You know you need to have a strategy and plan to promote your talent/employment brand.  You know that some of these activities are free and other cost money.  You know that building a strong talent brand will actually improve your recruiting efficiency and effectiveness.  However, you are having a hard time measuring your brand activities and convincing your leadership that these activities have a positive ROI (and thus, should receive some investment).

By breaking your branding activities into 3 different categories and providing some basic measurements around those activities, you can quickly track your success and build a business case for investment in branding activities.

First, spend some time placing your branding activities in one of the 3 following categories:

1. Awareness: Branding activities that build awareness are designed to simply expose your target candidates to your employment brand. These activities are geared towards target candidates who are not currently aware of you as an employer.  Activities in this category could include:
2. banner advertisements on niche career sites,
3. follow company ads on LinkedIn,
4. targeted advertising on Glassdoor or Facebook,
5. messages to an email list you purchased from a professional association, or
6. blogs by your employees on an industry website.
7. Engagement: Branding activities that build engagement are designed to get your target candidates to engage with your company.  These activities are typically geared towards those candidates who are already aware of you, but have not yet applied for a position at your company.  Activities in this category could include:
8. email messages to members of your talent community asking them to participate in a survey,
9. a candidate poll on your career site,
10. status updates on any of your social media properties that request your followers to ‘like’ or ‘share’ that status,
11. an open-ended question on your Facebook page, or
12. a newsletter to with links to company news or employee profiles.
13. Action. Branding activities that elicit action are designed to get your target candidates to apply for an open position.  These activities are typically geared towards your engaged potential candidates.  Activities in this category could include:
14. custom email messages with links to ideal jobs for your candidates,
15. employee profiles shared via social media that include a link to apply for similar jobs, or
16. an invitation to attend a career event.

Once you have categorized your current (or potential) branding activities, you then need to identify measurements for each one.  Prior to each activity, note the current state of that metric and then track the change as the activity is implemented.

For Awareness activities, you could measure the following:

• Click-through rates for your banner ads
• Increase in followers or likes on your social media properties
• Sign-ups for your talent community

For Engagement activities, you could measure the following:

• Percent of recipients who complete your survey / participate in your poll
• Number of shares and likes of your social media posts
• Clicks on links in your newsletter
• Replies to the sender of your messages or newsletters

For Action activities, measurement is simple – the number of engaged candidates who actually apply for your open positions.

Once you put these simple measures in place, you can accomplish 2 things.  First, you can identify the activities that are most successful in meeting your goals (increasing awareness, engagement or action).  Second, you can start to report on the success of your activities and thus, request additional resources to improve your brand reach.