Top 3 tips for creating brand engagement

Are you in charge of your own personal brand and how it relates to your professional life? If you’re not using the tools that can easily boost your brand and help you build an army of followers, you’re failing at one primary aspect of your job as a staffing professional – networking!

As a recruiter, your job boils down to finding the individuals who will help your clients succeed. The more people you know and connect with, the more likely you are to know the professional who is best for a position your client is trying to fill.

One 2010 Satmetrix study found that brand evangelists, which is a fancy term for exuberant company or product fans, spend 13 percent more than the average customer and they often will refer a business. So, not only are these super fans spending more than the average customer, they are promoting the brand to others, reports Marketing Profs.

While you’re not selling any product, as a staffing professional you are trying to demonstrate and convince others of the value of your service. You’re trying to attain new clients and you’re trying to convince highly prized workers who may already have a job to leave their current position for a new one offered by your client. Known to us in the business as passive job seekers, these are the people you’re really after. While they are not actively searching for a new position, if you can bring them the offer or the possibility of gaining access to a position they desire, you will not only be filling the desires of your clients, but the person you helped gain a new job will most likely act as a brand advocate for you.

So, now that you realize how important it is to manage your professional image, you might be asking yourself what’s the next step for creating this “army” of fans and potential contacts to fill out your recruiting software. Here are three tips for boosting your professional brand:

1) Understand your brand image. It’s tough sometimes to pick the proposition values that you want to represent. After all, you’re an entire person and have a diverse array of interests and attributes. However, if you spread out your efforts and make your brand so varied that a fan can’t describe you in five distinct nouns or adjectives then how are you going to be easily promoted? Remember, one of the key tenants of brand marketing is ‘focus.’ Flesh out a complete idea of who you want to be viewed as by your fans. It’s a lot easier to spend time thinking about how you want to be viewed and work from scratch at the beginning than to try and turn around a disjointed or unsuccessful brand image.

2) Empower your fans. You’re not going to be everywhere and able to talk to everyone. Even if you did manage to do this with everyone you meet in person or digitally, those efforts are not going to compare to what can be done by an active fan base. Operating on the six degrees of separation, remember that connectivity and creating brand advocates will go further than anything you can do on your own. Therefore, it’s important to empower and encourage your fans. Provide them with the information they need to share your ideas or even your contact information. Invite your fans to take control of portions of your brand and watch as it grows.

3) Create conversations. As a staffing professional, you are going to meet and network with a variety of people from many different industries. Some of them will offer unique perspectives about their individual markets and these points of view can be used to create conversations amongst brand followers. Engagement is key to keeping a successful professional brand alive and current.

Finally, use all of the tools at your disposal, such as your blog and your social media networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, to keep your contacts aware of who and what your personal brand stands for and how you can help them. Those contacts can then be brought into your recruiting software and thus become part of your revenue generating business.