule. Your best employer brand content should come back around regularly, not disappear after 48 hours.
• Weave it through your hiring process. Put it in candidate emails, onboarding flows and job ads, and pin it to the top of your LinkedIn page.
• Put budget behind it where your talent spends time. That might be LinkedIn, YouTube, or wherever your people actually are.
• Retarget your careers page visitors. They've already shown interest, so remind them why.
• Build audiences that look like your best people. Most platforms will do this from your own lists.
• Launch it internally first. Get your people sharing it, ideally with a link to your referral program, so there's a fair incentive attached. There's more on that in our post on employee advocacy.

The four to one rule.

I was sitting with the leadership team of one of the largest consumer brands in Australia recently. Their chief marketing officer has an internal rule for every campaign. For every dollar spent producing content, they spend four dollars on amplification and distribution.

Four to one. That's how seriously the consumer side of business takes getting seen.

Employer brand hasn't caught up yet, and that's a real missed opportunity. Even if four to one is a stretch, the principle holds. It's why some of our recruitment video packages now include a set amount of advertising, so we know the video will actually reach the right people.

It also makes your life easier internally. It's much easier to win your CEO's support for employer brand work when you can show the new careers video has reached 100,000 of the right people. That's the kind of result that gets taken seriously in the boardroom.

Set the media budget before you brief the video.

Here's a small change you can make next time. Before you brief your next piece of employer brand content, decide how much you'll spend putting it in front of people, and who those people are.

If the answer is nothing, and nobody in particular, it's worth rethinking the brief.

If you'd like help building a campaign that puts your people in front of the talent you want, that's exactly what our recruitment marketing work does.